How I spent my Christmas vacation

Whew!

We had all sorts of interesting plans for the Christmas holiday, many of which went awry on the morning of 12/20 when I got the message that my daughter had had a bike accident and perhaps broken her arm. She was brought to New York Presbyterian Hospital on 68th Street, about as far as you can get in Manhattan from Prince Street, site of the accident. But thanks to Sandy, the closer trauma centers are closed, and will be for the foreseeable future. Which means that Presbyterian’s ER is like Calcutta, only more crowded. After various tests and whatnot, it was determined that Kate had managed to break her scapula, which is really hard to do unless you’ve broken every other bone in your body by driving about a hundred miles an hour into a brick wall. She was going quite a bit slower than that, in traffic, when she hit a patch of ice; it being about 45 degress Fahrenheit, she wasn’t exactly expecting arctic conditions. It probably could have been a lot worse, all things considered.

She spent about a day and a half in the emergency room. First, she was lined up in the halls with everyone else lined up in the halls. You can just triage so many people, and there were only so many “rooms,” which in the ER are simply curtained off areas. Eventually she scored one of these areas, which she shared with another patient. Did I say it was crowded in there? My wife stayed with her overnight, and I heard stories of drunks and moaners and you-name-it. I came in the next day to take over, and I watched people spitting up blood and looking one minute away from death and generally being ER-worthy. Everyone had been there forever but no one was complaining much. It wasn’t as if it weren’t obvious what was going on and why it wasn’t going on all that quickly.

When Mike came by (Mike?) she asked him when the surgery would be and he said soon. Mike was her surgeon, or at least one of them, the one who talked to patients. With surgeons, talking to patients is low on the list of necessary skills, but this guy was young and good-looking and very presentable. You trusted him on sight, and would have given him a lead role if you were doing the casting. Anyhow, after an hour or two they did take her away, and I went from Calcutta to the Upper East Side, a special waiting room for families of patients in surgery. Very nice. A volunteer came and took all my information and promised to keep me posted, and when she went off duty another volunteer came and took all my information and promised to keep me posted, and after a few more hours I realized that the volunteers went home at 7:00 and there was a phone you could call to get information. “She’s still in surgery,” was the drift of it. Three and a half hours, and it was performed by the head of trauma, and it was rare enough that, I gather, it was rather a popular procedure for all and sundry. The general response when people would look at her and ask what the problem was, was a widening of the eyes and the response, “That’s really unusual.” What they ended up doing was framing her scapula with titanium, making a little metal triangle to hold it in place, and then screwing the frame to the bone.

She was in a lot of pain before, and after. She still can’t hold out her left arm much above her waist. Thank God she’s right-handed.

I was fidgeting in the waiting room when an old friend of Kate’s came by to visit. She said that she had been told that Kate was in Recovery. Oh. We talked for a while, and no one official came by, so we ventured out on our own. One truth always holds: if you look like you know where you’re going, you can go almost anywhere, no matter how many signs there are to the contrary. We found Recovery, and sure enough, there was Kate. I had expected her to be wrapped like a plaster-covered mummy, but she only had a large gauze patch over her left rear shoulder. Amazing. She was groggy and in a lot of pain, but she was with us. We talked to her, and the nurse, and eventually Mike, and they told us she’d be going to a room eventually (no more Calcutta) and I finally went home.

What a day. If you want to know how discombobulated I was, it was way late and I was starving and I stopped on the road to have a Burger King Whopper. You wouldn’t have recognized me.

The next couple of days were a slow climb back to normalcy so that she could leave the hospital, things like getting heart rate down and getting off the morphine and so forth. We brought her home on Christmas Eve Day.

The prognosis is for complete recovery. But there’s a lot of physical therapy involved, and we have no idea how long she’ll be staying with us. At some point we drove out to Brooklyn to collect vitals. For instance her cat, the Captain, is in our basement. Tik (pronounced tik) has demonstrated that this intrusion is one of those things up with which he will not put. When we tried to have them together, Tik cornered the Captain and hissed him into a paranoid fit. Now, when the spirit moves him, Tik sits outside the closed door of the basement making the sort of moaning sound we haven’t heard since we were in the ER last week. He’d make a good, albeit pathetic, patient. The Captain, on the other hand, sleeps like a cat. It's that Brooklyn background, I guess.

In the middle of all this, there was of course the poor spouse, who was still in England. He won’t be moving here until March. He was scheduled to arrive on Christmas night, just for a visit. Needless to say, he’s been with us too. Newlywed life can be…interesting. He’ll be going back New Year’s night, but it’s been great that he’s been here to help and to be with her.

So Kate has been doing fine, all things considered. She can go out, go for a walk, go to restaurants, go to the movies. She just has to rebuild her left side. Physio starts Friday. It will be a long haul, but in the end, she’s okay. Which is a lot to be thankful for.

And maybe now we can get back to normal.

You too can Bean

I'll post the questions on Twitter @jimmenick #HHBeans. We'll see how smart you really are, you spalpeen!

Debate: Think you're so smart, eh?

We ended up Beaning at the chez, as I said, because of those gas leaks. No one ate any of the beans, so there were no similar gas problems chez moi. It was a good turnout, with people squeezed in everywhere. We created balanced teams rather than sorting by vintage, and it worked pretty well.

For those of you who wish to play our game at home, I offer a sample challenge. Are you smarter than the average Sailor? Let’s try a few samples. Keep in mind that for some of these, it was only the group on the hot seat, not the entire bunch.

They were able to answer these questions:

• Which first lady was a former actress?
  
• What is Wonderland Center (category Lindsay Lohan)?
  
• Fill in the Stones blank: Please allow me to introduce myself, I’m ___
  
• Name the three Pixar features with no people in them.
  
• Who is Mr. Dithers (comic strips)?
  

Presumably you can answer all of them too. On the other hand,

• They were unable to name a Sondheim show (unless you count Fiddler on the Roof, which I was not prone to do).
  
• The best they could come up with for the year 313 AD was that was the year Rome fell. Much like 2012 is the year the world ends, I guess.
  
• They could not identify the composer, the name of the song, or any other lyrics from the the song in the Great American Songbook with the line: “The Rockies may crumble, Gibraltar may tumble, They’re only made of clay.” They spent a lot of time analyzing the fact that a lot of rocks were mentioned, presumably on the assumption that this represented the geological vein of the Songbook.
  
• No one could figure out which one doesn’t belong and why in the group Cosmo, George, Archie and Jerry.
  
• Nor did anyone know which Muppet plays the piano. (Actually, there’s more than one answer to that one.)
  

As for the lifelines, O’C had Gwyneth Paltrow starring in a movie that was never made, my daughter flunked miserably at comic strips and claimed it was because the particular strip sucks, and Spons, while knowing that birds gotta swim and fish gotta fry, thought that Showboat was written by Lerner and Loewe. No one ever went broke betting against the lifelines.

Two of the little Dec girls made it all the way to the finals, so as CP suggests, in the future I’ll keep my opinion of Dec to myself. It took a Yale student to actually win, but as usual, Meh was in there up to the finish.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a goodnight.

Debate: Beans, Kinda and Dec

We were supposed to do Bean Trivia last night, but there was a gas leak at the school and the place was shut down. They opened it this morning, took a few whiffs and shut it down again. Given that there are no days left to have the event, we're chezzing it up.

A lot of little Dec girls may never recover.

Anyhow, as you’re reading this, I’m officially kicking off the Christmas version of Bean Trivia, and O’C and Kt are standing by as lifelines. The categories? First ladies, the Great American Songbook (or as Michael Feinstein calls it, the Rod Stewart Songbook), Comics in the local paper (because I know they’re not reading the news, but maybe Beetle Bailey will ring a bell), Transvestites, Lindsay Lohan (who would make a really good policy topic some year, because there’s new info every day), Famous Dogs, Universal (a no doubt welcome change from Disney), Famous Dates, Original Sources (e.g., the play from which Hello Dolly was derived) and maybe one or two others that I’m forgetting. Plus there’s Which One Doesn’t Belong and Why, and Name a Bunch Of, both of which allow for extra points. And on top of that, there’s side betting on the lifelines, who in addition to the above-mentioned includes our beloved speech coach. If you guess accurately whether or not they’ll guess accurately, you can win a few extra beans. And what is the prize for all of this? Well, there’s some serious crap, as usual, but at the very top, numero uno, king of the heap, A number one: the largest bag ever to be imprinted with Hello Kitty material. I mean, really large. You can fit two novice Speecho-Americans and a Fiat in there. I don’t know why I’m giving it away. There has to be some good use for it around the house.

Policy turnout for the Regis Kinda Kristmas Klassic this coming weekend is looking fairly bleak. Kaz will be on-hand, but if these numbers persist, we might suggest she be off-hand, which would make her life traveling to her Midwest family home that much easier. (Note that I don’t exactly specify where in the Midwest. I can’t keep that stuff straight. Wisconsin? Minneapolis? Newark? It’s all the same to me once you cross the Hudson.) As for myself, I wouldn’t mind a nice manageable tournament. I’ve got a full boat going down, though, so at least I have a reason for being there beyond wanting to run over to the fancy deli for last minute stocking stuffers. But an easy tournament is so much nicer than a hard one. Throwing a few cards would be fun though. Haven’t done that in a while. Anyhow, the other divisions look robust enough, considering the date.

