Public Service Announcement

Important information for non-Catholics attending CatNats this weekend

Over the years at CFL events, local and national, I have seen non-Catholics make the same mistakes over and over when confronted with the practices of the practicing. For those of other faiths heading to Philadelphia this weekend, here are a few helpful hints.

1. More likely than not, at some point over the weekend the proceedings will break into prayer. The correct response when the prayer is over, if you feel compelled to respond at all, is to say the word “amen,” not to break into enthusiastic applause. Roman Catholic churches, as a general rule, do not have light-up Applause signs next to their pulpits.
2. If you run into Kevin Tidd, a Benedictine monk who is a member of the diaconate preparing for the priesthood, the correct form of address is, “Holy moly, you coached Zachary Quinto?”
3. Pope Francis is infallible only when he is at work, so to speak, defining issues of faith or morality. Papal infallibility does not extend to the staffs running the CatNats tabrooms. Nevertheless, I wouldn’t bother questioning them if I were you.
4. Catholics are obligated to attend weekly mass, which the tournament directors will make available over the weekend at convenient times when there are no rounds. Non-Catholics, just because they have qualifited for CatNats, are not obligated to attend mass, even if your Duo partner is Catholic and especially if your piece is The Book of Mormon.
5. Regarding IEs, if your piece is from the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the highest rank you can achieve in any round is a 2. Deal with it. Also, the odds are high that, if you have offensive material in your piece of any sort, at least one of the judges in the room will indeed be offended by it. Hello? Catholic Forensic League? If your piece is vile, sacrilegious and pornographic, it is more appropriate to perform it at the Non-Catholic Forensic League finals next month in Birmingham. They live for that sort of thing.
6. During the Depression, the church declared that in certain areas, because of the lack of alternatives on meatless Fridays, possum was not considered a meat. (I'm not making this up.) In present-day Philadelphia, however, possum is considered a meat. Whether this information will be useful to you over the weekend remains to be seen: did you order the Saturday lunch from the League?

In which logic is touched upon, along with yellow rice and old rope

Sometimes I think I’m operating in a different dimension than everyone else at the DJ. Don’t ask.

Meanwhile, I’ll be taking a blogging break for a week, both here and at Grinwout’s, and will probably return with yet a new way of doing things after I meditate a bit on life, the universe and everything. Speaking of which, Martin Freeman narrates the audiobook of The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, and I really like Martin Freeman, and he was perfectly cast as Arthur Dent in the movie, but he’s no Stephen Fry. [Sigh!]

Much TVFTing occurred last night, although with a bunch of cyloning or whatever they call it when Skype eats what people are saying. We talked about CatNats and some other stuff, if you’re interested, clearing up the thing about people needing an Amex card to get into the judges’ lounge. It’s interesting how almost every tournament has a sticking point or two, and some people just hate the X tournament and refuse to go, for whatever reason. If I’m not mistaken, I don’t have any tournaments at the moment that I personally refuse to go to, not counting NatNats, which I can’t go to, so I never get so far as refusing to go to it. That is, I couldn’t go if I wanted to, the inverse of which is I could go if I didn’t want to, which isn’t true. The contrapositive—If I didn’t want to go, then I could go—is untestable, because I don’t know if I want to go or not, because since I couldn’t go if I wanted to, I don’t bother wanting to. If you get my drift.

We also talked (offline) about getting CP into the neighborhood for socializing. Last weekend a bunch of us suited up and chowed down at a Cuban restaurant, and a swell time was had by all. It’s nice to get together and not have to get back in time to put out round 6 or whatever. It was a nice day in Manhattan, and we strolled Soho and met up with O’C in WaSqPa where we were set on by one of the famous falcons, which pretty much stopped park traffic in its boots. Weird people strolling the park are a dime a dozen, but falcons? Then Kate joined us with very light-colored hair, and we sauntered over to the restaurant, where Kaz and Peter were already in progress, with JV close behind. We celebrated PC’s recent graduation (Yay!), we kept increasing the number of appetizers we were ordering, and at one point O’C consulted the council (?) about a potential solo trip to WDW (acceptable, provided there was no Foursquaring—who needs to know that he just had another Dole Whip?). After which, gelato. Ahhhhhh.

At which point, I feel that I should type YOLO, but having sworn an oath to kill the next person that types YOLO, I probably shouldn't.

Marginal valediction

The questions are finalized for Bean Trivia. The event is next Wednesday. The crappy prizes are ready.

The season is over…

Last night we TVFTed. It was me, O’C and CP, talking mostly about TOC. This may also be the end of the TVFT season. I mean, things are winding down, aside from CatNats and NatNats, both of which are the same as they’ve always been. (You will debate all day Saturday at CatNats and complain royally about it, you will have mixed feelings about Baltimore, you’ll think the award ceremony is never going to end, and you’ll be glad to get home. As for NatNats, never been, no longer a member, and got nothing more to say.)

It was good to hear that TOC is getting its act together a bit under its new leadership. People regard this tournament very highly, and it should measure up to that esteem. In slow, steady steps, it is getting there, and as we said in the podcast, only slow, steady steps will work. Witness what CP had to do with the various college tournaments, some of which made TOC, at its worst, look like the Emerald City. I still think the colleges walk a thin line, but we’re keeping an eye on them, or at least on the ones we’re affiliated with. We did pretty well this year. We did Yale without CP and were none the worse for wear. We kept Princeton spinning at its peak. We pared down Columbia and kind of pulled it out of the ashes. UPenn grew some more, as we had always hoped it would. Not bad, overall. Come to think of it, looking back at the year as a whole, I’m pretty satisfied, except for the Incredible Shrinking Boat of Sailors, over which I don’t have much control. Needless to say, we’re working on it. And it must be admitted that our Speecho-American side was thriving, so it’s not totally off the tracks.

