One of the problems of putting CL into evolution mode is that when I say evolution, I meant it. I have no idea what I’m doing or where I’m going—intelligent design does not play into it. My only goal is to open it up to more things than debate. But at the same time, I don’t want to lose the debate parts, which are core. Or the audience that has developed over time because of the debate parts. I have a general idea who’s reading this, in other words. But I don’t think that all of them are only reading it for debate stuff. The VCA is interested in a lot of other things as well. My goal is to provide non-forensic material for those interests, to entertain the sort of person who would be in the VCA in the first place. Forensics remains core, though: make no mistake about that (as Richard Nixon would say, usually when he was lying). I have no intention of moving away from debate, letting the tail take over the dog, so to speak.
Still, we have problems, especially for those who really don’t want the non-debate stuff, or think of the debate stuff as apart from the rest of it. If I could do separate RSS feeds for the same blog, I would, but that is beyond me (or maybe it’s just beyond Blogger). That was one of the reasons Grinwout’s was created, but I’ve already discussed why I’ve given up on that.
Anyhow, to try to make things palatable, I’m adding a generic tag at the top of each post title. I’ll try to keep them to a manageable few, like Movies, Music, Coachean Feed (which I’ve revived as a weekly post), and of course, Forensics. This means that, at the very least, you can see off the top if you want to read that sort of post because you’re in that sort of mood. Or you can just pass over the ones you’re not interested in, if you’re merely reading this to keep up with registration dates at the next high school tournament. Your call. I’ll do this for a while, until I think of something else.
Meanwhile, if you missed it, we put up a new TVFT last week, talking about the second three in the set of 2012-13 resolutions. Mostly we agreed this time around, except maybe on the civil services one, which I went into hating. I came out of it hating it just as much, and I think some of my reservations (chiefly its broadness) started to click with the others. Listen for yourself. In any case, it was good to get all four of us back together again. We do come at things from such radically different points of view. I think of Bietz and CP as hot into the midst of today’s LD, whether they like it or not (L’Etoile did win TOC, after all), while Cruz has such a literally vast army that he has no choice but to take a broader view of forensics as a whole while I’m firmly rooted in the get-off-my-lawn land of about a decade ago. Our longevity is interesting, come to think of it. This was the 59th episode, going back at least a couple of years. We have yet to run out of things to say. How odd that a bunch of speech/debate people could be so chatty.
On the home front, I have sent out the call to the Sailors to get their acts together to sign up for the Pups and Jake, both of which open on August 1. The Pups opens at 1:00 pm and goes immediately to a waitlist, which is pretty sane if you ask me. Jake opens at 12:01 am and closes about a minute later because O’C prefers the style of the midnight opening of the latest Geaoge Lucas film, and models his tournament after The Phantom Menace.
Quick quiz for normal people. No peeking. Okay, quick: Name the last movie directed by George Lucas.
Aha! I knew you couldn’t do it. (O’C doesn’t count.)
Anyhow, at the moment, the Sailor signup sheets remain as pure as the driven snow. I’m sure this will change. (One parent has advised me that their kid is offline for a couple of weeks, which rather shocked me. I didn’t know people could go offline anymore.) I’ll fill in a few slots with dummy entries (that is, temporary space fillers, not wooden-headed students) until a reasonable time. I mean, I do hate going to tournaments alone. It sort of undermines the whole point of things.
Showing posts with label Grinwout's. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Grinwout's. Show all posts
Monday, July 16, 2012
Monday, June 18, 2012
Now what?
The attentive member of the VCA will have noticed the melding in of the Grinwout’s posts, which I think I threatened to do, or at least mentioned I was contemplating. Here’s the story.
I like doing CL, obviously, and have little problem filling it up with stuff during the season. The stuff that I fill it up with is, obviously, debate-oriented, although I have been known to go off on tangents, some more tangential than others. It’s one thing to write up a history of art as narrative (“Caveman,” of course, which I still love) and another thing to write up my personal experiences going to Disneyland. Still, it’s all of a piece, and once you start down the road of regular blogging, you write whatever is foremost in your mind at the time. During the summer, I wish I was at a Disney park, and there’s no debate going on, so there you are. No one ever complained, so I kept at it.
I’m quite satisfied with the readership numbers for CL, which are tracked for me by Google. Plus I know there’s untrackable subsidiary readership in RSS feeds and the like, so as far as I’m concerned, I’m reaching a number of people that makes it worth bothering in the first place. While I do write this because I like to write, I wouldn’t do it if there weren’t people who wanted to read it. Instead, I would do something useful like buy a high-end PC and play online games in my spare time. Or watch more TV. Or raise chickens.
I did at one point develop the habit of RSS reading, concentrating on debate-related materials, which I then, via automation inherent in Google’s Reader, posted over to what I called the Coachean Feed. I did this for a while, getting myself into the habit of following and organizing feeds, but without a lot of traction as far as readership. For a while I merged the Feed into the CL blog, and got a couple of complaints, and stopped.
Meanwhile, for the DJ, I wanted to create content to support the series I publish, and began blogging there, eventually evolving into an annotated link blog. I did this independently for months to prove that it could be done, then for a while did it on the DJ website. Unfortunately, the supporting materials on the website (marketing stuff) never materialized, and the DJ website people wanted something different, and there you are. (Actually, the DJ is getting its act together, and doing what I wanted them to do in the first place, so it may be panning out in the long run).
Because I was doing so much Feed/Blogging on entertainment subjects, I lost the time to do the Coachean Feed, plus Google’s Reader was modified so that the automatic part wasn’t working the same, so that fell by the wayside. Meanwhile, I so got into the habit of the entertainment feed/blog, that when the DJ cancelled it, a few weeks later I started it on my own. I figured I’d keep it separate from CL, and therefore baptized it Grinwout’s. I created a Twitter account which got direct feeds from the blog as they were written, and kept it as a separate entity. Eventually I created a Facebook page for it as well. The thing is, the Grinwout’s type of content has sort of become something I do, for whatever reason, but mostly because I like doing it. It gives me a chance to write about other things, and to explore videos and music and stuff that I like doing. It has become part of the Menickean mental makeup slash output.