The two months after the turn of the new year are, as always, packed to the gills. The odd Sailor has been signing up here and there, especially for UPenn, but there it’s mostly novice Speecho-Americans who don’t actually understand the concept of signing up for college tournaments. Then again, offering Dec? I guess it’s worth it at some level, even though I want to eliminate it going forward at the Gem to make more room for something else. UP is still building, and Dec probably brings in a lot of locals, so who can complain. It’s not going to bring in my yokels, though, unless they’re ready to double-enter and spend the hotel money premium. I posted a fish or get off the pot message to them; things should clear up by tomorrow, when I’m securing the hotel rooms.

And, going back to Bean Trivia, I leave you with this parting reminder of a Great Moment in Forensics.
Q. Name the Muppet beloved by Miss Piggy.
A. Hermit the Crab.

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Debate: Whoda thunkit

Tonight's bean trivia event was postponed because of a gas leak at the high school.

A gas leak? Bean trivia?

Do the math.

Debate: Catching up

Take off one weekend, and you feel like you’ve never been to a tournament in your life. I communicated with O’C at Blake a couple of times, although it was hard to get his attention because he thought that Walter Mondale might walk by at any moment. Curiously enough, he (O’C, not Mondale) forgot to secure the medals for the Newark MHL, which is something like [fill in your own metaphor here; the best I could come up with was either the Pope not bringing the holy water or Queen Elizabeth II forgetting her underwear, neither of which makes a lot of sense]. But apparently the Jerseyites managed to soldier through. Since one of the Sailors earned his first piece of tin on Saturday, I’m rather disappointed that he couldn’t immediately don it and look like he just won the Croix de Guerre, but you can’t have everything. Curse you, O’C!

I’m going to TVFT on Wednesday if it kills me. Palmer claims last week he thought it was on a different day, and meanwhile he’s kicking and moaning because I didn’t save the data from Wee Sma’ Lex for the ages. Who knew it was of archival quality?

Just to keep my hand in, I set up the January MHL on tabroom today, which is the same weekend as Columbia. Still waiting to hear from the Gems to confirm room numbers. I’ll bug them shortly. This coming weekend is the Regis Kinda Christmas Klassic (or Regis Chinda Christmas Chlassic), which will probably be pretty small, given that there was the MHL last weekend plus it is after the break officially starts. More judge food for the rest of us, in that case.

Otherwise, not much going on. Nice restful weekend, with poker on Friday, NYC trip and show and nice dinner on Saturday, then tree decorating on Sunday. Gearing up for the holidays, which should be pretty busy, apparently kicking off with a bout of slot machines with O'C and Matt Dunay’s mother. One never knows where one is going to end up next.

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Debate: Who doesn't remember the Oogs, eh?

Pajamas Wexler has reported to me that some poor misguided student from Lacking Pork, following a poorly aimed bolt of forensics inspiration to its logical conclusion, recently used an episode of Nostrum for a prose piece. Something to do with the Oog family. It rang no bells at all, so I went and read it, and it still rang no bells. It’s about the history of advertising, going back to prehistoric times, where apparently there was less advertising than there is now, although there were already plenty of people around who just watched the Superbowl for the commercials. Apparently the piece did pretty well. One never knows, does one…

There was no TVFT last night. I’m not quite sure why, but when I got to Skype, all was quiet. The only person I talked to was the British lady who tests to see if your connection is working. I need to get me a new batch of TVFTers.

On the plus (?) side, none of Tuesday's Sailor newbies responded with the mandatory signup email, not even the one who looked just like a debater, so maybe I won’t have to worry about that after all. Of course, it might just be the overwhelming burden of having to send an email. Kids these days… When I was their age, we sent emails all the time, and—by the way and Oh my God—spelled out every single word, and because there were no computers we carried them by hand five miles in the snow uphill in both directions. How did we get so quickly to a spot where sending an email is an archaic vestige of the stone age and an impossible burden beyond what a coach can reasonably expect of a student? It’s not like I’m asking them to click on the flashing gif on my Geocities account. Jeesh. What would these people do in a world of C. Colin Backslash, the original computist?

It seems strange not having to do a tournament this weekend. I look at the MHL registration longingly and my fingers get itchy wanting to scissor up some contestant cards. It’s a pretty good turnout, overall, although the JV divisions always shrink a bit as the year progresses. As ought to be obvious to anyone with the ability to read between the lines, I would like to apply some of the thinking of Academy to the MHL, to wit, tossing in some tutorials and the like. Maybe that’s where the idea will end up. Who knows? Byram, for all the hoo-ha, doesn’t look much different from last year in terms of numbers, which means that for all my bloviating I haven’t made much of a dent. My feeling is, if we can make just one noticeable difference in one venue, it’s a step in the right direction. I really do worry about small tournaments disappearing. The idea that someone will come and take over those weekends simply transfers the problem to a different venue, so unless that new venue has some intrinsic benefit over the former one, it’s all much of a muchness.

I'll probably slow down over the next couple of weeks as the holidays settle in, but I will continue to post the odd this and that. It's the least I can do, and I mean that with all my heart.

Video: Someone watched all of Atlas Shrugged so that you wouldn't have to

The funny thing is, even at 3 minutes and a few seconds, it's one of the most boring things you'll ever see.

Video: One good reason not to invite Yoko Ono to karaoke night

Debate: Newbies, disease-ridden adolescents and the tragically inept

So that was weird. Last week there was an assembly on extracurricular activities at Sailorville, at which Zip apparently wowed the crowd, leading to three new plebes at the meeting last night. Who expects new faces at this stage of the game? Assuming that at least one of them was appalled enough at the night’s proceedings to disappear for all eternity, that still means that one or two will return. What in tarnation am I supposed to do with them starting in January? At the moment, the ad hoc plan is give them a special session or two on the basics, have them watch at Bryam, and point them to compete at Newark and Scarsdale. That, of course, assumes that they have some live coal in their intestinal boiler rooms. If they are more like the traditional Sailor, there will be much hemming and hawing on their part and much gnashing of teeth on my part, and they’ll sit out the year wondering if there wasn’t something on TV Tuesday night that would get them out of this. We’ll see.

We didn’t have our practice round because of illness. Why do teenagers always seem to be at death’s door? As a species they are shockingly unhealthy. On the way to Ridge, for example, Pickles complained that he almost didn’t come because he was sick, and I told him to give me ample warning if he was going to vomit, since I find vomiting in my car less than congenial. On the way back, George Whose Name is Robert told me he was so sick that he almost stopped competing, and I gave him my same vomit speech. Neither GWNIR nor Jiminy Cricket were at the meeting last night, but at least I didn’t have to give her the vomit speech. [Cue the off-my-lawn music.] Now when I was a kid, they hadn’t invented sickness yet. Not only did we have to walk the proverbial snow five miles both ways, but we did it with a raging fever, backwards and in heels. (I thought I’d throw a Ginger Rogers reference in there for the dance fans among the VCA.) We were made of sterner stuff back in my day.

I seem to have been bombarded lately with questions from people incapable of reading. I’ve mentioned this recently, but it just won’t stop. RTFM, or in this case, substitute website for manual. What is most irritating is stupid questions from people who have done it before about doing it again. It’s the same. It will ever be the same. Please, don’t email me about it. That’s why they invented O’C (who, by the way, has entered into a special twilight zone of wandering away that is profound even for him; whatever he’s up to, he’s really up to it). I do have a little more patience with newcomers, but even they ought to read the invitation sooner or later.

Aaaargh!

Coachean Feed: the 6th Amendment, indirect limits to freedom, what exactly is a person, economics and prison, anti-gay movements

More links of interest to the debate community.

• The sixth amendment? The one about how everyone is entitled to a fair trial? How quaint, in a world where there are no trials anymore. The Sixth Amendment Rights to Fairness: The Touchstones of Effectiveness and Pragmatism
  
• Indirect limits to freedom are still limits to freedom: What is Freedom? (10): The Ability to Do Things
  
• When does an animal count as a person? Not just a protected species, but a person due the rights protections of any other person.
  
• Another article that dances around Jan-Feb: Foreword: Criminal Justice Responses to the Economic Crisis My bet is that you won't regret having too much data in rounds.
  
• Meanwhile, back at the ranch... There are those of us who worry that SCOTUS will make gay marriage unconstitutional, or immoral, or some damned thing fueled by Scalia-esque homosexual agenda arguments. Will someone please tell him that he's safe, and that there isn't a homosexual in the universe that wants to have sex with him? In other countries, they are not quite as blessed as we are, able to joke about things: Nigeria pushes “Jail the Gays” bill.
  

The last Steve Buscemi video you'll ever want to see

Assuming, that is, that you wanted to see this one. Remind me not to look up Diana Krall videos again any time soon.

A nice little treat: great animation

12 Essential American Cartoons

Absolutely—a fine selection. If you haven't seen some of these, stop everything now.

