In which we get together on the weekend

So I’ve been nursing an ailing tooth for a week now, waiting to get into the dentist’s today to finally have a root canal. Oh joy, oh rapture. Oh, well. At least my head won’t explode anymore every time I take a sip of coffee.

Caught up with the Usual Suspects over the weekend. CP came down, and we talked about his future as surf bum, among other things. I have this vision of him changing his name to Moon Doggy and wearing his baggies and waiting on the beach for the perfect wave, but he may have other ideas in mind. Met up with Kaz and JV and O’C and Kate and Richard and ate wonderful Italian food and gabbed like crazy. A lot of it was debate-oriented, but I promised Richard this would not be the case during the DisAd. After all, there is no debate in the summer for people to gossip about, and we’re certainly not still going to be talking about what happened at CatNats. (I know what you’re thinking. Something happened at CatNats? That’s what they said, and I’m going out on a limb and I’m going to believe them.) They were all also planning various hoo-ha-ishness over the upcoming NSDA powwow in Las Vegas, a venue worthy of planning various hoo-has. Aside from the NSDA part, I wouldn’t mind going…

Which does bring up the NSDA. Apparently it is now marginally public knowledge (since the Wunn and Only actually announced it somewhere) that tabroom.com is being subsumed by the Evil Empire NSDA, which actually is a good thing for all and sundry, insuring the endurance of a great system for managing tournaments, plus bringing the NSDA into something other than some Midwest operation that runs a tournament I can never go to. On the down side, this means that I’ll probably have to re-up, but I think I’ve made my point by now (especially since my local committee successors kissed and made up with Rippin’, pretty much entirely on the bases that I and so many others have been proclaiming since the Hundred Years War). So come the new school year, I will put my tail between my legs and shell out the Sailors’ money and get us back into the fold. And thus another great story ends with the proverbial whimper. Unfortunately, this time it’s me doing the whimpering.

For our weekend entertainment, we mounted a safari to Brooklyn, where we pretty much had to abandon Kaz in the Brooklyn Museum after she discovered their Egyptian collection. She mostly spends her free time acquiring information and photos and whatnot to inform her work teaching social studies, so this is as up her alley as you can get. She seems in fine fettle after acquiring a new school board and a lot of support from colleagues and grads to keeping the NFA debate program alive and well. Which of course always seems like such a no-brainer to those of us in the activity. That you have to hard-sell such a broad-based, empirically provable beneficial academic activity seems pretty counterintuitive, but somehow forensics remains the great underrated and often unknown educational tool that can do so much good in any school. Go figure.