NDCA: The Vegas side

I posted a bunch of updates via @jimmenick on Twitter, which I just removed from the right-hand column here; it seemed to conflict with the script for the Grinwout’s feed, for one thing, and I really don’t tweet much, for another, because it’s just not in my DNA yet. Anyhow, I wanted to talk more about Vegas.

I’ve been there before. The first time was 1955, the most recent in 2005, so although I’m hardly a habitué, I’ve got some sense of the place, especially how it has changed over time. In the beginning, downtown was central, and one spread out a ways to the strip, where the more resort-like casinos existed. That was the Rat Pack era, when Vegas meant headliners or (usually naughty) variety shows. Nowadays the Strip is the center, and it’s headliners, extravaganzas, and naughty shows. There are seven Cirque de Soleil venues, for instance (including one that is naughty), enough presumably for every taste. At one point, the lure of the place was supposed to be family entertainment, and there were all sorts of rides and amusement park attractions, but that’s mostly gone now. The thing is, a family destination has to be family at its heart; Vegas merely added a subset of the familial, which wasn’t enough. Vegas, at it’s heart, is adult entertainment (in the non-naughty sense, although inclusive of the naughty), mostly stuff that adults do that children don’t. There’s a few things left now to entertain the young ’uns, but mostly there’s restaurants, shows, shopping and gambling, and those are aimed at the over-21 crowd. So be it.

After I arrived on Thursday and settled into my hotel, the Luxor, which is at the top (or bottom) of the Strip, I put on my feet and started walking. For the curious, there is a lot to see, running the gamut from genuine Monets to flea-bitten Mickey Mouse impersonators. I consider it best to accept them all, rather than seeking out one’s usual norm, because Vegas by definition is all of them, and excluding any of them misses the point. Let it all wash over you: that’s what Vegas is all about.

In the space of about five hours, I ranged from faux King Arthur, where they had a Spongebob Squarepants attraction (very Arthurian), New York New York with its taxicab roller coaster, a Henry Moore sculpture, “A girl in your room in 20 minutes” brochure hander-outers (all looking like Mexican immigrants), the Eiffel Tower, Venice complete with gondoliers, an Apple Store where I bought a connector for my iPod to the rental car aux plug, a son et lumiere of the history of Atlantis (which failed a few minutes after it started), a bar based on Coyote Ugly, a chichi mall where everything costs too much right across the street from a downscale mall where everything probably still costs too much but it’s all crap as compared to designer labels, Spiderman and Batman in need of losing a few pounds around the middle, twin Michael Jacksons, the MGM lion, and a parade of tourists that would amuse anyone absent all these other attractions. There’s no uniformity to the passing parade, unlike in, say, WDW, where everyone seems to be a fairly overweight British family. This is more like walking the streets of Manhattan, except marginally more English is spoken.

How can you not enjoy something like this? You don’t have to do anything except soak it in, and if you like, think about it. Wonder over the amount of noise that is generated in the casinos: I happened to read that there is statistical data that proves that people gamble more if there’s a racket going on, which surprised me, unlike the fact that if you’re gambling they will ply you with free liquor. That made sense; I do the same at my monthly poker games. (“Hey, Mike, you need another beer there, don’t you, buddy?”)

I didn’t do much more than my Thursday afternoon and Friday morning strolling, in terms of pure Vegasiana. That was enough. I like gambling but I’m too cheap to do much of it, and after I won a few bucks I stopped, and that was that. I did notice that there was no free wireless in my room at the Luxor. Is there really anyone physically in Vegas and also on Facebook? No one over the age of 21, and that’s a fact.

Go look at #ndca2012 if you want to see my Vegas pix, and comments as they happened.

Whither the NDCA?

Today we settled the Aged P in a nursing home, putting an end to what has been a very rough period in the old chez. Getting old is no picnic, because your body stops being reliable, but short of a true mental impairment, there’s no great reason why your mind should also stop. Mark my words! Learn to appreciate everything in life, and learn to keep going forward. With luck, we’ll all get really old. With determination, we’ll make being old just another phase of life, and we’ll find the good in it. The alternatives—not getting old, and not getting old gracefully—pale by comparison.

Last night on TVFT we talked at length about the NDCA tournament, and the NDCA in general. Here’s the thing. Each of the finals events has its particular purpose. TOC, as I discussed here not long ago, is about competition qua competition, and is rather fierce and narrow in that regard. (This was not a value judgment on my part, merely a reflection of what I saw.) CatNats and NatNats are, in their way, culminations of local debate, but as Bietz pointed out last night, quite limited. Only 2 people in a district go to NatNats, even if there are 20 people in the district who are just as good. TOC, because it breeds in the $ircuit pool, is fairly limited to schools/students who are resource-rich. (In policy, especially, it requires a full team, whereas in LD a lone wolf, albeit with some long green, can do fine.) The point of NDCA is to provide a culmination tournament that is not artificially limited in numbers, and is not fiscally limited vis-à-vis resources. That is good on face, but we’re not sure how it’s coming off. I think that what we were batting around on the show was that fact that you’ve gotta have a gimmick, and aside from good intentions, NDCA doesn’t have one yet.

Give it a listen. I really enjoyed the NDCA experience, not only because B Manuel and Schenectady made for excellent hosting, but because the organization seemed determined to listen to the community, which cannot be said of any of the other culminators. If NDCA can carve out its niche, not replacing anyone but complementing everyone, it would be a very good thing. Curiously enough, the feeling is that the tournament is there when it comes to policy. LD? Still a bornin’.

Culmination

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

That’s a good question.