Sinatra

Born on this date in 1915, as a young lad Frank had the guts to partner up on the dance floor with Gene Kelly. He pulls it off too. (Then again, Kelly had the guts to sing along with Sinatra. He doesn't do too badly either.)

Debate: Planning this and that

I’m getting eager for the Academy Debate intro at Byram Hills. We put together an agenda at Ridge from earlier discussions, and sent it out into the world. We still need the seniors to fill the training slots, and I’m looking for volunteers, but there will be a Bronxwegian pool to draw from if all else fails. I want to lead some of this stuff myself. It might be a problem being in three places at once though. Still, I wouldn’t mind giving it a shot. The thing is, our competition on this weekend is the Sunvitational, which is good insofar as it won’t draw the primary field from a local event, but bad insofar as a few key people like O’C, for reasons I can’t understand, think a well-run tournament in Florida in January is somehow attractive. What are these people thinking? Curse you and your climate, Schappaugh!

We’ve also been murmuring among ourselves about the Modest Novice and possibly expanding it through December. There are plusses and minuses to this. This conversation will no doubt extend shortly. And speaking of extending conversations, we’re definitely recording a new TVFT Wednesday. The vast TVFTean Army rejoices!

I’m just about through clearing off the first wave of Columbia. I was actually asked what my waitlist strategy was, and it turns out I do sort of have one. No more than 5, outliers first, then locals. I would imagine that, aside from the heavily subscribed debate categories, just about everybody will get in, but it’s no big deal for a school from down the street to fill slots a few weeks out, as compared to someone who needs hotel rooms in Manhattan. I’m rather surprised, by the way, that they offer Declamation. That seems so… naïve. I mean, it’s a college tournament. There are better things they could be doing other than wrangling in freshmen and sophomores. We’ll have to talk about that for next time.

As always, there are the few schools who are starting out in forensics that are attracted to a big college tournament when they really should be practicing their chops more locally. I can’t talk them out of coming, but I’ve got to wonder why anyone would plop their entire year’s budget on a college trip where they’ll get whipped as compared to half a dozen shorter, closer trips. It has been ever thus, though. People didn’t turn the Harvard tournament into what it is today (which I can’t really speak to, having not attended in ages) for any other reason than that it was held at Harvard and not at the Hendrick Hudson Mail Order University for the Criminally Insane and the Women Who Love Them. High school administrations, from the loftiest to the looniest, are impressed by big names. Come to think of it, so is my mother. I tell her I’m going to the Bronx and she looks at me like I really need a new night job. I tell her I’m going to Yale and she thinks that’s exactly where I belong and why has it taken me so long to realize it? As I say, it has been ever thus.

Otherwise, these are peaceful times, with me not doing anything forensical this upcoming weekend. Tonight we’ll have a practice round at Sailorville, our last business meeting of the year, unless maybe we get together to make up some lost time over the break. I’ll get to watch my debating novices (as compared to my show up and stare at Menick novices) in action. Should be interesting. I hope.

A little fun video

Debate: Ridge-a-Roni

I find it interesting that Ridge has moved about a half hour closer to my school than it used to be. Much closer than I remembered. That’s a good thing. I’d much rather have a short drive to Ridge than a long one.

It was nice to do a high school again. 5 prelims, endless elims. At first we were in a room with good comfy chairs, but it was way too many of us and we quickly drifted over to our normal venue in the Media Center. (You would call this the library, but that’s not a tony enough name for the folks in Basking Ridge.) You can fit kazoodles of tabbers in this place and not even notice them very often, except when the policy folk get overexcited, which does happen occasionally. LD and PF tab never get overexcited. We don’t know the meaning of the word.

Things went fine for the most part, except for confusion over who owned which judges. PF liked to think that they were theirs, while we liked to think that they were ours. PF was being run by people who had taken vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. LD was being run by me and O’C. It was a bloodbath.

On the plus side, we had a “Jack.” Every tab room needs one, a major domo who is always there and who can solve every problem. Jack is a good name for such a person, and in this case, happened to actually be his name. We would just shout out “Jack!” when something was askew, and there was Jack, skewing it back up. Ridge happens to be slightly larger than the Pentagon, without the internal order of roomage, so it’s a major miracle to get from one area to another. I’ve been there enough now to have only gotten lost once, but it was for eleven hours, it being that kind of place. As I say, big and confusing.

I tried to keep CP around for various purposes, since I was using the notification system again (despite Ridge’s crappy wireless; I ended up plugging in my MiFi and paying the $5 for a day, which meant that when it ran out on the second day, it was either pay another $5 or let it go: I let it go). Unfortunately, he was the quality in the pool, probably ranked by everyone there as a 1, including the people who didn’t rank. So we didn’t see him much except at the short gathering Friday night at the motel, attended by everyone in the universe. I had brought nuts and cheese, which were quickly devoured. The other people were just nuts and cheesy. What can I say?

O’C didn’t wander off too often, although at those times when he insisted on blasting out “I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas” we were all wishing that he would wander off. JV was on burger patrol. There was one team that refused to use the other team’s coin for the PF flip because they had cursed it with negative energy. (Shouldn’t that be con energy?) The guys who had looked all professional last week running the Tiggers looked like normal human beings again judging PF this week.

And so it goes. This weekend I’m off. Yes, off. There had originally been no tournament on the schedule, so I made other plans. When a tournament came back on to the schedule, it was (thankfully) too late to change those plans. Whoopty damn do, as Clarence Thomas might put it.

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Debate: 'Tis the season

I remember from the old days Mad magazine’s snappy answers to stupid questions feature. One that sticks in my mind is a picture of a fish store with a big sign saying “Fresh Fish,” and a customer asking, “Is the fish fresh?” As for me, I will be instituting a new FASQ feature in my email. It will direct people to a web page that says simply, “The answer to your question can be found on the tournament website. You could look it up, or I could look it up for you. Let’s try option number one.”

Do you think that would work?

Why do people turn to me to give them directions, for instance? There’s Google maps, there’s MapQuest. There’s even Apple’s IOS map app, which works a lot better than anyone gives it credit for (every time I’ve used it, it worked fine). There is, however, no MenickMap app. Of course, the best use of a MenickMap app would be at tournaments, when people call the tabroom to tell us that they’re lost, and to ask how to get where they’re going. This happens way less rarely than you would expect. That it happens at all is remarkable, come to think of it. They really will call and say, “I can’t find the X building.” What do you say to that? “Well, they haven’t moved it, so the fault lies with you, not with them?” Sarcasm is probably wasted on anyone who calls to tell you they’re lost. And I’m talking adults here, not students. When students get lost, they tend to simply keep going until they’re so lost, they’re not heard from until an hour and a half after their scheduled start time. At least they have the courage of their (wandering) convictions: they don’t give up.

By the way, we didn’t level any fines in LD for not-picked-up rounds at the Tigs. Most people picked up right away, or showed up merely a minute late. Well done, all. One school didn’t pick up on Sunday morning, though. There is that other kind of fine, the non-fiscal one, the one that remembers who was there and who wasn’t when it’s time to clear the next waitlist. Didn’t pick up your ballots Sunday at Princeton? Why would I expect you to pick them up on Sunday at Columbia? Enjoy your weekend off.

Then again, there are some people out there whom I love. The judges who hang around the judge area and when you ask them to run down to another building to replace a judge who may or may not show up, their response is, “Hand me the ballot, boss,” as they disappear down to that other building, ready, willing and able. These are rare people, but they are there. And they’re there again and again. The good people. Come to think of it, most people are good people, but they don’t make for as interesting a blog. The ones who came to me and asked not to have to walk so much? Much more interesting. I told one person that we only had one room in this same building, sorry about that, and that one is reserved for a guy in a wheelchair. I offered to get him if she wanted to wrestle him for it; she failed to see the humor in that. No doubt she went to the other building, got lost, and called us to complain about it. At which I sent one of our saints down to replace her.

I can feel Festivus coming. Why else would I be airing all these grievances?

Books: Lee Child/Jack Reacher

Ira Gershwin

Ira was born on this date in 1896. He wrote songs with Harold Arlen and Kurt Weill and Jerome Kern. He also worked occasionally with his piano-playing brother. And if anyone has ever written better lyrics than these, I am unaware of it.

The way you wear your hat
The way you sip your tea
The memory of all that
No, no, they can't take that away from me

The way your smile just beams
The way you sing off key
The way you haunt my dreams
No, no, they can't take that away from me

We may never, never meet again
On the bumpy road to love
Still, I'll always, always keep the memory of

The way you hold your knife
The way we danced till three
The way you changed my life
No, no, they can't take that away from me
No, they can't take that away from me

Debate: In which we end up in the beans

It seems that one way to turn the notification feature in tabroom, and all the automatic posting features for that matter, from occasional niceties to normal life is to do them pretty much everywhere every time. CP concurs. Granted that in some venues (e.g., Scarsdale), the likelihood of getting cell service is virtually nil, except for that one spot next to the elevator on the third floor, and only if you’re standing on one leg and rubbing your belly and patting your head at the same time and there happens to be an AT&T truck driving by at just that moment. It will spread as more people use it and pass the word along. At the Tiggers, we were complaining that it seemed difficult to set up, and then some kid walked along and demonstrated that you click here and here and that’s all there is to it.

