Finally got the rooms for the Gem of Harlem and cleared what I could of the LD and PF waitlists. 100 of each, leaving exactly 44 of each hanging on the cliff. (Actually 101, since the extra kid doesn’t need a room, and plenty of them will come down with dengue fever, the yaws and potato famine on the day of the event). JV will clear the Speecho-Americans. It’s awfully late in the game, but then again, it usually is, so there you are.
We had a big group of Sailors at the chez last night, including one plebe who, so far, has sent me an email but not responded to my request for personal information. Maybe he has no personal information. He does seem interested in debate though, even if he did just start showing up a week ago. I’ve come to learn over time that an hour and a half meeting means a little over an hour of content. There’s starting friction, of course, but I’m as culpable in that as anyone, catching up on this and that and settling in, sorting out business like who’s going where and when, explaining to Pickles the need to understand French but that French-English dictionaries don’t actually define the words, which really seemed to fly right over his tete. When he asked if we spoke any other languages, we replied “Nyet,” and he seemed satisfied.
We spent a good amount of time hashing over Jan Pfffft. It’s quite hashable. A big problem seems to be a real link to harms for the Pro. Plenty of Pros were winning at Byram, so it’s not insurmountable, but the word is that people were flipping Con. It was a good discussion, though, and my Pfffters at least now know what they don’t know. We then went on to LD, where I think my novice, provisionally known as Sergeant Tomorrow, is on unsure ground with the basic premises of rehab vs retrib, so I tried to sum that up as best I could. I really think that the best way for a novice to handle this is a pure ethical/philosophical play, as it draws so much on the initial readings of Locke and so forth. In the la-la land that is Varsity LD, I would imagine things are much more creative. There is so much literature on prisons and incarceration and special groups therein and so forth that you ought to be able to run a new case every flight until you settle into the really good stuff, whatever that is. Meaty, in other words, although honestly, listening to what Ari and company were talking about on their podcast, they all seemed to like all this basic util stuff that seems to me like one of the standard issue blades on the contemporary LD Swiss army knife. Not that I grasped it, necessarily (although I’ve read up on utilitarian analyses of retributive justice, which are something else altogether, I think). It’s just that it sounded familiar, the jargon tossed around in the handful of rounds I’ve observed recently. Oh, well. Whatever. Don’t criticize what you can’t understand, as Bob Dylan once wrote.
Somewhere in my email is a list of rooms for Bigle X, and I’m ready for it. The weather looks promising (50 degress on Saturday), which is something I don’t associate with this tournament. We’ve been iced in, snowed in, sleeted in, blizzarded in—walking around in our Hawaiian shirts and sandals with iced beverages in our hands? Hard to imagine. (Hey, CP! Where’s my iced beverage? Where’s my Hawaiian shirt?)
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