What was learned this year? I think that the message of MJP needs to be clearer, but we’ve got it down pat as far as tabbing it. It needs to be recognized as a tool to protect different styles of debate rather than a tool for solely promoting circuit debate, which it de facto becomes if traditional schools don’t pref. PF continues to grow everywhere but in New York, but that won’t last long because the attraction of accessibility for students and judges will sooner or later be too strong to deny. New programs keep getting started, and around here, I don’t recall losing any old ones, so that’s good. On the negative side, O’C discovered Foursquare and has checked into hotels, motels, his subway stop, Bronx Science (multiple times), Japonica (enough times that they’re taking away his wasabi privileges), his podiatrist, Attica, Mos Eisley, Bette Midler’s dressing room and the locked gates of the Liberace Museum, to name a few. In other words, it’s been a pretty good year, mostly moving forward.

Excelsior! This would be the perfect time for me to announce my retirement, but once again I am going to disappoint those who are rooting for me to disappear and have done with it. Sorry, guys. You can't win 'em all.

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.

This is how the world ends, not with a bang but with a CFL tournament

The Regiscopalypse was last Saturday. Normally this is a cheerful little event around Halloween, with four joyful rounds and every now and then I pop out for a latte, and Grandma Julia—Regis’s resident bubbe, so to speak—lays out a judge spread that demonstrates clearly that all the money amassed by the Vatican has not been going to waste. This year they had meatloaf, mac and cheese and sliced Virginia ham in addition to the usual sandwiches and salads.

If I had known what was coming, I would have taken a doggy bag. A couple of them.

I was, as the saying goes, busier than a one-armed paperhanger. First we got round one out, then I did PF judge training, then I got round two out, then I did LD judge training, then I got round 3 out and read the texts from my wife telling me that the world was ending and did I want to be at Regis when Gabriel blew his trumpet, to which I guess I would have to answer that if I had to be anywhere, this was a fairly good choice. Fortunately Catholic Charlie was around to help me with the ballots. Since all the divisions were about as balanced as some really imbalanced thing [fill in your own metaphor here; I’m too cold and exhausted], we had to use cards every time, the only fun in that being that I can show off being able to use cards. Yeah, I know. Big deal.

At one point in the day I got a text from JV down at Whitman telling me that O’C had wandered off from their tab room, asking if I had seen him. Then I started getting texts from O’C about some stuff or other about the Tiggers or something, all of which was interesting enough but, honestly, I was doing that one-armed p.h. thing. The funny thing is, after training the PF parents, having to train the LD parents was like sending off your troops into a suicide mission. You know that their efforts will be futile and that they will never survive, but you need them as a momentary distraction as the enemy mounts an offensive on the Marne or something. The best I could do is promise the survivors that we will look out for them in the future and keep them away from the beast of VLD.

Oy.

Anyhow, after shutting down, we headed north. I had two plebes in my car, both of whom fell asleep as I played music from WDW to distract me from the fact that it looked like a scene from The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe as directed by Jean-Luc Godard, in 3-D and Smellovision. One drove at a handful of miles per hour through pure white, on ice, surrounded by fallen and falling trees, the sky ever darkening, occasionally going nowhere in a line of traffic extending forever, watching roads expand and contract from three lanes to half a lane and back again. After finally reaching home, the power was out, the house was cold, and the silence was maddening. Fortunately there was juice in my portable speakers so we listened to Hawaiian music.

Never underestimate the healing power of the ukulele!

A Well-Oiled Machine

The NYCFL moderators met this Saturday at Iona. It used to be that this was some sort of grand reunion at the beginning of the year, but in the age of Facebook and Twitter and the DiDeAd (we have our own listserver), I feel that we’ve barely been away. Kathy S and I talked a lot about the Sailors on our way down and back, and that was productive, but at the actual meeting, it was mostly, let’s do it again. I recall back in the day when this meeting would run on and on, but after a while you run out of things to discuss. There were a few new faces, but most of us are growing mold, and, well, there you are: a well-oiled machine. When it was over, JV and Kaz headed down to the VassaRR, which was at Collegiate. No doubt the Collegiate Alumni were meeting up in Poughkeepsie. If anyone doubted that the RR was at Collegiate, both O’C and CP kept checking in on Foursquare, presumably for no other reason than to annoy me. I had no choice but to retaliate. I am going to be the Mayor of the Taconic State Parkway in 3 days!

We’re still organizing who’s running what at the Pups. A few folks haven’t been heard from yet. And meanwhile we’re beginning to set up the Tiggers, with some defections here and there. That’s very early days, though. Pups, on the other hand, are breathing down the proverbial neck, and as far as I can tell, reality is just beginning to settle in and people are beginning to realize that they’re not going to be able to hire 50 judges and they’re paring down their entries. We could still use more LD judges, just to make things that much more swell. O’C is on the case, says he.