The problem was that having it separate from my main line, which is CL, seemed to be more trouble than it was worth. It’s a secondary brand, so to speak, and doesn’t have the oomph to allow it to stand on its own. And why should it stand on its own? After all, it’s still all Menickean crap. And CL, for better or worse, is Menickean crap from top to bottom. More Menickean crap would seem to fit right in.
So, the plan is to merge Grinwout’s and CL. For the time being, G posts will be written by Grinwout’s, and CL posts will be written by me. I’m stopping the @Grinwouts and eliminating automatic posting to Twitter, but I will kick myself in the pants and use @jimmenick to support Grinwout’s publishing. And I’ll let the Facebook page I created for Grinwout’s languish; it’s not hurting anyone, after all. I realize that if you really want to get stuff out there, you need to connect every which way, but I’d rather use FB for my own personal stuff, at least for now. We’ll see.
If all of this annoys you no end, keep it to yourself, you spalpeen! Who needs you and your negative worldview? Otherwise, let’s see what happens. It’s the beginning of a great adventure, as Lou Reed would put it.
I like doing CL, obviously, and have little problem filling it up with stuff during the season. The stuff that I fill it up with is, obviously, debate-oriented, although I have been known to go off on tangents, some more tangential than others. It’s one thing to write up a history of art as narrative (“Caveman,” of course, which I still love) and another thing to write up my personal experiences going to Disneyland. Still, it’s all of a piece, and once you start down the road of regular blogging, you write whatever is foremost in your mind at the time. During the summer, I wish I was at a Disney park, and there’s no debate going on, so there you are. No one ever complained, so I kept at it.
I’m quite satisfied with the readership numbers for CL, which are tracked for me by Google. Plus I know there’s untrackable subsidiary readership in RSS feeds and the like, so as far as I’m concerned, I’m reaching a number of people that makes it worth bothering in the first place. While I do write this because I like to write, I wouldn’t do it if there weren’t people who wanted to read it. Instead, I would do something useful like buy a high-end PC and play online games in my spare time. Or watch more TV. Or raise chickens.
I did at one point develop the habit of RSS reading, concentrating on debate-related materials, which I then, via automation inherent in Google’s Reader, posted over to what I called the Coachean Feed. I did this for a while, getting myself into the habit of following and organizing feeds, but without a lot of traction as far as readership. For a while I merged the Feed into the CL blog, and got a couple of complaints, and stopped.
Meanwhile, for the DJ, I wanted to create content to support the series I publish, and began blogging there, eventually evolving into an annotated link blog. I did this independently for months to prove that it could be done, then for a while did it on the DJ website. Unfortunately, the supporting materials on the website (marketing stuff) never materialized, and the DJ website people wanted something different, and there you are. (Actually, the DJ is getting its act together, and doing what I wanted them to do in the first place, so it may be panning out in the long run).
Because I was doing so much Feed/Blogging on entertainment subjects, I lost the time to do the Coachean Feed, plus Google’s Reader was modified so that the automatic part wasn’t working the same, so that fell by the wayside. Meanwhile, I so got into the habit of the entertainment feed/blog, that when the DJ cancelled it, a few weeks later I started it on my own. I figured I’d keep it separate from CL, and therefore baptized it Grinwout’s. I created a Twitter account which got direct feeds from the blog as they were written, and kept it as a separate entity. Eventually I created a Facebook page for it as well. The thing is, the Grinwout’s type of content has sort of become something I do, for whatever reason, but mostly because I like doing it. It gives me a chance to write about other things, and to explore videos and music and stuff that I like doing. It has become part of the Menickean mental makeup slash output.
The problem was that having it separate from my main line, which is CL, seemed to be more trouble than it was worth. It’s a secondary brand, so to speak, and doesn’t have the oomph to allow it to stand on its own. And why should it stand on its own? After all, it’s still all Menickean crap. And CL, for better or worse, is Menickean crap from top to bottom. More Menickean crap would seem to fit right in.
So, the plan is to merge Grinwout’s and CL. For the time being, G posts will be written by Grinwout’s, and CL posts will be written by me. I’m stopping the @Grinwouts and eliminating automatic posting to Twitter, but I will kick myself in the pants and use @jimmenick to support Grinwout’s publishing. And I’ll let the Facebook page I created for Grinwout’s languish; it’s not hurting anyone, after all. I realize that if you really want to get stuff out there, you need to connect every which way, but I’d rather use FB for my own personal stuff, at least for now. We’ll see.
If all of this annoys you no end, keep it to yourself, you spalpeen! Who needs you and your negative worldview? Otherwise, let’s see what happens. It’s the beginning of a great adventure, as Lou Reed would put it.
Thursday, May 17, 2012
In which questions are asked and remain unanswered
Wuz happ’nin’, sez you. Nuttin’, sez me.
I’m going to take a couple of days off from writing and blogging and whatnot, which is a literal translation of nothing happening, I guess. I don’t see much news on the debate front, needless to say. Some people will go to the various Nats in the next few weeks, but if you’re not among them, well, there you are. Sailorville officially asked me if I was returning next year, and once again I was forced to disappoint the debate community at large by answering yes. I will go away some day. I promise. But not just yet.
If you’re wondering, the DJ is getting downright weird, in ways I can’t pinpoint. I’d explain if I could, but, well, I can’t.
Those folks who have claimed to be my friends and therefore connected with me on Facebook (many of whom I sort of recognize) know that I’ve started hawking Grinwout’s on my fb page. Anyone who followed the Grinwout’s page knows that I’ve stopped hawking it there. The thing is, I’ve gotten a lot more views, and since I’m not doing it for my health (sort of ), it makes sense to go where the action is. Of course, this means that I won’t be posting much else on fb, but I never really have anyhow, so it won’t matter much. I’ve considered emulating O’C and hooking up to Foursquare and posting every time I pass gas, but decided against it. I don’t do anything all that interesting, and when I do, I’ll pass it along in detail here. Excruciatingly painful detail, as the VCA well knows.