)(*#^%^% kid!

Anyhow, that will be the mantra (using the automated features, not swearing at that wiseass kid at Princeton). We’ll start at Ridge.

Met with the Sailors last night. I think that the newbies were rather shocked that we’re onto a new topic (Jan-Feb) before they’ve debated the present topic (Nov-Dec). Downside of Modest Novice? Actually, I think it’s more like inattention on their part. Time moves quickly in the debate universe. If you’re not paying attention, half the year can go by and you’re lucky if you’ve gotten more than 4 rounds in. Not good. Fortunately, Jan-Feb at the novice level isn’t terribly off the orthodoxy scale, with all kinds of underpinnings of social contract and the like. Of course, I’m much more interested in the more serious issues of imprisonment, which I often allude to with posts in the Coachean Feed. The prison system, and criminal justice in general, is ludicrous in the US. There are an amazing number of approaches to the rez, if one wants. In my original post on this year's topics, I gave this a 7 out of 10. I like it, although I have some reservations about its durability for the Jan-TOC span. We’ll see, or more to the point, you’ll see. I’ll be in tab.

As for the Pffft topic, I think I like it. On the one hand it forces students to get a grasp of campaign spending in general, and the history of CU and McCain-F and so forth, and then it asks for very specific research on the effects. This can probably be combined with interesting analytics for pretty good arguments, and people will learn a lot. That’s good. More topics should be like this.

I did give a sneak preview of a couple of the topic areas for this Christmas season’s episode of Bean Trivia. No Disney categories? The look of astonishment on their little faces was startling. Of course, they never know the Disney answers, which means that they have to text O’C or the daughter as lifelines, and they know them all upside down, so what's the point? Anyhow, new areas include dogs, the American Songbook and fill in the Beatles blank only it isn’t the Beatles. Some other group, about the same vintage as the Fab Four. (Real tough, huh? Duh. I promise no classics from "Their Satanic Majesties Request.") Also introducing side bets on the lifelines, where everyone else can parlay a few extra beans into a bowl of chili by guessing if either of the above or our illustrious speech coach can answer the question correctly. Hmmm. Put your beans where your mouth is, I always say.

Happy Birthday, Walt

Debate: Moving right along

First of all, I’m glad to see that the Pope will soon be tweeting. Unfortunately, I can’t think of anything to say that isn’t irretrievably offensive, so I’ll keep my mouth shut.

The thing about tournaments is that, an hour later, you’re ready for another one. Just as the Tiggers are finishing up, the Gem of Harlem kicks into gear. They’ve got plenty of people registered, although there seemed to be some inadvertent slippage off the waitlist. CP reset it back to zero for me. The Gems are meeting today to begin getting rooms, always a tough process for them. I should start pulling people off the waitlist by the end of the week, starting with the long-distance folk (but not the long-distance folk that last year blew us off in favor of doing the NY club scene or whatever, or the long-distance folk who didn’t pick up their Sunday morning ballots at the Tiggers, etc., etc.) and the reliable friends of the tournament. One big problem will be assembling the tab room. I was hoping to corral CP himself, but he’ll be doing sleepy time down south, and Catholic Charlie is going all Catholic on us with some CFL meeting (no doubt discussing the Pope’s tweets). Oh, well. I’m not worried. I just need to find out who’s going to be around.

Coming up this weekend is Ridge. Nice and compact after sending people far and wide last weekend, although the numbers are pretty high. I’ve been going to Ridge for a while, perhaps from when it first started, and always liked it. I remember in the beginning when Dario was still there and the computers would turn off automatically at 10:00 pm and we’d unexpectedly lose all the data; this was before we all had more laptops than we know what to do with. I remember the year we tried the Indigo hotel, with smell-o-vision or whatever it was, and no one could find the place. I’ve always enjoyed the look on Y’s face when any of the tabbers slipped out to grab a latte or something down the road, as if we were abandoning him to the wolves. As far as tournament management is concerned, it’s a Machine, with Ridge kids everywhere doing what they’re supposed to do (or else, I guess, Y feeds them to the wolves). And one high point is this hidden little burger and shake place downtown. I’d highly recommend it, but if I told you about it, it would be even more crowded, so you’re on your own.

Tonight we’ll meet at Sailorville (last week was cancelled for yet more bad weather—we have not had a good run this season) and talk about the new topics. I like the subjects, but I’m not yet sure one way or the other on the PF wording. As for LD, it’s so old it’s got a beard, but there’s nothing wrong with that, and it’s as solid as the day is long for the endless stretch that is theoretically Jan-Feb. On the home front, we’re also champing at the bit to do a new TVFT, where I want to talk about Academy. We had thought of doing it on the fly at the Tiggers, but as always, there really wasn’t any fly to do it on. Oh, well. We’ll get to it, probably next week.

How to be a good debate citizen

Or, 25 steps to a better you.

1. Don’t ask questions because you’re too lazy to look something up. Especially don’t ask questions that would make someone else have to look it up for you.

2. Show up and stay showed up until you’re no longer needed. Then go away.

3. Be the first one to pick up your ballots.

4. Be the first one to get your ballots back to tab.

5. If you have friends in the tab room, they will have had dinner with you the night before. If they didn’t have dinner with you the night before, you do not have friends in the tab room, and you should go hang out somewhere else.

6. Cover all your judging, and if you’re a big school, bring a couple extra. Be a giver, not a taker. If none of your alums are willing to come back to judge, you’re doing something wrong. If none of your upperclassmen will judge underclassmen, you’re doing something really wrong.

7. Do not use foul language with the students you are judging. You may have been brought up in a manure pile, but some of them do not like to find themselves awash in your vulgarities. Also, "You effed up, dude," is not exactly a constructive criticism.

8. Do not expect anyone to read your paradigm past the sentences that say a) that you are fine with speed and b) that you will vote on theory. The rest is just nonsense.

9. If you are asked to text your decision, you might want to text your decision; it’s so much easier than coming up with an excuse for not texting your decision. And if you don’t know how to text, how can you possibly know how to judge?

10. If you do something really stupid, join the club. Admit it, and move on. Just don’t do it again. And again. And again.

11. Do not imbibe alcoholic beverages if there is a possibility that you will have to judge within the next six hours. You’re not that wonderful to begin with. You intoxicated is even less wonderful.

12. Ear buds should be in your pocket, not in your ears, when you are judging.

13. Double thirties in a round, while acting as proof positive that you do not have a clue how to judge, do not give any real indication of how well the debaters did. Don’t do it.

14. The tab room does not have your missing ballots. The tab room does not have anyone’s missing ballots, including its own. We haven't gotten a complete set of all of our ballots in our packets since that one time back in 1997. Why should you be any different?

15. Since it is never all right for you not to fulfill your judging obligation, don’t bother to ask if you really have to come back tomorrow morning. You do.

16. It’s Mutual Judge Preference, not Most Preferred Judging. If your debater got a 4 judge, so did their opponent. That was the best we could do. It’s called an even playing field. If you want more 1s, rank more people as 1s.

17. If you think there’s a ballot error, act quickly. Depending on the error, the further away we are from its occurrence, the harder it is to fix. The tab room does not think it is perfect; far from it. We’ll take accuracy however we can get it.

18. Smoke when you’re not obligated to do anything else, not instead of being where we can find you when we need you. Better yet, quit smoking. With the cost of cigarettes what it is these days, you could be saving enough money to buy a new iPad. Every week.

19. Don’t complain to the tab room that you’re too tired to judge. We’re too tired to tab, and we were here before you arrived today and we’re going to be here after you’re gone tonight, so if you’ve ever wondered what the expression “falling on deaf ears” is all about, this is it.

20. Don’t complain to tab that you’ve had to judge every round. Your debaters have had to debate every round, haven’t they? You haven’t heard them complaining. Not to mention that we’ve had to tab every round. Besides, what else are you going to do in a high school on a Saturday afternoon? This isn’t Disneyland, you know.

21. Ascertain beyond all doubt who you have with you on the team and judging when you arrive at registration, and even more important, relay that information to the proper authorities. Why else do you think we’re asking you to check over your registration?

22. Pay for the tournament when the tournament requests payment. Nobody wants to have to remember that you were too discombobulated to come up with the check you’ve known you needed for the last two months.

23. Do not ask when the next round is. Every time someone asks this question, it postpones the next round by the length of time it takes to listen to the question, curse inwardly, and then explain that we’re working on it.

24. Do not complain that you never get any ballots. In MJP, it is the students who have determined that they don’t want you to judge, not the tab room. To alleviate this situation, learn to judge better, at which point you can proceed to refraining from complaining that you’ve had to judge every round (see 20, above).

25. Feel free to leave cash gratuities in the little jar next to the computer in the tab room.

Debate: After the Tiggers

What is interesting is that, with the passage of time, while some things remain constant, enough others do not that the whole rigmarole continues to be novel.

