The Pups in depth

I saw the headline for this and had to read it. Gary Larson, Father of Mutual Preference Judging, Calls into Question its Impact on Policy Debate Larsen's analysis revolves around committed rounds of judging, but his reasoning leads him where my reasoning led me, but from a different starting point. If you're interested in the subject, you should read that article. Its bottom line is that people are not going to continue to exclude boatloads of the judge pool in the MJP universe. So be it.

Meanwhile, I've been so wrapped up in MJP thoughts that I haven't talked about anything else here for ages. I guess the first thing of interest that has passed is the Pups as a whole.

I have to admit that at the Pups I am more a functionary than anything else. Whereas at the Tiggers and the Gem of Harlem I am, for lack of a better designation, the Palmer, at the Pups I just keep my mouth shut and enter the data. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. There are times when I’m quite happy for someone else to handle the nutty stuff that always tend to arise. And there was nutty stuff, and I was happy not to handle it. I did, however, absorb it, and will be advising other tournaments accordingly. Every time out we learn a little something that we need to make very clear in the posted invitation. So be it.

One thing that bothered me that I had nothing to do with but that I heard about offhandedly was some sort of complaint that there was a third-year debater in the JV field. Having originally written the description of the JV field, which urged coaches to keep it to second-years but ultimately leaving that decision up to the coach, I was rather surprised to hear that people were now somehow interpreting JV as either freshmen or sophomores. Freshmen? That was certainly never my intention. But as I say, I'm just in the tab room these days, so I heard about this without being a part of it. I'll keep an eye on it for next year, though. Occasionally somebody may indeed want to put a third-year person in there, presumably because they're less seasoned than the average third year. Nobody's trying to hijack the tournament. I mean, what is this? PF, where everybody's at each other's throats? LD is the civilized the debate activity. Or so I thought....

We seem to have settled in to Wil-burrrrr as the LD school for Friday and Saturday. (That’s a Mr. Ed reference, which you have to be about a hundred years old to understand.) It’s a perfectly good venue with a lot of space to run the two divisions virtually simultaneously, although in practice we do VLD first then JVLD. The Pups team as always was very strong, keeping us fed, watered, wired and balloted. We did have some issues with judges, though, which I think can be easily solved by putting the judges in judges' lounge with a ballot table right outside it and the tabroom right next door to it. Judges, especially college judges, can disappear faster than some thing that’s really good at disappearing very fast [put in your own metaphor; I didn’t get that much sleep last night.] If we almost literally block the door, we have a better chance of finding the slip-aways because they can’t slip away in the first place. I mean, Wil-burrrrr is in the middle of nowhere, so it’s not like they’re heading anywhere other than not where we want them. And we can also go with a “you’re released” scenario, which the Pups used to do back in the dark ages. Unfortunately, back then they also handed out a couple of hundred ballots one at a time by hand, which ate up all the time they were otherwise saving by having the judges all on hand. In any case, as I think I pointed out, we did pretty well keeping prefs mutual, but when a judge doesn’t show up, mutual gets redefined as “not a strike and apparently still breathing.” A more controlled environment is the only way we can attempt to handle that. Fines are pointless, because money can’t judge rounds. So it goes.

Sunday we were back on campus, in HLS (I think that’s the abbreviation). There was a eureka moment there for me, in that after 20 years of attending this tournament and being in that building one way or the other, I finally found the men’s room. For five bucks a pop, I’ll be happy to share that information with people next year.

My team comprised Eponymous Matt and Catholic Charlie, and we made an interesting trio, to put it mildly. But we didn’t have to listen to any Genesis music, and both of them are numbers people, so the assembling of panels was about as fast as it could get. Panels in MJP are way harder than prelims. One judge, you just find who you have that’s mutual. It’s mostly just a matter of seeing who only has one flight and going through the tedious navigation process to give a second flight. With panels, it doesn’t take long to exhaust the 1-1s. For the record, we start at the top and work down until everyone has a 1-1, then we go down and work up, and then we go up and work down again. Of course, it doesn’t take long before it’s no longer all 1-1s. But a panel of a 1-1, 2-2 and 3-3 can happen, or a 2-2, a 1-2 and a 2-1—anything so that one side adds up the the other side. But not this one or its close relatives: 1-3, 4-1, 1-2. In this sort of pairing, whoever has those two 1s has a serious preferential advantage over the 3-1-2 person. Balance doesn’t just mean adding up the numbers. I remembered this distinctly from a final round years ago between Diana and the Panivore at Bigle X. I wasn’t tabbing, but obviously I was in the room. With the judges that were on hand, this was the best that could be done (in the Panivore’s favor, if you’re wondering). I suggested that, since both of them would be there the next day in the Round Robin, and there were going to be more judges to chose from, they could run the final as one of the Round Robin rounds. A much fairer adjudication panel resulted, and I’ve kept that in mind ever since. Sometimes it’s not just the numbers.

At our hotel, I gather that O’C was given the Emirates Suite, with eight Jacuzzis, a private DJ, 24/7 mani-pedis, and a brief live set by Elton John, flown in especially for the occasion. Bronx army roll out indeed. But make sure you send in the hundred flower girls to pave the way for the general.

Feh.