Forensics: Early movement on the tournament front

As I said, somewhere, the 2012-13 season is beginning behind the scenes.

First of all, we’ve brought Militza Diaz into the MHL to represent the Jersey contingent. I think we confused her originally, making her think that somehow there was work involved, but we quickly disabused her of that. The real work of the MHL is being there at the events and making them come off successfully; she’s already demonstrated mastery of that many times.

And then, tournaments are beginning to fall into place. We all know the schedule, of course, except for a few loose ends. Certainly the invitationals of 2012 are all set. But who’s running what can be a question. I’ll be back at Yale doing LD; JV will be our token grownup, working speech. I hope we’re back at the old high school, and not the one from last year, just because it worked better logistically with the campus between us and the school. I do have hotel rooms reserved, an act that always makes one realize that, yes indeed, it’s just around the corner.

O’C sent out the Bronx invitation. As I ribbed him on Twitter, the damned thing is long! There’s so much pomp and circumstance, and every action is named (The Matt Dunay Round, The Andrew Markoff Traveling Trophy, the Jim Menick Bathroom Break)—the bind moggles. Then again, come August I’ll update the Bump invite, and I should admit that I do take care with that. Given that last year we had the Sat-Sun event, there’s a bunch of changes I’ll have to add. Most importantly there’s the policing of the novii; I’ll get into that at a future date.

While all of this is going on, CP is updating Tabroom.com. Yale and Bronx are opening 8/1, so we’ll all get to see how well that works. Then again, the basic registration process can’t change all that much; it’s the debate tabbing side that I await with bated breath. I’m especially looking forward to automatic notifications during tournaments. At NDCA we used Joy’s Warm Room and people showed up right away every time, including the ones on crutches and whatnot straight from Lourdes. CP talks about eliminating ballots eventually, and online entry thereof, but that sounds way off to me, given what I expect will be generic user resistance. The seven stages of grief users give systems designers: “This is new, it must be bad; it’s definitely hard, I can’t learn it; what’s in it for me; this sucks; hey, this isn’t so bad after all; I told you we should do this, what took you so long?”

We’ve also pinned down the weekend of the MHL workshop as 9/29, the Saturday after Yale. And O’C is beavering away on a Vassar tournament, which may have hit before you read this.

So, things are getting into gear. And it’s still early July. Aaaahhh.
.

Et voila, les superpuissances

It is only to ask, to receive. A partial list:

Public Forum Debate:

The judges gets to flip pro or con before the round. Then both teams are on the same side. Whoever is the most con or pro, wins.

Your topic is: Ron Paul would make a better president than Newt Gingrich.

Switch partners: Judge gets to decide who pairs with who.

Famous Coach Who Will Remain Nameless Power: the judge gives a live commentary throughout the round, letting the debaters know how s/he is feeling about arguments, the round, or life in general.

Judge asks all the questions in all cross-examinations. 

You can be as nasty as you want in crossfire. The nastiest team wins.

You cannot be nasty in crossfire. The nicest team wins.

Your topic is: Newt Gingrich is a good example of American family values. 

Final Refocus: You get one extra three minute speech.

Your topic is: The NFL ought to have better PF topics.

The Fifth Amendment -- the team with the power can refuse to answer any question posed by the opposition without penalty.

Judge decides who goes first and on which side, after listening to two minute argument from each team on what he/she should do.

Your topic is: Birthright citizenship should be abolished in France. [Cruz comment: this is evil.]

Mr. District Attorney -- the judge gets to intervene if someone is being unduly evasive in CX/crossfire.

Resolved: The costs of a college education outweigh the benefits. Both sides must go Pro.

Add or subtract a word in the resolution.

Lincoln-Douglas Debate:

Special guest star: a varsity debater will give a speech of your choosing for you.

Phone a friend: you can have a partner with you through the entire debate to advise you.

Strike That: strike any argument or card off the flow. The argument no longer exists and the judge may not consider it in the round.

The speaker points of both debaters will be determined based entirely on speaking.

Katie Menick Lives: debaters have three minutes to review their cases prior to the start of the affirmative constructive, but must extemporize their cases without notes.

Extra two minutes total of speaking time to be added to any speech(es) of your choice. 

The 1AR will be five minutes long.

The 3NR: you get a bonus speech

Famous Coach Who Will Remain Nameless Power: the judge gives a live commentary throughout the round, letting the debaters know how s/he is feeling about arguments, the round, or life in general.

No prep.

Only one side gets prep

Mr. District Attorney -- the judge gets to intervene if someone is being unduly evasive in CX/crossfire.

The Fifth Amendment -- the team with the power can refuse to answer any question posed by the opposition without penalty.

The judge is God -- the judge gets to decide which team/individual upholds which side.

Add or subtract a word in the resolution.



Policy Debate:

Evidence Interpretation: The HI Policy Round

No prep (can be used for LD too) [Cruz comment: this is especially evil.]

Only one side gets prep (can be used for LD too)  [Cruz comment: this is the most evil of all!]

Strike That: strike any argument or card off the flow. The argument no longer exists and the judge may not consider it in the round.
Famous Coach Who Will Remain Nameless Power: the judge gives a live commentary throughout the round, letting the debaters know how s/he is feeling about arguments, the round, or life in general.

The 3NR: you get a bonus speech

Policy: Inside Out: The negative starts and ends the debate. In other words, every speech that is usually an aff speech is a neg speech and the reverse.

The judge is God -- the judge gets to decide which team/individual upholds which side.

The Fifth Amendment -- the team with the power can refuse to answer any question posed by the opposition without penalty.

Policy can have the guest star power, the phone a friends power and the 3NR power.

Mr. District Attorney -- the judge gets to intervene if someone is being unduly evasive in CX/crossfire.

Add or subtract a word in the resolution.

So long, MHL

I just shut down the MHL for the year by marginally updating the site and putting in the info on the next tournament, which is the First-Timers on Oct 20.