I’ve been going to the Tiggers since the 90s. In the beginning, it was as a judge with the team, and of course lately in tab. There was a period in the middle when I didn’t go because of issues with the way the tournament was run. The Tigs really thought they knew all about LD, but they didn’t, and their judging was terrible, and although I liked their schedule of 2 up and 2 off, that wasn’t reason enough to go. Hence the MHL on that weekend got built up. You wouldn’t want me to have a weekend off, would you?

Under CP’s tutelage, the tournament got good, and now I’ve followed his lead on the last two as a guiding spirit, and I enjoy it quite a bit. The constants are the various times the traveling tab room gets together for coffee or dinner or whatever, the trip back and forth and JV handling the hotel, the general expectation of reasonable weather (although last year it was bitter cold, which we kept remarking on this year when it wasn’t). There are some other constants as well, with the usual suspects. Every tournament has its own unique USes, that is, the people that you only see there and maybe one or two other places. Looking out over the crowd at the Tigs from the podium, it’s virtually the same year after year. We could have teleported from 2011, or 2008. Same people. Same foibles. We’ve come to expect them. Some of them are irritating, some of them are endearing. It’s part of what makes the Tiggers the Tiggers.

This year though, while the tournament ran swimmingly, with my slow learning of the new features of tabroom and so forth apparently beginning to bear fruit (I only cursed CP a handful of times, and on his side, likewise I’m sure), it had some rather original moments. Everyone, it seemed, was in fine form when it came to filing complaints. I cannot remember a tournament where more people came to us with issues of one sort of another, issues that had nothing to do with the tournament itself or the Tigs, but just…stuff. Registration had barely opened when the first person came to me to informally gripe about something. I replied that I could only pursue formal gripes. Later the informality fell away and the formal attire was put onto this gripe, and I handled it. That’s the first thing, if you’re of the griping persuasion. If you just want to whine about something, you might as well talk to the wall, because you’re going to get exactly the same response as you will from me. But if you want to formally complain, especially about another team, that’s a big deal, because I will do what has to be done. Sometimes that’s not what you want, but it’s what has been deemed right. And in those situations, it’s not me that deems, it’s the tournament as a whole. If an unusual issue arises beyond the scope of what we’re used to in tab, it will be discussed with the hosts. I am not the autocrat of the debate world, even if occasionally I act that way. Keep in mind that I live in the same debate world as, for instance, JV. How many autocrats can there be in that small universe?

So there were a number of formal complaints over the weekend. And here’s the thing. They were handled well by the people bringing them to us. That’s really important. There was one problem where a round didn’t happen, for reasons that were, after all was said and done, extremely unclear, although each side certainly thought that they were as clear as day. The coaches in this situation came to tab with cool tempers, and we talked to a few people, and we figured out a way to hold a makeup round. Everyone left the room happy. We like that. We do want schools who make the effort to go to a tournament and pay all that money, to have a good tournament. Even when a kid does something royally dumb, they shouldn’t have to suffer too too much for it. Just a little. We do want people to have rounds. Why wouldn’t we? We’ll do what we can to make them happen.

There was an unfortunate incident that I don’t want to discuss in specifics, revolving around student behavior. Here’s the deal on that. I feel very strongly, and I know we’ve discussed this on TVFT and that the rest of us in the traveling tab room feel likewise, that modes of behavior during competition must be kept to the highest standards. Part of the forensics experience is that adolescents are maturing rapidly, and forensics focuses that maturation in a good way, with all the travel and so forth. It doesn’t always take, though. At some point, idiots are idiots. Idiots who cause harm, however, should not be exempt from paying the price of that harm, even if the idiots are teenagers. If a situation perceived as harmful arises at a tournament, any tournament, talk to your coach. Come to me, or have your coach come to me. I will find someone to help. I promise.

On another note entirely, and obviously much less sympathetic, I reamed out three judges who, for reasons that defy my understanding, felt that we should all hang around an extra forty-five minutes on Saturday night while they did whatever it was they were doing that wasn’t texting their results to us in a timely manner. If you were one of those three, find some comfort in that I was an equal opportunity reamer, although by the time I got to the third one I simply told him to consider himself reamed out, as I was tired of reaming by this point. So, another thing to keep in mind. The tab staff leaves the tournament about a half hour after the last ballot is handed in. If the members of that staff have a team with them, likewise the team leaves a half hour after that last ballot. We are the last to get home, and the last to get to sleep. We are waiting, impatiently, for you. You do not want to be one of the people we have to wait for, because we have it within our power to assign you to 0-5 rounds for the rest of your debate career. And we will. Trust me on that.

Music: Don't try this at home

The problem with YouTube is all those other videos on the right. The curious thing is that this string started with a bad Hawaiian song.


I forgive this one the lack of video in light of the abundance of meat.




I like to thing that these folks will look back one day and shake their heads in wonderment at their crazy youth.



But my favorite is the Twinnies, who lip-synch and accordion-synch, on skates.

Debate: Ready to Tigger 'em up

I love dealing with CP. Somehow with him it’s always my fault when I screw something up. I prefer to blame everyone else. Given that there’s only one of me and quite a few of everybody else, the likelihood that one of them is at fault versus me being at fault are about seven billion to one. Those are good odds. What can’t CP accept them?

I think Princeton is ready to roll, in any case. We threw in the strikes for PF late. I had thought about these off and on, but more off more often and hence they fell through the cracks. PF strikes are a slippery product. There’s a certain sanctity of any damned fool can judge it, versus the problem that some damned fools always drop you and I’d rather have some other damned fool judge me if it's all the same to you. It’s curious to look at PF from the other side, as in, newcomer parents who I try to toss in there from the Sailors. Everyone seems to want to spend the next three or four years observing. I mean, once, okay, but after that, you’re in. Watch one, do one, teach one. Watch fifty, do one, attend child’s graduation isn’t really how it’s done. This despite how much we insist that PF is intended for their lay adjudicating ears. I’m seeing the same thing with our Speecho-American parents. How many times do you have to observe Dec before you feel competent enough to judge it? (That, of course, is a trick question. Just watching one round of Dec will turn the most profoundly competent adult into a simmering bowl of hyena sweat incapable of ever rustling up another cogent thought.)

At this point the tournament is about to pounce from the gate. Tonight I’ll look at the data and start setting things up in TRPC. Judge prefs close at 9, so everything is ready at that point, aside from the usual memo from You Know Who asking for more time. Or, maybe you don’t know who, but that’s neither here nor there. I’m still getting people asking about the waitlist, which is sort of moot at this point. I overbooked a little as it is, with the aid of a couple of extra rooms that turned up unexpectedly that I hope are still there once the festivities begin. Also, of course, there is the integrity of the tournament. Some schools could fill up an entire division all by themselves, but that does nothing for everyone else. We’ve got the right numbers for the debate divisions, we’ve had them for a while, and we’re going to keep them. I wouldn’t give my own mother another LDer, but then again, she would know better than to ask.

We did move registration time up a bit on the speech side. I’m wrangling the debate side of things, and JV is wrangling the speech side, and he reminded me that when he figures he’ll be done as soon as registration is closed, the next thing that happens is that tabroom crashes and it turns out that all the numbers are not divisible by any reasonable number for assignments and the judges are all taking the day off to work on their macramé projects. He wants to get out at a reasonable time, as do we debate tabbers, and there’s no reason why he shouldn’t. Needless to say, he runs with full autonomy on his side. I really know nothing about tabbing speech.

Then again, CP would claim that I also really don’t know much about tabbing debate. That’s where we disagree. It’s those other seven billion people who don't know much about tabbing debate. Next to them, I'm Mr. Tab incarnate.

Music: The greatest players of the guitar and ukulele?

There's something magical about people really making music...

More articles we didn't finish reading

These headlines are all real, directly copied from our RSS feed without editing. When we say we didn't read them, we mean it. They didn't exactly pull us in, for some reason...

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Debate: Running things, sort of

In a way it’s rather odd helping out at the Tigger tournament. Obviously I run the tournament at my own high school, which for me means getting as many other people aside from myself to do the work as is humanly possible. Come to think of it, getting out of doing work has been my modus operandi for as long as I can remember. In the DJ it meant inventing all sorts of technical systems that got everybody else out of doing a lot of work too, one of those high tides lifting all boats sort of things. I’m pretty good at systems overall, and I was able back in the day to apply that talent not only to classic bureaucratic bloat but to some burgeoning technologies; putting the two together got everything exactly the way I liked it, and still like it. It reminds me of The Doubleday Cookbook. When I was working at that particular publisher in my youth, they were putting together this classic magnum opus, one of those enormous how-to-cook-everything books. For reasons I don’t quite recall, I was assigned to do the index, something I had never done before or since. I took to it with a vengeance. The end result, lo these many years later, is that whenever I look something up in the index of The Doubleday Cookbook, I always find what I am looking for at the very first try, exactly where I intuitively expect to find it. If you can’t organize the world the way you like it, then at least try to organize the index.

