Everything seems to be going batty. I would quote the first
stanza of Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” but you know it by heart so I won’t
bother, or, if you don’t know it, you at least know how to Google it, and if
you don’t know how to Google it, you’re not reading this, so there we are.
(The worst are full of passionate intensity? Was Yeats
contemplating the 2016 presidential election?)
First of all, the fields of the TOC are stretched beyond
recognition. Sorry, people, but it isn’t the TOC if it’s open enrollment. I
know that I’ve often said that if the TOC didn’t exist, I wouldn’t invent it.
Maybe it’s gotten the idea and it’s starting to self-destruct. I’ve even heard
that they might change the date to March in the future. There’s a splendid idea
for you.
Everyone seems to want to change their dates. We went
through the whole thing with Emory, which apparently has never heard of the idea
that there are high schools out there, and that they already have a calendar,
and if Emory sneezes, they all don’t catch cold. Now there’s rumblings that our
friends at Penn are thinking of moving. Again. Their tournament filled up every
available space this year, and a few unavailable spaces, and people came from
all across the country. I guess they want to fix that by changing weekends. Go figure. Even venues like Poor Little Byram Hills
thinks it needs to be on a Saturday/Sunday rather than Friday/Saturday. My
money is on this being a bust for them, but maybe they’re right. But whenever
it is discussed that tournaments not start on Fridays, if they can, the same
arguments prevail that, uh, some people, like debate coaches, like to have the
odd day off on a weekend. Just sayin’.
And of course the Pups tossed me to the winds because I eat
too much. Whatever. I see a Pups without Menick as being similar to, well,
every other tournament I do without Menick. I’ll be home eating chips and dips
and watching reruns on the Golf Channel, so I’ll manage to pull through one way
or the other. And any venue without me will have someone else perfectly
capable, I’m sure. Time marches on, in other words.
The good news is that Rather Large Bronx will hold in its
usual place at the usual time. Kirby has already talked to Kaz about it. We
missed them in Orlando at NDCA; I hope they get it back together to rebuild their usual
schedule. There’s too many of them to subtract any of them from the event
equation.
I think most everyone else will be where and when they
belong, and probably I’ll be back for most of them. There may be one or two
changes forthcoming, though. Of course, any tournament I don’t do is a break
for CP, because it means one less person complaining to him that none of it
works the way it’s supposed to (or at least some of it doesn’t work the way it’s
supposed to). He’s out in Colorado climbing mountains with JV, while Kaz just
got back from climbing the rigging of all the schooners in South Carolina,
while all I did all weekend was nap and eat chips and dips.
I need a vacation. A real one, without a tournament at the
end of it. And I’ll be getting one soon. Whew!
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