Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Debate: Life with the young 'uns

The Sailors met again last night, and had something of a meeting mixed in with watching Meh regularly break out into the heebie-jeebies. Just another day in the debating life…

With so little debating under their novice belts (one kid, three rounds), there doesn’t seem to be much sense into going into tactics like, say, cross-x. They’re still at the level of showing up. The plan in any case was mostly to talk about Nov-Dec LD, which, since it’s a PF resolution, has the virtue of there being little or nothing LDish to say about it. Remember, we’re talking novices here, so they can look at the neg as a pure social contract play, which is easy enough, and aff as a pure morality play (no, you spalpeen, not that kind of morality play—jeesh!), provided they’re willing to defend supererogatory government “ought-to’s” at a point in their careers when they don’t know what the word supererogatory means. Doesn’t the government have a responsibility to its citizens to protect them as best it can from bad things? The problem is, I don’t want to construe it for them as a soc con argument on both sides, because that would actually either require both sides to know what they are talking about (i.e., the fungibility of soc con), which is highly unlikely when presumably no one in the field will have actually read anything on the subject much more in-depth than the Hillary Duff at this point in their careers. Then again, you could just go pure PF, and say that more people die on the other side, so I win. I don’t know. I’m thinking now about what the poor varsity will do to mangle this. At least novices will mangle it on a predictably simplistic level. What happens when you slice in all the latest LD bologna? The mind shudders at the thought. Have fun, people.

I spent a bunch of time yesterday looking at tournaments other than Jake. The Tiggers was leaking information from last year on a global level, with hundreds of dollars of fines charged against every single school. I erased the global data, but it had no effect on the prior leakage. CP was very helpful, if “It sucks to be you, fix it all by hand” is to be taken as solid help-desk advice. I clicked it all away, but for a little while a bunch of people were rather nuts. This is after I sent out a message saying that it was screwy and we were working on it. Here’s the deal. If I send you a message saying that X is screwed up and we’re working on fixing it, there is little or no percentage in your responding hysterically that X is screwed up, OMG OMG OMG. Please try to follow the narrative here.

And Bump is now less than three weeks away. How did that happen? I’ve tried getting a few of the ribbon clerks to cut themselves out, with some effect. And I campaigned to get extra judges (as in, you provide me more than your share, you will be rewarded on this earth and in heaven), but that’s only worked out slightly. In any case, I was able to accept all the housing requests, although at the limit, of course, so that’s all sewn up. Now all we need are families to house: my crack parents on that have now begun the thankless process.

This weekend is the Halloween Regis event. Last year this was the day of the killer snowstorm that I had to drive home through. Come to think of it, Regis after that in December was the site of the meltdown with numerous schools that had no idea of what their entries were and the legendary Kid With the Three Byes. Why do we keep going back to Regis again and again? Oh, that’s right. Grandma Julia and the food in the judges lounge. Got it!

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