Marginal valediction

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

The season is over…

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

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

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

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

How does your brain leak, then?

I’m hoping to TVFT tonight. I’m rather curious to hear about TOC. O’C said in a comment that it was an improvement in many ways, and that is good to hear, I guess. At the same time, I wonder how many people who broke in LD at TOC in 2002 would have been able to adjudicate the rounds among people who broke in 2012. Oh, well. The $ircuit is the $ircuit, and either you play the game or you don’t. I’ve discussed this ad nauseum.

The Sailor Speecho-Americans, I’m happy to say, acquitted themselves well at the NYSFL championships. Panivore Junior came in 3rd in his DI division, and one of our sophomores managed to break as well in Oy. (Actually, I think they call it OI, but Oy sounds so much better. “Did you break?” “Oy!”) That’s half the contingent that we sent, so proportionately, who else broke 50%? They’ll spend the rest of the year working toward pieces for next year. Except for next week, when they play Bean Trivia. Best (worst?) crappy first prize ever! But I don’t want to give it away here. I don’t want to frighten anyone away.

I’m working on editing a complex book at the DJ, and after an hour or so of bearing down, my brains start to leak, so I look for ways to take short breaks. Yesterday I was pricing hotels at WDW, doing a little early comparison shopping for the DisAd. The problem is, you can pay way over twice as much for a hotel as we did in the DiDeAd, but you probably won’t get more than twice as much out of it. Let’s face it; most WDW time is not spent in the room, or even in the hotel, for that matter. And if you want to take advantage of something at another hotel, it’s no big deal to truck over there and do so. (There’s a lot of trucking at WDW. Like the doo dah man… Speaking of which, or not, I finally found out why Jimi Hendrix speaks that line about never hearing surf music again, but I won’t explain it here. That’s what Grinwout’s is for.) I can’t believe I’m thinking about this more than a year early, but as I say, complex work requires short breaks for leaky brains. This is how my brain leaks. Could be worse, I guess.

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.

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.

Whatever happened to TVFT?

I think that O’C and I have decided that it’s time for TVFT 2.0.

Whatever that means.

Our problem lately has been sloppiness: no agenda, bad audio, lack of getting everyone’s act together to show up. The good news is that we haven’t foisted this sloppy material on people, when it’s actually made it as far as recording, but the bad news is, we like doing it, and miss it. And our three regular listeners probably also miss it, although none of them have raised their hands and asked for some more.

I’ll keep the VCA apprised of what’s happening, presumably so that they can avoid it at all costs. I know that at the very least O’C wants to interview various people in the community, which sounds fine to me. He referred back to his old interviews on WTF, which were all published as transcripts. If I remember correctly, I used to make fun of them, but mostly I enjoyed them, otherwise I wouldn’t have bothered. That’s the deal of course: you poke fun at things and people you like. People and things you don’t like, unless they’re causing some sort of actual harm, you leave to themselves, because, well, you just don’t care enough.

If you don’t have any debate this weekend, you should catch up on Grinwout’s. The season is ending, after all, and there are other things in the world than debate.

A milestone in recorded entertainment

Last night we attempted the worst TVFT ever, and succeeded beyond our wildest dreams!

All the usual suspects agreed to participate, i.e., myself, Bietz, CP and O’C. I had posted an open invitation, which Pajamas W responded to in the negative, expressing his regrets. Remember, he had participated in the rather good episode with Ryan Miller, the one that I screwed up the recording.

At the appointed hour, O’C was there and, untrue to his word, so was PJ. Bietz, meanwhile, was sending emails how he was getting bizarre Skype screens even though he’s a Platinum Member or something, so he was out for the count. We never did hear peep number one from CP, although he had claimed that he was snowed in by the Blizzard of 2012 and had nothing better to do. So, it was me and O’C and PJ. But…

O’C kept saying I sounded digitized, like a bad robot on a bender. He kept fading in and out from my perspective, and then I recorded us and played it back, and I sounded like the King of France and he kept fading in and out, so I maintain it was him and not me. Then PJ was calling from the train, and we could barely hear him, and we kept losing him after the train left the station (which, coincidentally, was located near the Museum of American Shaving) and he kept trying to call in, so every two seconds I was getting beeped by him, and we’d put him back in, and then he’d drop off again.