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

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

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

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

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

Putting it together

Sophie was right. I had assumed without looking closely that there would be a run-off of the down-three folks, and the victors would advance. When we do something analogous to this with partials, maybe one or two more secure people have to fight for advancement. With as many 5-3s as will be at TOC, though, they’re really going to sear up through the ranks of the 6-2s, which seems extremely counter to the approach of TOC in the past. I wonder if people, like me, have not thought it through completely. If they have, then this is really a literal double-octos. That just doesn’t compute for 77 entrants.

Things are so much saner in PF land. We have 72, and 7 rounds. The only wrinkle, which also affected NDCA, was the partial obligation of judges. One team = 4 rounds. Without having MJP this shouldn’t hurt too much, but it is something different I don’t normally think about. Still, there’s plenty of judges. If it wasn’t for this, I would have set it up with single flights, but I don’t want the hassle of fighting with people to explain that 4 rounds of judging would mean 8 single flights; debate judges are notoriously suspicious when it comes to accepting my math. It was bad enough at NDCA when we went to the 8th round and told everyone that their obligation was now their obligation +1. Making it their obligation (a perceived) X2 sounds really dicey.

Last night was the first time I entered data manually in a while. Normally I just upload from tabroom or the Goy, but here I used an old-fashioned spreadsheet. I dug up my old registration sheet that has the formula for taking the name of the school and the kids’ names and concatenating it into Bronx Science OC, and then just pasted in the results. Reminded me of Bump in the good old days (if there are ever good old days when one is running a tournament). Maybe we should do the whole thing on index cards. Speaking of which, I may indeed toss cards for the random rounds. TRPC, with its randomization, does things that are mildly suspect, like the Bietz effect I’ve talked about in the past where single entries from a school are always paired against other single entries (meaning that if you have a round robin and some lone $ircuit kids, they always end up meeting in Round 1). At NDCA we broke the LD division into 4 groups and mixed and matched so that you never hit more than one person from any of the groups, which you can do when every student entered has a certain number of points. I mean, random needs to be random, but it shouldn’t be random violence. We save random violence for when we need it.

You know, in Scranton they think "The Office" is reality. (In Scranton, maybe it is.)

Last weekend was the NDCA. You shoulda been there.

I like the idea of a tournament where the entries must meet a certain objective criteria for admission over a broad span of other tournaments. There’s nothing terribly wrong with a one-time qualifier like Districts or CFL Grands, but it is a one-time thing, and if you’re having an off day, you’re outta there. Our state organizations predicate primarily on multiple tournament wins, with some exceptions for a team or two. Certainly TOC requires a couple of good days on one’s c.v. But NDCA goes for an even broader base. If you’ve demonstrated your skill, if you’ve beaten a lot of people, you’re in, and it doesn’t matter where you beat them. This is the distinguishing characteristic from TOC, where a select number of tournaments are chosen and leveled as qualifiers in a process that is, in a word, unfathomable. I have friends on the advisory committee, and I’ve even been on it myself, and none of us can explain the hows or whys other than that advice is given and actions are taken. This is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know.

We talked a lot about TOC over the weekend. I have long claimed that if TOC didn’t exist I wouldn’t invent it, but on the other hand, I can respect the idea of a circuit of debates that is self-limiting (which is why, in my mind, it’s the $ircuit). If you can afford to go, which means not only transportation and lodging and registrations but training and prepping and coaching—and a lot of other people can’t—should the fact that others cannot prevent you from doing it? This is a problem for Peter Singer. That there may be harms (philosophical and not sociological) from the existence of the $ircuit is moot. Some kids dream of winning TOC with barely the skills to put their pants on in the morning, while plenty of other kids have debate skills to burn and don’t give a goat’s whisker about the thing. As I say, moot point. (CP talks eloquently about the sociological aspects of exclusion and privilege on his blog, which you might want to read for a take on that side of the coin.) When all is said and done, if people want to have a TOC $ircuit, I say, let them. I can choose to pursue it or not with my own team. Nobody is forcing me to do anything one way or the other. Just as there are Division 1 schools and Division 3 schools in sports. So be it.

In light of this acceptance of TOC and the $ircuit, we can support at the same time NDCA, which occasionally intersects but stems from different roots and attempts a different result. There is plenty of overlap, of course, but there is also some things that are missing from TOC, especially transparency of process. Regardless of one’s opinions of the recent TOC hoo-ha, there is no question that the organization’s lack of transparency is not to its benefit. It is not an oligarchy but it looks like one. A couple of times this weekend we were trying to figure out things like whether or not to have 8 rounds, and someone would come in and report that the kids had heard that “they say” some ridiculous thing or other. The fact that we were they was mildly amusing, but the point is, people who don’t know what’s going on tend to believe that someone else in a better position does know what’s going on, and often ascribe evil means or ends to that mysterious “they.” When "they" haven’t got a clue about whether "they" are doing 7 or 8 rounds, as I say, "they" are mildly amused. But when there’s a secret committee perceived as making secret decisions, that’s another thing, and all that ascribing of evil ends occurs. Not a good thing. The more transparency you offer, the less “they” can do that will bother people, so people will be less bothered and will go off and worry something else over which they have no control.

I guess what I’m saying is what I’ve been saying for a while now, that transparency is good, especially in a community where some people are perceived as being more powerful than others, as in tab rooms. I’m in virtually all of them, but I’m not in them because I want to exercise power and hide that exercising from everyone. I’m in there because I like doing it and I do it pretty well. I’m happy to let people look over my shoulder while I'm at it (unless the tournament rules demand otherwise).

Anyhow, more on NDCA specifically tomorrow.