Speaking of which, I was talking with someone yesterday about young and old editors (again a propos of the DJ), and one of the things I realized was that the one big difference is not that the younger ones can articulate an explanation of their connection to social media, but simply that it is in their personal universes in a way not true of old farts. I mean, it’s not as if I don’t have accounts everywhere for everything, but I seldom bother. With Twitter, for instance, every time I look at it it’s as if I’m starting from scratch: you’re either in it, or you’re not. It’s easier to be a casual Facebook user, but that makes you mostly a lurker, reading what other people are up to which, if you have enough friends, can pass a bunch of time interestingly enough. But some people, mostly younger, use Facebook as the air they breathe, or at least the interwebs air they breathe (and the mobile air, as well). I’ve seen no explanation of why this is so, or at least no convincing explanation other than it is what it is. Watching corporations try to find their place in this is interesting. For instance, last night someone (Warner Bros?) streamed the movie Casablanca on Facebook. In the universe of Why Bother, this has to rank pretty high, although presumably somehow or other it probably means the fb is looking toward going into the streaming business along with every other business they’ve invaded. Did anyone watch this? Was it really a movie-watching experience? Is the world now divided into people who watch movies and people who live-blog movies?
As I say, I’m not in the game here. I’d like to understand it more, though.
I’m going to take a couple of days off from writing and blogging and whatnot, which is a literal translation of nothing happening, I guess. I don’t see much news on the debate front, needless to say. Some people will go to the various Nats in the next few weeks, but if you’re not among them, well, there you are. Sailorville officially asked me if I was returning next year, and once again I was forced to disappoint the debate community at large by answering yes. I will go away some day. I promise. But not just yet.
If you’re wondering, the DJ is getting downright weird, in ways I can’t pinpoint. I’d explain if I could, but, well, I can’t.
Those folks who have claimed to be my friends and therefore connected with me on Facebook (many of whom I sort of recognize) know that I’ve started hawking Grinwout’s on my fb page. Anyone who followed the Grinwout’s page knows that I’ve stopped hawking it there. The thing is, I’ve gotten a lot more views, and since I’m not doing it for my health (sort of ), it makes sense to go where the action is. Of course, this means that I won’t be posting much else on fb, but I never really have anyhow, so it won’t matter much. I’ve considered emulating O’C and hooking up to Foursquare and posting every time I pass gas, but decided against it. I don’t do anything all that interesting, and when I do, I’ll pass it along in detail here. Excruciatingly painful detail, as the VCA well knows.
Speaking of which, I was talking with someone yesterday about young and old editors (again a propos of the DJ), and one of the things I realized was that the one big difference is not that the younger ones can articulate an explanation of their connection to social media, but simply that it is in their personal universes in a way not true of old farts. I mean, it’s not as if I don’t have accounts everywhere for everything, but I seldom bother. With Twitter, for instance, every time I look at it it’s as if I’m starting from scratch: you’re either in it, or you’re not. It’s easier to be a casual Facebook user, but that makes you mostly a lurker, reading what other people are up to which, if you have enough friends, can pass a bunch of time interestingly enough. But some people, mostly younger, use Facebook as the air they breathe, or at least the interwebs air they breathe (and the mobile air, as well). I’ve seen no explanation of why this is so, or at least no convincing explanation other than it is what it is. Watching corporations try to find their place in this is interesting. For instance, last night someone (Warner Bros?) streamed the movie Casablanca on Facebook. In the universe of Why Bother, this has to rank pretty high, although presumably somehow or other it probably means the fb is looking toward going into the streaming business along with every other business they’ve invaded. Did anyone watch this? Was it really a movie-watching experience? Is the world now divided into people who watch movies and people who live-blog movies?
As I say, I’m not in the game here. I’d like to understand it more, though.
Friday, May 11, 2012
In which we step back and wonder
Hmmmm.
I’m up in the air about handling the other blog. Our story so far: I wanted to do a blog for the DJ, and eventually did, reaching the point of averaging 4 posts a day. Then they cut it, and I went cold turkey, but I was so obsessed by it that I brought it back under my own (well, Grinwout’s) auspices. Now the DJ is relaunching blogs as I had originally suggested, with all editors contributing, but something tells me that they won’t all be doing 4 a day. They asked me for 1 a week. Whatever.
I see those DJ posts as being more chatty and less aggregation-ish, but they’re very beta at the moment so nobody really knows. I know I went chatty on my first tries. But then again, I’m a chatty guy (on paper; in person, you’re unlikely to get a word out of me).
This leaves me with this blog and the Grinwout’s blog. I tweet Grinwout’s automatically, and otherwise hardly ever look at Twitter, even though I regularly tell myself I have to. I’ve got too many Twitter accounts, I think. That could be the problem.
I also have Grinwout’s as a separate Facebook page. I did this because, well, everything nowadays has a separate Facebook page, but the fact that blog posts don’t automatically replicate to FB anymore means that all the G’s fb content has to be manually entered.
In other words, I’ve got a lot of accounts that require way more maintenance than I really want to do. What I want to do is write about debate, life in general and the arts. I can do the former here, the latter on Grinwout’s, and the middler on both, depending. I’ll probably change things around a bit over the next few days. I’ve got to organize my brain around keeping some content for the DJ separate from Grinwout’s, for one thing (although I may try it out on Grinwout’s first, with a different approach). I don’t really want to merge everything into one blog; I tried that with the Coachean Feed and found that it just diluted the pool. I may rethink what I’m doing on Facebook, though. I may put the G’s page aside for a while and promote Grinwout’s directly on my own page. It’s not like I post much else there, and everybody in the universe does seem to use fb every two minutes.
Interesting times.
I’m up in the air about handling the other blog. Our story so far: I wanted to do a blog for the DJ, and eventually did, reaching the point of averaging 4 posts a day. Then they cut it, and I went cold turkey, but I was so obsessed by it that I brought it back under my own (well, Grinwout’s) auspices. Now the DJ is relaunching blogs as I had originally suggested, with all editors contributing, but something tells me that they won’t all be doing 4 a day. They asked me for 1 a week. Whatever.