Tomorrow night is the inaugural Sailors meeting. I heard from the admiralty that there was whining about the pamphlet, because it had pictures of people who were no longer at the school. So, I wonder, we put on pix of people still at the school, for what? The pamphlet goes to people before they show up, to convince them to enlist. Does it matter which pictures of people they don’t know are on the page? It’s not like the pix are so old that everyone has a mullet or something. Speaking of which, if you Google Hen Hud for images (I was looking for the official Half Moon for O’C for the Bump medals), pretty much the first image you get is The People’s Champion. He obviously made his mark on the place.

Culmination

The mononymous Dan posts in the comments: “So what would you push your LD'ers to attend as a culminating event? You've already expressed issues with the way the TOC is run, the NFL is too impractical for your school system, and the NCFL is something of a poorly run tournament. What becomes the championship the normal debater in your program strives for? NDCA? Though NDCA has it's own issues with size. It's kind of hard to see a tournament that only has about 40 kids and accepts anyone who applies until they get to 70 as a national championship either (though I really do like the way NDCA is run and it definitely has potential). But so what does the end of year culminating event become?”

That’s a good question.

I don’t categorically object to TOC. I simply question its relevance to more than just a small number of national debaters. The issue becomes, do I try to point my own Sailors toward that small number. I would say that this is more a question for them than for me; I have no particular resources to help them if that is their goal, and they will have to go beyond me to succeed. This was not necessarily true a decade ago, but I’ve changed in one direction and TOC has changed in another. I’m not in the back of the room much anymore, so I admittedly don’t have great skills at what is au courant. When I judge, people have to do a bit of adapting to me with speed, and that means some compromises. Anyhow, assuming that I don’t have anyone on the team willing to go beyond available resources, then what? As Dan says, NFL is impractical and CatNats, with its small number of rounds and random judges, is not a test of skill reflective of the events of the rest of the year.

Does that leave NDCA? I don’t know. I’m late to the game, and this was the first year I’ve attended. I had no particular expectations, and I admit to not knowing well the application process, which is something I want to learn more about. Obviously, if anyone can get in, it is far from a national championship. One question has to be, how can it distinguish itself from TOC (since it already distinguishes itself from NatNats and CatNats). I don’t know the answer to that, and maybe only time will tell. It will be on my mind though.

To answer the specific question of culminating event, as a general rule I like the idea of having a meaningful State finals. Meaningful here is defined as representative of the events of the rest of the year, but limited to the most successful debaters at that event. Staying within the state keeps expenses down, if nothing else. My school is strapped when it comes to money: if Sailors don’t have their own long green, they’re not on the $ircuit. At times I question the need for national events, or at least for 4 of them.

As I said in my original post, I’m torn on all of this. I don’t have great answers. The best I can do is what I have always tried to do, guide Sailors along on paths that make sense for them as individuals. Everyone doesn’t have to be trying to qualify for TOC. Everyone doesn’t have to go to expensive college tournaments. I can provide a very satisfactory, educational experience for a debater without ever going off our regional circuit. If they save a few shekels and can attend a college event during the year to enjoy the running around attendant to such an affair, better still. My biggest worry about TOC in that series of articles I wrote was how serious we all take it. I wonder if we’re forgetting that it’s just a high school extracurricular activity. I suggest that there’s all-consuming and then there’s mind-bogglingly all-consuming, and that we’ve jumped from the former to the latter, and that we may have had a shark under us when we did it.

So, no answers. Lots of questions, though. C’est la guerre.

CatNattery

Last Wednesday night on TVFT we talked about, first, CatNats, and then TOC. It’s either amazing or remarkably mundane that all you have to do is point us in the right direction and we’ll immediately start blathering. It’s what we do best.

The subject of CatNats was not a positive one. I haven’t been for a couple of years, but I’ve honestly mostly enjoyed the experience because it’s usually been in an interesting city, and you get to see people you may not have seen for a while, and you get to hang out with friends and your varsity folk. I’ve never given much thought to the tournament itself because it just always seemed to be there, iconic, locked into what it was, and you went because you went. In our universe, the NYCFL is very active. Throughout the year we have plenty of speech events, plus two big debate events, plus our qualifier for Nationals. That qualifier is tough. Usually there’s a dozen competitors in the field who could easily grab one of the six slots. One just falls into the lockstep of participation, and since qualifying is such an accomplishment, one aims for it.

Then there's the tournament. The thing is, it runs differently (in debate) than every other tournament, in ways quite contradictory to what we usually proselytize on TVFT. It's not transparent by any means: not only don't they tell you who won which prelims until days later, they don't even announce the winners of the elim rounds until the next elim is posted. It's got too few rounds for a meaningful break. It's exhausting. It's expensive. It's got random (and often inexperienced) judging uncharacteristic of a national finals event, with no paradigms and, for that matter, no identification of the judges. It's got lag pairing and, perhaps, three out of five random rounds (but we don't know much about these, because of the lack of transparency). It's got an odd number of rounds. It is, in a word, the anti-tournament.

Still, as I say, I haven't given it much thought. I have no expectation that it will change, and no interest in changing it. It's not evil, it's just lost in some universe different from the rest of our debate universe. I push our Speecho-Americans toward it as their culminating national event, if they're up to it. But should I be pushing our LDers? I really don't know. But I have to admit that after last week's conversation, I'm beginning to have my doubts.

2011-12 is just around the corner. Then again, so's Eddie Krueger.

