The roar of the greasepaint, the smell of the crowd…

Saturday morning was the NYCFL moderators’ meeting. All the usual suspects were there, and there was rapture among them all when we did not spend an inordinate amount of time arguing obscure points of Congress, or, for that matter, any points of Congress, despite Catholic Charlie having brought some manuscripts of changes of old obscure points of Congress into new obscure points of Congress at the CatNat level. Without such things to distract us, we were able to dig into the good stuff, like obscure points of Declamation (or Declamatory Debate, as O’C would call it).

The high point of the meeting is always the going over of the schedule, during which it somehow eluded us that the first NYCFL debate tournament would be up against the MHL First-Timers’. Whoa, say what? This finally dawned on us as we were practically out the door. We scrambled around to find some solutions, and I think we have, but I’m now waiting to hear from the solutioners if, in fact, what we proposed makes sense. I’ll keep you posted, but for now, I’ll keep things a little vague to protect the innocent, whoever they may be. I also officially enlisted Catholic Charlie’s services in working with me and Matt on Pups LD. I’m figuring VLD on my machine, JVLD on Matt’s, CC working the reading and everybody and their mother eyeing the prefs. I find the combination of the three of us interesting. I mean, there is no Genesis on my iPod except for a few random scraps of Phil Collins and a solo album from that other guy whose name I can’t remember, whereas CC eats, lives and breathes those guys. God knows what Dunay eats, lives and breathes. I’m thinking my extensive collection of classic Hawaiian music should please everyone.

Maybe not.

Anyhow, after the morning session I drove down to NYC with Bronx’s extemp coach, who thinks Chicago was a good movie. To punish him for this, I had him carry the traveling trophy to Collegiate after I parked the car, and let him suffer the hernia. That thing is ridiculous. And Collegiate is bizarre, at least in layout. If you can find your way around in there, you can find your way around anywhere. When we arrived all the RRers were scarfing down pizza, so I got to talk to O’C and CP about this and that. CP promises that there will be an escape hatch in the tabroom software in a couple of weeks, and everyone seemed to be in seventh heaven over electronic balloting, but blissful though this may be, it is to me a bell and a whistle, and confident tabbing comes first. I’m semi-confident, but errors still pop up. Don’t worry: the Pups will be the old fashioned TRPC style.

While I was there I offered my services to O’C for his Humongo Bronco RRs, which he happily accepted. I’ll work with CP on it, and get a first hand look at the automated features. Realistically, a Round Robin doesn’t need much in the way of tabbing software, since they’re all preset rounds. Just look up and see which judges are available and there you are. The thing is, I have a lot of days off I can still take this year, and throwing one more at the Bronx won’t hurt. Much.

It was nice to hang out for a little while at a debate tournament again, especially since I didn’t have to do anything other than get back to my car before the parking meter ran down. Which I did.

And so we begin again.