And so we bid a fond farewell to 2009-10

It’s nice to see that NDCA honored O’C with a Educator of the Year award. Unfortunately, I gather that when the award was announced, O’C had wandered off somewhere, and was never made aware of it. Let this be a lesson to you, young padawan: Do not wander off. Wandering off never led to any good, but has often led to much bad. Being a wanderer off (or wander offer, as some linguists would have it) is a dangerous business. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

I put paid to my official year this last Saturday with my regular judging stint (this is my third year in a row at the 6-rds RR, which means I can practically set my calendar by it). Six whole flights: what a burden! It was fun, of course, some of the time. One guy played a rap song as his 1AC. I penalized him for not citing his source, and gave him low speaks because, uh, he didn’t speak. I also suggested (for the bazillionth time) that if your judge announces a paradigm of traditional resolution-based bias, ignoring it is worse than just not asking in the first place. I found myself aggravated by the idea that “the Joe Blow evidence takes that out” is an argument. “The Joe Blow evidence takes that out” is a commentary on the argument, which must still be made to convince my antediluvian little mind. Why do we bother to argue at all? Half the debaters are running the same evidence. Let’s number it all, and the AC can say #23, #28, and #3, and then the neg can just refute by saying #7 takes out #23 and I can say Aha, how convincing, and we’ll move on from there. It’s called Lincoln-Douglas Debate, not Lincoln-Douglas Inventory. And I was irritated that I had to drop someone on the basis of a definition, but if you concede a definition and then you run content counter to the definition and get called out on it, if there is any sense of rule-based order, there’s not much I can do, even if I think you otherwise won everything because if your case doesn’t stand, it falls, end of story. Worst of all, I was forced to vote in favor of a case that led to nuclear annihilation. As I said in the oral, it felt so 90s policy to me, and I hated myself for it. But in fact, that was my favorite round of them all. What can I say?

In typical Sailor fashion, we managed to leave behind at least one computer at the school. How does one forget one’s computer? It’s not like a coat, where you go outside and it’s cold and we never forget—Oh, wait a minute. We’ve left a string of coats up and down the eastern seaboard. Oh, well. At least the Panivore was impressed that I used the word fiat on a ballot. I think she imagines that all I understand is the social contract and Danish pop music. Talk about your young padawans!

I have announced to the Tars that we will be having a wrap-up Bean Trivia game next week, which will give me enough time to rustle up some new questions. I think I’m running out of categories: I looking at the Hittites, the unpublished song lyrics of Cole Porter and shoe sizes of the Americas as possibilities. There’s going to be a lot of losing of beans if I don’t fix that up a little bit…