slugfest from the inside -- b1's glove view

from an archipelago perspective, the slugfest was a huge success. site numbers hit record highs and a surprising number of my friends mentioned to me how much they were enjoying it.

my sincere thanks to the judges (especially captain hops for rushing in as a judge when it looked like jdiego went a.w.o.l. and then jdiego for romping back to tie up loose ends -- the chaos added to the suspense, which i liked). they were given, literally, no warning, nor any instruction and handled it all with a great cross of humor and seriousness.

as a combo, they were great.

the cap'n took it all as earnestly as a trip to a trappist monastery (that round 5 could not be called a draw, and his recusal from round 7, just busts me up), with a clear penchant for technical moves.

jdiego was much more shoot-from-the-hip, throwing rounds merely for the mention of things like "tofurkey" and "streetbeater."

the match was close enough that any different combo of caffeine, alcohol or sugar in the collective blood streams of the judges could have yielded radically different results. never in my life has an outcome of an event depended so heavily on what someone else had for dinner the night before.

i'm not an al gore type -- i don't second guess the judges, nor what they did for the reasons they did it. they were, in a word, awesome.

but i did want to catch, for the viewing audience, and especially the vegan, what i saw transpire in the events.

• day 1

i think this is a round that goes easily to the vegan. va wears a sign on his back the size of virginia saying he's a democrat -- i mean, come on, how many republican vegans do you know? so i figured i'd just mentally trip him up straight from the start. he'd seen me doing my heteronymic-homonymic-palindromic haiku and i knew he'd expect me to come out with a technical challenge -- so i came from the other side with a mental feat.

now it's true he ignored the task of why george bush was a great president (much to the dismay of a hardcore republican friend of mine), but i've got no problem with ignoring, or even breaking, rules as long as you have a compelling reason to do so.

coupling the two ideologies together was clever, and i'll forever wonder if the line "intolerable darkness" was double entendre or not.

for some reason people seemed really pleased with my yoko poem, but i feel the alliteration is actually better.

1-0 vegan

• day 2

i'd thrown out chuck taylor as an idea because i own about 50 pair of converse and know only vague things about the man. figured i might as well have the vegan do my research.

oh my, how little did i know.

i don't watch t.v. (which by default, also means i don't follow sports), so i don't know anything about the phrase "hoosier daddy." if it's a familiar sporting phrase, the vegan did well to incorporate it; if the vegan coined it for this event, it's a work of genius. (and that's a word i've used seriously, maybe, ten times in my life.)

simultaneously taunting, informative and dripping with entendre.

chuck taylor is so strong that the other haiku of the vegan's isn't even worth talking about and i could've written haiku at the level of bashō and it wouldn't have mattered.

my friend feddy spoke the truth when he said, "if this were a real fight, there'd be no round three."

2-0 vegan

• day 3

Light! Life! Floods! Laws! Whales?
Kill your son, Abe! Just kiddin'!
Hold the bacon, please!
(va)

god made everything
then god made a few people
then things went to hell
(b1)

i thought the vegan's definition of the word "a" was over-played, but his biblical piece was stunning. eight different biblical images in 17 syllables, with abraham (not noah, not moses, not adam) mentioned by name and a leviticus closer. hilarious. amazing. i studied the bible in original direct-greek translation in college, and it's remarkable how close the vegan's take is in spirit -- it actually feels like the bible. from a fight perspective, the chuck taylor piece is the vegan's best work of the 'fest -- from a modern-internet-haiku-purity point of view, this biblical piece is.

i had written my piece after i'd given the vegan his assignment, but before he'd written his and i think the differences are very very telling.

the vegan's style, very much, is massive information in a small space. hit hit hit. we see it again and again in his work.

mine is more slow and plodding. essentially, "this is my one joke and here is my punch line." i was very impressed that jdiego caught this difference in his final commentary.

but i also show a fighting chance here, really for the first time. i was looking for some information on the bird flu that i could hang my hat on and came across that ridiculous picture as one of 75 slides in a yahoo! bird flu slideshow. all i could think was "what the hell is that?"

now i hate using pictures as part of my haiku, but i really really couldn't pass that one up, so i used it.

my didi senft piece is, in a word, crap.

i'd give myself this round if the senft piece was just a tad stronger. it isn't, so i call it a toss-up.