So CatNats is holy water under the bridge, but I didn’t get much from it. I saw that a lot of numbers had broken into elims, but having no idea whose number was which, I maintained a less than a dance-in-the-streets sense of enthusiasm. Go New York, says I, whoever you are. My personal investment just wasn’t there. After this, all that’s left is NatNats, where I do have the investment of the Panivore, so I will watch that avidly. Still, I’ve mostly started thinking about next year.

We’ve had a lot of discussion at TVFT of ways of improving tournaments. Some things have stuck in my mind. One is to establish the purpose of the tournament, which is usually to have the person debating the best at the tournament win it. Makes sense, at least with a varsity invitational. So you design the tournament to achieve that goal. But the goal of a novice event may not be the same. At Bump, for instance, it is the very first two-day tournament novices go to. It’s early November, and they are still wet behind the ears. What they need is a lot of rounds of debating. The idea of having five prelims and then having most of the field stop debating is, when you think about it, not quite the best thing for that division at that time. Having the most rounds for the most people is what you’re looking for with the young ’uns. So next year at Bump the novice divisions will have a lot of rounds and, probably, just acknowledge the top whatever. This is judge- and room-intensive, but it does make sense. Later in the season, it wouldn’t make sense anymore. At Bigle X, for instance, the novices have been debating for three or four months: they don’t just “need rounds.” They’re ready for the normal invitational/elimination process.

The key thing here is, the right setup for the people attending. If you’re running a $ircuit tournament, you run it a a $ircuit level. For instance, you hire 20 extra A+ judges. If you’re running a regional event for freshmen and sophomores and you hire 20 extra A+ judges, you need to have your head examined. And so forth and so on.

I do feel that MJP makes sense at most varsity venues, though, as I’ve been saying, since nothing better has come along. You probably can’t match straight up 1s every time unless you have a zillion judges and those 20 extra A+ hireds, but you can satisfy the customers with the best judging they can expect from the pool you have, without anyone arbitrarily imposing their opinion on what exactly defines “best.”

It’s going to be an interesting year.

I wonder if Jar Jar is in the latest version of It's a Small World...

We were going to TVFT last Wednesday, but O’C had other fish to fry at Japonica or something, so we didn’t. It seems that just as we get a thought going, it goes. I really do want to talk more about bracketing. We’re going to try again this week, but the coachean breath is not being held.

Not much else going on debatewise, at least for me. I’m not CatNatting, although the Panivore’s brother is doing his Speecho-American thing. I wouldn’t mind going down to Washington for a weekend, even with a tournament happening around it, but this year it was not to be. There will be ample ops in the future, I’m sure. I’ll be using the time to get my golf game up to crappy from its present position at appalling, but it won’t be easy. The weather this spring has not been conducive to such activities. It’s hard to play golf in a snowsuit during a monsoon. Jeesh.

So I’ve been pursuing other pastimes. I’ve begun the Lego Harry Potter, for instance, which is so up my alley skill-set wise. It’s not terribly hard, it’s pretty funny, and when you play it you make real progress. I loved the Star Wars Lego game too, for the same reasons. I don’t have the patience for learning to press A and Z while standing on my head with my thumb up the cat’s nose while whistling “Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavor on the Bedpost Overnight?” I’m a plain, simple kind of gamer. The relatively button-free Wii is right up my alley.

I’ve also been catching up on the movies I haven’t seen over the last year. Social Network and The King’s Speech were very enjoyable. Tron: Legacy was totally incomprehensible, but I sort of liked it anyhow, except for the Jeff Bridges scary Polar Express face. Spooky. Humans don’t look like that.

Our DiDeAd/DisAd listserver has been filling up with moaning and groaning from O’C who wants to ride Star Tours 74 times. No appreciation of antici

pation. All these kids want nowadays is instant gratification. Bah! Of course, not only will there be a new Star Tours the next time, but also a new Tiki Room: they’ve booted the “new management.” Strike a blow for the traditionalists.

Bonus question: What's the name of Space Mountain?

Rippin’ informs me that we only need 1 judge in the presets, not 3. Much better.

I am getting erratic about holding Sailor meetings in these last dwindling days of the season. First of all, I’m running around a bit now trying to get my aged p. settled, and second of all, we’ve sort of run out of steam. There’s not much more to say about anything, truth to tell. Last week it was just me and the P telling war stories (“Back when I used to judge, justice was your value and you stuck with it through thick and thin…”). In other words, it’s time to move on.

I had trouble posting results of the Grands to tabroom. I literally couldn’t see the posting platform. CP told me to look where it always is, but always, in my opinion, was now more like once in a while. He kept telling me it was there and I kept telling him I couldn’t see it, and then finally I could. This is my fault…how? Anyhow, the results went up last night, two days late. I blame CP, end of story.

I do have hotel rooms and the like set for all the upcoming qualifiers. I do like it when a hotel creates a website just for the tournament group. Of course, if it’s like TOC, it only works if you stay two extra days, but with some of them it’s an absolute charm, e.g. the CatNats hotel. Bing, bam, reservations done. Simple as cake. After Districts this week the future holds State, NDCA and TOC. After which, I’m done for the season. Somewhere along the line we need the Sailor’s final batch of bean trivia, but that’s something else altogether. It’s the one meeting everybody attends, for one thing. Texting Cruz as one of the game options isn’t what it used to be though, as lately he’s been having dinner with Obama or something silly like that that has taken preference. Oh, well. He doesn’t know the name of the flying elephant in the Magic Kingdom, so who would want to use him as a lifeline anyhow?

