Joe Edley Needs to Relax and Maybe Do Some Yoga

Hey, I'm back! There's a lot of Scrabble news I need to catch up on. But first, there's the matter of the Baton Rouge Scrabble Tournament.

As far as I know, there will be a one-day Baton Rouge Scrabble Tournament on Saturday, February 11. It will be held at the Baton Rouge Bridge Club. The question is whether the tourney will be officially sanctioned by the NSA.

Apparently, there's a rule that a tournament needs to be announced 12 weeks before the day of the tournament, or it won't be sanctioned by the NSA. Because this tournament is being thrown together at the last moment, the proper notice was not given.

One must remember that two annual tournaments were cancelled due to the hurricanes this fall: the Lafayette and Baton Rouge tournaments. And the New Orleans tournament is looking too likely either. This tournament was put together to accomodate us Gulf Coast residents who are hankering for a return to normalcy.

The main rules hound in the NSA is Joe Edley, and he's sticking to his guns, despite that fact that everyone on the CGP (Scrabble mailing list) seems to think that the NSA should make an exception in this case.

I don't want to go on about how much the hurricanes disrupted everyday life here in Louisiana. But suffice it to say that things were still sketchy back in early November, when the tourney should have been officially announced.

And I think the 12 week rule is out of date anyway, if the reason is to let those people who would attend know about it and have time enough to plan for it. Modern forms of communication have made it obsolete.

So Joe Edley needs to meditate on this problem. Take some deep breaths, do some stretches and think about the reasons we all play games such as Scrabble in the first place.