In which we cost a pretty penny

It’s the weekend, so just some glancing blows. 

Debate: The Harvard tournament is this weekend. Back in the day I used to tell my students that attending the Harvard tournament is completely unrelated to attending Harvard. In fact, winning the Harvard tournament is completely unrelated to attending Harvard. (Winning any Ivy tournament is unrelated to attending that Ivy, for that matter.) Let's look at one example. This year they’re listing 378 entries in varsity PF. The entry fee is $180. That’s $68,040 revenue, for one event. And they are conducting every other forensic event known to humankind, with similar numbers. In PF they are also listing 443 judges. My guess is that maybe one or two of those judges, at the very least the ones without paradigms, are, shall we say, not exactly the person you want in the back of the room when you’ve paid almost two hundred bucks to challenge 377 other competitors. (And of course anything we say here about money elides the the facts that: 1) you have to get to Cambridge in the first place, which many people do from rather startling distances, and 2) you have to get a hotel room or two in one of the most expensive cities in the country.) I’ve always said that you have to be very, very good to do well at Harvard, but that being very, very good is no guarantee of doing well. The numbers are simply against you. Yet people go, year after year, for one reason: the name of the tournament. The competition numbers rig the odds against you before you even sign up on tabroom, and you can blow your entire season’s budget on a handful of JVers in non-bid events. If this were called the Hubba Hubba Faceoff instead of the Harvard Invitational, would you even give it a second’s thought?

Oh yeah. There’s nowhere to park, either. 

Books (audio division): I gave up listening to H. G. Parry’s Declaration of the Rights of Magicians. This is the first of his Shadow Histories series, and it really is about human rights, albeit applied to the use of magic, peopled by real historical figures. I should have liked this on all counts, but I just couldn’t get into it. I’ve done one other Parry book in the past, however—The Magician’s Daughter—and I enjoyed that one quite a bit, so I guess it’s just this series that didn’t do it for me.