Countdown to WTF!

I have received the following from my trusty correspondent at you-know-where:

Mr. Menick:

H. I'd spell out "Hi," but we're too rushed here at WTF HQ. Only 4 more days! Holy Hannah's Hosiery! Or as we say here as we zip about, HHH!

Needless to say, we are agog, agape, atwitter, amok—some of us are even akimbo. Being the only debate institute in the country is not easy. We are expecting countless thousands of innocents to descend on us this weekend, each one with a nice big check payable to the WTF Beer and Retirement Fund. We've got former debaters who know everything there is to know meeting with these innocents and telling them everything they need to know so that they too will know everything there is to know. It is as if the entire sum of all knowledge ever will be contained right in our hyper-modern meta-dorm! If we all jump off a chair at the same time, people in China are going to feel the bump.

I may not be able to communicate with you for a while again, until the brouhaha bubbles down some. I know you wish you could be with us, especially when we cash some of those Beer and Retirement Fund checks. We are well aware that the only knowledge we won't have here will be yours and a few of the other dinosaurs', but we figure if we train people to use enough speed, no one will ever know.

Have a happy 4th! Our fireworks here will be all mental! May you and yours be mental as well.

Your f (I'm too busy to type out the word "friend"),
HM
CR

Pffft? Pfui.

Sabrina has finalized the Monticello invitation. I feel as if I'm late already. Where's the Bump invite? After last year's installment, I sat down and wrote up preliminary changes to the invite, mostly telling people that if they brought brain-dead judges we would draw and quarter them (and their judges), but I've quieted down a tad since then. Still, I will be sending out how-to-judge instructions, and handing them out, and maybe reading them during the rounds. I do like lay judging, but not so lay that they've been blindfolded, gagged, kidnapped and dropped into the round directly from some non-English-speaking country and now they're wondering if 14 points is enough to give because it says right here on the ballot that 14 points means I am in Ecstasy Listening to your Greatness! (Actually, the judge will come up to me and say something like, "Kerfloyin-ze mala oola mintz?" At which point I draw and quarter them.) (And I am in Ecstasy Listening to your Greatness sounds like— No, I won't go there.)

So, I've got to polish up my judge instructions. I have my tried and trues, plus Ewok's mom's notes, plus Matt J's fine discussion. I will put these all together and see what happens.

As for Monticello, I am happy to see that the JV division is eliminated. I do feel that second-year folks can do fine in an open division, and will encourage the troops accordingly. (If you're a troop of the second-year pursuasion reading this, consider yourself encouraged.) I also see that Pffft is going to be happening. I might start encouraging a little Pffft. Why not?

(Only 39 hours till DOA begins. I am all atwitter. Throw water on me, please. Throw water on them, please.)

The Supes go on hiatus (just in time to lead their labs at VBI)

The two Supreme Court decisions on the Ten Commandments yielded enough opinions and dissents and concurrences to keep interested parties busy forever. Keep in mind that Nino believes that all law comes from God, an opinion that I will not allow in our debate discussions unless the person offering that point of view offers an inarguable warrant. I mean, did Nino *see* God do this? Can we go to the videotape? It's an argument that doesn't stand up in court, if you know what I mean, personal beliefs notwithstanding. Anyhow, the point is that religion in public life may be the most hotly contested issue of the day, in that, as you well know, religious beliefs can inform all actions. This part wasn't written down, but Nino verbally decried those who were standing up for religiosity v. irreligiosity, saying that there was no way the Constitution defended the rights of the non-religious.

I love Nino. I can just imagine the homosexual agenda people getting together with the atheist agenda people. Maybe they can all go fishing with Nino next time he heads out with Dick Cheney on the old private yacht. That would be one hell of a party!

Additionally, the Court continued what the Times seems to feel is its assault on the Press. You should read the analysis of that in today's paper. Does the media deserve special protection (what we associate with the First Amendment) when it doesn't warrant special protection? Raise your hand if you can tell me the name of Tom Cruise's fiancee but not the name of the winner of the election in Iran. Then ask yourself, which one is Bush more likely to invade (no doubt because God tells him to)?