Oct 20? Yikes. I'd better start ordering buses.

Of course, I'll have to update for real at some point, with the dates of the actual tournaments and whatnot. Talk has been that the Nov event will be in Spackenkill, loosely tied into a Vassar event, but it's early days to really believe that it will happen. The People's Champion is working on it, though. (Speaking of which, he's now officially a Bronx Science graduate. Who knew?) And January will be a bust, but then again, in 2013 Beacon will be the New Improved Beacon, now featuring Rooms! Not much else will change, though.

I love the MHL. I love a league devoted entirely to newbies. Get 'em while they're young, eh?

In which the meatloaves come home to roost

I guess we should take it as a milestone that we now have the Official Meatloaf of the MHL, but if you followed the excitement on Saturday, you know that there was some dispute on how official this meatloaf really was. It looks as if O’C, having scarfed down enormous quantities of said loaf up at Monticello (and I can’t imagine when, since he wasn’t at the tournament, so he must have shot up there some other time specifically to serve loafish ends), and proclaimed it the best to ever walk the earth, so to speak, the chef responded by baking another one especially for him (although it must be noted that, if the rumors are correct, if wasn’t exactly baked yet, but I may be wrong about that). Upon its arrival at Horace Mann, the niftiest tournament site since they stopped letting us use the Taj Mahal, O’C immediately publicly announced the officialness of the item, thus leading all and sundry to believe that there was meatloaf in our luncheon future, only to have our hopes dashed when it turned out that there was meatloaf solely in O’C’s future, no doubt in between trips to Japonica, which as I understand it does not serve meatloaf, and sees in this pile of meat a grave threat to its hegemony over O’C (whose mayoralty is in serious meatloafian jeopardy over this whole incident). Much agina was felt over all of this on Saturday, and promises were made, but I will point out that the meatloaf disappeared way before lunchtime and never was served to the teeming masses, and anyone who wants a slice will apparently have to go Chez O’C to get it (unless he left it behind at HM, abandoning it in shame, or maybe he was fearful of carrying it on the subway—if there was ever a mugger magnet, the Official Meatloaf of the MHL would be it).

The MHL Blowout lived up to its reputation. This is the tournament where people draw superpowers (or whatever you want to call them). Maybe they get a new topic in PF. Maybe they get an extra speech, or the judge gets to make a running commentary of the round as it progresses (a highly coveted power for judges, needless to say). My favorite is that you can add or subtract a single word to the resolution, although I was also kind of fond of the PF round where one side was Pro and the other side had to be even More Pro. Everyone accepted these with good humor, and we spent a lot of time announcing them and milking them for all they were worth. We of course only got three rounds in, but we expected that.

We also give medals to every novice attending, as an acknowledgement of their work over the year, regardless of how they did competitively. It is not whether you win or lose, but how much you learn that ultimately matters, but still, it’s nice to win, and it’s nice to get awards. Here we theoretically bow to the idea of Unnecessary Enhancements to Self-Respect, but with the extra fillip that every award has a name, bestowed by the novice’s teammates. Some of them were pretty nutty, and all of them were fun, and nobody had to carry home a big heavy box of medals, allowing them instead room to carry home a big heavy box of, ahem, meatloaf.

And thus ends another season of the MHL, not with a whimper but with a blowout. Nice.

Do-It-Yourself Registration

Things are a little odd at the DJ and I may get some time back for other things, i.e., the time I spend at home on DJing might go back to time spent NJing. We’ll see. If it turns out that way, it will probably only be for a short time, but I really want to take a look at some of my manuals, which are probably a bit out of date by now. As they’re intended for novices, the core is probably okay, but to say that LD has changed in the last few years is to say that the sun rose in the east this morning. I think I have some work to do.

We ran our first MHL under the new rules this weekend, to wit, having people take responsibility for their entries online right up to registration, which consisted of them saying they were all present and accounted for. No registration sheets to ignore. The first problem was that you can’t access your registration on tabroom.com on tournament day, so I had to tinker with the dates, but after that, people were able to get in fine. The usual complication of changing a name, requiring a switch to a non-participant, then a drop, then a switch to the real participant, is always a poser; I did a couple of those myself for people. I kept myself online with tabroom, meaning that at registration I could help people out a bit. But mostly people did what they were supposed to do. A few folks had some extra judges that showed up for later rounds, but there’s nothing wrong with that, as long as I knew it, which I did. One school had an extra judge they didn’t know about, but that judge was a hoverer, and we had to put up sandbags outside of tab to keep her from literally standing behind us as we paired. Jeesh. We finally figured out that the problem was not that we weren’t giving her rounds—if you breathe down our necks at any point in this millennium, we will put you in every round we can—but that she was never entered by her school. There are worse offenses when it comes to handling a registration. Anyhow, the new rules went quite well, and will become the way of the future.

What I couldn’t do anything about is the number of rooms we had. I had to set limits, and you’d think that I had sold the students into hard labor in the diamond mines or something. Rule number one: don’t complain that it’s the end of the world if you’ve never volunteered to host yourself. We need solutions, not conspiracy theorists. Jeesh.

One school didn’t get in because they registered for the tournament and a minute later dropped their entry; God knows why, but all this happened a couple of weeks ago. They thought I had done something to eliminate them, which is why I always activate the change log in tabroom, so that when somebody says you did something, you can point out the date and time and name of the person who actually did do it, which more often than not is them, and not at the time and date they claimed. (The usual offense on this is that someone claims shouldn’t be charged fees because they met the deadline. But they didn’t. Tabroom.com doesn’t lie. Much.) Honestly, though, the sad thing with this school was that it was a new program that was obviously tripping over its own feet; if I had had the room, I would have let them in. Alas, we had a lack. What can you do?

Yip Harburg, if you were wondering...

I do like the rhyme of “exploring the Amazon” and “with her pajamas on.” Is there any day that watching Groucho won’t improve?