Oy. The good news was that we had nothing to talk about, so the fact that you can only hear me is mitigated by the reality that even if you could hear all three of us it was a waste of time.

I love technology! We will attempt to solve all of these problems, and maybe visit the Museum of American Shaving to celebrate. We’ll know how successful we are when/if we post another show.

TVFT or die

I will try again tonight. Join me, if you dare.

And then I listened to Avenue Q...

Well, I wasn’t exactly true to my podcasting plans. I did check Skype last night at 9:00, saw no one lit up, and immediately went on to other things. Then again, no discussion had ensued during the day about TVFTing, so what did I expect? I need to set better ground rules or something. Part of it might be that I really don’t want to do it every week. Every other week sounds much more sane. How much of people whining about debate can anyone take, after all? In addition to what they get in person, that is.

And I will point out for you audiobook fans that 1Q84, which I started listening to on January 2, 2012, ended this morning. This is at the rate of about an hour and a half a day. I obviously enjoyed it, or I would have bailed weeks ago, but still, that’s almost 8 solid weeks. And to think I was considering George R. R. Martin! I can read him way faster than I can listen to him, I’ll bet. As a listen, I wouldn’t necessary recommend or not recommend the Murakami. If you’re really looking for a good audiobook, grab Stephen Fry reading Hitchhiker’s Guide—pure bliss.

TVFT

So the only person who showed up last night for TVFT was O'C, and he and I talked about the whole number of topics question. Next Wednesday at 9:00 I will again be at my Skpye-ish post, bringing in voices from down your street and up your alley and across the universe to discuss...something. Anyhow, the new one is posted at the usual place. Or will shortly arrive on your device of choice via the magic of RSS, reminding you once again that it's time to upgrade your RSS and get rid of the damned thing.

TVFT

We are really bad at doing The View From Tab. First of all, as often as not, we can't get a quorum. Am I the only person in the world who isn't busy at 9:00 on a Wednesday night? We originally chose that time because of its likely availability. Who knew that it would eventually rival Saturday night at the singles bars, or wherever these people hang out when they're not TVFTing. (Actually, on Saturday nights they're most likely on a bus home from some high school in the middle of nowhere, so maybe that's not the best example.) I mean, we've even gotten Japonica to set up a private recording studio just for O'C, and that hasn't proven enough!

Then there's the whole technical thing. You would think that by now we would know what we are doing, but every now and then we try something new, and all hell breaks loose. It needs to be written on the wall: Do What You Did Last Time. No new computers. No cell phones. No new versions of Skype. No new headsets. One of these or another has been our most normal downfall; last week, because I kept looking for PJ (sounds like a lost Tennessee Williams play, "Looking for PJ") I got Skype all befuddled and never captured the audio. I never did find how to get the list of contacts to pop up, a real flaw when it comes to looking for your contacts.

Every Wednesday morning one of us emails the group and asks if we're doing it tonight. When enough of us agree, then around 9:00 we round one another up and start the proceedings. Since I'm the one who posts it and marginally edits it, I start the conference call.

Sigh.

We may or may not get one off tonight. In any case, starting here, starting now, at 9:00 on Wednesdays I'll be on Skype and I'll turn on the recording. If you want to get on the podcast, find me and I'll add you to the call. It's not as if there isn't a lot to talk about; that whole subject of the choosing of topics, for instance, has a lot of life in it. Think about it: the March-April LD topic is targeted killing. What infinitesimally small percentage of LDers will debate it? What a waste!

Got Skype? And a decent microphone? Or is Wednesday night your Singles Night too?

NOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!

We recorded a TVFT last night. Started with me and CP and Ryan Miller, and shortly thereafter Pajamas Wexler showed up. It was very interesting. You would have loved it. I would have too, if I had actually recorded it. Alas, I screwed up. How doesn't matter; in the future CP will back me up. Can't hurt.

Anyhow, we talked about the topic cycle, and didn't necessarily come to any conclusions, aside from the fact that better resolutions is a good idea.