And don't ask how many bagels they consume in a week

Last Saturday was CFL Grands. Twas a lovely day.

First of all, if fewer than 20 teams are registered, we only have to use two judges per round. Right off the bat, JV and Kaz and I were dancing in the aisles of Stuyvesant. Nineteen—count ‘em, 19—LDers, so we made this by the skin of our teeth. Doing 3 is very hard, and can require double-flighting. Doing 2 just requires paying attention, especially when you can do the odd bit of juggling between PF and LD judges (a small number of the former were qualified as the latter, and a large number of the latter were qualified as the former), but it isn’t a nightmare. I remember back to some of our earlier shots at this, and some of the Grands I attended before I was tabbing it, when we’d be out of there no earlier than 8:00. This time we announced awards at 4:15, and I was standing around killing time waiting for everyone to show up. Nifty.

As far as qualifications of Sailors was concerned, Panivore Junior qualified in DI (or DP or DIP or DRIP or whatever they call it). The PJ is the younger brother of the P, and I might not have mentioned him before, but he’s a good actor and a lousy eater, making me seriously wonder if it’s just a matter of the family figuring that the only way to raise kids is to make them work hard and feed them bread and water. Of course, that’s an exaggeration. They eat more than bread and water. I’ve seen the official Hendrick Hudson Town Mac & Cheese truck delivering to their house: they have a coal shuttle into the basement into which the truck just pours a couple of tons of M&C a week to feed the panivorous young ‘uns. What can I say? While all this was going on, the P herself was down at Whitman doing quite well at that venue. Reports on the tournament were very positive. If only we could find them a weekend earlier in the year…

The topper of the day at CFL Grands for me was the announcement of the Rippon award, a scholarship given annually by the NYCFL primarily for representing the ideals of the league: leadership through forensics, personal growth, team and community spirit. I had nominated the People’s Champion, and lo and behold, he won it. (That’s Zack Struver for those who don’t follow the nicknames—he deserves a real name for this achievement.) I couldn’t have been prouder.

Next week is the NYS District tournament, and I spent a bunch of time yesterday boning up on the rules and setting up the software. [Sigh.] You need three rounds, minimum, and when there’s 8 or fewer entries, 3 judges. This means, for us, for all intents and purposes, 3 rounds with 3 judges from minute one. My head hurts already.

Pick a card, any card!

JV and I spent Saturday at Regis running the Almost All Hollows Debate CFL. It wasn’t quite as big as the first-timers last week, and there were a couple of divisions that were simply unrunnable, if one were to use TRPC, either because they were too small or too overrun with one school (both Regis and Bronx had mega contingents). This meant that we had to call out the cards, which truth to tell we love to do because 1) we can, and 2) it’s fun. The law of this brand of tournament is that teams must occasionally debate their own schools, but we do our best to spread this around. One wants the dominating school to have some rounds beyond itself. And one also must do one’s best to prevent the people who aren’t from the dominating school always debating the dominating school. And one wants to make sure all the judges who showed up from the big school get to see some service elsewhere. And one wants to finish the Saturday puzzle somewhere in there… We were up to the task. Catholic Charlie, instead of seeing to our needs and keeping the Diet Coke flowing like wine, was at a wedding somewhere, presumably keeping the wine flowing like Diet Coke. The guy has no sense of priorities.

Yesterday I did all the puzzles, went grocery shopping, got a fire going in the hearth, napped, read some of the Imagineering Part 2 book, roasted a chicken and watched the Harry Nilsson documentary, in that order. A rich and full day. I made a deal with myself to not consult the outside world via email, Twitter or Facebook, and in fact never turned on the computer except to download a Harry Nilsson album that recently became available. I might make that my official Sunday from now on. No digital life. I won’t miss anything, and it won’t miss me. If it’s really urgent, ring me on the Ameche. That, I’ll attend to. Otherwise, fuhgeddaboudit.

I sort of expected Bigle X to be up for registration this morning, but I gather the new world order from CP is that tournaments now open at 1:00 pm. This is so that that Samoans get a chance to register, I guess. Whatever. I did sign up for Ridge and the Monti MHL, just to keep my chops up.

Bump is now grinding down to the final moments. This year we’re only closing registration once. In the past I’ve closed it, and then I’ve really closed it. This time, it closes Monday before the tournament, fees are set, and a minute later you can enter your strikes. Done. Fines go to charity. Last year a school that will remain nameless didn’t tell us name changes at the table in order to avoid those fines. Try that again this year and we’ll toss you. I know that school well, and don’t trust them as far as I can throw them. You wouldn’t either, if you were me. And there’s a few others whom I wouldn’t put this past, so the eagle eye is now officially open. Anyhow, we’ve got as much housing as is humanly possible given the size of our team, and I wish some people would drop so that I can free up better rooms for all the rounds, but I won’t know about that until that magical closing moment. (God, I hate Bump.)

Like a cicada, seventeen years later

I feel about one step away from being back in the middle of things. The Sailors start school tomorrow. Then, they have Thursday and Friday off. Not like when I was a kid. Then again, I went to Catholic schools, few of which observed the Jewish holidays. It was shortsighted on their part, granted, but not unexpected. These kids nowadays, however—bah! Get off my lawn!

