Casa de No Sense of Humor

[kevin_standlee]

As bovil announced, the first issue of Pacheco Progress, regress report of the hollister2008 Casa de Worldcon Worldcon Bid Committee, is now available.

I put up a note on the SMOFS e-mail list announcing its publication, and got a private e-mail from a Person Who Will Not Be Named earnestly telling me how concerned I should be that this bid will win because of how badly all of the other Worldcon bids were doing. Such person does not know as much about the WSFS rules as I do. The chance, while not actually zero¹, is so small that I asked the person how much money they want to lose to bet me that one of the bids actually listed on the ballot wins.

I haven't received a response yet.

__________________________________________
¹Hollister is less than 800 km from Anaheim, and is therefore ineligible as a site. An administrator would have to reject a filing from Hollister because it's ineligible. (The filing deadline for the ballot has passed anyway, but that's only for getting on the ballot, not for eligibility to win.) Therefore, even if every single voter placed Hollister as their first preference, the bid is not allowed to win. WSFS rules would require the administrator to discard the first-preference votes on those ballots and move on to those voters' second preferences. The only way Hollister could win would be for None of the Above to win the election, which throws the election into the Business Meeting and suspends the normal eligibility rules. Then the BM would have to vote to select Hollister, which presumes that the committee actually would stand up and say, "Oh, sure, vote for us" under those circumstances. As I say, it's not actually impossible, just highly unlikely.

Comments

[jbriggs.livejournal.com]

We had the same concerns expressed when we bid Point Barrow, Alaska for a westercon. While it techically could have won, there was a Snowball's Chance in Heck of it doing so. It didn't stop each Chairman of bids that were on the ballot from .. "strongly hinting" .. we should withdraw.

Clueless, I say.

[bovil.livejournal.com]

I'm sure we can find other eligibility rules to violate, if the distance rule isn't enough...

[johno.livejournal.com]

A stated intent not to host the BM?
A stated intent not to award hugos?
Hogus as a official event?

[gridlore.livejournal.com]

I'm still upset that "I-5 in '05" didn't win.

[dinogrl.livejournal.com]

Hey, I am there for the party (I hope), will there be enough restrooms?

[http://users.livejournal.com/_darkvictory/]

Has a hoax bid ever won? I've wondered why some fans are so nervous about them. Is this a fannish form of superstition (if I don't say Hedorah's name aloud, he will NOT rise up and devour Burbank)?

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

There are people who seem to think that certain bids that won were hoaxes, but that's more a reflection upon those people's attitude toward any bid they dislike.

Two bids that started as hoaxes -- Bermuda Triangle in '88 and Hawaii in '93 -- ended up turning into real, filed bids, and both placed strong seconds in fields with four candidates. The Roswell in 2002 bid, which certainly intended to be a hoax but went as far as filing technically-valid bidding papers, came second to San Jose, but there were no other serious bids on the ballot in 1999.

As far as I know no actual hoax bid -- that is, a bid that had not serious intention of winning a bid, and was in the race for fun and party purposes, and possibly for satirical commentary on the bidding process -- has ever won an election.

Remember, lots of fans don't have a sense of humor. They take things Deadly Seriously. They aren't capable of understanding parody and satire. To them, all bids are created equal. The Hollister bid has said these people are known as "easy targets."

[http://users.livejournal.com/_darkvictory/]

As an enthusiastic supporter of hollister2008, I think we should have an "easy target" ribbon. Or would "Deadly Serious" be better?

[boywhocantsayno.livejournal.com]

I'd wear an "easy target" ribbon.

Then again, my TT nickname is "The Easy Chair."

[blackfyr.livejournal.com]

I have a question about the distance. Is it measured from city center to city center, nearest city border to nearest city border, or nearest convention building to nearest convention building? Or some other means of setting the two points of measurement?

Measuring Distances

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

This question comes up periodically at WSFS Business Meetings, because there has always been an exclusion zone, even when we had zone-based rotation. (The zone was smaller then.) The answer is: It's not defined in the WSFS Constitution, and there is no legislative guidance or precedent. This means that the administrator of the election has to make the decision on how to measure. The only thing we can be pretty sure about is that great-circle distance is what we mean when we're talking distances. It's the only objective measurement, since you can easily calculate it given the two coordinates.

I know that if I were administering it, I would make a city-to-city comparison first to see if we it was important to check more closely. (Most of the time is it not.) Were it necessary, I would try getting GPS readings for the main convention facilities -- convention center to convention center. I'm not sure what I would do if it happened to make a difference where you measured within the convention centers. I hope it doesn't ever come to that, but there is a small possibility of that happening if Montreal wins the 2009 election and DC does actually run for 2011; the cities are close enough together that we may have to make the site checks.