I assume most people did follow through on the emininent domain discussion recently; as DOA pointed out, it is potentially a topic next year. In a way, it's a classic: how about a quote from Mr. Spock? "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few." Those Vulcans were obviously of a modern Utilitarian bent.

So now the Court is done for a while and no one quit in a huff. The prospect of a congressional battle over Rehnquist's replacement just has to have your juices flowing, but we won't see it for a while. Maybe old Bill is waiting for Jeb to take over the White House.

Long live the Bush dynasty! Semper arbusto (or something like that, as the Romans used to say)!

Memo to Tom Cruise: Take her away, please.

Obviously I saw Batman Begins this week. Aside from wondering whether Katie Holmes is a dropout from the same acting academy that flunked Hayden Christensen and Natalie Portman, one has to say that, finally, someone has gotten Batman right. Then again, watch Pacino in INSOMNIA. Nolan knows how to direct actors. Simple as that.

They also showed a long preview of Charlie and the CF, speaking of directors whose Batmen were near misses, making one wonder how JDepp manages to get weirder with every single picture. All right, every other picture, if you count Neverland.

And I heard from the Nostrumite last night, who claims he is in a state of permanent depression over the fact that, with the school year ended, he now has to make the rounds of institutes, where he is teaching his fine brand of polician strategy and tactics across the country, leaving Odelie behind for weeks at a time with no company other than the Nostrumutt, Pecksniff the Nostrumian Applehead, and her congregation of High Episcopalians. Oh, the torture of a busy life. I prefer my existence, where all I have to do is dig up old juvenile justice files and send them to the team and go back into estivation. (That's a great word, estivation. Feel free to take it and use it yourself, whenever it seems to fit. Tomorrow's word is musth.) Anyhow, the lad vows to keep up his TWHS episodes, a new one of which he promised he would post this morning. I haven't checked yet, but I've never known the Mite to back down on a promise, except that time at the baccarat table with the go-go dancers back in Monte Carlo, but we won't go there. This time.

I can't wait

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I've found the perfect crappy prize for O'Cruz.

Now he has to do something crappy-prize worthy.

Why I can't retire

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You know, I'd be inclined to send money to these Nigerians if only they were better spellers. If I ever go into the SpamScam business, I promise that everything, including my phony name, will be correctly spelled. Maybe I'm supposed to trust them with my money because their crappy spelling is proof positive that they're really Nigerian? Is that how you can identify a Nigerian in a lineup? "Hey you, number six. Spell Mnemosyne!"

Anyhow, speaking of crappy stuff, I have been amassing tons of it. My office is overflowing with crappy prizes, including a real find, a 1972 Guide to Being a Secretary. I also have Hans Blix's book on how to disarm Iraq. All kinds of good stuff. Which is why I can never retire from the Digest. If I did, I wouldn't have a source of crappy prizes anymore. None of this is Digest stuff, of course, just the detritus that floats up on our shores. By the same token, I can't retire from debate because I keep bringing this stuff home and my house is filled with it, and I have to have something to do with it because I don't think the local sanitation folks would pick it up for love or money. Then again, I could leave it out on bulk pickup day. Neighborhood scavengers will take anything! Finally, someone who really wants my Andrews Sisters LPs.

Craig tells me they're arguing juvey justice at VBI. Talk about chestnuts. I'm pretty sure this was a good topic when we last did it, about 3 weeks ago. It's sort of real. Most judges just decided on the basis of, if one of these two kids killed the other one, would I want to send him to Old Sparky? Nasty SOBs were dropped left and right, while saintly, naive looking puppies picked up like it was going out of style. Try to look innocent! That's the best advice I can give (until I go home and dig up my research). I wouldn't be surprised to see it get voted in, precisely because the coaches won't have to do much work. God, we're a pathetic lot.

