Feed me, Seymour; newbies galore; no bumps on the road to Bump

Last week I was met with enough blank stares to open a Blank Stares ‘R’ Us store when I asked about RSS, a propos of the Coachean Feed. (Which I know you’ve been following, you being just that kind of person, because you like articles on the philosophy of voting and Mill’s thought that the educated should have more votes than the non-educated and things like that, because they make your debate experience so much richer and fuller, but you’re not like other people, and you never will be, so deal with it, you weirdo!) It wasn’t so much that they weren’t interested in the Feed as they were profoundly uninterested in the mere thought of anything computistic aside from, presumably, Facebook and IMs. (Good luck, Future of America.) I was blathering about keeping up with the news in general, and how I’ve given up on expecting them to read a physical newspaper, this being 2008 the last time I looked and me being the realist that I am, but that I did expect a certain current events literacy, and that they could assume that their better opponents would certainly have that sort of literacy and would tar and feather them in rounds if they weren’t keeping up. So I got around to saying that, at the very least, you should feed X, Y and Z from the Times, at which point the glazing over of the eyes would have inspired George Romero to embark on yet another zombie movie. In a show of hands, RSS got no votes.

Sigh.

So, assuming you have the same problem in your neck of the woods, here’s a how-to. Wear it in peace. (I've also added it over to the right in the Greatest Hits.) If you seriously don’t understand RSS, or have students who don’t understand it, rather than handing them Darwin Awards, or grabbing one for yourself, go forth and learn. (At the moment I have 1000+ new items, but that includes 300 some-odd from Wired that I’m never going to look at. Still, I will eyeball the remaining 700. Because it’s in my reader, it won’t take all that long. And the best, of course, will hit the Feed. The tortures I put up with for the debate community…)

This weekend, at the first-timers’ MHL, we have about 100 LD novices, plus another 100 or so assorted other mixed nuts. I’m excited about that. I wish I had more Sailors, but PSATs have had their effect, and given that half the plebes are sophomores, well, there you are.

And you can’t imagine my pleasure at having tabroom.com doing all the fretting about Bump while I merely dip a toe in occasionally to check the water temperature. The tub is almost filled, to complete the metaphor, and I haven’t even thought about going crazy yet. Struvey has been sent off to acquire rooms, and I’m expecting to add a few novice slots shortly, which will reopen that division. PF is landing where it always does; there’s just no traction there yet, for some reason. And VLD has a few slots open, which I expect will dry up in a day or two. O’C keeps barking at the Bumpian tree, hoping that some extra slots will fall off for the Jakes, but he’s just going to have to keep barking. It’s not as if he doesn’t have the love of a good bus driver to get him through the dark night. Flat tire? Yeah, right. We’ve all heard that old story before. Next time, you watch, they’ll be running out of gas.

Ain’t love grand?