Anyhow, the real point is that I enjoy running things. My daughter calls this going into God mode. I’m good at delegating what can be delegated, and doing myself what can’t be delegated, and knowing the difference. Of course, I really don’t run the Tiggers or the Gem of Harlem so much as guide them along where needed, as needed. It’s different for every school. The Tigs are terrifically well organized (perhaps as a result of their years with CP, but then again, when I got into the Gem, they were terrifically not well organized after the same number of years with CP, so go figure) and all you have to do is point them in the right direction. We put O’C as their guardian on trophies and judge acquisition, for instance. Having O’C as your guide to awards is like having Lance Armstrong as your guide to biking: he does it on steroids. But universities need university trophies, and O'C got the Tigs over the hump of their Dollar Store awards into the real thing. I mean, let’s face it. While a university tournament may offer good competition, most people go because it’s that particular university. There’s an underlying reason why so many Ivies do high school events with people breaking down the doors to get in. They don’t even really need the allure of bids: people just want to walk those hallowed paths and imagine themselves being here in a few years as actual Tiggers (or whatever) themselves. I think it was Bietz’s proposal that all universities automatically get semis bids, somewhat based on this premise.

So we point the students at a school in the right direction, and do some of the stuff ourselves. For me, it’s always running the registration, which I love doing. I love pulling people off the waitlists (it always makes you look like some great hero), matching up judge hires, rapping recalcitrant knuckles as needed, wondering if this year yet against XY HS’s coach will blow off her judging obligations (which is why her school was taken off the waitlist so late) and if YX HS’s parents will pull out all their losers on Saturday night despite the hundreds of dollars of fines imposed on them last year. Have I ever mentioned I have a pretty good memory for tournament shenanigans? Combine that with the number of registrations I run, it’s not a good idea for your school to join in the shenaniganning, if you know what I mean. In any case, running a big registration means picking at tabroom every couple of hours, especially as we get close to finalizing fees. I get a kick out of that. Other people no doubt would find it torture of the worst order.

What will be interesting this time out is using tabroom again for notifications. I have to admit that I have no confidence in my understanding of this from the users point of view, which means that a) I haven’t read the directions in tabroom and b) when people ask me questions I’ll have to make something up. It worked pretty well at Bronx, insofar as notifying people that something was happening, but it didn’t necessarily notify them of the correct thing that was happening. CP, happily unraveling a parli tournament at the Pups that weekend, occasionally texted responses to my cries of help to the tune of, “Oh, that’s not good,” and, “Um, I should look at the data.” I’m not sure where he is this weekend, but I can imagine getting texts from some random gin mill on the south side of Boston telling me that “Oh, that doesn’t sound good.” We’ll see.

The point of all of this is that I do like working other people’s tournaments. Sometimes it’s just sitting in tab keeping the machine humming and pulling out the sausages. Other times it’s getting out front and pushing the random animal parts into the sausage-making machine in the first place. The Tiggers is a Random Animal Parts tournament for me. Which, as I say, I really enjoy.

(I hope that the linguistic abuses in this post don'tt mean I’ll have to turn in my Metaphor License any time soon.)

Dumb ways to die

The catchiest tune I heard all day.

Debate: More on Academy

I've cross-posted this to the Northeast-Forensics group on Google. Please respond there, if you're so inclined.

It would seem that there are a couple of immediate responses to Academy Debate.

First, there’s a misperception that it offers some change of the present debate activities. It was suggested that it would be a new debate activity altogether, or should somehow work as a preventative against certain practices that some coaches find displeasing. This is not the intention. Academy, as it relates to actual debating, should be seen an no different than the connotation of novice or varsity or junior varsity as they relate to their particular brand of debate. Academy is rigidly defined as aimed at sophomores and juniors and excluding seniors; it can also be judged by seniors (and, of course, the usual college judges and coaches). In other words, we limit who can do it, and expand who can judge it, but we do not attempt to interfere with the content, nor make claims for any new content of debate. As I’ve said, in that regard it is something like an expanded junior varsity division. Why not just call it JV? Well, around here JV has a very specific connotation. Aside from Yale, the first tournament of the year for most participants, it only exists in local events, where it comprises mostly sophomores and upwards looking freshman, and is primarily a division that provides randomly paired rounds and access to state finals at the end of the year. In other words, there are no “real” tournaments aside from Yale that offer it, and there it’s only in LD. For the most part, aside from the local occasional one-day events (which I value highly, don’t get me wrong), debaters in LD and Policy are either novices or varsity, and for the most part they’re all varsity in PF. So on the one hand, the idea of Academy Debate is predicated on finding meaningful rounds for intermediate debaters, who both get their heads handed to them at varsity events (a little learning from losing goes a long way) and often learn to dislike the activity (at least LD) because the commitment at the highest levels is so intense, and they’re always facing competition at those highest levels (until they’re bracketed down into the bottom).

So on the one hand, there’s the benefits to a specific group of debaters of a division dedicated to them. Secondly, there’s the benefits to tournaments. Academy is not intended to be some new structure for some new tournaments. Speaking frankly, there are some tournaments that are in trouble, or will be in trouble, and Academy might be the help they’re looking for.

We need to look at the tournament situation in the region. The season begins at Yale, and then for all practical purposes there are no weekends off, aside from holidays, until April. This is not an exaggeration. Some of these are big invitationals, some are local one-dayers, but they take up the entire calendar. Every now and then some program comes along and wants to hold a tournament, and we always tell them the same thing: Fine, but there’s nowhere to put it.

So our calendar is full, and what happens is, the season begins to take shape as a result of what tournaments are when, and teams adjust accordingly. It seems that there’s about one big TOC-qual tournament every month, and there’s a lot of jockeying around them. They anchor a team’s calendar at the varsity end. Then there’s the regular one-dayers, in NY being the MHL and the NYCFL. There’s also about one of these a month, and they anchor the team’s calendar at the other, younger end. And then there’s the tournaments with no bids, and maybe no plans at trying to get bids. The bid-seeking varsity debaters aren’t very interested in these, for the most part, not only because of the lack of bids but because the competition won’t be at their level. Monticello is the perfect example of this, in all its divisions. It comes between Yale and Big Bronx, and used to have bids, but lost them over the years because it really is a regional tournament that doesn’t go out and buy a lot of circuit judges or anything like that. I find it a very welcoming venue, with great amenities for judges and coaches, plus it offers housing to the students. It’s also big enough to hold the winter Olympics in there (and, in Monticello, it is always winter). But after it lost its bids, programs seemed to lose interest in it. What programs didn’t do, I would imagine, was lose interest in developing their sophomores and juniors, many of whom might not debate at the bracketing tournaments of Yale and Bronx because of entry limits. But since Monti had no lure for the top varsity, but divisions that were called varsity (or open) that had to be judged by paid adjudicators, it became much less attractive. It was one thing to get some rounds for lightly seasoned debaters when you also had the chance to pick up a bid, and another thing altogether to get some rounds for lightly seasoned debaters between the expensive Yale and Bronx events, at the same cost.

Over the last couple of years attendance has declined steadily at Monticello, and the tournament runs the risk of disappearing, yet it is a venue that has proven it can hold a tournament of great size successfully (no easy feat year after year). If it were to disappear, I would bet dollars to doughnuts that someone else would grab the weekend, but the same issues would ensue, regardless of who grabbed it under what aegis. The bracketing tournaments determine that this one will always be what it is (unless Yale and Bronx somehow lose their bids). So we are faced with the situation of lightly seasoned debaters losing an opportunity for rounds on this weekend (and there are a couple of other weekends like this throughout the year, but let’s stick to one example for now). We can let the weekend expire, or we can try to revitalize it.

The other half of Academy Debate, and the reason for its name, is that tournaments offering this division will also offer training/workshops/lectures/brainstorms—whatever makes sense to provide not just much-needed rounds to a particularly underserved audience, but also desirable educational enhancement. Not every team has the coaching resources to do a lot of this, even if they’re piloted by strong educators. But if we find an open slot or two at a given tournament, and allow students at that tournament to brainstorm the next topic, or hear a lecture on social contract, or whatever, it becomes an even more desirable event to add to a team’s calendar. We not only get tournaments on the calendar specifically geared to the most experienced and the least experienced, but also for those in the middle.

It may be a lagniappe of having seniors judge that certain seniors with strong credentials might also participate in training. Rising varsity might especially appreciate a half hour discussion of, say, theory, from a bidded-up LDer known for running theory. Or a crack PF team who explain how they, personally, prep for a topic. There are plenty of opportunities like this, that would appeal both to the seniors showing off their skills and to their potential audiences.

Obviously the nature of the academic events offered at an AD tournament would vary according to the personnel at the tournament. And some tournaments might offer in only one division, because their other divisions are TOC level. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. And most tournaments wouldn't offer it all, because they're serving a different audience.

The plan is to test this idea at the Byram Hills tournament in January. The situation there is a tournament right after the break, the week before Big Lex, conflicting on the national level with the Sunvitational. This is a young tournament that has never drawn a strong varsity field, and it never will. But the intermediate students who will get crushed next week at Big Lex might really benefit if Byram were an Academy Debate tournament, with rounds at their level and enhancements for their long-term careers. And that’s what we’re going to try to do.

Coachean Feed: public speaking, standardized tests, sexism on campus, compulsory voting, software patents

More links of interest to the debate community.

