@mildconcern@tech.lgbt
So a domain reseller has decided to spam me daily offering me the “preferred” azuen.com domain name to complement my azuen.net domain, because it’s better for marketing. This all for the low low early buyer’s price of $560, which could go higher, because “he expects strong interest in this domain auction.”
Cha, right. As if a word carved into a board by a drunk in Fitchburg is really going to set the marketing world afire. The word doesn’t mean anything to anyone but me, and even to me it doesn’t truly have a meaning. It was just something I found once, in a forest that’s no longer there, in this little shack with some empty vodka bottles that had been slapped together on an impossibly beautiful spot in the New England woods. So this guy’s persistent efforts to turn his $10 registration into a $600 profit are really funny. If I cared about marketing the name, I would have bought the .com version 9 years ago when I registered the .net version too.
This weekend is the Debacle on the Charles Invitational. The schedule looks as unpleasant and unnecessarily difficult, as usual. Why they can’t just cluster the IE events and give people half-days off, instead of these awkward four hour breaks is beyond me. This year I only have extempers, a DI, and three PF teams going; the rest of the interp crew for the most part found better things to do than to pay $75 to lose a lot of sleep this weekend. Can’t say as I blame them. It does mean I don’t have to stay for the late round Saturday in IE. That helps a lot.
The Monday schedule has changed a lot too; Extemp finals are now at 9:00 AM, which I’m sure will lead to sharp, clear analysis and great speeches, especially given that the semis will have been at 8:00 PM the night before. I hope this also means they’re no longer going to wedge Extemp into the half-again too small room in the Science Center like usual, but I have my doubts. It looks like all the other finals are in Sanders Theater, so I have to wonder why the Extemp final can’t be at a gentle noon hour in the Science Center rooms, which will by then be empty?
Between this kind of scheduling and the fees, it’s almost like they don’t want people to come to their tournament. I can say they’re doing a damn fine job of it with me. I find myself hoping the extemp kids tank and don’t make it to the final just to avoid that. We are bringing a finalist from last year along (though not last year’s champion) so we’ll see how that works out.
The other odd thing about Harvard is the campus and the area is a huge part of my daily life. I’m an alum, and I worked there for about six years or so. I pass through there regularly today; it is a definite part of my non-forensics life. For the most part, forensics lives in forensics-specific worlds; I will never be able to walk around Yale’s campus without thinking about Yale’s tournament; when someone mentions “Yale” to me, I take it to mean the tournament, not the college. The same goes for the area high schools, Columbia, UPenn, etc. Even my own Newton South’s building means “speech” to me, since I go there for no other reason. But Harvard is my home territory; I know how it lives the other 362 days of the year, so the annual invasion of the forensics world makes this weekend stand out and jarringly so. Coaches I know from the forensics world simply don’t “belong” in Harvard Square in my mind; that’s not their setting, it’s for other folks, my fabled private life. So this weekend tends to be jarring, though being a native has its privileges: I know where to park, I know good places to eat that the kids won’t find, I sleep in my own bed each night. If the weather changes, I have the clothes to adapt.