Friday, March 23, 2012

Meanwhile, back at the ranch

Let’s get off this MJP kick for a while. I think I’ve made my point, right or wrong. I do not believe that MJP is the hand basket in which LD is being carried to hell. It is, at worse, neutral, and potentially it’s a tool for traditional teams to hold their place in the activity. Neither is bad.

Last weekend was the CFL Grands tournament. A few years ago we realized that putting in 3 judges in each round really wasn’t all that great if there were 20 or fewer debaters, so now we put in 2, which means that no one has to see the same people on the other side, which is good for the teams, and we can single-flight, which is good for everyone. We did double-flight one round for the purposes of lunch, though, so that everyone would get a break (except for two poor soul judges who got both flights, but didn’t look that hungry to us). In other words, not a hard gig, although we did it entirely with cards. Speaking of MJP, fans of random judging can rejoice at a tournament like this: all the judges have to have experience, and we just toss them where they fit. Which may explain why a lot of $ircuit debaters avoid CatNats. For that matter, it may explain why a lot of traditional debaters avoid CatNats. Judge adaptation is one thing. Adapting to a random panel of unknowns? Wow. Plus not all 4-1s break? On the bright side, you get to go to remote schools on the edges of random cities, bussing out at 5:30 a.m. and returning home before the next semester starts, and that’s always an attraction. Especially on a unique topic. Oh, well. Honestly, I’ve always sort of enjoyed CatNats. What can I say?

The tournament was on St. Patrick’s day, which meant that we felt we needed Irish music. I failed miserably to supply any. I have one Chieftains song on my iPod, and a CD at home (never ripped) of Celtic music that I don’t really like. It’s not the CD, it’s the whole genre. Lots of pipes and clodhopping, if you ask me. If this were a Hawaiian holiday, on the other hand, I would have been able to get us through for a couple of days. Brazilian? A couple of weeks. African? French? Spanish? Caribbean? No problem. But Irish music? That’s one of my much needed gaps. Fortunately (?) JV’s iPod was drowning in the stuff. We plugged it in at some point in the morning and it was still going strong when we took it off life support at the end of the day. How can somebody who likes that much Irish music also like Sondheim? Is a puzzlement.

My vow to quit golf remains unshaken. I suffered no adverse effects last weekend, and this week I moved all the paraphernalia that was sitting in the front of the basement to the middle of the basement, i.e., a bag of tees and this bizarre plastic hand that one uses to extend the life of one’s golf gloves. I do like the golf gloves. They should have debating gloves. Or at the very least, tabbing gloves.

And, of course, I’m up to my ears in Grinwout’s business. No doubt I’ll eventually kick that habit as well, but it is fun. It gives me incentive to keep up on stuff I want to keep up with, that I ordinarily would let slide in favor of reading a book. I read plenty of books already. When I was doing this in an early version to demonstrate to the DJ that it was viable, it turns out we got about 35M hits doing virtually nothing, no promotion, no nuthin’. That’s not bad. I don’t pay too much attention to stats (although the new version of Blogger tosses them in your face), except that I do know that, historically, I am not writing this blog for my own benefit. Well, all right, it is for my own benefit, but it is being well-read. People in debate want to know if I’m insulting them directly or indirectly, for instance. (Feel free to send me a sawbuck or two and I promise I’ll do it however you like.)

And finally, this week O'C and I tried to TVFT on a test basis, and it was a disaster. There is no volume control in the new Mac Skype. It’s not that we couldn’t find it; it’s not there. This is the dumbest thing since [insert metaphor here; I’ve written enough for one day]. We’re working on a work around. Or working around a work. Or rounding a work work. Or something.

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