Here's something Ryan posted when we had our original discussion:

LD should have two resolutions a year, one released August fifteenth and the other December first. Resolutions should be drawn from a very long list which has five added to it every June by the topic committee. Advantages:

1. The list can grow very long (a hundred?), thus making current prep on the entire list infeasible for even very large teams, and lowering the edge provided by going to a summer camp which luckily picked an important topic (and the resentment from paying a lot of money to a camp which failed to do so). This also means that resolutions will tend to spend a long time on the list before being picked, allowing campaigns against those with poor or offensive wording.

I just love this idea, or something like it. As it stands now, the topic people (who, we all agreed, do a great job under the circumstances) come up with some topics in a couple of days, and then a list is posted, and then when most people aren't even really at school we vote, with no chance for input or real analysis, and there you are. This may make sense in the age of the buggy whip, but we have the interwebs nowadays. Why can't NFL come up with a system like Ryan's suggestion that allows the community an opportunity to really study and polish the resolutions? There is no rush to run LD topics, as they are inherently timeless, as compared to PF topics, so giving them a chance to get good, so to speak, far outweighs any needs of immediacy. I wouldn't suggest eliminating a dedicated committee, because someone digging in on this is a good idea. But why do they have to get it done at NatNats? Don't any of them have email?

Lots of things are done a certain way because that's the way they are done. LD topic selection need not be one of them.

And, lucky you, I've saved you over an hour of your life listening to CP curse like a sailor (and not a Henhuddian one, btw) and me try to find PJ on Skype; you can use your iPod for more satisfying pursuits, like finding all the Madonna songs you've acquired and feeding them to the crocodiles.

Friar Pajamas

The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ debate coaches gang aft aglay.

The unfolding of TVFT in the annals of narrowcasting has been a perilous adventure for all concerned. It started with me just talking to my microphone about various subjects, mostly because I liked (and still do like) the idea of podcasting. Actually, I think I started with the recordings of Nostrum, and then after I bought a decent microphone, I branched out. In any case, the idea of getting a bunch of us together to talk about debate issues was a pretty obvious one, and it started with me and O’C and Bietz, which gives a nice cross-section of opinion and a pretty broad base of experience. Somewhere along the way we added CP, which means that if one of us is out painting the town that night, the other three can put together a quorum (unless I’m the one out painting the town, since I do all the dogsbody work of recording and posting and XMLing).

Every now and then we have had a guest star, but not very often. I like the idea, though. Often somebody has a unique perspective on something or other, and it’s good to hear that perspective firsthand. I recently repeated my offer to add anyone who wanted to spew about something onto the show, and got a positive response from Pajamas Wexler, who is always eloquent about debate issues (and who has strong opinions on some of what he thinks are negative trends in LD lately). He also has the world’s worst handwriting, and I have students from 1995 who are still trying to figure out what he wrote on their ballots, but that’s another issue altogether. At the same time, I posted a couple of articles that resonated with Ryan Miller. One of them, on tenths of a point, he posted to Facebook, and never have so many people who haven’t been in a debate round in over a decade had so much to say about the present state of the activity. Since I haven’t been FBing much lately, I just followed it from the comfort of my email account. Then, I wrote about the changing of topics, and he posted a very interesting response, and as far as I’m concerned, this is a great topic (although I’m tempted to change it now that it’s February) and since PJ had also chimed in, that seemed like a good one for TVFT.

Right.

The good news is that I got Ryan on okay, although he wasn’t exactly state of the art in his equipment. As long as he didn’t move his head, he was fine. (He should save up those nickels and dimes and get a headset. Then he could call just about anyone and sound like James Earl Jones, more or less.) PJ, on the other hand, had problems. I had forgotten that he has taken a vow of technological asceticism. He’s like a monk when it comes to computers: he could have the internet, but he chooses not to. Actually, he does have the internet, but only via dial-up. Dial-up? The last time anyone seriously dialed up on the internet, aside from PJ, was when Madison was in the White House. PJ says that if he had a regular connection it would somehow suck all the life out of his brain. Whatever. So, knowing that Skype wasn’t going to work at 16 bits an hour, he went to his school, Lackpig, and tried to access Skype there, and got about as far as anyone ever gets trying to do something remotely outré on a school internet connection. After various failures, he tried to download Skype to his iPhone (where his technological asceticism breaks down, apparently), and as far as I know, he’s still waiting for it to load. (I hope he’s paid up on his data plan.)