I see those DJ posts as being more chatty and less aggregation-ish, but they’re very beta at the moment so nobody really knows. I know I went chatty on my first tries. But then again, I’m a chatty guy (on paper; in person, you’re unlikely to get a word out of me).
This leaves me with this blog and the Grinwout’s blog. I tweet Grinwout’s automatically, and otherwise hardly ever look at Twitter, even though I regularly tell myself I have to. I’ve got too many Twitter accounts, I think. That could be the problem.
I also have Grinwout’s as a separate Facebook page. I did this because, well, everything nowadays has a separate Facebook page, but the fact that blog posts don’t automatically replicate to FB anymore means that all the G’s fb content has to be manually entered.
In other words, I’ve got a lot of accounts that require way more maintenance than I really want to do. What I want to do is write about debate, life in general and the arts. I can do the former here, the latter on Grinwout’s, and the middler on both, depending. I’ll probably change things around a bit over the next few days. I’ve got to organize my brain around keeping some content for the DJ separate from Grinwout’s, for one thing (although I may try it out on Grinwout’s first, with a different approach). I don’t really want to merge everything into one blog; I tried that with the Coachean Feed and found that it just diluted the pool. I may rethink what I’m doing on Facebook, though. I may put the G’s page aside for a while and promote Grinwout’s directly on my own page. It’s not like I post much else there, and everybody in the universe does seem to use fb every two minutes.
Interesting times.
Wednesday, May 09, 2012
The crappy prizes will flow like water
I’m thinking that, maybe, I might start blogging for the DJ again. I’ll at least be doing book reviews (there’s a no-brainer for you); more than that, it’s hard to say. Having sort of invented the category for them, then gotten bumped without notice, then gotten thrown into a random group of other editors, I’m not terribly hopeful, but at the same time, I strongly believe that our brand can do some serious good stuff on the interwebs that we’re just not doing.
I just wasn’t made for these times. It may require reworking of the new sister site. We’ll see.
Speaking of which, I was really taken by that clip of the Beach Boys on Grinwout’s. Previously I was thinking that at best we were talking just another oldies act, but that new song is really good. Can they pull off a whole album like that? We’ll know next month. I’ve been following Brian’s solo career, which has been, in a word, mixed. Sometimes aggressively overproduced misses, sometimes one of my favorite albums ever (“Orange Crate Art”): you never knew what to expect. The jury is still out on the Gershwin album and the Disney album. Interesting choices, though. Anyhow, as a group, the band looks awfully well fed (those royalties must be still coming in), and somebody needs to tell Mike Love that we know he’s lost a hair or two and it’s okay and we’ve known it since 1971, but they sounded incredible. Then again, does anyone look unhappier on stage than Brian Wilson? I’ve seen proctology patients with bigger smiles. (I hope that last sentence doesn’t come across the wrong way.)
Finally, tonight, the Bean Trivialists will get their due. The daughter and O’C are poised to provide their lifelines (I can’t imagine that they’d miss any of these). There’s also a new lifeline, the Spons Google Catastrophe. Can our speech coach Google the answer on the top page of the iPhone? Her computer skills are, uh, well, I’ve seen proctology patients with bigger smiles, so this should be interesting. She’ll be doing it on my iPhone. Of course, she doesn’t know this yet…
I just wasn’t made for these times. It may require reworking of the new sister site. We’ll see.
Speaking of which, I was really taken by that clip of the Beach Boys on Grinwout’s. Previously I was thinking that at best we were talking just another oldies act, but that new song is really good. Can they pull off a whole album like that? We’ll know next month. I’ve been following Brian’s solo career, which has been, in a word, mixed. Sometimes aggressively overproduced misses, sometimes one of my favorite albums ever (“Orange Crate Art”): you never knew what to expect. The jury is still out on the Gershwin album and the Disney album. Interesting choices, though. Anyhow, as a group, the band looks awfully well fed (those royalties must be still coming in), and somebody needs to tell Mike Love that we know he’s lost a hair or two and it’s okay and we’ve known it since 1971, but they sounded incredible. Then again, does anyone look unhappier on stage than Brian Wilson? I’ve seen proctology patients with bigger smiles. (I hope that last sentence doesn’t come across the wrong way.)
Finally, tonight, the Bean Trivialists will get their due. The daughter and O’C are poised to provide their lifelines (I can’t imagine that they’d miss any of these). There’s also a new lifeline, the Spons Google Catastrophe. Can our speech coach Google the answer on the top page of the iPhone? Her computer skills are, uh, well, I’ve seen proctology patients with bigger smiles, so this should be interesting. She’ll be doing it on my iPhone. Of course, she doesn’t know this yet…
Friday, April 27, 2012
New Blogger worse than Old Blogger. Just like New Coke. Feh!
I can’t for the life of me figure out why the posts here, which I write willy-nilly but like to post at 7:30 pm, and therefore schedule for that time, are not being posted automatically, while the Grinwout’s posts, which I set for automatic publication at roughly three-hour intervals during the day, roll out without a hitch. (And yes, I know that the previous sentence would get me in trouble with a lot of present-day English teachers who think that commas are the tool of the devil, but I maintain that each one is in its proper place and that the sentence parses perfectly.) Maybe Google just likes Grinwout’s more than CL. Could be. I guess for the time being I’ll just post the damned things as I write them. There’s no real reason not to.
Speaking of Grinwout’s, if you’re reading this in Lexington because you’re bored because they couldn’t find a round in which you were even remotely preferred, go read that instead. It’ll hold you for a while.
