1.5 * 24

Well. Yesterday was a day and a half, now, wasn’t it?

1. New Nostrum episode up and running. We seemed to have re-achieved schedulation normalcy.

2. Long talk with some yabbo from the WSJ who’s been talking to everyone who’s anyone in an attempt to uncover the dirty truth about LD, how it’s been hijacked by the $ircuit and stands at the brink of either despair or Kirkegaardian leap. The more I talked to him the less convinced I was that we were in imminent danger of much of anything. Thinking back to the rounds I heard at TOC, which is about all the rounds I heard last year except for some perfectly normal material at the Bi’g Lex RR, I had to admit that I saw nothing much that I hadn’t seen 10 years ago, with the exception of one truly too-fast-for-me round. I guess I could have gone on some about framework debates, but if there is a more boring subject than frameworks, you’d have to dig a lot deeper in the WSJ morgue than the features page. So I recommended he talk to some people who are actually doing the things the Legion would claim are sabotaging the activity. O’C ought to be able to connect him to these notorious LD hooligans. I couldn’t.

3. Long talk with Scott Wunn about our Red Light District. Wunn is good at his job, which is convincing yabbos like me that the NFL is superduper. I mean, I didn’t come away thinking that literally, but he made sense regarding the NYS district’s position. That’s the problem in debatefolk talking to other debatefolk: they actually make and listen to arguments, and if the arguments are good, they are accepted. This is also why debatefolk aren’t good politicians: who wants to actually listen to and respond reasonably to a good argument? Get real. Anyhow, there are some provisions for upping the status from Red Light to Commie Pinko for a couple of years, and I think we can meet those criteria. After that, other steps could be taken. Since I feel a commitment more to the regional community than to the NFL, and the regional community is probably better served by doing our best to maintain a normal district, I’m back in the fold. Although I’ve never had any brief against the NFL aside from the Red Light business, as you know. And I am excited about the new LD guidelines (about which more soon). Anyhow, as I said to the district committee, take the fork out of me, because I’m not done yet.

4. I’ve looked at the VB brief Mike B sent me. It’s a bit different from the sort of thing they were doing a decade ago, and I have to admit I came away from it feeling rather agnostic about the whole enterprise. Any reasonable team will sit down and brainstorm and come up with most of this stuff, depending on one’s bent. They have different kinds of people talking about the topic, and some of them approach it one way and some of them approach it another way. Just like real life. And you take from it different opinions (some of them contradictory), and there you are. Just like sitting around in a debate meeting talking about the material. They point to some directions for research, and provide a little background material, but there’s no real wealth of material to preclude the need for you to do your own digging. (Here’s one big variance from the past, if I remember correctly, when they provided skadoodles of raw, undigested research material and quote blocks as if that could substitute from doing your own research.) I would imagine that a debater in a vacuum could profit from this material, but debaters not in a vacuum wouldn’t benefit too much. It’s certainly not the end of life on the planet as we know it. It really won’t let anyone successfully circumvent the work that goes with debate. Honestly, it just looks like hiring some first- or second-year college kid as a part-time assistant coach, except it can’t judge for you. You get some stuff out of it, but is it worth it? That would be your call, wouldn’t it?

5. Working on some Bump stuff last night, I realized that registration closes next Wednesday. Holy McMoly! This thing is now about two weeks away. I feel as if I haven’t done much of anything, but realistically we have filled up the high school (except I still haven’t heard from the admin about the number of rooms available to us), and we should edge over 100 in LD shortly, and the biggest question is going to be where to put PF. Which is now my favorite activity, because you charge the same as policy but you can fit twice as many people into the same time/space continuum.

6. For some reason the old PC doesn’t recognize the Jack-Ride install disk. My initial attempt to return debate to its former trivial glory has thus been a bust. I’ll try again tonight. When in doubt, reboot.

7. I tried a number of times to access the MFL site. First I wanted to register for Li’l Lex (it’s too soon, says La Coin), then I wanted to just enter team names, but I was stymied. Feh!

8. Edgemont will not host policy the same weekend as Scarsdale’s tournament. Another Feh! Their admin pulled the rug by giving the facilities to someone else. Ain’t that a kick in the pantaloons?

Tonight I’ll enter the CFL data for Saturday, which is always more fun than Tik pronounced teek jumping on my head with his claws out while I’m trying to sleep. But only a little bit more fun…