Bloomsday

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I heard last night from the Nostrumite, who is in a state of permanent depression over the end of the school year up at TWHS. "My first season in the place and I haven't accomplished anything," he told me. Nobody at TOCs, nobody at CatNats, nobody at LapsedCatNats. It's not easy working with a new team, he says. "I'm still married, though, so I guess that's something. And we did spend Bloomsday yesterday reading aloud, as all good Joyceans must. 'Stately plump Buck Mulligan... ' "

Ah, Bloomsday. June 16th. The novel Ulysses takes place entirely on that day, and many people celebrate the occasion by hitting up the old tome again. In some places, they actually have public readings of the entire thing. I'm glad that the Mite is keeping his hand in literary affairs, despite his self-described poor showing in forensics. "If I could write like Joyce," he says, "I'd be an Irishman now." Which is probably true. Of course, if he wrote like Joyce most of us wouldn't be able to make any sense of TWHS, which he has just updated. "My plan is to throw up a new episode every Thursday or Friday," he says, "give or take the odd Thursday or Friday, and factoring into it Odelie's plans, whatever they may be, and traveling with the team and everything. But this coming summer should be okay. Having just gotten back from a honeymoon, it's not like we're going anywhere else for a while."

Too bad he couldn't be at LapsedCatNats, though. It was bad enough he missed meeting O'Cruz in Milwaukee, but to also miss him in Philadelphia? Jeesh. We could even have gotten a picture of the two of them with Soddy. Maybe that would clear all of us of the charge of actually being one another.

News from my favorite correspondent

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Dear Mr. Menick:

Hi. How are you? I am fine.

Things are winding down here in Philadelphia. As you know, there was a lot of talk about replacing some of the statues of Ben Franklin with statues of Jon Cruz, but the mayor finally decided that the time just wasn't right yet. Next year, maybe. After Villiger.

It's been pretty hectic here, as you can imagine. Most of my time was spent trying to figure out which code was which person. Keeping everyone's identity a secret is really important, as you know. It's like Batman and Bruce Wayne; if everyone knew Batman's secret identity, he'd win a lot more rounds than he would if he just went on talent alone. Or something like that. Anyhow, you can imagine how hard it is to find out that 14393023-A34-B34^^7&-X is actually Joe McDoakes from Kalamazoo. There's like twelve thousand people here, and usually the minute I found out their code, they dropped out of the tournament. It's been a busy week for me.

Too bad you can't be here. You'd get a lot more NFL points if you actually showed up some year. I know you think that NFL points aren't worth all that much, but Mr. Wunn is working on an arrangement where they can be exchanged for frequent flier miles on TWA (which will be great if TWA ever starts flying again).

After this is all over we head back to KGB headquarters to get ready for our annual summer camp. "That's when this forensician idolatry all pays off," or at least that's what some instructor from another institute told me. "They tell the little bastids how cool they are, and then they soak 'em all for a couple of Gs each. What a scam!" Of course, that's all sour grapes, I think. Our KGB camp really is better than the one that guy has in El Paso, for instance. I mean, yes, they can cross over the border for cheap dentistry, but we've got Forensic Idols!

May all your Christmases be white.

Your friend,
Herman Melville
Cub Reporter

Exercise

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I decided to start walking in the mornings for a change. For a while now I've been on the treadmill, which has its advantages and its disadvantages. Obviously, it's indoors and therefore not dependent on the weather. And you can time it, and you can sense pretty easily whether you're giving yourself a decent workout by just looking at your speed setting. The thing is, when you rank the most boring things in the world, being on a treadmill has to fall somewhere close to judging declamation. So to make the time fly, I bought a little TV/VCR combo, and I watch stuff that works in a treadmill situation. Poker works real well. Fifty-seven-part series on the Civil War don't. You need something that's not too good or too dull that you don't really have to listen to, given that you're making a racket already. AFI's 100 Best Puppy Movies works. Rat Pack bios are perfect. Star Trek Enterprise is good, because it's so lousy you'd never actually sit down and watch it, but no one ever really does get enough Klingons in one's life so this is just the right fix. I have high hopes for Battlestar Galactica. I've been watching the miniseries, and it's quite good. Sexy cylons was a mighty inspiration! In my day they were just clunky robots, which may be why the original series fizzled out. Sexy robots, on the other hand, and the thing would probably still be in syndication. I've got the whole show on tape, ready for the treadmill. I just hope they don't default back to clunky robots.