You might have noticed in the comments that the uninymous Glenn explained that in his region, there is little or no difference between the speech and debate experiences. I think that this is widely true. Or at least in many regions, work is done to minimize the differences. I know there are regions where students debate one half of the year and speechify the other half of the year, and the tournaments are designed to make that a reality. I remember talking with a displaced Texan (I think it was a Texan) who said that at his local debate tournaments they worked in extemp somehow, an all-in-one one-day affair, and I really liked that but it would be hard to do the same here. We kicked it around, however, for a possible MHL event some day. I bemoan the lack of a need for debate students, at least LDers, to know what’s going on in the world. If they do, it’s a lagniappe. Even PF only requires that you know about the topic at hand, but at least a little preparedness doesn’t hurt, so that when the new topic is released you are not totally clueless. One of the things I’m working into my new curriculum is not a recommended program for keeping up with the news but a mandate. Anyhow, the idea that one could go to a tournament and do both a debate activity and extemp on the same day is mighty appealing to me. The students might not embrace it so gleefully, however. Or the judges, for that matter. Oh, well. What's the Coachean Life if it isn't full of dreams?
Speaking of Grinwout’s, if you’re reading this in Lexington because you’re bored because they couldn’t find a round in which you were even remotely preferred, go read that instead. It’ll hold you for a while.
You might have noticed in the comments that the uninymous Glenn explained that in his region, there is little or no difference between the speech and debate experiences. I think that this is widely true. Or at least in many regions, work is done to minimize the differences. I know there are regions where students debate one half of the year and speechify the other half of the year, and the tournaments are designed to make that a reality. I remember talking with a displaced Texan (I think it was a Texan) who said that at his local debate tournaments they worked in extemp somehow, an all-in-one one-day affair, and I really liked that but it would be hard to do the same here. We kicked it around, however, for a possible MHL event some day. I bemoan the lack of a need for debate students, at least LDers, to know what’s going on in the world. If they do, it’s a lagniappe. Even PF only requires that you know about the topic at hand, but at least a little preparedness doesn’t hurt, so that when the new topic is released you are not totally clueless. One of the things I’m working into my new curriculum is not a recommended program for keeping up with the news but a mandate. Anyhow, the idea that one could go to a tournament and do both a debate activity and extemp on the same day is mighty appealing to me. The students might not embrace it so gleefully, however. Or the judges, for that matter. Oh, well. What's the Coachean Life if it isn't full of dreams?
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
In which we continue to push you-know-what
On Grinwout’s:
I continue to pump them out, and seem to be getting a little traction. More people read this, though, than that, for some reason. Which means, if you’re one of those who aren’t following it, that you’ve missed things like a life-sized replica of the Starship Enterprise, Daffy Duck’s finest hour, a working version of WDW in Minecraft, Haruki Murakami, Tim Curry, a lost Monty Python travelogue, and the price of bootleg liquor for the Algonquin Round Table. Not to mention my sterling commentary on all of these things; maybe I should put up a subhead, “It ain’t just links!”
The url is http://grinwouts.blogspot.com/
The RSS is feed://grinwouts.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss
The Twitter feed is @grinwouts
The Facebook page is http://www.facebook.com/Grinwouts
I’m not sure about keeping the fb page, but everyone says that one must. Of course, everyone also says that one must do it in Google+ and, heaven forbid, Pinterest. I looked at Pinterest for a few minutes once and ran away screaming, so it might take some time for that to happen. However you view it, please go like it on Facebook (even if you detest it with every fiber of your being). Apparently if the page gets enough likes, I get to do more interesting stuff with it, and I’m curious to see what. The other thing is that whenever anyone likes the blog itself or a given item via fb, it gets on their feed, which gives it more exposure.
Which raises the question (note correct avoidance of the phrase “begs the question”), why am I doing this? I’m obviously not in it for the money. As I’ve said, I just got into the habit when I was doing it for the DJ. It’s nice not to have to tow the DJ line with it, meaning more fun stuff and occasionally NSFW language (albeit never NSFW content, because of the tender age of some of my followers who do, nonetheless, swear like fishwives) and fewer guides to parenting. I mean, can you affored to miss videos like this one:
I continue to pump them out, and seem to be getting a little traction. More people read this, though, than that, for some reason. Which means, if you’re one of those who aren’t following it, that you’ve missed things like a life-sized replica of the Starship Enterprise, Daffy Duck’s finest hour, a working version of WDW in Minecraft, Haruki Murakami, Tim Curry, a lost Monty Python travelogue, and the price of bootleg liquor for the Algonquin Round Table. Not to mention my sterling commentary on all of these things; maybe I should put up a subhead, “It ain’t just links!”
The url is http://grinwouts.blogspot.com/
The RSS is feed://grinwouts.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss
The Twitter feed is @grinwouts
The Facebook page is http://www.facebook.com/Grinwouts
I’m not sure about keeping the fb page, but everyone says that one must. Of course, everyone also says that one must do it in Google+ and, heaven forbid, Pinterest. I looked at Pinterest for a few minutes once and ran away screaming, so it might take some time for that to happen. However you view it, please go like it on Facebook (even if you detest it with every fiber of your being). Apparently if the page gets enough likes, I get to do more interesting stuff with it, and I’m curious to see what. The other thing is that whenever anyone likes the blog itself or a given item via fb, it gets on their feed, which gives it more exposure.
Which raises the question (note correct avoidance of the phrase “begs the question”), why am I doing this? I’m obviously not in it for the money. As I’ve said, I just got into the habit when I was doing it for the DJ. It’s nice not to have to tow the DJ line with it, meaning more fun stuff and occasionally NSFW language (albeit never NSFW content, because of the tender age of some of my followers who do, nonetheless, swear like fishwives) and fewer guides to parenting. I mean, can you affored to miss videos like this one:
Friday, April 06, 2012
Grinwout's Pt 4
So, if you haven't looked yet, here's what we've covered just this week:
Honi Coles (an amazing tap dancer), S.S. Van Dine's rules for writing detective fiction (he created Philo Vance), a gallery of contemporary art photographers, Casanova, Doris Day, Marlon Brando, Ulysses on audio, the need to be first at things, various versions of Snow White in the movies, how to create memorable secondary characters in fiction, AKB48 (the enormous Japanese girl group, including the one that's CGI), a history of space opera, who's controlling the legacies of dead rockers, the history of the word "dude." cryptozoological postcards, a site filled with free live concert music, Peanuts, The Science Fiction Encyclopedia, Roger Corman, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees for 2012, James Patterson, Eugene O'Neill, the Garbage Pail Kids, Tim Rice, alternate movie casting, an interview with Mark Twain and Tiger Woods.
