Sandy Binder trains judges -- the March BAKA meeting

[Wright Huntley <jwwiii at pacbell_net>]

We had a fascinating meeting, last night, with a huge auction that was 
increased by fish from the NWK box exchange and the stuff Sandy brought 
from LaLa land. Quite a few "Roloffias." Good plants, too.

[Since Bill Gallagher has taken on the huge F&E Chair job, we have not had 
a good way to prelist our auction fish on the web page. That is a shame as 
folks often don't realize what they are missing.]

Sandy followed one of the late Al Castro's "canned talk" formats to go 
over the judging of killifish shows. This went through the judging form a 
point at a time, with killifish slides to illustrate each one and 
narration of what to look for in each slide. It was not only fasacinating, 
it met the requirements, as I understand them, for the classroom part of 
judge training.

That means that at least those there have become apprentice judges and can 
work with our few regular judges on WCW next month. We have been derelict 
out here on the left coast about keeping our judging staffs up to date and 
qualified, per AKA requirements. In recent years, at least four senior 
judges in the bay area have passed away, a couple more moved, and we need 
to replace them. Sandy tells me that we will be using the WCW opportunity 
to get some holy water sprinkled on some new judges, and is working with 
Liz now to see that it happens.

Several of us have been judging at local shows for years, without getting 
official AKA blessing. Hopefully this will end that situation.

Al Castro was an accomplished speaker, who was in demand at many aquarium 
societies. He had a huge collection of slides and they were organized into 
presentations with PowerPoint charts and text, plus supplementary text for 
both the slides and PowerPoint illustrations. BAKA may have the 
opportunity to acquire that collection, and we had a neat discussion of 
how we could use them, effectively.

The idea of putting one talk at a time up on the BAKA web site was an 
attractive one. The slides would be displayed at lower resolution, perhaps 
as "thumbnails" but the full-size versions might then be made available 
for rental to clubs wishing to use them for their programs. Don Greig gave 
one on the Desert Pupfish at our January meeting, which I missed. :-(

I think we all agreed that this is a huge resource for the killifish (and 
Tetra, Chicklet?) hobby and that we need to use club resources to make 
these talks more widely available. Maybe even on DVD some day?

The problems of WCW, which is coming up next month, received a lot of 
discussion. Brian Perkins had an emergency that meant he could not give 
the Lampeye presentation or run the auction. We will try to get the 
always-entertaining Dr. Ron Harlan to step in and give a talk, and Tim 
Patterson has stepped up to manage the auction, with help from the rest of 
the NWK contingent.

Maybe Ron will do this year's in a French accent. ;-)

Great meeting and all seemed to have fun. Steve Hulse now has a fancy belt 
buckle with a blue *Cyprinodon sp.* on it that we all refused to identify. 
He wants it to be *radiosus* so we may let him have it, that it is, after 
a little more teasing. :-)

Wright
Sec. BAKA

PS. Bet you did not know that Castro Valley, where we met last night, the 
Castro District of SF and Castroville, the artichoke capitol, were all 
named after Al's family members. My grandfather came to CA with the 
railroads, century before last. Al's family beat mine here by quite a long 
while!

PPS. Save April 25, 26 and 27, 2003. See below.
-- 
Wright Huntley -- 209 521-0557 -- 731 Loletta Ave, Modesto CA 95351

            http://www.sfbaka.net/New_Folder/BAKA-WCW-12.html

The best show on the West Coast, this year, for killifishes. Watch this 
page for changes.


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