[There's a new short post over at Adventures, if you're into that whole inside-baseball thing.]
As we creep into the dawn of the Gem of Harlem, I’m sort of
surprised by the numbers. Given the demand for slots this whole season, Gem has
been surprisingly light. It’s not small by any means, 100 or so each of LD and
PF, but it’s not got door-busting waitlists like everyone else has had. Even
O’C seems satisfied with the number of slots he’s gotten, which in ’ertford,
’ereford or ’ampshire ’ardly ever ’appens. We talked about this a bit at Bigle.
One of the things is probably that it’s so damned expensive for schools to
travel to NYC. There’s no hotel bargains, so you can really end up depleting
the old annual budget. Then again, we’ve had a history of people who have flown in
primarily because they want to go sightseeing, and who have tickets for Wicked
Saturday night and thus blow off the tournament altogether, but these
miscreants seem to have evaporated. I can’t say that I miss them. A lot of them
seemed to come from Utah. I think they really came to see The Book of Mormon,
and only pretended to see Wicked. Whatever.
Meanwhile, back at the battleship, the Sailors will soon be
bidding a fond farewell to one of our novices, who is being shipped to
California for some reason or other, apparently because they don’t have enough
people in California already and they have to take ours. This leaves us with
half a very good PF team, although the survivor claims she has a substitute
waiting in the wings, who will appear at next week’s meeting. We’re going to be
doing a practice round, which may be the best introduction to the event, as
compared to me doing the orientation that historically has scared of 125% of
all the potential plebes at the first meeting. I do hope this works out. That’s
a big problem with a small team in the PF business. It doesn’t take much to
rock the boat.
Last night we began to look at the Feb PF resolution. It’s
very straightforward. The pro is empirically proven to be true on face in
literally every piece of research known to man or beast, so once again you sit
around wondering if anyone at the NSDA ever actually looks at these things
before sending them out. The alternative one had ships passing in the night,
and a virtual certainty of not generating any clash. Here is what I would do if
I ran the circus. Do whatever it is you do now to pick topics, but when you’re
at the final point, write them on a board and stare at them. Then do 10 minutes
of research. Then write down pro arguments and con arguments. If, for any
reason, you can’t find arguments for one side, start over. This rez is in
amazingly clumsy English: On
balance, economic globalization benefits worldwide poverty reduction. Benefits
poverty reduction? As compared to harms poverty reduction? Would it kill them
to use phrases that have at some point in the history of humanity actually been
used before? My guess is that they wanted a topic along the lines of
globalization benefiting developing nations, but couldn’t actually come out and
say that because, well, it doesn’t sound debatey enough. Me, I’m just trying to
figure out pleonastic use of globalization and worldwide. They missed that? Or
they’re envisioning a scenario where globalization must benefit all poverty
reduction worldwide? Or what? It can’t just be the DJ that makes me so word
conscious. If I’ve said it once I’ve said it, well, more than once: The NSDA
needs to hire an editor. Even though we often know what they’re trying to say,
they don’t consistently actually say it. In a debate round, where the handful
of words of a resolution ought to determine everything that follows, that
handful of words better be precise. No wonder LD doesn’t bother with rezzes
anymore and prefers the EILDR: it’s easier to ignore some of these resolutions
as compared to actually trying to figure them out, or worse, debate them. Anyhow, we did come up with a couple
of good strategies for February, to wit, either flip pro or take the month off.
[Sigh.]
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