Illegal, official and officious

There’s a round robin for Jake on Thursday. O’C is keeping the location under his hat, for some reason. I hope he tells me before Friday.

We recorded TVFT last night, concentrating on the Nov-Dec topic. One of the points that was made is how, 10 years ago, there would be a tacit agreement to interpret the topic a certain way, and we’d go from there. But no longer. When there’s a problematic word in the rez, instead of eliding it to get to the meat of the content, we theory it to death. Thus have we evolved, for better or worse. In Nov-Dec, the problematic word is illegal; listen to the podcast if you’re wondering why. One thing is clear, I think: the varsity rounds are going to be radically different from the noobie rounds. Thank God the noobs still tacitly agree to stuff, perhaps without even knowing it. Whatever. Tonight the Sailors begin to brainstorm this rez, unless the Panivore and the P.C. have some other plan for taking over the novice world that they haven’t told me about. Wouldn’t surprise me. They’ve taken over organizing the Plebes the way Hitler took over Czechoslovakia. Makes my life easier, I guess. I sort of miss coaching, though. Maybe next year.

We also talked a bit about the PF hoo-ha, but I can’t say I was that interested. The idea was floated that the NFL had abdicated authority to select topics because of sponsorship, but that was sort of tied into everyone otherwise always following the NFL topics in the first place. There’s a rich history of people doing whatever they want, using the “official” topics at their own discretion. It requires control of the region where your debates are happening, because you wouldn’t want one school to prep on one topic and another school to prep on a different topic, but after that, why not? In the olden days, Bronx always had its own topic, and I liked that. It kept things interesting. NY State finals also had its own topic, at the same time we would be learning about the CatNats topic, not to mention the NatNats topic (the presumably official one). People could easily be prepping LD cases for exactly one tournament and one rez, serially. Granted the topics were less specific and more philosophical, but they were still different enough. In the Northeast, of course, we have our own novice topic through November of the year. So in practice, one uses the NFL topic because everyone else uses it, unless there’s a good reason not to. It has been ever thus. The authority of the NFL resides not in its irreproachable ethics but in its lack of competition, at least as far as I’m concerned, being that their one tournament is not on my attend list, and I don’t get all that much else out of them. My organizations are the local ones that run tournaments regularly, like the MHL or the local CFL. If these didn’t exist, it’s not hard to imagine that, somehow, we’d do something under the loose auspices of the NFL, but they do, and we don’t, and as far as I know we never did, and there you are. It’s a northeast thing. We start school after Labor Day. Other people start school mid-August. They’re out in May. We’re out late June. Different universes. With different aliens. Not much you can do about that. So I don’t think much about the NFL, and they don’t think much about me, and nobody loses much sleep over it.

Meanwhile, coming up, not one, not two, not three but four days of Big Bronxiness. The mind boggles. If you’re there (and you probably are going to be there, given the size of the thing), drop by and say hello. My tab door is always open. We’re going to be in Room इल्.*

*deleted at the request of the owner of this blog