The Beacon MHL is proving problematic. The simple fact is that there is a limited amount of space, which hardly ever happens at MHLs, and people are reacting as if infinity is guaranteed. I set limits (equal in every division) and sent out a message that people needed to act fast. But there’s still more debaters than there is debating rooms. Some people act as if this is a change of policy, others just sort of moan and groan, but I have to say, I’ve gotten more reaction to this than I’ve ever gotten to my requests for people to volunteer to host an event. Just sayin’.

In any case, I’ve been trying to be fair when giving out the waitlisted slots (made available by not hitting the limit in other divisions). One to you, one to you, one to you, which is the only way that occurred to me as acceptable, because it spreads the lack of wealth. With any luck, someone else will drop a couple of entries tonight and we can accommodate more people, but I’m not counting on it.

On top of that, tomorrow is the first day where registration = get it right by 9:00, have an adult tell me it’s right, we start the tournament. This should be entertaining, but I’m adamant about it. If you’re too dumb to have read the emails about this, you’ll pay the price. I’m not your mother (as my mother used to say, which I have to admit caused a lot of confusion around the house). Clean up your own messes. What will really piss me off is if anyone drops people in the a.m., in slots that others could have picked up.

We’ll see.

Them's the rules

I cleaned this up a little and took out some whining, but it's what I sent to the MHL membership this morning.

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1. No partial judges allowed. If a judge cannot make all 4 rounds in the day, please find another judge. The only way all debaters can debate all the rounds is if all the judges judge them. This is a mathematical fact of life.

Note: Schools that provide an amazing overage of trained/experienced judges, that may wish to allow some of them to relieve one another, are not the issue here, and such generosity of judge pool on their part remains encouraged and will continue to be supported.

2. No children in the tab room. If a kid has a problem, they tell the coach, and the coach comes to tab. If the coach isn't at the tournament, there is a responsible adult in lieu. Kids go to their coaches with problems, not to tab. Tab staff will make every effort at the beginning of the tournament to get all the rounds started and to sort out any loose ends, however. This is not a rule to isolate tab from the tournament, but simply an attempt at keeping the communication of problems at the appropriate level.


3. Most importantly, all registration is entirely electronic. Coaches have until 9 on the morning of the day to correct their entries in tab room. (This might mean that teams might have to find web access at the last minute, but there is no question that, if there is no wireless, nonetheless someone on every team has brought either a smartphone or iPad with 3G). Registration closes at 9, tab takes down the data and prints up the schematics. End of story.


It works like this: registration officially closes at 9:00 p.m. the previous Thursdays. No additions are allowed after this point, period. (The chief reasons for this are that we need to assign and sort out rooms and organize the amount of food necessary). All students and judges must be entered on the Thursday deadline. However, we understand that kids get sick, and things come up. So, you have until 9:00 on the morning of the tournament to sort it out. If you are coming from some distance on a bus, you can make your changes en route. If you are meeting at the school at a city event, plan on doing so well in advance of the 9:00 deadline. Students "on their way (maybe)" do not count as entries, and a team's inability to arrive in plenty of time for coaches to take attendance will not be considered an excuse. The idea that round one is the taking of attendance penalizes the students who are there on time and wish to debate and learn. A bye due to a no-show is not a debate. At some point before 9:00, a coach or adult (college students are NOT considered adults for this purpose unless they are employees of the school they are representing, i.e., official assistant coaches) will come to the registration desk and report that their registration is final. At 9:00, any schools that haven't come to the desk will be assumed absent, and their entry will be erased from the tournament. If in fact some of these missing folk are around, they can be added for round two with forfeits for round one. This will penalize the students of the school not registered rather than the students at the schools that did register. Schools en route by bus can text by 9:00 that their entry is set; it is not unreasonable to assume that they could miss the deadline by a few minutes because of traffic, but since they've had all that time on the bus they've had ample opportunity to set things aright on tabroom.com.


4. All reported changes after 9 are $25 each, payable at the making of the change. All unreported changes (e.g. teams that are registered that don't show up, missing judges) are $50. In the MHL, no teams will be allowed to participate in future events unless the fines are paid; they will be contributed to the Grameen org. In the CFL they will go toward the Fr Rippon scholarship.

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Some comments (that I didn't send, but I share with the VCA):

Coaches who complain that they can't meet the 9 a.m. deadline need to be asked why. Since I'm closing registration at 9 anyhow, why can't they have their team organized by then? In fact, it actually allows them to conveniently and efficiently handle last minute changes. What it doesn't allow is for them to not be there, or to be in a situation where they might as well not be there. It does not allow them to foist the responsibility for a whole team on one assistant college coach who has no idea what's going on in the other divisions. It also forces them to have their kids and judges there in a timely manner. As I say, the ramifications of their not giving accurate registrations is that the good debate citizens, other kids from other teams who have shown up on time and ready to go, suffer. This is not acceptable, and there is nothing in what I am suggesting that is onerous (except the fines for their inefficiency, which need to be onerous).

I will point out that we try to run 4 rounds at CFLs and MHLs to give the kids a better tournament experience, and more experience. Additionally, most of these events have judge training conducted by the tab staff; if the tab staff is still taking attendance through round 3, this valuable training cannot take place.

Oh, yeah. We start reading Nietzsche in pre-school.

The Monticello MHL was an oddball, in that instead of having four rounds we had three plus a workshop session. Kaz handled policy, talking about 5 different technical apsects of debate. O’C had a PF demo. I talked morality for LD.

It seemed to go well. My goal was to present the basic lines of thinking about morality, and eventually to tie them into Nov-Dec. So I started with the question of whether there even was such a thing as right and wrong, one someone went off into multi-culturism, and someone else cited Nietzsche’s belief that there is no truth. Did I say that I love debaters? I heavily leaned on x phi stuff, the scientific bases of morality (if any). That the trolley examples travel cross-culturally undermines a lot of cultural morality analysis, and for that matter, just because someone believes something, even if a whole culture believes something, doesn’t make that thing right/moral. It’s a nice belief though, having respect for other cultures. It may not stand if there are inherent evils that a given culture perpetrates. In any case, all of this leads to explaining consequentialism and deontology, then into Hauser and Haidt and Singer, and by then, you’ve given them some decent stuff to start the new topic on (the northeast Modest Novices debate civil disobedience through the end of this month, and get only one month on the supererogatory topic which I continue to believe is among the worse ever for anyone other than novices struggling with morality research).