Although many schools have been in operation for weeks now, the northeast is only just emerging. But I am not alone in my feeling that things are about to settle in. I’ve gotten emails from CP showing that he’s back at the helm of tabroom.com, keeping an eye on things. O’C has his finger on the trigger of some NYSDCA stuff, and I too want to dig in a little more there after an abortive early start on the website with WordPress, which did not play nicely with me. Catholic Charlie has scheduled the annual NYCFL directors’ meeting for this Saturday. I’ve sent out a tentative curriculum for the MHL workshop to the usual suspects, and we should finalize it over the next week or so, filling in the names of instructors. Where new coaches are starting, connections have been made, but there’s always a surprise or two that pops up early in the season. The Panivore’s already been to a tournament, the Vassar Babycakes RR, which ran much earlier than usual this year because, for some reason, O’C did not appreciate my idea that he run it on Yom Kippur and call it the Non-Jewish Vassar Babycakes RR. (The guy has no creativity!)

I updated some of our signup sheets, and while the Panivore and the People’s Champion seem to be gallivanting across the country for the next six months nonstop, already registered for just about everything up through graduation, the rest of the schedule seemed rather light. But putting in the MHL events filled in the gaps. And, after the meeting with the NYCFL folks this Saturday, adding in the local CFL events as well will seal the deal, eliminating any free weekend between now and kingdom come.

Tonight I meet with the Speecho-Americans again. Last time all I did was yak at them about various pieces/authors/ideas floating around in my own mind; tonight they perform their Pups pieces for me for the first time. So different from LD, sitting there watching someone not speak entirely in acronyms… Speaking of the Pups, they’re booked up the wazoo, a very large tournament, although I’m still waiting for them to add in the VLD judges, which of course need to be entered by the same deadline as the participants. I always fret about colleges and their judges. It’s just the way I am. Shockingly enough, the Tigers have already reached out to ensure that JV and I are on hand to do our usual in December. Of course, we responded. We’ve already got our meals all planned out! I suffer at Princeton from the proximity of Starbucks, where I start buying a series of triple-shot lattes one after the other with seemingly no effect other than the diminishing of my wallet. Go figure.

As I write this, the plan is tonight to start TVFT up again for the new season. Right after the speech meeting, to be precise. I’m looking forward to it. We had a lot of fun last year, and I think this year we’ll be adding a lot more independent voices to the mix. Skype makes it pretty easy for anyone to chime in; let us know if you wish to be among them. Anyhow, as I’ve mentioned before, the topic will be case disclosure here on the eve of Greenhill. And on the other podcast front, Jules has sent me an email saying that he wants to get started going again, but the Nostrumite is sort of busy with the opening of school so it may be another week or two. Whatever. It’s not as if I need something to do to fill the empty hours.

Back to business after the holiday weekend

I’ve started putting photos of the UK trip up on Facebook. I’d put them on Flickr but they say I’ve already got too many and should start paying them. Didn’t they read that book about the internet being free? What I really need to do is figure out a way to post them to my own site. Some day, when I’ve got some time on my hands. As it is, editing the photos takes longer than going to England and taking them in the first place. The SLR is still new to me, and I seem to have taken a lot of pictures that are slightly askew, something I noticed late in the trip that I starting thinking about on the fly but meanwhile I’ve now got to fix it on the ground, and it takes forever. I’ve worked out a system using iPhoto and Elements alternately, and it’s very confusing and, trust me, you really don’t want to hear about it. I estimate that, at the rate I’m going, I’ll be done in time for the DDA. At which point I can start all over again.

I also managed to record a Nostrum over the weekend, but had all sorts of issues with the uploading to my site and the RSS and hearing it in iTunes. I ended up loading a couple of different versions, and never did understand the problem. So maybe, if you’re a subscriber, you’ll hear the same episode (with Botch and Wednesday) twice. Maybe not. It is available on the NostrumNation blog, in any case, if you need to get it. Which, I guess, stretches the definition of the word need beyond your wildest nightmares.

I wasn’t able to go to CatNats, where SuperSquirrel debated her very last round (always a gleeful moment). I’m curious to see how she and the Panivore did in the ballot count. And of course, the P has to prep for NatNats. No rest for the wicked. Anyhow, before the event we had a call for a TVFT from Rob Frederickson, as I like to call him, which Bietz set up, and I enjoyed that conversation a lot. Adam T was also with us, and in addition to CatNats we discussed NatNats, so if you’re running that LD topic, you might want to check it out. I also posted a segment of Fred trying to set up Skype. The man is not a technophobe, but he’s not exactly Mr. Skype either. And he does resort to salty language at times, so there goes our G rating. I’m thinking of making a hip hop recording out of it.

And, oh yeah, there is the iPad. It took me a while to get it set up, mostly because there was a whole new EULA that I didn’t bump into right away that was walling me up. Then there was the Apple store guy telling me to let it run down the charge, so I haven’t gone back and synched it again to see how some of the issues were working out. One big thing for me is reading books for the DJ, and that means getting mss that come into the office into iBooks, which requires, first, turning them into ePub format, and second, dumping them into iTunes on Vegas Elvis, then synching the iP to VE to get them into iBooks. A lot of bloody hoo-ha, in other words, but worth it. Something as simple as reading them on Stanza doesn’t work because the Stanza software for the Touch, while it expands to cover the territory of the iP screen, gets too fuzzy for extended reading sessions. And a simple pdf is possible, but it has none of the elegance of an iBooks title. Anyhow, my overall take on the device at the moment is pretty favorable, and I haven’t even tried to play iPad Civ yet. It’s a little heavy for reading, but not prohibitively so: it wasn’t so bad that when I virtually tried to turn the page that I fell out of bed or anything. O’C wants to use his for tabbing, which requires a virtual connection to your home machine, which seems to avoid the need to do something simple like print schematics, but that’s him and not me. I’m seeing him this Friday, so we can compare notes. I do need a name for mine, though. Nothing immediately comes to mind, but I’ll keep working on it.