But walking is different. You plug the old iPod into the old earholes and head out. The music is quickly inconsequential, provided that it's lively enough to keep you moving. That is, your Kindertotenlieder probably won't get you to the corner, if you know what I mean, and Gregorian chants would have you run over by the first Suburu to come along, but a little Steely Dan is just what the walking doctor ordered. Except maybe Boddhisattva. That one always stops me dead in my tracks. And to think, ol' Skunk is now a stockbroker.

Anyhow, as I was saying, walking is different. When you walk, your mind is free to work. And work it does. I had forgotten that. You just start traveling down various mental paths and working things out, your legs pumping away, the rhythms subconsciously keeping all your physical systems on go. After about 45 minutes I get back to the house with ideas for MHL trophies, a completely functional generic response to resolutional critiques (which I was clever enough to write down, with Pip's help—downside of any of this noodling is that if you don't take notes fairly quickly, you might as well have watched sexy robots on Battlestar Galactica), menu ideas for the next week and a serious longing to participate in the 50th Disneyland Anniversary. That's just one day. I'm going to get back into this for a while. Maybe I can come up with another novel.

Sexy robots will just have to wait.

Am I the only one...

...whose immediate thought yesterday was, "Great; now Michael can dedicate himself to the search for the real molesters"?

Over the weekend I updated the Hen Hud rules, a holdover from the meeting way back when with the speechifiers. They were mostly interested in internal stuff, such as how many tournaments you need to attend and issues like that, which has never been much of a deal on the debate side. The only thing I've ever really held out for is that you can't judge if you don't debate. There have been occasional rollovers who sort of want to lord it over younger kids, which strikes me as a bit of a crock. I certainly have had students who have given up debating but still judge, like Burgers or Ben or Sarah, but they've maintained their connection to the team by attending meetings and shown a willingness to pitch in where needed. What bugs me is folks who want weekend vacations with the team who I never see any other time. That doesn't work. Still, I didn't bother including that in the rules; that's a case-by-case issue. There are some new rules, however, that you might find interesting. Dave is going over this stuff now, and it won't be official for a while, but I thought I'd give you a sneak preview.

1. No singing on the bus. Anyone caught even humming while be dropped off in Hartford.
2. No bathroom breaks in Connecticut. It takes long enough to travel route 84 without having to take bladders into consideration.
3. All debaters must learn to play Spades.
4. Roulette and craps will no longer be allowed at team meetings.
5. All discussion of postmodernism will be conducted in French, but with Canadian accents.
6. Any student caught robbing a Seven-Eleven will be suspended from the team for three days.
7. Any student who can install a wireless network in Menick's house will be allowed unlimited Seven-Eleven robberies without suspension.
8. The song title in question is "Take Me Down to the Prairie Dog City." This makes more sense than Paradise City, and is much funnier.
9. Anyone qualifying for tournaments during golf season can haul their own butts to 'em.
10. The VBD website is permanently blocked. Anyone found gaga-ing national circuit debaters will be sent to a correctional institution in Juarez for six months with no personal items except a copy of O'Cruz's Star Wars Christmas album, a jar containing Dan Bruno's burgered-to-death appendix, and a 1943 Vassar class offering guide (There's a war on, ladies!).

Otherwise, mostly it's status quo antebellum.