So, we gave up. I had a nice talk with Ryan though, about this and that. And then I went on to creating more new iTune playlists, until I was interrupted by the need to work up pairings and panels for the Newark Round Robin.

Which is another story entirely.

They are out to get us. Unless we are they, in which case, we are out to get you.

I long for the golden age when people would fall off their seats because of this: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OpenCulture/~3/tlde5RNB3Q0/michel_foucault_free_lectures.html I think that was two years ago.

Anyhow, I've enjoyed thinking about the number of topics per year immensely, because the more I think about it, the less I know. I'm trying to organize a little discussion on TVFT about it; stay tuned (if, in fact, you were tuned in the first place). The TOC has announced that it will stick to Jan-Feb this year, but I don't know if there's any deep meaning to be read in that. My sense is that, if the $ircuit had its way, there really would be only a couple of topics a year, but I hesitate to suggest that it must be bad because the $ircuit wants it. That's why I want to extend this dicussion. It's a good one. So far most of it's been in the comments here, in case you missed it.

Speaking of TVFT, we did one last night, Bietzless (although he had said he'd be showing up). We discussed NDCA, and it was rather heated. One of the issues we touched upon was openness, and I think that was the most interesting thing we talked about. No matter how you slice it (said moi), people always seem to think there's something going on behind the scenes in the smoke-filled room of the old boys network. They say it about TOC, CFL, NDCA, and NFL, and they say it about such lowly operations as the MHL and our local traveling tabroom. Some folks have been rather upfront in their idea that our region is run behind closed doors and as an exclusive club of some sort, and we're all pulling the levers to have debate go the way we want, but those same people don't have any actual evidence of it. I neither deny it nor admit to it. (You either trust me or you don't.) Since I tend to blab everything that's going on in my mind in this venue about two minutes after it occurs to me, I will cop to not being exactly behind the door in expressing my opinions and my plans and whatever. But it is the nature of things that an organization comes along, it gets established, and sooner or later new people come along and look at the organization and decide that it needs to be shaken up a bit because the leadership is out of touch or whatever. This is not news. In the world of LD, where there are more people than you can shake the proverbial stick at claiming that some thing they've just discovered is "progressive," and where there is no doubt that the activity changes regularly (or at least it has been in a state of flux ever since I've been doing it), the idea that people look at an organization and want to give it a kick in the pantaloons is pretty predictable. Of course, we always want it to be somebody else's pantaloons. However, with the exception of a few debate coaches who are a little over-competitive, and a few people who resemble the nether portions of your average pony and don't have the wit they were born with, I've always found that this is a group of people who are happy to express their opinions and fairly willing to change them. I don't think I'd still be in it, otherwise.

Anyhow, check out the TVFT podcast. It's a good one. (And I don't say that about all of them...)

Your chance to be a Guest Star!!!

We recorded a TVFT last night (sans Palmer), and it's been a long time. One thing we agreed on (we do occasionally agree on things) is that we'd like more people to join us in dialogue about...whatever. In this episode we talk about the warring civilizations of LD, the conservative folks versus the circuit folks. The problem is that rather than work together to create an LD environment that works for all, we tend to entrench at the coachean level, which doesn't really help anybody. A solid discussion leads to a dialect movement towards truth: we can create a synthesis based, first, on commonality. But only if we talk.

If you're interested in being on the podcast, let one of us know via email. All you need is a Skype account and the little microphone headset that came with your smartphone (unless you want to get all Larry King about it and rent a radio studio for the occasion). It's so simple even a child can do it. For that matter, it's so simple even me and Bietz and Cruz and Palmer can do it!

Go for it.

Happy End of the Universe!

It was a peaceful, quiet holiday, vis-à-vis forensics. Vis-à-vis everything else, for that matter. That’s not a bad thing, once in a while.