Every one a winner! And that's just this week.
The site is grinwouts.blogspot.com. RSS is feed://grinwouts.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss. Twitter is @grinwouts. And you can like it on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/Grinwouts. I mean, it has to be better than most of what you see on a given day. Right?
Honi Coles (an amazing tap dancer), S.S. Van Dine's rules for writing detective fiction (he created Philo Vance), a gallery of contemporary art photographers, Casanova, Doris Day, Marlon Brando, Ulysses on audio, the need to be first at things, various versions of Snow White in the movies, how to create memorable secondary characters in fiction, AKB48 (the enormous Japanese girl group, including the one that's CGI), a history of space opera, who's controlling the legacies of dead rockers, the history of the word "dude." cryptozoological postcards, a site filled with free live concert music, Peanuts, The Science Fiction Encyclopedia, Roger Corman, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees for 2012, James Patterson, Eugene O'Neill, the Garbage Pail Kids, Tim Rice, alternate movie casting, an interview with Mark Twain and Tiger Woods.
Every one a winner! And that's just this week.
The site is grinwouts.blogspot.com. RSS is feed://grinwouts.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss. Twitter is @grinwouts. And you can like it on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/Grinwouts. I mean, it has to be better than most of what you see on a given day. Right?
Thursday, April 05, 2012
Grinwout's Pt 3
The blog is not pure aggregation. That is, it’s not just a hot link to something else. Each link is part of a short article, and it was always my intention, in every version of the blog, that it could stand alone. That is, you could read just the entry I’ve written and get enjoyment out of that, but if you were interested in the subject and wanted to know more, there was the link to click through. I guarantee that you won’t be disappointed on the other end, but by giving what I consider entertainment on the front end as well, you won’t be disappointed coming or going. Additionally, there are occasional birthday commemorations, usually drawn from YouTube. There I try to be less than predictable, looking for the less than famous who should be more famous, or finding the obscure rather than the obvious (although, occasionally, only the obvious will do). And once in a while, I just get inspired to write something up because I want to write it up, much as I do here.
I played around with different configurations of blog, Facebook and Twitter, thinking that they might be complementary somehow, but in the end decided that they would just be different gateways to the same material. So Twitter gets the RSS from the blog directly, while I just enter the link and a couple of words into the Facebook page. (That used to be automatic, RSS to fb, but they killed that functionality, and I figure it won’t kill me to enter directly rather than automate Twitter to fb, which doesn’t grab me, for some reason.) If you’re a Facebooker, I’d appreciate your liking the Grinwout’s page, because if I hit a certain number, I get some goodies that aren’t available to the riff and the raff directly off the streets.
As we enter the dry season for debate, and people stop debating every week, and all that’s left are some finals and then institutes, there won’t be much for me to talk about here, so however you follow this blog you should also follow Grinwout’s. If you’re an actual debater, it will do you good. You need to put something into your brain other than the knowledge of whether it makes sense to run an RVI when the moon is in Pisces. Having not terribly much to say here may lead me to simply pointing there, from here, once in a while, just to drive some traffic. In the end, of course, I don’t have unrealistic expectations. I know the traffic that CL drives, and I’d like to see likewise with Grin, which would mean a sizeable enough audience to warrant the time I’m spending on it. If it doesn’t come to pass, so be it, and I’ll finally give up and start playing videogames. (I can’t wait to dance with Mara Jade in the new Star Wars Kinnect game. Don’t tell Luke…)
I played around with different configurations of blog, Facebook and Twitter, thinking that they might be complementary somehow, but in the end decided that they would just be different gateways to the same material. So Twitter gets the RSS from the blog directly, while I just enter the link and a couple of words into the Facebook page. (That used to be automatic, RSS to fb, but they killed that functionality, and I figure it won’t kill me to enter directly rather than automate Twitter to fb, which doesn’t grab me, for some reason.) If you’re a Facebooker, I’d appreciate your liking the Grinwout’s page, because if I hit a certain number, I get some goodies that aren’t available to the riff and the raff directly off the streets.
As we enter the dry season for debate, and people stop debating every week, and all that’s left are some finals and then institutes, there won’t be much for me to talk about here, so however you follow this blog you should also follow Grinwout’s. If you’re an actual debater, it will do you good. You need to put something into your brain other than the knowledge of whether it makes sense to run an RVI when the moon is in Pisces. Having not terribly much to say here may lead me to simply pointing there, from here, once in a while, just to drive some traffic. In the end, of course, I don’t have unrealistic expectations. I know the traffic that CL drives, and I’d like to see likewise with Grin, which would mean a sizeable enough audience to warrant the time I’m spending on it. If it doesn’t come to pass, so be it, and I’ll finally give up and start playing videogames. (I can’t wait to dance with Mara Jade in the new Star Wars Kinnect game. Don’t tell Luke…)
Wednesday, April 04, 2012
Grinwout's Pt 2
The last time I tried something like this was the quite different Coachean Feed. Since I was trawling through debate-related articles anyhow, philosophical or social or cultural or whatever, I figured I’d pass them along to anyone in the community who was interested. I never bothered to check the stats, but I don’t think this was particularly popular except among a few people who got it, so to speak. Of course, as LD has moved along from resolutional concentration to positional concentration, all the articles in the world about, say, drones, wouldn’t matter much anymore. And certainly articles on rights and ethics and so forth would be mostly falling on deaf ears, or blind eyes, or whatever. So, I stopped.
While I was doing it, though, I tried various ways to popularize it, including mixing it up with the entries here on CL, which proved quite unpopular. The VCA clearly wanted their RSS feed stuff separate from my rantings and ravings. Okay, sez I. In any case, those postings never aspired to anything aside from pointers, that is, I found something, here it is if you’re interested. I added little or no comment, because they mostly needed no comment.
