Today is the first day I have felt normal in a while. I’m getting over 1) a cold; 2) Bump; 3) pesky Sailors; and 4) Tiggers. But, as they say, life goes on.
I’ll skip telling you about the cold. My guess is that you’ve had one yourself once, and can appreciate all the ins and outs. For me the hardest part was that I couldn’t talk during much of Bump, although other people considered this something of a mitzvah. I only got to scream at two novices, one of mine and one of O’C’s. Such a waste.
As for Bump, one thing I need to do is figure out a way to ameliorate the sign-in process. If I had the luxury of more time, it wouldn’t matter so much, but I’m trying to get it done in half an hour. This is not easy. I had lit on the idea of express check-in run by Robbie and Termite, which would have worked a lot better if they both hadn’t gone to the train station to pick up HoraceMan, TSWAS. One to hold the steering wheel and another to press down the pedals? And this year we learned the name scam. Here’s how it works. If you make changes at the table, it’s $25 each nuisance fee. So what you do, even if you have a lot of changes, is don’t tell them. You save a couple of hundred bucks. Then you go into tab later and tell them they’ve got the initials wrong. Do these people think we didn’t notice? I won’t mention the school, but they have been a royal PITA since as long as I can remember. Next year, I will handle their registration personally. CP recommends the $200 “The tournament director claims you deserve to be reamed from the inside out” fine; I may institute this in the future.
Nevertheless, we did get through registration and start about as planned, and we ran the tournament as planned, and to be honest, there weren’t a lot of noticeable events other than a tournament happened. The housing was done by the mother of our Hardware Engineer, and it was amazing. She had these little index cards all printed out that would make even Apple Valley die from envy. And she never complained, even on Thursday when I was sending her changes faster than the schools could make them. One thing: it does behoove one to pull the data out of tabroom (or the Goy, for that matter) at the absolute latest possible minute. It’s hard to hold off, but hold off one should. It just makes sense in the long run.
By the one measure of success that I consider to be infallible—we got out in time Saturday for dinner at India House—we were the biggest hit in years. And I was floored by having so many alums there this year. The continuity is amazing. It’s curious, though, that the community rankings were unaware of the experience of a couple of them. Get a few TOC bids but not that recently, and you fall out of the collective memory. Then again, would you really want a Harvard or Georgetown third-year law student judging you on this topic if you were totally full or koala poop? Probably not.
After some discussion with my daughter, we came to a rather unstartling conclusion about the state of LD in general, and I think from my own experience in the back of the room, light though that may be lately, it is pretty much true. Good debate hasn’t really changed much over the years. People present strong arguments for their side of the resolution with clear values and criteria and warrants. This is the classic winning approach. What has changed over the years is the nature of bad debate. Half a dozen random burdens unrelated to the framework is the sort of thing that would have been unimaginable in the 90s, albeit just as annoying. Off-case analyses would have been just as beside the point: off-case means, in a literal translation, “this has nothing to do with the resolution but if I’m lucky you’ll pick me up because it sounds smart and you don’t want to look dumb.” The other thing about bad debate that remains true is that it nonetheless appeals to smart people, so often bad debate wins rounds because it is being dealt out by good debaters. It’s a waste, but it’s true. If good, smart debaters actually decide to engage in good, smart debate, then that’s what a debate round is all about.
As for #s 3 and 4 at the top of this entry, for some reason I can’t get the Sailors to do what I tell them to do. Simple things, like tell me their last names or do research or write case positions. Then again, what coach ever gets such complex cooperation from a team? I ask too much. I’m a dreamer. And as for the Tiggers, they required a bit of shaking up because they had oversubscribed both the number of allowable teams and the number of sellable judges, but I think we have things in hand now. What I’m working on is a schedule with the Revba that will make some decent sense. I think it can be done. But, then again, as I say, I’m a dreamer.
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