We did try to get a TVFT going, but we are becoming progressively more incapable of turning up at the same time as the eons progress. We’re going to try to get back to the Wednesday routine, and I think we’ll put something out even if it’s just me and O’C making Disneyland plans. Of course, we have more important stuff to talk about, to wit, the Jan-Feb resolution. Plenty of people have been talking about this elsewhere, but I have not been one of them. In a way, with such a limited commitment to LD at this point, I feel a little less than involved in the situation. But I have my opinions, and I would like to exercise them a bit with others. CP is strongly planted agin’ it, and I think Bietz was likewise. I want that conversation.

In the world of upcoming, this week is Byram Hills. It’s small and local, so should be simple enough. Then there’s Bigle X, which is always fun, although this time I’m only staying for the main event: no RR for me this year. They’ll have to provide their own beans for the trivia event (if any). On the other hand, it’ll be the first time in decades I’ve had that Sunday and Monday to myself. That will be a treat.

And then there’s the Gem of Harlem. The real problem there has been securing rooms. Without rooms you can’t accept entries, and there’s a lot of people hanging on, waiting to hear. I cleared off all the far-aways who needed plane tix, and have started on the locals mostly by when they entered. I should have a better idea of rooms by the end of this week. Then we can get serious, and even, just maybe, create a schedule.

Then again, this being the year the Mayans are proven right, we could go off into oblivion at any moment. I probably shouldn’t plan too far ahead. Aside from the Disneyland trip, that is. Me and O’C, together again. Set your Twitter feed on stun.

The ship of Hud is scarcely manned

It’s hard to say if the number of plebes (and for that matter, Sailors as a whole) is ridiculously diminished in general or if we’re just going through fits and starts, including the Regiscopalypse storm that still had people cut off from the world through Tuesday’s meeting. Only my most reliable plebes showed up, plus Zip, and we did some work and about as much schmoozing, but three people doesn’t make for much momentum. It’s sort of disheartening, because momentum is what carries a team along. An individual can proceed on his or her own momentum, because an individual doesn't look to a team for support of any kind. But a team makes arrangements and argues different topic approaches and plays cards and does all sorts of things that, at the moment, the Sailors aren’t doing much of. My vision of encompassing both LD and PF suffers if I can barely find a one-person team to do LD.

Sigh.

We also didn’t TVFT last night. I admit being personally pooped lately (too much DJ, mostly, for extracurriculars beyond my normal extracurriculars), but I think part of it was that we couldn’t agree on a topic, and if we have nothing much to talk about, schmoozing publicly doesn’t make a lot of sense. The shows should at least attempt to be about something if we really want anyone to listen to them. We did commit to next week, sort of, in the way we have of committing to things. We’ll see what happens.

This weekend is the Monticello MHL. We’re going to try to squeeze a little workshop into that, with me on morality, O’C on PF and Kaz on policy, but at the moment, there isn’t much of a PF signup. Maybe that will change as we near the deadline.

Monticello was also going to host another two-day event, in the place of the suspended Scranton event, but apparently they couldn’t get the numbers high enough. It is hard to add a new tournament or switch gears too much in this business. Schools are not what we would call flexible, and making arrangements is hard enough without having to make rearrangements. Anyone who doubts that bureaucracy is alive and well has nothing to do with school administration…

And meanwhile, Bump cometh. It’s fully subscribed, and now we should get the last-week dropoff. And we’ve cleared off the top of the Princeton waitlists in debate, and sorted out the rooms, so we’re in good shape there. We made the fields a little bigger. People traveling from kingdom come are now all off the list; next up will be the locals. Unlikely anyone will get any extra slots, given the numbers. We’ll see.

Don't clean your glasses. It's me, not you.

I'm not quite sure why I disparage Speecho-Americans' response rate to messages from on high. (Note: On high = me.) Debaters aren't much better. I'm trying to assemble a quorum for a little chez on the new topic, but the responses range from nil to spam to no to demurrals from people I didn't even know were on the team. Obviously, when Menick cracks the whip, the whip gets cracked. Nothing else happens, though. You'd think I'd know better by now.