CP on the Pffft topic

"I often throw out ridiculous topics to my debaters when teaching generic skills such as flowing or case organization. Such topics include “Resolved that ketchup is superior to mustard” or “Resolved that the US should nuke France.” These topics are more fair and debatable than the NCFL PF topic." More...

There's a touch of manifesto to this. But the idea that we might not go to a tournament that ignores us? I mean, duh. Can you say NYSFL?

Been there. Doing that.

Winding down in numerous ways

Any pfffter doing the CatNat Boogie might wish to look at the comments on the TVFT blog. If there isn’t enough there to base cases, then you’re not thinking hard enough.

In preparation for a move at the DJ, I’ve taken down a lot of crap memorabilia in my office and boxed it up. All I have left to look at is a postcard of a Fra Angelico, a ’64 World’s Fair calendar (April is General Electric’s Progressland), a limited edition Cheshire Cat pin, an honorable mention ribbon from the NYCFL, two family photos circa 1984, and a Mid-Hudson League medal (V1.0). In many ways, this arcane assemblage is the story of my life, give or take a few key incidents. I just thought I’d point that out.

Speaking of packing up, I now need to pack down (which ought to be the opposite of packing up) the crap tools in my traveling tab bag. God knows what’s in there in addition to the obvious. I did retrieve the granola bars and put them in my golf bag, so I don’t have to worry about feeding the mice over the summer. But the thing is, at tournaments people give me stuff that I toss in there, and I forget I have it, and then April rolls around and I look and say, Oh, great, a coupon for an iPud for only $24.95, then, oh, pooh, it expired two months ago. If anything good turns up I’ll let you know. I think there’s a Sims game in there, for instance. I never got the hang of that one. Maybe some other stuff of note. We’ll see.

Tomorrow is the last Saturday morning on which I will be setting an alarm until September. If that doesn’t mark the end of the season, nothing does.

TVFT announces hiatus, @NN announces ignoble return, etc., etc., etc.

We are nearing the end of this season on TVFT. Which is interesting, because until last night, we weren’t even aware that we had any seasons. But taking one consideration with another, it seems that this is the time to fold, while we’ve still got a few chips on the table, or something like that. We were going to comment on the Pffft comments last night, but we were all sort of tired of Pffft, although we did excoriate the CatNat Pffft topic for a while because, well, if ever a resolution deserved looking up the word excoriation in the dictionary, this one is it. I should be going to Omaha just to judge that rez. I’d pick up the con every time, sort of a mercy ballot. Actually, word on the street (if the street is in the Vatican) is that they’re using the resolution to weed out the atheists in the organization. Anyone who casts a con ballot will immediately be sent to Texas for regrooving, after first emptying their pockets of all those two-dollar bills with TJ’s picture on them, not to mention leaving their nickels behind for charity. I think they’re giving the TJ-branded lucre to Parker and Stone to back their upcoming Mormon play on Broadway.

Is the world getting weirder, or is it just me?

Anyhow, last night we also talked about tricks and psych-outs, although mostly that turned into a discussion of the more subtle aspects of the debating game. I actually suggest you listen to this one, if you’re a debater. You might get something out of it. You’ll also get to see the quintessential O’C, because for no known reason, in the middle of the podcast he wanders off. That stuff doesn’t wash out, in other words.

And then I think we’ll wrap it up next week, or maybe have one more show after TOC. I know that Bietz has written a manifesto of sorts to the Advisory Committee (how unusual) with various suggestions, but I don’t know what they are, nor how much he wishes to reveal, although normally he’s pretty forthcoming about stuff like that, given his commitment to transparency. I like to think of it as Open Bietz. Whatever. So one more or two more shows, then a break for a while until so much new stuff builds up for next season that we have no choice but to continue. However, I may try to get some folks on the side to record interviews or something, just to keep the momentum going. We’ll see. Skype makes it so easy to do, I figure, why not?

Meanwhile, if you’re following @NostrumNation on Twitter you saw the message that Buglaroni will be returning. That came as quite a surprise to me, I have to admit, because nothing I’ve seen in the future episodes (not that I’ve seen all that much, although I am a week or two ahead of you for obvious reasons) has any HPB in it. So I guess it won’t be for a while. Still, at least even I can now see the point of following the guys’ tweets, although at the moment I think I’m the only one who does.

This is why we nail the bed to the floor

“Resolved: That the constitutional right of freedom of religion has wrongly evolved into freedom from religion.” Okay. We can now move away slowly from the crime scene. Bietz suggested in a private communiqué (no communiqué with me is private for long!) that he’s had enough of Pffft on TFVT. The Cats must have heard him loud and clear, and responded with a resolution guaranteed to shut all of us up forthwith. If you don’t recall, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” And I love a resolution of dubious fact modified by a judgment of “wrongly.” While the line of history from the Constitution through to the latest declarations on the subject from SCOTUS is an interesting narrative, one must in this instance contend with a (possibly) false premise leading to a moral judgment? And argued, potentially, in front of panels who have already accepted the premise and drawn a deeply held religious conclusion from it? Either you argue that it hasn’t happened or it isn’t wrong? I’m with Bietz. (By the way, a word to the wise: Flip pro. Oh, wait. It’s CatNats. No flip. Okay, a different word to the wise: Skip your con rounds, unless your opponents are raving lunatics.)

