In which warmth emanates from the outer borough

I feel the heat rising as we near Rather Large Bronx.

There’s the Round Robin on Thursday (or Friday, for Congress people), and that looks set. The Bronxwegians seemed to be under the impression that rounds would happen quickly and folks would move on lickety split from one round to the next, and that the whole thing would be over in time for tea. I stuck the proverbial pin in that balloon, and I think the sked now is pretty workable. Plus everyone is debating everyone else, and there’s judges in the back of the room at all time. It looks good. I won’t be there for that, although I have attended in the past and even grabbed the odd PF ballot, just for old time’s sake. But RRs sort of run themselves, once they’re set up, provided all the judges are in place. And they usually are, given the nature of the beast. Once upon a time, RLB had its very own LD topic, usually based on the Policy topic, and the RR would precede it, using that topic, giving the Round Robinskis a leg up for the tournament, which always sort of annoyed me. The last thing the elite needed was a distinct and palpable advantage. (I wrote about this in Nostrum TOS, come to think about it.) But that was then and this is now.

There have been plenty of last minute school adjustments. Once you start sending out emails to the teeming masses, they start corresponding with you, rather than the Bronxwegians. I’m fine with that, as long as it doesn’t revolve around kale (which used to be a not terribly unusual slang word closely related, of course, to lettuce, but which now usually only means, well, kale, which I hope Bronx is not offering as one of the Foods of the World Unite this year). The money is Bronx’s business, not mine. Telling people to be there or else? I can do that.

Meanwhile, the Gem of Harlem is beginning to kick into gear. All the usual suspects have been rounded up for tab. That’s one of my favorite venues, for a variety of reasons, one of them being that we always have a lot of fun, and speech and debate tab together in perfect harmony. If only the democrats and the republicans were more like us…

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