We're shooting for the season opener of TVFT tomorrow night. I forget who cracked the whip on this one. Bietz, I think. He's obviously rarin' to go on the new topic. I hope he doesn't propose the sushi affirmative.

For reasons too complicated (or too inane) to explain, I've redone the blog template. Most of it's still here, it just looks a little different. Bear with me as I punch it up a bit. I mean, before, everything looked so... 2010...

See you in the funny papers

There's an app for the iPad called Comic Life. I think they used to give it away with Macs back in the day, but now, as I said, there's an iPad version, and last week it was half-price, and, well, there you are. I spent this week giving it a road test. I am happy with it. I wish now to thank O'C for providing enough content to last until, oh, 2032, give or take a month or two. I won't post them every day, but when the spirit moves me, Bronx Funnies it will be.

Other than that, we're closing in on opening the first tournaments of the year, with both Bronx and Yale getting out of the gate on 8/1. O'C is going for the every-screen-in-the-cineplex-Harry-Potter approach, meaning that if you're not signed up by about twenty minutes after midnight, we'll see you in 2012. CP is going for the you-sign-up-for-the-waitlist approach, which I know others, including Bietz, have done. I'm agnostic on approach, to tell you the truth. One thing is certain, though, the rise of the electronic registration has taken a lot of the mystery out of things. Of course, while registrations may close the minute they open, forensicians themselves are not so efficient. Not yet, anyhow. The Sailor Speecho-Americans are all of the maybe-might persuasion, and few have committed to actual events. But they can't just sign up in general... [Sigh.]

Things at the DJ have heated up so much that I've boiled over, which is uncharacteristic for me, as the VCA well knows. I like to maintain a detached, mellow attitude, but lately I've been reduced to an attached stridency. I'll be taking some days off shortly, and that may help. If not, just try to stay out of my way. JUST TRY!

And on the home front, so to speak, I have finally gone to the movies this year. I think this is the first time, but I don't know anybody who's not running out to see HP7.2. What are we all afraid of that we have to see it practically the minute it comes out? Spoilers? Like we don't all know? The only surprise was that Kaiser Soze was actually Snape. To be honest, I couldn't remember all the details from the book or the last movie about what piece of YKW was where, and what that sword was all about, and the chalice or whatever it was at the bank. But it didn't matter, because as one watched the movie, there was stuff our heroes needed and they were trying to get, and that much was clear, and it didn't really matter why. It was nice to see every actor in England assembled for the finale except, as my daughter has pointed out, Alan Cumming, the only living British thespian who wasn't hired for the series.

Over the next week or two I've really got to get Bump organized. A couple of major changes need to be thought through; if you followed TVFT you may know what some of them are. If so, could you please remind me?

Meanwhile...

Before I forget, read about Nozick and libertarianism, if that's your cup of tea.

Not much happening, meanwhile, on the coachean front. I did get occasional messages from NatNats, what with the Panivore putting paid to her debating career and whatnot, and O'C having fun on the resolution committee, and all the powers that niffle wondering why I wasn't there because they missed me so much and wanted to touch the hem of the garments of the world's worst district chair. The tournament seemed to last as long as the entire rest of the season put together. And of course NY schools are still in session, although it was nice to see Diana made it to the final round. Some New Yorkers will go (and when they do, watch out!)

I gather that the TVFT crew will gather another time or two to go over all of that. I am starting to miss everyone and everything, but then again, not so much as it will cause any psychic damage. Things usually heat up around debatewise around the beginning of August, when I start regrooving for Yale and whatnot, and that's only a couple of months from now. It is nice, otherwise, to have a break. This weekend I actually golfed only slightly miserably, which means that I'm finally beginning to believe that summer is here. Weatherwise this was a crappy spring. A crappy winter, too, come to think of it. I blame George W. Bush for it, needless to say.

Anyhow, just checking it so you'll know I haven't gone over to the Dark Side (i.e., giving up my job to travel with Sarah Palin's bus tour). Summer will mean few entries, especially given the continuing busy-ness of the DJ and the Aged P. Come to think of it, I really am looking forward to debate season kicking in again. I could use the rest.

CatNattery

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

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

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

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