• Fear of public speaking is as common as can be. Having once painfully suffered from it myself, I am a true believer that the best cure is to do it, hence the best way to beat nerves as a debater is to debate more. That's also some of the advice in The neuroscience of stage fright — and how to cope with it. Plus there's other interesting stuff about the problem.
  
• Why It’s Time to Get Rid of Standardized Tests Hurry up, please, it's time. Except, in one form or another, I've been hearing this all my life. Since I used to be one of those people who, as they said, tested well, and since I knew there was no particular reason for that (brilliant I was, but not all that brilliant), I believe the underlying truth of this. Changing it? Something else altogether. Where's the PF topic on it?
  
• Sexism on campus? No way, right? Wrong. Is Student Life Becoming More Sexist?
  
• Our war on drugs is an abject failure. Why doesn't this surprise me?
  
• On compulsory voting. It could be a topic this year, or some year.
  
• And then there's software patents:
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

Debate: How I spent my Thanksgiving vacation

Back to the DJ today after a full week off. It’s amazing how quickly one forgets how to sit around doing mostly nothing.

After Wee Sma’ Lex, we celebrated an early Thanksgiving at the daughter’s, as on the day itself she was off to London to visit the husband. (They’ll be skying back and forth until March when he lands here for the duration.) One of the guests was a relative, the grandson of my father’s Uncle Dom. I have no idea precisely how any of us are related to him aside from being some level of cousin at some level of removal. The funny thing is, he looked just like a Menick. It was like talking to one of my father’s brothers, except he’s half my age. Kate discovered him at her new job. You never know who’s going to turn up! He was full of family lore, including the source of the name which was Germanized in order for the Italians to get what was in our area a German-controlled liquor license. I recommend that every holiday have a surprise relative show up. Makes for interesting conversation.

On the entertainment front, saw Skyfall and Michael Feinstein (separately), and a superior exhibit of the circus in NY at the Barnard Graduate Center on the west side. Read about futurism in architecture. Ate out fewer times than I had expected. Paid little or no attention to blogging. Did some online Christmas shopping but went into no stores. Had another Thanksgiving on Thanksgiving day, this time at the chez. Watched five minutes of the annual Macy's Lip Synching Parade. Actually walked by the balloons being blown up on the previous Wednesday around the Museum of Natural History. They were working on Buzz LY and Spongebob SP when we were there, and the streets were lined with barriers in preparation for the big…preparation. Watching the parade get made up is about as popular as watching the parade happen, and you don’t have to suffer through people you don’t know pretending to sing.

Sorted out Princeton rooms. Complained a few times to CP about things for which he was not responsible. Cleaned up all my mother’s financial papers from the floor of the chez and stacked them in the basement. Discovered the NY Times site with the extra puzzles (including SET). Took a few naps. Chopped a bunch of wood. Started discussing Academy Debate on the northeast forensics listserver. Began preparing questions for the annual Christmas Bean Trivia session with the Sailors.

And, oh yeah, while I was typing this, got distracted and cleared off the last major bloc of Tigger entries.

We're where we should be the Monday after TG.

Debate: Gearing back up

I probably should think about getting back to business. I took the whole week off, and it was sort of full and empty, depending upon the time and the day. I seem to be way off my normal schedule lately, for a variety of reasons, like Sandy and Bump and General Malaise and whatnot. But that can’t go on forever. It’s not as if I haven’t been doing what I have to do, but I haven’t been spending much time on the extras. There are enough hours in the day, if one bothers to use them.

A whole weekend ago we went up to Wee Sma’ Lex. This is always fun for me and for the Sailors. First of all, it’s a breeze after Bump, and one wants a breeze if at all possible. Second, it’s a chance to take my young ‘uns away for their first housing in some cases. Plus it’s a tournament lite, with four rounds, so they get experience without having their heads handed to them. It worked out well, for the most part. My two debuters won some rounds, which is way better than debuting and sinking like the proverbial stone. On the down side, we were expecting an Italian feast and ended up in a Thai restaurant, which was fine, but the Italian food in a Thai restaurant can’t hold a candle to the Italian food in an Italian restaurant. (You’ll just have to trust me on that.) CP tells me that they shut down the Italian place after last year’s Lex RR. Feh! You leave Lexington alone for two minutes and they start shuttering the landmarks. On the positive side, I think it would take Armageddon to shut down Rein’s Deli in Hartford, so we had that on the way home. At times we’ve gone in attempting to set the record for individual consumption of matzo ball soup, but this time we just ate like normal (non-adolescent) people, except for Pickles who, when eating a pickle, managed to acquire a nickname. ‘Nuff said. On another down side, the bus driver was of the persuasion: “You go up here and turn right and then left,” and she would respond, “Turn left and then right.” After a while you wanted to rely on the curvature of the earth to get her there eventually when she headed off 180 degrees somewhere else. On another up side, we got out of Lexington earlier than ever before, and home earlier than ever before. All in all, it was delightful.

At one point CP sat me down and explained that in my parochial fashion I had introduced Academy Debate to New York and New Jersey, but had left out Massachusetts. Duh. So, I created a Northeast regional debate coach listserver. It’s called Northeast Forensics on Google groups if you want to join; it’s open to one and all. I used the Wee Sma’ registration to acquire the names of relevant Massachusetts people. I figure any minute now I’ll put the Academy outline up there for discussion. The thing is, if it’s a good idea, it will appeal to debate teams there too. Curiously, someone responded here that AD should be used as a tool to control the content of debate, i.e., less $ircuity, but that’s not it’s goal at all. It’s there simply to provide of level of debate for younger students who are almost intrinsically non-circuit, i.e., slower and less theoretical and more likely to debate the resolution head-on. While I personally have no love of LD at circuit events these days, if for no other reason than that I simply can’t follow it, I’m not out to sabotage it or create an alternative. I mean, debate will go where it goes, and there are things people can do (and I think that MJP is one of those things) to keep it where you like it, but generally not liking it doesn’t make it bad. It just makes it something you don’t like. There’s a lot of forensic activities out there: no one is forcing anyone to concentrate on LD if they don’t want to.

And I’ve spent a lot of time working on Princeton. We’ve got more rooms this year, which is nice, and I divvied those up according to some internal logic that I couldn’t possibly remember five minutes after I created the files. Something to do with geography and brain power, probably, based on the idea that VLD judges and debaters could probably go the furthest afield while PF judges (maybe more inexperienced and parental) and novice LDers were more likely to get lost before they even walked out the door. I also kept the old eye on the waitlist, which has whittled down nicely. My guess is that there will be a few left standing in VLD, but the rest look fine. C’est la guerre. If you want to debate nowadays at major tournaments, don’t wait three weeks to sign up. It shouldn’t just go to the first-day types, but at some point a little sense of urgency on the part of coaches can’t hurt. The tournament opened 10/15. I’m waiting for someone to use Sandy (10/29) as an excuse. And I have a pretty good idea who it will be, too.

Somewhere in there, we also opened registration for Columbia. There were some glitches during the first hour or so, which CP claims he was valiantly fixing, although I claim he was invaliantly screwing things up in the first place. Speaking of which, I want to use the warm room features of tabroom at Princeton, so I’ve been bugging him to give me a refresher on how to work it. I think it’s looking good. We’ll see.

And that’s that.

Riding off into the weekend: Premies

There are those among us who, when they think of classic Coney Island rides, think of parachute jumps or wonder wheels or cyclones. But these pale in comparison to my personal favorite: the incubators! With live babies! State of the art natal care for the prematurely arrived!

What?

I actually am a connoisseur of classic Luna Park and Dreamland. And one of the biggest attractions back in the day? The title of the piece says it all: Babies in incubators were once an attraction at Coney Island

If only there was a way to add something like this to #DisAd13.

Academy Debate

I have proposed this to the NYSDCA and gotten a good response, and we plan to try to inaugurate the idea at Byram Hills in January. Slightly edited, here is my original memo:

We need a division of debate that recognizes that while every student can benefit from forensics, not every student wishes to make it their life’s work. Additionally, we need to provide a better link from beginner to varsity, regardless of a student’s commitment to the activity. And finally, we need to insure that all our regional tournaments provide the community with appropriate levels of competition and engagement, so that our rich competitive calendar continues to thrive.

I offer the solution tentatively titled Academy Debate.

Academy Debate is, primarily, a level of competition that can be applied to any division of policy, LD or PF. Academy Debate is primarily intended for sophomores and juniors, and is open to anyone except seniors and students past their third year of debate (i.e., juniors who debated in middle school now in their fourth year would not be eligible to participate at the Academy Debate level).

Additionally, Academy Debate can be judged by seniors in their fourth year of debate. In fact, seniors in their fourth year are urged to judge, and will be considered not only judges but instructors, especially at tournaments that embrace the full Academy Debate designation.

We have a number of students at the senior level who have a lot to give to the community beyond their ability to adjudicate rounds less expensively than college students (although one reason for creating the Academy level is to remove the need to hire judges for local tournaments). This proposal intends to use those other skills of our upperclassmen. The idea is that if a tournament wishes to adopt an Academy Debate structure, the regional community will work with the tournament to develop a program beyond the rounds that will be interwoven into the tournament. Beyond-­the-­Rounds activities will include lectures and brainstorms on new resolutions, demo rounds by TOC-­level seniors with commentary, stop rounds (coaches judging a round can break in at any time with advice and questions), background lectures by coaches and student instructors (e.g., a unit on sovereignty or due process or whatever). The hope is to slot maybe two or three of these special events into a tournament, during down time and even in lieu of a round.