So I sped along for about and hour and then ran out of gas, which was pretty good. I asked them about the modnov topic, and they were iffy about it. One kid said he would have preferred animal rights because all you had to do was ask if the judge had a pet and then you always won on the aff. Cute: you gotta love novices. This kid needs to read more of that Nietzsche his colleague was digging into.

Then on the way home I had one of those magical moments that makes debate so interesting to me. In the back seat a heated conversation was unfolding comparing the merits of the various LOTR movies. I was asked which one was my favorite, and I said the one with Snooki. “Snooki was in a LOTR movie?” I was asked. “Yes,” says I, “the one with the elves.” “Oh, that must be the second one. That’s your favorite, then?” “Sure,” says I, hopeful that I will somehow be instrumental in starting an urban myth that Snooki played an elf in the second LOTR movie. This stuff has to come from somewhere, after all. Why not me?

The Debutante Ball

The 2011 First-Timers’ (and Some Old-Timers’) event now joins a billion other tournaments in the annals of forgotten history, except by O’C, who memorizes all the results just in case there’s a pop quiz some day. Somehow we didn’t get the policy results posted; Kaz gave me empty files, so she’s poking around her computer and should come up with something shortly. Perish the thought that the results not enter history. It’s small things like this that send the O’Cs of life over the edge.

We had not one but two schools trying to put sophomores in as judges. This has never been allowed, and it’s clear on the website, and now I’ve asked CP to help us incorporate something into tabroom.com as well. Meanwhile I’ll have to choice but to check all the judges against team rosters: quelle pain, as they say in France (although when they do, they’re probably talking about bread, which is a comment that proves that, once again, if you were smarter, I’d be funnier). I tend to take a mean view of shenanigans, as the VCA well knows. I have no compunctions about tossing people out of tournaments, and I intend to continue that practice. The good news is that the violators are always the same people, over and over again. Recidivism runs high in debate circles. Go figure.

We had the tournament at Bronx Scientology, which looks exactly the same as it did last week for Big Jake. Even the postings and announcements were still taped to the various walls. I would suggest that if the custodians expect to get trophies for cleaning up after the tournament, they might want to get on the stick.

The tournament itself was nonstop busy work. JV and Abdul did some training while Kaz and I data’d it up, then Abdul came by to help enter and JV went to California to try to break into the movies or something. O’C was shocked that I managed to pull off a 6:30 award ceremony and four rounds. Actually it was 6:35 but You Know Who was, as always, the last ballot in. (Yeah, we had Voldemort in the PF pool.) A splendid time was had by all, and then, wonder of wonders, we announced that we would roughly do it again this coming week at Regis.

The fun never ends.

The novices are about to launch, etc.

We TVFTed last night, for the first time since August. This abundance of infrequency is not from lack of trying. Early in the year there’s a lot of traveling and setups, and then this, that and the other thing arise, and the next thing you know, it’s the end of October. We should settle into a reasonable regularity going forward.

The abundance of infrequency with this blog, on the other hand, will probably continue. There are just so many hours in the day, and writing that other blog makes this one harder to fit in. I do try, though.

On the Sailor front, it looks as if we have 4 solid plebes and a couple more translucent ones. NPR is dithering between speech and debate and has asked me to choose for him, earning a predictably Yoda like response. I can’t tell people what’s right for them; high school is all about answering that question for yourself. At this week’s meeting the Cannibal stood up to the plate on some training (shades of the Panivore), which bodes well for the future. But the future remains clouded because the juniors were out on the bounding main visiting Ellis Island, my first thoughts on hearing which were that they were leaving the country and going back where they came from. With the abundance of their absence at this week's meeting, we were unable to discuss PF. Next week.

This weekend is the annual First-Timer’s event. I’ve gotten a couple of people complaining about the rules of the MHL, specifically in regards to the fact that a middle school debater is not a novice. Our experience has been that former middle schoolers are way beyond the average novice; after all, Robbie and HoraceMan won novice Scarsdale as 8th graders, and granted they were exceptional, they weren’t all that exceptional. People tell me that their middle schoolers only debated a little bit, though, and I am a little torn. We’ll have to talk about this among ourselves over the weekend. Maybe we can do better than an absolute elevation to JV. Anyhow, the point of first time debate is that it’s a person’s first time; in the past we’ve had a not-first division, and we’ll try that again this time and see if the numbers support it. We want everyone to come and have rounds, one way or another. The goal of the league is inclusiveness. Unfortunately, you can’t please everyone.

I have talked a bit about Big Jake last weekend, and there isn’t a lot to say. Each happy family is the same: a well run tournament mostly does all the things a tournament should do the same as every other well run tournament. The problem is that well run tournaments are not guaranteed at any level. But I have to admit that, if nothing else, the reliability of the software these days, combined with the experience of the folks behind the wheel (Bietz and I worked like telepaths—it was spooky) means that things will probably go okay at that end at least. As I said to O’C, running a tournament, i.e., being the tournament director, means you don’t do anything yourself but manage everybody else doing things. He’s gotten there now. And he’s appreciative, as a manager, of the roles everyone else plays. If he thanks the little people (like me) one more time, I’m going to have to poison his dragon roll. On the other hand, he did claim that the entire Bronx team (there’s 2837 novice LDers just for a start) have all come down with Big Bronxitis. There’s a price to pay, apparently.

Blow it out!

