We chezzed it up last night, with a select handful of varsitians and pfffters, discussing all manner of topics. On Sept-Oct, of course, there is only one clear strategy that makes any sense, same this time as last time a few years ago. Send me plenty of money and I’ll tell you what it is; last night I told the Sailors for free. Some of them believed me. As for the Pffft topics, Peanuts seems quite on top of Sept, while everyone stares at October as if it’s [insert metaphor here for some really dangerous, confusing thing you wish would go away]. Asking high school students to make sense of Iraq is a tall item, but then again, they’ll probably do a better job of it than George W. Bush has. At least the high schoolers have an exit strategy, to wit, the November resolution, coming out in little more than a week. For that matter, Nov-Dec LD will be coming out, according to the new voting approach. I did mail in my ballot, which was a little easier than the PSATs, but not much, and with a similar amount of guesswork. As I’ve said, the overall batch of topics was pretty good, so barring any true lunacy, we shouldn’t be too bad off no matter what happens.
As I told O’C yesterday, I’m looking forward to tabbing the Pups. CP has enabled my access to the data, which I’ll start porting on Tuesday (which for me, next week, is a theoretical free night, as we’re having our normal meeting on Wednesday; if you don’t ask why I use the word theoretical, I won’t tell, and we’ll both be happy). O’C is reveling in his own upcoming Big Jake, and as MB pointed out in a comment, O’C would be happiest with a tournament that had all the trappings and none of the debating. You could kick it off with an award ceremony, for instance. O’C is a big one for traditions, and he thinks everything that ever happened qualifies. If some kid trips and breaks his keister at this year’s confab, that will be a tradition for all the years to come at all ensuing Big Jakes, and there will probably even be an award for it. The Keister Award. Bet on it. (You know, if Big Jake did have a Keister Award, there would finally be a compelling reason to pay attention during the award ceremonathon.)
Some yabbo with a debate mailing list who’s always sending me stuff has created a debate resource site, or something like that, listing all the blogs and whatnot. Mine is the only coach’s blog, not unsurprisingly. All the other coaches are out there coaching. I’m sitting around typing. Then again, having imparted the secret of the topic to my minions, what else is there to do? I do not believe in providing positions to my team; I mean, if I do that, what is left for them to do? In a way, I guess I’ve got this thing down to a science. Write blog. Have one big thought. Pass along one big thought. Write more blog. What a life!
Yesterday I hobbled together a list of potential Bump judges and sent out a request (btw, if you didn’t hear from me and want to judge, let me know). I’m not quite sure why I didn’t have a ready list waiting to go, but I didn’t. All the data was scattered from here to kingdom come, and some obvious people weren’t on any of it. Go figure. A couple of people I need new addresses for, and I’ll get them shortly from those who should know, at which point I’ll see what I can do. The initial reply was gratifyingly strong, and my selling of judicial flesh will transpire as usual. Not to mention novice and PF judges, which I still need to sort out.
And finally, if you weren’t aware of this, the NY Times has reopened its electronic doors, and the whole paper is accessible online again. For free. Since I’m always wanting to clip and send things to the Sailors, it’s nice to finally be able to do it again. And the folks who don’t get the actual newspaper can get back to the odd electronic browse. The people win! Hallelujah!
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