Tim Averill sucks

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I just read his interview on DDT. I mean, the interview was fine, and I like Tim and everything, but I've known this guy for ten years and not once—I repeat, NOT ONCE—have I ever gotten a lobster out of him. Nor a crayfish. Not even a shrimp. Go to his tournament and they feed you chicken soup and albino bagels, while in the back room among the elite apparently it's all lobsters and caviar and Waiter, bring me shad roe. Jeesh. But here's the big question. Averill and I are pretty much the same age. How come he can retire and I can't? It makes you wonder. Of course, my understanding is that most of the northeast is looking forward to a tournament without another Tim Averill Retirement Tribute. We can all finally breathe easy again.

I heard from the Nostrumite last night. He's in a state of permanent depression mourning the death of his PDA. It's an old Handspring that, as he put it, "died and died again." Apparently it winkled out on him, taking all his unsynchronized data with it, and although he thought he had fixed it, it winkled out again a day later, this time beyond any hope of resuscitation. "I didn't really lose much data," he says, "but that little black box has been an old friend to me. I've known it longer than I've known Odelie." It's always a bad sign when a newlywed compares his wife to his Palm Pilot. "The real issue is, what to do about replacing it. Get a new model? Switch to the—AARRGHH—Microsoft platform? Or blow off the whole thing and spend the money on something else I really want?" And then he goes on to ask me if I've looked at those new PSPs yet. Will this guy never grow up? What kind of choice is that, a data machine vs. a PSP? Should I buy a PS2 or a microwave oven? Jeesh. Given that the Mite is up there in Averill country, maybe he should just invest in some lobsters (God knows he isn't going to get any freebies out of the old Timster). Anyhow, he told me he'd posted a new episode of TWHS, so losing the Palm hasn't set him back all that much. I wonder if TW will serve lobsters next year at its tournament. It's worth considering...

Duck Soup

Last night the Brewers let me down. I hereby withdraw my support. Anyone who has thought to turn to this weblog as their primary source of baseball news will have to look elsewhere.

While thinking of things filmic, I happened to notice that Duck Soup is on TCM tonight. If you've never seen it, I strongly recommend that you correct this deficiency in your personality ASAP. It is the best of the Marx Brothers movies, which is saying a lot. I fear sometimes that the Bros and their ilk (e.g., W.C. Fields, whose Bank Dick is also on tonight) are sort of lost to the NapDyn generation. I was raised on that stuff; they always seemed to be on the TV on rainy afternoons on those stations in the corner of the dial. Remember, I grew up with seven stations. There was no such thing as narrowcasting. So if I was singing "Hail Freedonia" you know that a couple or forty million other baby boomers were doing likewise. Nowadays they probably play Duck Soup just as often, but how do you find it in a universe of a bazillion channels? On top of that, there is a (rather philistine) mindset that one should only watch new movies, as if films are comparable to milk, turning sour if they're left in the fridge for too long. Granted that many films don't hold up, but age alone is not a count against them, just as age alone isn't a count against, say, paintings. "I only like new paintings." Who says that? For that matter, who says, "I only like old paintings." What Duke Ellington said about music is true of all art forms, that there are only two kinds: good, and everything else.

Speaking of quotes, U. S. Grant was cited as saying, "I have two favorite songs. One of them is 'Battle Hymn of the Republic.' The other one isn't."

Humor was so much easier a couple of centuries ago.

I heard from Herman Melville last night. PCP's cub reporter is already in Philadelphia, apparently manning a booth in the airport so that the PCP website can photograph everyone as they pick up their luggage. "It's not very comfortable, sitting next to carousel number eight for twenty-four hours a day, and the federal security people have been giving me the eagle eye, but it will be worth it if we can get a shot of one of PCP's recently announced instructors as they scoop their laundry up off the conveyor belt. That's what the fans want to see." I guess so. Which brings me back to W.C. Fields, and quotes. On poker, when asked if it was a game of chance: "Not the way I play it." Given one last request when about to be hanged: "I've always wanted to see Philadelphia." And allegedly (you can look it up and disprove it) printed on his tombstone: "I'd rather be in Philadelphia."