I created the DJ blog to serve a particular purpose, to support a web presence for my DJ products. But, alas, I’m an editor, not a marketer, with only editorial powers. I couldn’t develop a book-rich site beyond the content I created myself. I did create content, though, not much different from Grinwout’s. It was fostered by the belief that I could use the DJ brand to demonstrate that there was good stuff out there, and that we could find it for people. This was true, and again, I don’t know the stats, but I do know that I found myself suddenly on mailing lists and getting requests for stuff and being invited to screenings of obscure independent films. Whether or not the DJ appreciated what I was doing, the subjects I was writing about did. But my goal was never to garner some particular popularity for the blog beyond pointing out that we had a rich entertainment heritage that we wanted to share by applying our editorial skills to selecting articles on the web that we thought were of interest. A couple of months ago the DJ redesigned the website, and that was the end of me.
But I had gotten so wrapped up in doing this that I couldn’t stop. The thing is, the regular actions of the DJ are such that doing the blog was the perfect coffee break. It used totally different mental muscles, and actually helped keep me more focused when I was concentrating on the main event. And as I’ve said, I liked scouring RSS feeds for the good stuff, and I liked writing about the good stuff when I found it. Hence Grinwout’s was born.
Pt 3 next time.
While I was doing it, though, I tried various ways to popularize it, including mixing it up with the entries here on CL, which proved quite unpopular. The VCA clearly wanted their RSS feed stuff separate from my rantings and ravings. Okay, sez I. In any case, those postings never aspired to anything aside from pointers, that is, I found something, here it is if you’re interested. I added little or no comment, because they mostly needed no comment.
I created the DJ blog to serve a particular purpose, to support a web presence for my DJ products. But, alas, I’m an editor, not a marketer, with only editorial powers. I couldn’t develop a book-rich site beyond the content I created myself. I did create content, though, not much different from Grinwout’s. It was fostered by the belief that I could use the DJ brand to demonstrate that there was good stuff out there, and that we could find it for people. This was true, and again, I don’t know the stats, but I do know that I found myself suddenly on mailing lists and getting requests for stuff and being invited to screenings of obscure independent films. Whether or not the DJ appreciated what I was doing, the subjects I was writing about did. But my goal was never to garner some particular popularity for the blog beyond pointing out that we had a rich entertainment heritage that we wanted to share by applying our editorial skills to selecting articles on the web that we thought were of interest. A couple of months ago the DJ redesigned the website, and that was the end of me.
But I had gotten so wrapped up in doing this that I couldn’t stop. The thing is, the regular actions of the DJ are such that doing the blog was the perfect coffee break. It used totally different mental muscles, and actually helped keep me more focused when I was concentrating on the main event. And as I’ve said, I liked scouring RSS feeds for the good stuff, and I liked writing about the good stuff when I found it. Hence Grinwout’s was born.
Pt 3 next time.
Tuesday, April 03, 2012
Grinwout's
In publishing, the area of my DJ, there are definitely foxes and hedgehogs. You can be a very specific kind of publisher, concentrating on, say, medicine or antique automobiles or cat breeding. There are books and magazines on all of these, and many of them. (Cat Fanciers Association recognizes 40 pureblood breeds, so one has to wonder what they talk about in the 41st issue of their magazine, but who am I to cast stones?) On the other hand, you can be a very general kind of publisher. The age of the generalist editor in print has sort of moved on (Life magazine would be the perfect example), but what is the internet if not one gigantic generalist publication, comprising a bazillion little specialized publications. The net is that giant, labyrinthine library that Jorge Luis Borges would have invented if he were a computist.
I maintain that the nature of the interwebs library is so overwhelming that most individuals hardly bother with it. We all have an infinite-access library card to a library that is virtually infinite, and most of us run past the thing with fear and trembling. At best there are some who pop into the coffee shop for chats with their friends, or we go look something up in the encyclopedia, but that’s about it. Because there’s too much to digest, we don’t even try.
There are some tools that purport to help us access this library, but they’re far from perfected, if they ever will be. RSS can take certain internet material and collect it for us, but only certain internet material. Twitter can aggregate other certain information. There are the Flipboard-type programs in the iPad that collect material (from RSS and Twitter and Facebook). But while we can automate access to some extent, soon enough the automation is as overwhelming as the lack thereof. There’s just too much damned information out there. There’s even just too damned much information that we want! It’s not as if all that stuff is of no interest to us. We just have trouble getting at it.
The librarians of the future will be the people who help us access the internet. We’re presently calling them curators or aggregators, but the key thing is, they bring some human discrimination to the material on the web, selecting a reasonable number of materials to pass along. Which makes them very much like editors (or exactly like editors, really), picking out material that they think others will like. They can be hedgehogs, picking out very specific material, or foxes, picking out a broader base of material.
That’s what Grinwout’s is all about. I do this because I am compelled by internal forces. It is the way my mind works. I thrive sorting through data. I enjoy picking out the best data, and I love writing it up and passing it along. I’m trying to provide an access point to arts and entertainment (and some miscellaneous) content on the web, because I think people will enjoy it. I was trying to do this for my DJ, but it just didn’t fit into their digital plans. Whatever. I thought I could stop doing it, and I went cold turkey, but it took only a few weeks and I fell back into my addiction. I think I’m actually good at it because, well, viewed other ways, it’s been my career for the last 40 years, and I just happen now to be applying it this particular way.
The site is still evolving. I’ll talk more about specifics tomorrow.
Friday, March 30, 2012
As March goes out like a cotelette d'agneau
There may be no more nautical debating, but there are a few Speecho-American Sailors on the loose, heading for the state tournament the end of April. We’ll have a workshop or two at the chez for them. This is where we have them perform but take them apart practically word for word. Since I haven’t seen them in a while, and a couple of pieces not at all, it’s a good opportunity for them to get a last shot at seeing what’s working and what isn’t. The first of these sessions is next Monday, during our school’s break.
