A pot of pourri, including Little Elvis goes AWOL, my encounters with morality, and a Montwegian revelation

I look forward to catching up on things, now that the forensic season is in its final inning. I’m behind on at least two million to-dos, and I’d like them to become have-dones, and every Spring I say that by next season I’ll have completely done-did them, but I never do, but at least I have good intentions.

I didn’t mention my worst fear over the District weekend, when I looked around Saturday morning and didn’t see Little Elvis anywhere. We were running the tournament on my Dell, for no other reason than I’ve got nothing better to do with it, and using at tournaments gives me an opportunity to dust the cat hairs off its screen. I had Little E with me as a backup, with the software installed just in case (and of course, we religiously backed up to a flashdrive every hour or so, meaning that the worst case scenario wasn’t all that bad). But Saturday morning, Little E was nowhere to be found. Normally this would drive me insane, but my mind was concerned with other things driving me insane, so it wasn’t until the bus ride home that I really started to fret. But that evening when I opened the back door of my car in the Sailor parking lot, there was Little Elvis, lying on the floor and wagging his tail, his nose cold and wet as we nuzzled one another in our reunion. (My nose was also cold and wet, but that’s a different story altogether.) As much as I would like to upgrade, I wouldn’t want to be forced into it. During those dark hours of contemplating potential Littleelvislessness, I had to admit that I had no good reason to upgrade other than technolust, which would be better directed elsewhere (e.g., the Touch, assuming the rumored price break and after the June upgrade). Little Elvis remains my boon companion. Till death—or a really good reason to upgrade—do us part.

So yesterday I shipped off the mountain of paperwork to Rippin’, and with any luck, that is just about that. I do need to create the ad (oh, great, they can get another $100 out of us) but I do feel that it’s nice for kids to see their home district supporting them when they’re lost in the desert. Like in Las Vegas. That’s awfully strange, you know. Obviously it’s a good place to host a couple of thousand people (you could host a couple of million and never notice them), but as locales go, it doesn’t say High School Forensics to me. Maybe I’m just deaf to it. What is the legal gambling age, anyhow? I certainly hope it’s not eighteen. Talk about nightmares I wouldn’t want to face…

Tonight we take up Caveman where we left off last week, starting with Plato. I wonder how many Sailors will survive to part two. It is something of a long haul, on both the giving and receiving ends. I wouldn’t blame them for phasing out of it. But of course, it gets better as it goes along. Starting friction is always greater than moving friction; even I know that: physics applied to life. (And don’t you just wonder about a sentence with a semicolon and then a colon? It’s correct, though. I’m pretty good with punctuation. When you digress as much as I do, good punctuating skills are a must.)

And I almost recorded a new Nostrum last night, but I got involved in some other stuff instead. Wednesday for sure. At Districts one of the judges regaled me with his tale of just having discovered Nostrum and reading all the pdfs in one swell foop. This is akin to discovering the abscess and applying it to all your teeth at once, if you ask me, but I'm allowed to say that, being the official middleman between Jules and the Nostrumite and their appreciative, waiting audience. This masochist judge was ruminating on how real all of it was, and after the conversation I was struck by the resemblance of the literary Mr. Obomash’s plight with the gubernatorial Mr. Spitzer’s. Recording that "Obomash in Miami" material had felt sort of, well, not exactly R but certainly PG-13, and I wondered about its suitability, but as Mr. Clinton in the 90s made certain activities fodder for the kindergarten set, so now has Mr. Spitzer opened up new worlds for all of us. That’s what I regret most about these failings among such gentlemen, their lowering the public discourse to the level of their uncontrolled libidos. Of course, I also prioritize their gross lack of judgment over their right to live whatever private lives they wish, believing as I do that such failures of judgment portend poorly for their public actions. I tend to be in the minority about this, I think, if one goes by the Clinton debacle. It’s not easy being a moral critic, or more precisely, a critic of the morals of others.

And speaking of Friends of Bill, I will point out something that occurred to me recently, following as I do the Facebook obsessions of a certain former Montwegian over the candidacy of Mrs. Clinton. I have been regularly struck by the rabidity of this support, and it finally occurred to me last night where else I had seen such fervor, to wit, RJT’s similar obsession with a certain Wisconsin football team. Which leads me to wonder, is it that all politics is simply sports without protective equipment, or is it that all Montwegians are simply rabid? It could be either or both. Although I have to admit that Tyler and Tanner, Montwegians to the core, have always looked pretty laid back to me. I’ll have to consult O’C, my own private Tanner on this one. Or is he my own private Tyler? I can never tell.

(And if this keeps up, I’m going to have to add T&T to the glossary. Will wonders never cease?)