Phildadelphia doesn't have much of a reputation; Babylon on the Delaware it isn't. Still, I love the State House area, the sense of history of this place, the Founders roaming around (probably making Philadlphia jokes), the funk of the South Side, the market, statues of Ben Franklin everywhere. It's a nice little city. I wish I could go. Someday, if I'm still in this activity but no longer in the Day Job...

Actually, I did chuckle over the time machine...

If this keeps up I'm going to start reading the sports section. Go Brewers!

And, oh yeah, I managed to get that box against the wall in God of War, and my next challenge is battling the Hydra. I am probably the worst video game player in the world. I just sit there randomly hitting the buttons over and over, hoping something will happen. Eventually something does, or I give up. As you play any of these games they're always slow-feeding you instructions on new subtleties, presumably at the point at which you're ready for them. Tap lightly on L1 while breathing garlic on the X button twice, then let go of R2 for special Groin of Power Spell. Like anyone can remember that stuff. Just hitting the buttons at random is enough for me. It's thoughts like these that will probably stop me from spending a fortune on a PSP, despite the attraction of instantly available games for all the debate down time.

I'm always doing my best not to spend money. It's not as if I have all that much of it, but I would like things like the aforementioned PSP, an iBook or 12" PowerBook, a portable DVD player, a cellphone smaller than Chihuahua, a new PDA. I may or may not get anything of these things, depending on forces of lust beyond my control. I did just get a standalone hard drive, however. This way I can dump all my stuff in one central place for both my active home machines, and not have to think about it again. Seems to be working fine, so far, but I haven't tried hooking it up to the Windows 98 machine yet. That's tonight's challenge. Then I'll take on the Hydra.

And I've come to the conclusion that Napoleon Dynamite is simply the bright line between blind youth and benign old age. I have yet to find anyone past one score and five who likes it, or anyone under that age who hasn't memorized it. Fortunately, it's easy to memorize. One viewing was all it took for me; it only has about four pages of script, recited very slowly. What I'm thinking is that I can drop little Vote For Pedro references into my everyday conversation in order to look cool while I'm husbanding my Tots. That ought to fool the little buggers!

Addendum re Brewers

Okay, I was half right. The Yankees still suck. And the world is going to hell in a handbasket when AL plays NL. Jeesh.

Ask me about the Mets pitching staff; I'm ready!

I now know everything there is to know about baseball. The Brewers beat the Yankees last night. This means that, A) the Brewers are probably in the American League (I was wondering about that), and B) the Yankees must really suck. With this information in hand, I'm ready for everything. Maybe I'll take up sports betting...

And then there's the Lincoln-Douglas Education Project (people.hws.edu/barnes/ldep). Going back to my ruminations following TOCs, apparently the fears go deeper than I had understood. I just got an open email from Jason Baldwin explaining that the feeling is that this is the moment to save LD, otherwise it's over. That's sort of scary, because if these feelings have spread as much as they have around the coaching community (Timmons, Wycoff, and Miller are among the founding board members of LDEP) then we're talking serious fears. I've been protected by being in too many tabrooms and by not giving a horse's patoot about national circuit. The good thing is, LD is held together by a pretty thin thread, that thread being the handful of folks who actually throw tournaments. If all the tournament directors are in agreement about stuff, and can actually come up with ways to improve that stuff, we could really see positive change. I have, of course, signed up to join this illustrious group. It will be interesting to see what we come up with. I, for one, look to lay judging as one possible savior. The further we move away from general (albeit informed) adjudication, the further we move toward specialized and possible agenda-laden adjudication. Regardless of what that agenda might be, it would undermine the academic value of LD: learning to read, write and speak. Implicit in RWS is that students read, write and speak English. At the point where it's Chinese, or meta-Chinese, it's policy with one person per team. At which point, no parent chaperones. At which point, fewer participants. At which point, Hello Public Forum.

The possibilities are mind-numbing.

Settling into Summer

I'm making the reservations now for the Yale hotel. It's just around the corner (the tournament, not the hotel). I would love to let one year rest before beginning the next year. But we're also hacking around the MHLs, I've begun instilling some discipline on myself on the team webpage update, and I hope to have the Bump site up before 9/1 for a change. This is ridiculous.