Our belief is that this will invigorate tournaments that do not have TOC bids by making them appealing to younger students, who can come and actually learn something, and to older students, who can come and, quite frankly, show off their skills.

Any tournaments in the region could find material that would be of great interest in the Academy Debate model, depending on the time of year. There are always new resolutions to explore and new techniques to learn. For instance, look at January in the northeast. On Martin Luther King weekend we have Big Lex, a triple-­threat TOC-­level tournament with heavy competition in each division. Additionally, for most LDers this is the first TOC-­level shot at the Jan-­Feb resolution that will also be the TOC resolution and, probably, the NYSDCA resolution. In our present system:
• Seniors and TOC hopefuls are working hard on their cases, and have little interest in “prepping for Lex” at a tournament with competition not at their own level.
• Younger students are preparing to have their heads handed to them at Lexington, starting for some what might be the inglorious end of their careers because they are not interested in continuing with high stakes TOC level competition.
• Nobody knows what other schools are going to be running, and everybody finds out during the competition. And if you happen to be running something totally illogical that sounded really good back home, well, it’s too late now.
These apply fairly equally across the divisions, but of course with different ramifications. January in PF, for instance, is rich with competitive opportunities, but again, is it best to dive into a TOC bid tournament with a new case filled with untested ideas?

Well, what if there were an Academy Debate tournament the week before Big Lex?
• Seniors who are working hard on their cases would not have to present a finished case, but as judges they could hear what other folks are running andmaybe get some ideas therefrom.
• Seniors who have been working hard will get a chance to lecture and brainstorm their ideas
• A coach or two might do a half hour unit on background for both the PF and LD divisions
• A “lab” might do a training session on CX for all divisions

You get the picture. To pull this off requires commitment from everyone. There is a fear that some tournaments, primarily those without TOC bids, are not getting the attendance they deserve. (The likelihood that any new tournament will somehow work its way up to attaining bids is, honestly, about nil, given the politics of TOC.) At the same time, there is a big issue that we want younger students to remain in the activity if at all possible without becoming dispirited. Additionally, the removal of the need to provide hired judges seriously reduces the cost of debate in the region. And for large programs, there becomes a logical way to split the squad between events.

And that, in a rather large nutshell, is Academy Debate.

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These headlines are all real, directly copied from our RSS feed without editing. When we say we didn't read them, we mean it. They didn't exactly pull us in, for some reason...

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Debate: The next tournaments

So, we move onward.

This weekend is Wee Sma’ Lex for the Sailors. We started going there when we stopped sending an oodle-load to Glenbrooks. Not that I didn’t like Glenbrooks; it was and presumably still is a great tournament with a very high QOL schedule. I stopped going when I was starting to realize that I was flying somewhere almost every weekend, and I preferred to stay a little closer to home. If Sailors wanted to go, I was all for it, but it was no longer the team event of the weekend. Wee Sma’ provided instead a first-time housing opportunity for novices, and a chance for younger students to get some meaningful rounds in. I was, and am, all for that.

We’re up to our ears in Princeton. The events are all packed, and nobody has dropped out yet, but I’ve scanned the list and as far as I can tell, the furthest flung are in, if they need to fly or whatever. Now we’re assembling judges and prepping to sell them to the assembled multitudes. As always, O’C is in charge of that, and, shockingly, in charge of trophies as well. It was he who kicked the Tiggers in the pants a while back and got them to upgrade from Dollar Store generics to the real thing. The point is, trophies mean something, especially with college tournaments peopled by hordes of Speecho-Americans. If the colleges don’t deliver, they look sort of punk. And considering how expensive college tournaments are because of transportation and hotels and everything, that’s not the right look.

Columbia is just getting geared up. They always have issues with getting their rooms, which always happens late, but last year they pulled off a great tournament, after pulling off less than great ones, and I see no reason why they can’t repeat. What might be different this year is angling in some policy; we’re working on a bizarre solution to the problem of wanting it but having no place to put it. We’ll see how that works out.

And finally, on a different note entirely, there’s the Byram Hills tournament. For this one, I’ve been pushing for the introduction of Academy Debate, and we’re good to go as far as the school is concerned. Now we have to focus in on what the bells and whistles will be. Academy Debate could be a big deal in the future for some of our local tournaments, making events directed primarily at younger varsity students a lot more valuable. I’ll talk about that more in depth shortly, as we come to some conclusions.

Anyhow, we had our first Sailors meeting in a while last night. Apparently there was a better Sailors meeting somewhere else, because two out of three of the novices came late and left early. I wanted to discuss how to argue, but never got past the basics, so how any of this applies to a debate round will remain a mystery to them, I guess. We also talked about December PF. I like it because it forces people to learn a lot about something they may know literally zip on. Even our Zip, taking economics as a class, couldn’t make heads nor tails out of it. I consider that a good thing. If you don’t learn anything from studying a resolution, what’s the point?

I still haven’t organized the Bump follow-up, like getting the checks to the office and whatever. I’ll do that before we leave on Friday. And, as we say, another one will officially bite the dust. I didn’t get any calls from the schools, so apparently nothing horrifying was left behind in our wake, except a couple of bottled imps crappy prizes. So it goes.

Debate: Mini-Tales of Great Debate Adventure (Bump 2012 Edition)

Let’s see, let’s see, let’s see.

First of all, of course, there’s the annoying stuff, like the school that always insists on leaving before fulfilling their judging obligation. Same school every time, same look of wonder in their beady little eyes when we tell them they can’t do it, same reluctance on my part to let them into future tournaments where I’ve got any control because who needs the aggro?

And then there’s also that one school that didn’t show up at all. They also didn’t show up at Monticello. They are on the waitlist for the Tiggers, and I’m running the waitlist. I mean, what are the odds of that working out in their favor? The problem with getting yourself on my bad side is my ubiquity. I may be right or I may be wrong, but regardless, I'm the one pushing the buttons. Sacrificing the occasional goat to me can’t hurt.

I did start the novice events with a pretty negative complaint about what their predecessors had done in the past to cost me a whole wing of the building. Not these people, but their schools, and this could be the last time, yadda yadda yadda. I warned that I would be patrolling the halls to look in on them, which turned out to be remarkably easy as each door has a big window, or I could walk on the path outside and look in from there, so I didn’t have to disrupt anyone. Everyone seemed to be behaving. The only thing negative I heard was one idiot judging with his earbuds in, but I looked at his ballots and they were fine, so presumably he was just too dumb to take them out and was actually listening to the debaters and not his favorite G-pop groups.

A couple of new programs have survived so far, having debuted at the First Timers’, and are doing quite well. This is very nice to see. It’s hard enough just to keep body and soul together when you’re starting out, but to actually take some trophies? That’s an achievement. Usually by now the programs that peeped out at the first dawn have burrowed back in for another time. This is good.

O’C, as has been stated numerous times, only was able to stay for half the tournament because his associate, the G Man, was getting married. I like to thank my tabbers with a nice bottle of wine for their efforts. For O’C, it was a nice half-bottle of wine. There was also no Cruz Award this year, but I did find a menopause video for him to carry him over to next year.

As I said yesterday, I’ll eliminate the award ceremonies for the Varsity next year, but I’ll still keep one for the novices. I’ll do it down at the grammar school, which has a right-sized auditorium. The thing about novices is that the jokes either work really well with them (the word “orgasm” had them falling in the aisles) or else they look at me like I’m speaking Ardhamagadhi. They also liked my shout-out for Mitt Romney, probably because it’s the last time they’ll ever hear anyone do so. See ya, Mitt.

The Sailor runners seemed to be doing a good job; whenever I saw one, they were working. There were a couple I told to watch some rounds who apparently felt that this was the equivalent of snorkeling in quicksand, but I don’t necessarily chalk that up as my loss.

I am happy to report that we were awash with retirees. We threw all of them into LD at one point when we eked out a single-flighted round (there’s still blood on the library floor), but the ones who wanted Pffft mostly got it. We had a great alum dinner on Friday, when I wasn’t too exhausted to appreciate it, at India House, of course. We had some leftovers that we gave to Michelle to give to her male roommates at the funeral home, who will, apparently, eat anything (and live anywhere). Much discussion of living at a funeral home ensued, but for me, having had friends in grammar school and high school both who did exactly that, it wasn’t much of an issue. I’ve also had some neighbors who I would have preferred that they were dead—much quieter that way—but for some folks, this was pretty odd. Not so odd though that Olivieri, who was going to stay with me, opted for the House of the Dead instead, because of access to an iron. I mean, it’s not that I don’t have an iron in my house, but not at that time of night. Maybe it’s another sign of aging on my part: I just can’t feature ironing after bedtime.

The next day the daughter came up and we picked out a Christmas tree and ate Greek food and saw Wreck-it Ralph. And Bump was over for another year.