The MHL Blowout was a rather remarkable event in many ways. More than anything it was a reminder that debate can be fun and serious at the same time. Too often people forget that, and things are taken so seriously and so all-the-fun-wrung-out-of-it that you wonder if in fact we are negotiating the end of life on the planet as we know it rather than an extracurricular high school activity. Lighten up, in other words. Why so glum? It’s high school debate. It gets you out of the house and meeting new people, it gets you thinking new ideas and it allows you to get some nice credentials for your resume. Years from now you will remember all the fun and forget all of the glum, so I advise you to make sure that there’s enough of the former in it to make up for the presence of any of the latter.

At the blowout, each round began with all the opponents drawing a power. This might be something like having an extra speech, your opponent having no prep time, or your judge being able to interject during the speeches (“I’m not buying it!”). You might be able to get a varsity debater to handle one of your rebuttal speeches, or get a debater or coach to sit with you and coach you through the round. There were numerous variations on these themes, and as each person drew a power, JV announced it to the assembled multitudes to great moaning and/or glee, depending on the power. He quite enjoyed his role as maitre d’ of the event, adding his own level of glee if the power was particularly poisonous. After all the powers had been drawn, everyone went off to their rounds, and a splendid time was had by all. We had powers for all the divisions, although adjusted for whether it was LD, PF or Policy. You might be able to detect that, in addition to adding some humor to the proceedings, there was an underlying educational benefit. Shouldn’t you be able to run a case without any prep? Or without any flowing? Or at least try it once in your life? You might fail, but you’ll learn why.

At the end, we managed demo rounds of LD and Pffft with bona fide stars (for instance, the Panivore handily managed to defeat the hipster K, whatever the hell that is). Policy, which ran much longer, as always, ran longer still with addition of the powers, so we couldn’t do a demo there, but that was all right. At the end of the day we all assembled at roughly the same time to give out awards, including a set that each team had designed for its own novices. Being awarded “Most likely to forget your case” or “Most likely to wear skintight jeans” or whatever seems a fitting end to the day. Let’s face it. Some novices never win nuttin’. They should at least get an award for effort. The award for “Least likely to show up for practice” was given in absentia, of course.

The blowout with its silliness immediately became a must-do-again event. Maybe next year we’ll call it the MHL Blowout Classic II, and O’C will start giving service awards. He wandered off early to slice pizza or something, so I can’t say I saw much of him Saturday. The divisions were fairly small and Kaz and I were able to handle everything on one machine. And then, home by 7:00. A good day, on all counts.

The ragtop blues

I failed to mention that Chavez also managed to ruin my life completely by showing me the video of David Hasselhof singing “Hooked on a Feeling.” I’ll never be able think of the phrase ooga chaka ooga ooga ooga chaka in quite the same way again. Not that I ever did, but that’s neither here nor there.

This weekend is the final MHL, which we’re referring to as the Blowout. We have a lot of ideas for making it memorable, but we haven’t pinned any of them down yet. I’ll report after the fact. One team did question whether the competition would be up to their excruciatingly high standards, to which we responded with fart noises, so that answered that.

I have made live the NY State District Tournament website on the Goy. I know. You’re waiting sooooo patiently for me to comment on this. I will. I promise you, I will, but probably without too much vigor. I’m fairly out of interest on the subject by now, and have little to offer that hasn’t been offered in the past. But I understand the needs of the VCA to hear the latest invective, and far be if for me to ignore that demand.

Tonight is poker, for the first time in ages. I have a slight cold, but nothing short of the ague or St. Vitus dance would keep me away. (Although, come to think of it, I haven’t heard the phrase St. Vitus dance since I was a kid. My parents were always talking about it, so perhaps it was more popular back when they were young and hopping about. Or maybe they were referring to my dubious terpsichorean skills, which are, admittedly, minimal at best. Whatever.) I feel that this game is the first sign of spring, for some reason, although I almost killed myself on the residual ice on my driveway this morning, polished to an almost invisible fare-thee-well by a driving rain during the night. I want to be roaming the streets without a coat. I want to be a flaneur sipping absinthe on the boulevard. I want to feel the warmth of the sun and to put the top down on my car (not that it’s actually a convertible) and drive around listening to Beach Boys hits (like, for instance, “The Warmth of the Sun”). I want to scoot around the links in a golf cart, thinking to myself that if I can just get the next shot to within a mile of the pin I might, for once, not run the risk of being expelled from the course for sucking beyond the pale. I want to eat gelato in the West Village.

Soon. Soon. Soon.

Well, instead of the good news, they could have brought the haggis

Last weekend, while some of you were hobnobbing with the beys and poohbahs and assorted muckamucks at some tournament with a longer official name than many of the rounds, the rest of us were doing the day-to-day work of the activity, digging the ditches with the novices and jvers and making the world safe for people who don’t happen to have keys dangling from their nether parts. (Do they dangle the keys from their nether parts? I’m just guessing here.) At the MHL we don’t have keys, we have medals, and we give them to the debaters, not the coaches. We’re strange in that way.

(Of course, whether the medals would make it to us or not was a sort of “Ghent to Aix” kind of adventure, as it turns out. They had been left…somewhere, and…someone…forgot to pick them up, although…someone else…forgot them altogether in the mad rush to dangle the key from his nether parts, so…someone else again…had to beat the horses to death getting them from…somewhere…to us. But they did arrive, so I won’t mention it.)

I had never been to Beacon before, but it’s easy to drive to, accessible right off the West Side Drive. Parking was another thing, because NYC remains under about thirty feet of snow, but there was a cheap garage (really!) in the neighborhood, so that was no big deal. We only had about 40 rooms for the rounds, but that was fine, and we had just enough overage for switcheroos when one of the ceilings fell in and other catastrophes like that. Harry F, the Beacon coach, had to solve those problems. When someone came into tab and told me the that ladies room was about to float away on the flood, I was happy to refer them to Harry rather than having to grab a mop myself. Such is the joy of working in someone else’s building.