I also wonder if I'm cut out for video games. I am stuck on God of War after putting in about 11 minutes of game time. I know what to do; I just can't do it. I keep pushing this block toward the archers, and they keep shooting the block. #&^%^$% archers! When this begins to get me down, I say to myself, Yo, let's watch a movie. Everyone recommends Napolean Dynamite, so what the hell. Pop it into the old DVD player. Hmmm. Good credits, but that was about it. Here was a movie that, if you ask me, definitely could have used some archers. Why is everyone recommending this to me, not just teenagers but adults (all right, stunted adults to be sure, but adults nonetheless)? It is, I grant, unique, but would it have killed them to actually be funny? Nothing worse than staring stone-eyed at the TV for an hour and a half just wondering about the state of mind of those people who liked this thing. When the most amusing thing in a film is 'Tater Tots, you know you're in trouble.

Jeesh.

The answer to the question, by the way, is City of Glass by Paul Auster. The book, not the graphic novel (no cheating!). I mentioned this earlier as the perfect postmodern novel, but never actually named it. It distills all the themes of narrator/narration/language that I'm working on in Caveman. I'll analyze it there, but if you're curious now, check it out. Don't expect to actually enjoy it, in that boring conservative pre-modernist sense of a good read. It's not a reading experience the way, say, The Hobbit is a reading experience. But you may find it fascinating.

Finding time for Caveman is getting difficult. We're on summer hours here, which means a longer day and golf on Friday afternoons. I keep thinking there's a joke somewhere in the concept of Sumer hours, but I can't really figure one out (as in Sumerian, not icumen in). I'll leave it to you. (I know, if I were smarter, I'd be funnier. Yeah, yeah, yeah.) Still, if I can give just one night a week to Caveman I might have it finished before the summer is over (Sumer is already over).

I need to concentrate. Settle down a little. It's summer. Enjoy it. Debate is over. Ahhhhhh...

Lightening up

All right. Enough already. I'm running out of words. When do I get my paycheck for this stuff, anyhow?

I heard from the Nostrumite last night. He's in a state of permanent depression over having to get back to the real world again after his honeymoon. He and Odelie mostly just lapped up sun and pina coladas for a couple of weeks while the rest of us were in Milwaukee (his guys hadn't qualified, which was too bad, because I wanted to see the expression on O'Cruz's face when I introduced him to the non-existent Mite). As proof of his return, he has posted a new installment of TWHS, and he claims he is back in business sharpening his metaphoric pencil and bearing down hard. So marriage obviously hasn't addled him all that much. Yet.

As for me, I've got a couple of things to do. I want to break down the PF Nationals topic (preferably with an Uzi), I'm looking forward to my first free Saturday since April to continue my fruitless pursuit of wirelessly connecting my home computers, I'm back on the golf course on Sunday with all new grips (when people tell me to get a grip, I do just that), last night I embarked on God of War, the galleys of the new Doctorow are on the credenza (but first I have to finish the Eco), Caveman continues to beckon (I did very little in Wisconsin), my fingers have forgotten what the piano keyboard feels like, the new Paul Johnson Art book is sneering at me from the coffee table, there's the summer reading list to settle, much hassling over MHLs for next year, etc., etc., etc. You know, maybe I should have retired when they gave me that award!

A Tale of Three Cities, or, Walt was Wrong

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In the last few weeks I have worked my way through the cutting edge of urban critique. Las Vegas, Santa Fe and Milwaukee; from these three cities you can learn just about everything there is to know about the unreality of everyday existence and the death and life of great American cities, without having to read Jane Jacobs or Jean Baudrillard. It's amazing how our lives are sometimes much more interesting than they appear on the surface. Somewhat along the lines of my favorite quip—if you were smarter I'd be funnier—there's the idea that if you just pay attention a little bit, and think a little bit, you'll find a lot more than you were expecting.