We return you now to our regular scheduled broadcast.

There were some interesting sidelights to the Lakeland tournament last weekend. First of all, O’C chezzed up with us again, as he does here and at Byram. To get him in the mood for the DDA (that’s Disney Debate Adventure), I dug out a bottle of WDW shampoo and a little Mickey Mouse soap I had stolen from my hotel room last time I was there and put them into his bathroom. He loved them. He also stole them, no doubt for the O’C loo back in the city. This didn’t bother me that much, but he also stole the towels, the pens, the alarm clock and the Knight Rider lunchbox. Jeesh.

In preparation for the MHL side of the tournament, we had asked member schools to nominate literally all their novices for recognition with what we were calling the Modest Novice awards. We thought it would be fun to have some jokey awards that acknowledged everyone’s hard work through the year, and also aided in team building and community building, which as I said yesterday, are big with me. Most programs rose to the occasion with fantastic results. It’s one thing to have your own private humorous awards, but when they’re public, it forces a level of creativity that will make the joke work with others. For the most part, they did. We asked that upperclassmen be the ones to come up with the categories, unique for each kid or, occasionally, pair of kids. I’m pretty sure this will be a standard feature of the MHL grand event in years to come. There were things like “Most Likely to Call His Judge a White Supremacist” and, for a policy team with one very big guy and one very little guy, “The Cutest Couple.” I got a real kick out of this.

Of course, there were numerous other awards as well, what with O’C and Stefan both sorting them out and whatnot. They are the godfathers of a new group, the New York State Debate Coaches Association, in aid of getting coaches working together to promote regional debate, so they had recognition awards for that plus the tournament per se, plus the Modest Novice awards, plus the People’s Champion Award (for the challenge round), plus one remaining award I have in my possession and will announce shortly. With O’C, in other words, you’re never at a loss for awards. Come to think of it, I had some old trophies in my house, and when he took the soap and the shampoo, he also stole them!

Then again, for reasons that totally elude me, I now have in my possession, and in the chez, the traveling trophy for LD for Lakeland. Why me, I wonder. Oh, well.

Obama wins the Kenyan vote!

You’ve got to love CatNats. “Resolved: That the United States government has a moral obligation to afford the same constitutional rights to all people on United States soil.” What they’re trying to say is that constitutional rights protections should (or should not) apply equally to citizens and non-citizens, but they’re so afraid of people going off-rez that they’ve provided a bizarro “all people on United States soil” concept to replace non-citizens that, well, just makes you love the English language. Realistically, though, it’s not the world’s worst topic, I don’t think, although personally I find it pretty one-sided.

A while ago we had a similar topic, and often debaters took this as license to argue that the right to vote should somehow be granted to non-citizens. This was, and remains, ridiculous. Simply enough, no polity exists of people who are not members of the polity, by definition. Only judges who left their brains at the door of the room could be convinced otherwise, but, of course, there were such judges. (I tended to use this as a litmus test of tabula rasa, myself. If your slate was wiped that clean, you were just too dumb for the room.)

If you don’t buy that (hmmm, that’s some clean slate there, pal), let’s look at that wording in the rez: “the same constitutional rights.” Now let’s look at the right to vote in the Constitution.

“The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” “The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, elected by the people thereof.” “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” “The right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for President or Vice President, for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State by reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax.” “The right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age.”

Maybe I’m missing something here, but every single iteration of the right to vote requires that a person be a citizen (although more loosely in the Senate requirement, where one must be one of the “people thereof” that state, which is tantamount to the same thing). That is, the power of the vote goes to citizens much like the power of being Commander-in-Chief goes to the President. One can’t simply claim this power willy nilly. I can’t say that since the Constitution grants someone the right of being CIC, everyone should have that right. To wit, you would have to amend the constitution to apply the right to vote to non-citizens, which means that clearly that right is not a "constitutional right" at the moment, which is what the rez is talking about.

However, the word “citizen” does not appear at all in the Bill of Rights. Duh.

The legitimate arguing of this resolution will be about whether the enumerated rights in the Constitution, i.e., the Bill of Rights, ought to be applied to all. (And, yeah, it’s on our soil, so the US can’t grant rights to people in Ulan Bator. Duh again.) There are plenty of people who feel that the answer is no. Non-citizen immigrants, suspected terrorists and felons are all among those whose rights are moot. Unfortunately, they’re a disparate bunch, and it’s hard to unify them in an argument. The illegal working at WalMart should be a different case than Osama bin-Laden who should be a different case than some drug dealer who was just released from prison. Normally I would look for the unifying factor to find debate material, but aside from their all being on the questionable side of rights allowances, there really isn’t one. So, good luck with that. Still, however, one or the other of these will allow for the best debates. I haven’t thought it through myself to know which ones, but illegals seem intuitively the ones worth arguing about on both sides of the rez.

We’ll see. I’m meeting with the Sailors Tuesday. I’ll be interested to hear their take on this, since two of them are heading to the CatNats Conflagration.