We ran four rounds and had them finished by six, thanks to the rule that no table changes are accepted anymore other than drops. The usual suspects who ignore the idea that their students should sign up a couple of days before the tournament rather than at the tournament or maybe halfway through seem to have learned their lesson. Round 1 was on the boards by 9:45 and in action by 10:00. That’s good. We even threw in a half hour break for lunch at some point. That’s very good. The era of the half-starved polician is no longer!

Of course, this was the kind of event where you do everything yourself, aside from mopping up the ladies room, although I had great help from Ms. Diaz and Mr. Bathhurst, both of whom know how to move kids and sort ballots and all that sort of thing you need to do to run an event. I even managed to sort out the pairings for the upcoming Newark RR during down time, but by now that’s second nature: I did the heavy RR lifting a long time ago (and believe me, pairing RR rounds the first time or two you do it is heavy indeed). At the end of the day Harry’s eyes were wide when he asked if he could read the results. Like a little kid, you know? Apparently he’d never done that before, and I have to admit, it is kind of fun. As the VCA knows, I’m very bad at pronouncing names so I always cook the results so that only kids named Smith and Jones ever win, but I don’t let on about that because, well, it might not be so popular in the world at large. (Actually, I always feel I pronounce everyone’s name perfectly, and they’re the ones who get it wrong, but what can you do? Is it my fault their parents are confused?) So Harry was happy, the medals were distributed, and the ditches were dug.

All in all, it was a successful day. I crept out while the awards were going on, and got home in time for a nice pasta Bolognese. What more could you ask for, except, maybe, a key dangling from your nether regions.

Like Abbott forgetting Costello?

I can see that you have a technical bent, which means you’ll be interested in last night’s TVFT. Bietz did some research and found undeniable statistical evidence of negs beating affs way too often for it to be kosher. We looked into this with more data, and I’m pretty ready to say that the prevalence of neg wins increases as the field gets better. In other words, at a novice or low-key regional tournament, things look fifty-fifty. But as you proceed to the bubble rounds and outrounds at a $ircuit tournament, things go dramatically neg.

On the podcast we analyze some possible reasons. Maybe it’s the judging. Obviously resolutions have something to do with it. And the structure of the round is certainly one of the usual suspects. We kicked around ways of testing new structures, although implementation is difficult. In any case, smart affs have no choice but to recognize this inherent neg bias, regardless of its cause, and prepare for it. The trouble is, we’re unclear how, as it depends on the individual case in hand. But think about that. It might be important to you real soon now. In the best of all possible worlds, it shouldn’t matter if you flip aff or neg. Unfortunately, we do not live in the best of all possible worlds.

In other news, I’ve ported the Twitter feed from the DJ over to the right hand column here (which means if you’re RSSing this you don’t give a rat’s hoot). It’s not filled to overflowing with new tweets, but there’s one or two a day about books, old and new, that you might find interesting, if you’ve ever read a book in your life or intend to do so at some time in the future. Looking at the old right hand column when I did this, I realized that it’s time for a little spring cleaning. Too bad it’s not spring. Soon.

And in the most shocking development of all, O’C forgot that we needed medals at the MHL this weekend. This is like Donald Trump forgetting that people need real estate. Like Tom Cruise forgetting his elevator shoes. Like Lindsay Lohan forgetting to do cocaine. Whoda thunkit?

Tidbits

Listening to Disney music is not a bad way to overcome the umpty-umpth drive to work in the snow. “Pretty good sure as you’re born…”

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In my new office at the DJ we have The Two Guys Who Look Alike Who Don’t Look Alike, and The Guy Who Looks Just Like Them. When I mention that to anybody, they know exactly who I’m talking about.

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The Sword in the Stone is quite the oddest book. I read it about a hundred years ago, and just finished listening to the audio version on my way home last night. It has the narrative drive of pinball machine, and what, exactly, is the intended age of the audience? Not that I didn’t enjoy it. It’s just…unique. Next up on the audiobook queue: The Eyre Affair. I absolutely love the Jack Sprat mysteries by the same author, and have never heard anything but praise for the Thursday Next novels. Hopes are high.

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These are interesting times. I have achieved, simultaneously, loathing and loving as a result of the exact same actions. There are people who want my head on a platter, and there are people offering me the world as my oyster. I prefer a more even keel, with neither platter nor pearl, and I don’t understand why things are so nutty at the moment. Maybe the moon is in Pisces. Or the swallows are coming back to Capistrano. Or maybe it’s sunspots.

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There’s an MHL this weekend, which for me is like a weekend off. I need that. O’C had last weekend off, and he probably needed that. He showed up at the Gem, let a few people genuflect and kiss his ring, and then went back to his atelier to watch Howard the Duck again. I should have gone with him.

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You really need to read this, about the Constitution. It reminded me about this, which I just downloaded. Her American Scripture is in my Top Ten. (Any wonder I like people to argue about resolutions?)

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There seems to be a round robin every day of the week all of a sudden. Why don’t we just eliminate tournaments? Get the top ten or twenty debaters, lock them in a room for a month, and go back at the end and see who’s still standing. It will get them out of everyone else’s hair, and I’m sure they’ll be happy as clams hobnobbing exclusively with one another. (I’ve got five independent arguments to support this, plus a reverse framework, a theory shell, two spikes and enough acronyms to take over the U.S. Army, so don’t try to argue with me.)

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What happens to football players who make a practice of missing practice? Something tells me they do not remain football players.

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Why am I at fault for your ineptitude?

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I am no doubt among the last people among whom you should demonstrate an attitude. I am notoriously patient with many things—stirring risotto, braising the shanks of various random beasts, starting up Windows on my old Dell—but not that. If we are two people on an equal footing trying to solve a problem, we will get together fine. If you perceive me as your problem, we probably will not get together quite so well, even if I am your problem, because by your treatment you have forced me to perceive you as my problem. Which, of course, does not solve any problems.

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I am not perfect. Why do you expect that I should be? Do I exude such perfection from every pore? Have all my previous moves indicated to you that anything less than perfection on my part is incomprehensible? My claims of infallibility are mythical; my fallibility is legendary. You should know that by now.

