Saturday I tweeted the Harrison RR, which translates into taking a minute occasionally to find something interesting to mention to a waiting (albeit small) world. (There's a list of all the tweets here a couple of entries ago.) I’m not quite sure what the world is exactly waiting for in terms of content arising from some old fart judging LD at a high school with corridors modeled after the sets from Star Trek (via Cooper), so that was the challenge. Was there anything interesting to say aside from HogwartsHP is meeting SmallvilleCK? Turns out that, with any sort of attentive eye, there is. One of the first thing I noticed was a list of brothels and saloons on one of the classroom walls. This is something I don’t often see in high schools, and it was worth commenting on. On the other hand, I didn’t comment on some teacher’s inability to spell miscegenation correctly, since it has become commonplace for some educators in this country to demonstrate their ineptitude at every opportunity, especially when it comes to spelling. (You know, there’s these things we used to call “dictionaries.” They should get one for the school. It’s bad enough one schlub couldn’t spell the word, but that every single student and teaching colleague and administrator and parent passing through that room can’t spell it either and therefore hasn’t pointed it out to said schlub? Jeesh. On the other hand, at least it indicates that no one is thinking much about miscegenation these days. Maybe they meant misogyny. Or syzygy. Or synecdoche. The last two, at least, are still illegal in some states.)
Anyhow, there were other interesting things worth writing about in short form, and judicious use of tweeting could make for an interesting narrative on the other end, and if it’s not an interesting narrative, then don’t do it, is my philosophy. If it’s neither entertaining nor informative, keep it to yourself, because I don’t want to read it. The fact that during the lunch break a small group of kids almost got a ticket for trying to park on the wrong side of the street (which, in LD land, is about as criminal as anyone ever gets; we’re not exactly the Corleone family) allowed for a few interesting tweets. You have to ask yourself, when a cop pulls over a car filled with teenagers of various genders in ties and sweater vests and comparable attire, plus two older black guys (one of whom is an advertisement for droopy pants and, of course, is also the responsible adult on the trip), what does the cop make of it? One of our hardened criminals says he tried to explain to the cop that they were at a debate tournament, but apparently the cop had had enough when our h.c. tried to demonstrate how you achieve your value through the criterion, and the officer shooed the batch of them on their way with a stern warning never to go new in the two. (Which, by the way, was rampant in the rounds I saw, and cited by the opposition every time. Come on, people.)
So the bottom line is that one can tweet something interesting from a tournament above and beyond the mundane, or at least one can try. I was using the @tabroom account, which I wouldn’t do in the future, as I’m saving that
By the way, the notorious Luddite CP has so far not taken me up on my offer to link to @tabroom for official CatNat announcements. He’s too busy barbecuing cats. I’ll keep at him. Maybe I’ll threaten him with more Cher references. Can you say Shoop, Shoop?
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