Running the NYSDCA tournament this weekend should be interesting. It’s small, and I want to try pairing using TRPC’s pairing-on-screen function, which I’ve never used before. I’ve certainly asked CP to incorporate something like that into his new software, so this will be a fun test. It’s also supposed to be sort of a crappy weekend weatherwise, so I don’t feel as if I’ll be missing anything I could be doing. The really warm weather is coming, and those strolls around Manhattan…
O’C and I recorded a TVFT Wednesday, but the sound quality is miserable. Not miserable enough not to release it (that distinction goes most recently to the “The Train Has Left the Station” episode with Pajamas W), but miserable enough to want to not repeat it. O’C says the problem is Time Warner, and if he’s ever home to let the cable guy in, all will be fixed. Of course, if the cable guy sees all the Willow memorabilia, he may become too distracted to do the job he is paid for.
Grinwout’s continues apace. I’ve started a Facebook page for it, that I’ll promote next week after I play with it a little more. I realize that when I was doing this for the DJ I sort of became obsessed, and the obsession has stuck. My brain is a mess of lightly connected data informed by books and movies and culture in general, which is one of the reasons I’ve done okay as a book editor, where a certain dilettantism can be a plus if you do general stuff. In other words, I have a great interest in a lot of things mixed with a short attention span; this is the mix an editor needs, I guess. Unless you want to edit brain surgery texts, that is. You want those folks to keep their eyes on the ball, so to speak. You’re in there disconnecting the cerebellum from the carburetor or whatever, and the last thing you need is to be distracted by a really good tap dancing video.
Running the NYSDCA tournament this weekend should be interesting. It’s small, and I want to try pairing using TRPC’s pairing-on-screen function, which I’ve never used before. I’ve certainly asked CP to incorporate something like that into his new software, so this will be a fun test. It’s also supposed to be sort of a crappy weekend weatherwise, so I don’t feel as if I’ll be missing anything I could be doing. The really warm weather is coming, and those strolls around Manhattan…
O’C and I recorded a TVFT Wednesday, but the sound quality is miserable. Not miserable enough not to release it (that distinction goes most recently to the “The Train Has Left the Station” episode with Pajamas W), but miserable enough to want to not repeat it. O’C says the problem is Time Warner, and if he’s ever home to let the cable guy in, all will be fixed. Of course, if the cable guy sees all the Willow memorabilia, he may become too distracted to do the job he is paid for.
Grinwout’s continues apace. I’ve started a Facebook page for it, that I’ll promote next week after I play with it a little more. I realize that when I was doing this for the DJ I sort of became obsessed, and the obsession has stuck. My brain is a mess of lightly connected data informed by books and movies and culture in general, which is one of the reasons I’ve done okay as a book editor, where a certain dilettantism can be a plus if you do general stuff. In other words, I have a great interest in a lot of things mixed with a short attention span; this is the mix an editor needs, I guess. Unless you want to edit brain surgery texts, that is. You want those folks to keep their eyes on the ball, so to speak. You’re in there disconnecting the cerebellum from the carburetor or whatever, and the last thing you need is to be distracted by a really good tap dancing video.
Friday, March 23, 2012
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.
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.
Monday, March 12, 2012
It's not over till it's not over
In all my moping about over the end of the season, I forgot about NDCA, the weekend after Easter. That will be my swan song for the year.
This coming weekend is the CFL qualifier. This is potentially a nightmare. First, there’s the wrinkle that, if there’s over 20 entries in a division, we have to use 3 judges. A few years ago we changed the rules so that 20 or fewer we could use 2 judges. The result was a major headache turned into child’s play. Assigning 2 judges per round, when the judge/team ratio is 1-1, simply requires paying attention. Assigning 3 requires mind-numbing attention to detail, lots of room-switching, watching a team you've seen but on the other side, you name it, because the field is so small (but not small enough to lose a judge). We’ll know tomorrow, when registration closes. There will either be a happy tabroom or a glum tabroom. Time will tell.
I’ve gotten back into the swing of the link blog, which I trust you are visiting religiously (defined as faithfully, not as on your knees, you filthy heathen). I realize that, for instance, Facebookers can see all the links they want if they never leave home, but that’s merely one source, and, depending on the number of people you have befriended, a fairly hit-and-miss one at that. I go for long stretches barely visiting the site, although lately I’ve been religiously (i.e, faithfully) updating my status to point over to the link blog. I need to get some traction there. The last time I did this, prior to going official for the DJ, the number of hits was quite remarkable. I like to think that the enterprise is entertaining on its own. But I guess you’ll be the judge of that (you filthy heathen). The point is, please go try it out. There's some fine stuff there.
This coming weekend is the CFL qualifier. This is potentially a nightmare. First, there’s the wrinkle that, if there’s over 20 entries in a division, we have to use 3 judges. A few years ago we changed the rules so that 20 or fewer we could use 2 judges. The result was a major headache turned into child’s play. Assigning 2 judges per round, when the judge/team ratio is 1-1, simply requires paying attention. Assigning 3 requires mind-numbing attention to detail, lots of room-switching, watching a team you've seen but on the other side, you name it, because the field is so small (but not small enough to lose a judge). We’ll know tomorrow, when registration closes. There will either be a happy tabroom or a glum tabroom. Time will tell.
I’ve gotten back into the swing of the link blog, which I trust you are visiting religiously (defined as faithfully, not as on your knees, you filthy heathen). I realize that, for instance, Facebookers can see all the links they want if they never leave home, but that’s merely one source, and, depending on the number of people you have befriended, a fairly hit-and-miss one at that. I go for long stretches barely visiting the site, although lately I’ve been religiously (i.e, faithfully) updating my status to point over to the link blog. I need to get some traction there. The last time I did this, prior to going official for the DJ, the number of hits was quite remarkable. I like to think that the enterprise is entertaining on its own. But I guess you’ll be the judge of that (you filthy heathen). The point is, please go try it out. There's some fine stuff there.
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