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Tonight I’ll get all of this out of my system on TVFT. And then we’ll return to normalcy, whatever that is.

The last un-snowy day in Monticello

Saturday was the tournament we affectionately referred to as the Matt Thomas Pizza Toss IV, since O’C was there and he’s good with things like which roman numeral we’re at. Of course, this was the Monticello MHL, which I have to admit ran with a smoothness uncharacteristic of the breed. For some reason we were done with our four rounds much earlier than usual, and we even had to wait around a tad for the Policians to catch up. And we still got out of there by around six. Not bad. If helps when most of the problems are your own team. My judge was, to some, in a mode of disappearance, whereas in fact I had simply put her elsewhere because another judge, the Late Mr. C (who is always the last ballot in any division he’s judging), was, well, running late. And then a kid didn’t show up for a round, but it was my kid, who showed up for another kid’s round which is, I’m afraid, a forfeitable offense. It’s one thing to be confused about assignments, but when the school named isn’t yours, it’s a bit of a stretch of the not-paying-attention rubric. And a lesson learned, one hopes. Of course, other teams did cause some problems, like providing untrained judges and not checking their registrations and providing unacknowledged drops. Jeesh. For some reason, through it all there was a loose woman’s dress shoe in front of the ballot table. Presumably there was a loose woman’s foot somewhere in the cafeteria, but we never did find it. Also through it all, JT, as the students call her, kept us apprised of all the football scores. I have to say that O’C and I found this a less than vital addition to tab life, but ever since Mr. Favre went bananas and left Wisconsin or wherever he was, JT has not been the same. Neither have I, but I don’t think it’s related to Brett Favre. Then again, who knows. Stranger things have happened.

I took yesterday off from computing again, aside from checking my email over breakfast, responding to a friend request on Facebook from Queen Elizabeth, and filling the empty time before lunch with recording a new Nostrum. I’m getting to like this day-off-the-grid business. It clears the mind. I relaxed and read the Imagineering 2 book and made meatballs and generally charged up the batteries. They’ll need charging, with Bump coming up.

I find it curious that, no matter how we start, Bump always ends up looking roughly the same, with the same numbers year in and year out. Ol’ Reliable, in that regard. There are a few more souls courtesy of the novice PF division, but not many. I’ve managed to cover most housing, but not all, which is also roughly the same as always. Next year I may establish limits for per-team entries and housing, but no limits to the overall events. Less forbidding that way. In any case, it shuts down tonight, and then the judge rankings begin and I can shoot the housing list off to the appropriate authorities. Then on Wednesday, judge ranking shuts down and I start massaging the data in TRPC, with an eagle eye on the strikes.

And then it will all be over, and it will be your turn. Good luck and good night.

The fleet's in at the end of the day watching movies and studying up on Bumpiana

Kathy, the new Speech Admiral, came over last night to learn this and that. For those of us who’ve been doing this awhile, it’s easy to forget how much of this and that there is. Sign up on this, access to that, buses, custodians, organizations—and somewhere in there, work with students on their pieces. If it were only the latter, this would be a piece of cake. I guess that’s why, as they say, we earn the big bucks.

(And speaking of what they say, I just want to point this out, as a bulletin from the DJ. At some point it will, in fact, be the end of the day. What phrase will you then use over and over again to drive me crazy? Is “at the end of the day” the methadone to the heroin of PowerPoint? You’ve got to wonder. Or maybe teenagers who say “like” every other word grow up to say “at the end of the day” every other sentence. Could be.)

The Panivore is skying out to Minneapolis with the Scarswegians today, while locally we’re prepping for an MHL tomorrow. It’s much smaller than the last couple of adventures. Monticello is about as far away from civilization as you can get, and the idea of driving up there from civilization on a Saturday morning is pretty daunting for most people. The passport control alone is enough to slow them down. At least the weather forecast doesn’t include snow. The Montwegians usually shut down the city early in November and don’t reopen till the Fourth of July. I don’t envy them their weather. The bright side of this is, amazingly, an absolutely free Friday night, the first I’ve had (counting non-debate obligations) since Labor Day. A movie, definitely. Wow. What a thought!

I got the room list for Bump today. It is surprisingly similar to the room lists from 1996-2009. Ain’t life grand?

Convalescing, chezzing, chatting, aging

Tik (pronounced teek) is doing well. He appreciates all the cards and flowers and fish from the VCA. The vet said that he is healing very quickly; the stitches have been removed, the collar is a thing of the past, and he is allowed to jump up on the bed. He still needs to remain relatively quiet, in Tikish terms. No chasing mice through the chez at all hours, no jumping on the counter to see what I’m cooking for dinner, etc. So he’s still quarantined to the bedroom for the foreseeable future. But soon enough he’ll be back to terrorizing Sailors. I can tell he’s looking forward to it. I’m not quite sure about the Sailors, however.

Speaking of which, tonight is the first chez of the year, with this year’s plebes. Not being attacked by the cat will limit the authenticity of the event, but otherwise, they’ll get to see how the other half lives. It is election day, if you’re wondering, which is why the change of venue. The Panivore and the People’s Champion (aka Vegas Struve, for those of you who have seen his yearbook picture) have been doing an excellent job of doing my job, but maybe I can pitch in just a little? I mean, I must know something about debate, right?

I think I’ve decided to get an iPhone if it really comes out on Verizon. JV made fun of my cheap VirginMobile phone over the weekend. I bought it originally to replace a clunky old phone. Now it has become a clunky old phone on its own. I’ll have to cut back on some expenses elsewhere to make it happen, though. Fewer Netflix disks at the same time, for one thing. And cutting back to absolutely essential-only cable service. I spend bunches of money on old useless stuff; this needs to stop, so that I can spend bunches of money on new useless stuff. Time marches on, as they say.