2.5-0.5 vegan

• day 4

in my mind this is, truly, the closest day of the match. vegan's shuffling haiku surprised me. i was expecting him to take a key word that actually has two different meanings and play against it ... something like this rough draft i just banged out:

golden fields of rape
recall all the older times
and lives of pirates

pirates’ lives recall
the older golden times of
rape and all of fields

(side note: i consider haiku with wrapping lines to be big-time cheater stuff. e.g.
i went shopping with
my little sister and her
thirteen dumb boyfriends
in my mind you have to have one complete thought per line. adding to that thought on the next line is only okay. where i make the exception is if i'm trying to do something technical.)

there're two things i like about vegan's scramble. one is it's ribald, sticking it not only in the face of classic haiku, but also keeping the competition at about the right mental level.

the other is that it's pretty obviously mucking with the rules of shuffling words -- and it's good at it, so i find it acceptable.

having said that, i think my two poems here are both very worthy. the anagram is topical and wouldn't be too bad "normal," as an anagram it's great.

but the play is where it's at. just the fact that i turned it into a play should be good enough, but i think it's truly funny. i looked at that photo for about 15 minutes and kept thinking about the tower and i was going to write it from the tower's point of view. and then i thought i want to have the tower fall on the car. and then BOOM it hit me.

i give myself this round.

2.5-1.5 vegan

• day 5

my second pat benatar is a lot better than my first, but it is second. the susan b is good, i think, but a little too droll.

tofurkey, though, is the clear winner. i knew it would be a nice, easy, softball pitch for the vegan, but hey, tofurkey is funny and a large part of this is about funny.

his hamburger piece is lame, and dodging the bullet again, although without the acceptability of george bush.

still tofurkey carries it (and i love the mild disdain here of tofurkey with the word "eerily").

3.5-1.5 vegan

the only way i even have a chance to win from here is to win two-straight and then make a tie-breaker.

• day 6

my stuff this day isn't that great, but neither is the vegan's. his work this day feels either rushed and/or uninspired. running through the end of the alphabet feels like an act of desperation to me and i was expecting more from 12(1), 5(1). i really thought he was going to nail the 12-5 piece -- it plays very well to his tempo and style. a disappointment, both ways.

3.5-2.5 vegan

• day 7

i still don't know what to make of my pun dictionary piece. it's either really good, or just reaching way way too far. the pangram is solid, though.

of all the days of the vegan, this is clearly his worst. the disappointing one is the "terminator 2" piece (movie tag title:judgmentt day) and the vegan has chosen to ignore it completely with a weak schwarzenegger reference.

i like the idea of having to say a haiku in pirate voice, pretty much no matter what it is, so that's a keeper.

still, i give it to me.

3.5-3.5 tie

okay, i didn't put day 3 as a toss-up just to get here at a tie. the first time i realized it makes a tie is just now in writing.

in my mind this means you have to go back and examine the works as a whole. don't look at them as days, look at them as canons.

if you do this, it's pretty clear in my mind that the vegan wins: first day intertwined (and not required to do so), chuck taylor, bible. i don't have three items that lock together that tightly, nor that well. let's see, i've got bird flu, play and _what_? and you could very well argue that i need four to make up for just how much better chuck taylor is than my collected work.

the only thing arguing against this is a concept of momentum -- the vegan feels like he simply ran out of steam.

i say the momentum argument is not enough and therefore, in my mind at least, vegan wins. so forgive me if i don't tap dance on his still-warm grave.

the cap'n has the right idea for the future -- each make an idea and write against both. maybe do 15 tasks each and randomly draw 14 from the pool so you don't have people "priming" going in.

i have more to say about the vegan, specifically, but i'll leave that in a post for later.