The Monticello MHL is still small at the moment, but plenty of folks haven’t signed up yet. We may have some discussion of Middle School vs High School in terms of experience, i.e., what makes you a novice? There are two universes to consider, the people who were in middle school, and the persons who weren’t. We don’t want to unfairly disadvantage either group. Going as I do on a premise of wanting to push my debaters into higher levels, I would always want them to debate up. But there is a point where debating up is a bad idea: I don’t put novices into rounds against TOC qual’d varsity, after all. I’ve seen both sides of the debate represented, so we can discuss it at length Saturday and have done with it. Should be fun.

Debate lives!

Holy Cannoli. (And I do not use the expression lightly.)

The first-timers’ (and JV) MHL at Byram Hills was, in a word, a barn-buster. Six divisions, two each of LD, PF and Policy, and they were hanging off the rafters. Joe V did the math, and adding in the NYCFL event running simultaneously (to which bunches of us sent the proverbial other bus), we had about 900 kids competing this last Saturday.

900? 900. And that doesn’t cover the observing noobs and the training parents and the like. Forensics—extracurricular, no less—is alive and well in New York. Wow.

Running a big event like this has some problems, because almost every division had some sort of imbalance with a lot of teams from one school throwing everything into a tizzy. But the numbers were so large that mostly this didn’t matter except in two smaller divisions where one school dominated and we had to do some hand-pairing and intra-team debating. In these situations it is especially important that every round not be with the elephant-in-the-room school. But we’re used to pairing these, and the couple of big programs are used to getting some them-them rounds. I think we’re good enough at it now that real winners emerge. We’re also good enough that we get four rounds in and we’re out by 6:45. O’C calls it Menick MHL Time. Whatever. It works. At Monti we’ll have to remember to slow down a tad so that the Policians get a moment for lunch (4 rounds is a longer day when there’s no flights), but Menick MHL Time should stand. Get ‘em in, get ‘em out. Sort of like the abattoir routine in Monty Python…

Not that the day was without issues. Some folks seem to interpret first time as something other than first time. We will be explaining the absolute nature of virginity to a couple of coaches, with serious repercussions for failure to follow the rules. This is not rocket surgery, after all. And the advantage of having even one tournament over those at their first tournament cannot be underestimated. The first-timers’ exists for good reasons: to get kids to learn and have fun, to overcome their stomach butterflies, to figure out how to read schematics, to see their peers in suits, and to find out how cold a pizza slice can get when it’s been sitting there for three rounds. It is not about winning, although winning is nice. But it’s certainly not about losing, when the reason you lost is that your opponent was seriously more experienced than you. As I say, these infractions cannot be tolerated. We (the MHL management) are girding our loins accordingly. But, fortunately, these infractions were minimal. Still, they were unfortunate, and mar an otherwise great experience.

On the plus side, we also had a number of new programs in the mix. It’s not just the same old schools with bigger teams all of a sudden. It’s new folks dipping in their toes, and I hope we’re making the experience work for them. We are certainly trying. If they come back next week, we’ll know we are on the right track.

And these, mes amis, is Tik (pronounced teek), who shattered his leg and now must wear a collar to keep him from removing the stitches. Awwwww.

I do love the word "gallivant"

The best laid plans and all that. I was going to close the MHL First-Timers registration yesterday, but then it turned out that it was broken and nobody could get in to make corrections, and when I called CP (this was an emergency requiring conversation, not just a casual email situation), he was out gallivanting with Sara S, no doubt plotting all sorts of mischief at Little Lex, but the good news is he carries his computer with him at all times and he managed to fix it on the fly between the sorbet and fish course, so registration went on and on and on. Of course, it seems that CP was the one who broke registration in the first place, so adequate punishments are perhaps necessary. I might have to talk to Jules and the Nostrumite about turning off Dude Firmguns’s steady stream of willing girlfriends. I mean, sometimes you just need to make a point, you know?

(If any of this is too obscure for you, you’re not the VCA soldier that you think you are. There is a glossary over there on the right, for one thing. Sometimes I think the only one who ever looks at it is O’C, who actually has no reason to look at it except that he’s nuts that way. We did give him the data files for Big Bronx, after all. I figured that would keep him busy until Easter, but yesterday he bugged me that the MHL was still Mid-Hudson instead of Metro-Hudson. Jeesh. And then the Emperor of Hamiltonia threatened a lawsuit… Yesterday was a long day.)

Out of all that, the First-Timers’ Event is the biggest ever. Yay, us. There was some reservation among a few registrants about its first-timer-ness, but we learned last year that the vast majority of the entrants expect it to be firsters only, and that all the benefits of firsters only are lost when it’s not. We could make it open, but then we would lose those benefits. That’s why we went back to the way it always was. Sometimes you experiment and change. Sometimes you try something new and you realize you were right the first time. Read On Liberty if you need to apply this to your debate cases.

Meanwhile, Tik (pronounced teek) is home. (“I didn’t know he had gone away,” sez you.) It seems that while I was tabbing Jake, Tiki was breaking his leg. Or more to the point, shattering it quite a bit. They had to put in a metal plate, which means it will be difficult for him to get through security next time he has to fly somewhere. He returned to the chez yesterday with a collar to keep him from fussing with the area, and a rear leg that was shaven and stapled and sore looking, but this morning looked much less sore. He is surprisingly active and normal acting, for all the horror of the accident in the first place and the subsequent hospitalization and operation. What he can’t do is his normal running around like an idiot for the next six to eight weeks, which is like asking O’C not to hold an award ceremony at Jake next year. We have a cage for him (Tiki, not O’C), and that helps. (Come to think of it, a cage for O’C might not be a bad idea either! Why didn’t I think of that before?) Anyhow, let me warn you. If you’re considering breaking your cat’s leg, make sure you check your bank account first. This ain’t no walk in the fiscal park, let me tell you. It would have been cheaper to have broken my own leg (or, better yet, O’C’s leg, if I think it all the way through and factor in the pain).

What an interesting world we live in.