At some point in the mid-twentieth century, urban planning was the replacement of rickety depressed areas with new subsidized housing. You can get a great sense of this when you're on the train passing through Harlem going into Grand Central. You can see some decrepit, crumbling streets, and you can see some big, ugly, anonymous apartment buildings. The theory was that replacing the crumbling streets with these apartment buildings would somehow alleviate the problems that had led to the crumbling streets. At the same time, at least in New York, there was enormous destruction of neighborhoods in general in aid of the building of roads and bridges under the vision of master builder Robert Moses. Moses, in his lifetime, was responsible for practically every major artery in New York, including the city, Long Island, and all the way up to Niagara Falls. He built the Triborough, the Whitestone, the Throg's Neck, the Verrazano. He build every major highway on Long Island. He built Jones Beach. He built much of the Taconic. You name it, he built it. The problem was, or at least one problem was, that Moses had little or no regard for the harm that his constructions did to the areas in which they were built. Quite famously, the stretch of highway through the Bronx from Van Cortlandt Park to those small bridges like the Alexander Hamilton was once a tight, low-income neighborhood that was ripped apart in a blood battle that may not even have had to happen if Moses had simply routed his Cross-Bronx Expressway a few blocks away. But Moses, who was a compromiser like George W. Bush is a francophile, wouldn't even listen to the idea of an alternative.

In the early 60s, Moses was planning the Lower Manhattan Expressway, an elevated eight-lane highway through Greenwich Village connecting the East River to the Hudson River. The damage to lower Manhattan's neighborhoods as neighborhoods is probably incalculable. Jane Jacobs was among those who stood up to, and eventually defeated, the most powerful man in NY. Jacobs' urban theory is a simple one, that the life of a city is in its diversity on the streets, the interplay of people in neighborhoods, the humanization of what is otherwise the enormous scale of place. There are 8 million people in New York City, but to individuals there are only familiar families and familiar shops on your street, where children grow up playing in the parks and the old folks sit in the sun playing chess—you get the picture. Jacobs was right, and she wrote about it, and she is a key figure in understanding modern urban thought. Which is why Walt was wrong. His view of EPCOT, the city of big buildings of commerce separated from residence, is an extremely clear portrait of the modernist (and now discredited) view of urban planning. That city is, ultimately, devoid of life. A living, breathing city is a hodgepodge of residence and commerce and young and old, and that diversity is not only the sign of urban health, it is the cause of urban health. Walt, by building a city that would prophylactically solve for the urban problems that do exist (slums and everything that goes along with poverty), would create a lifeless shell of a city that would never survive. Urban problems must be addressed, but with an eye on the people, not the architecture or the roads. (Malls, of course, are another jejune answer to the problems of the city.)

The other thing Walt did, and this is why we enjoy reading Baudrillard, is create Disneyland, where reality is refined into themes of unreality (e.g., compare a real main street with Disney's Main Street). Disneyfication begins to pervade modern thinking, and over time, back in the real world, designers start emulating unreal themes into so-called actual existence. That is, architecture becomes consciously disneyfied to the extent that we are living in a total world of unreality, or at least a world where the real and unreal are indistinguishable.

So, a tale of three cities. Start with Milwaukee. What marks downtown Milwaukee and connects it to the themes of modern urbanization, is its skyway (or whatever they call it). This is a series of passageways about one flight up above ground level connecting apparently all the main downtown buildings. I took a long walk through it Sunday, and it was deserted. At one point I entered the federal building and went through metal detectors and saw the only other human beings (uniformed guards) in the system. This kind of skyway or something like it has been built in a number of cities, ostensibly to connect hubs and to protect people from the weather. But what they do is remove people from the commons of the ground level. You don't need permission, you don't need to look employed, you can be any kind of bum or race or religion on the streets, but indoors, in the seemingly private sphere of the skyways (even if the skyways claim to be public) you have what is essentially the mall mentality vis-a-vis security. No hare krishnas. No homeless. No teenagers hanging out. No one of dubious ethnicity being dubiously ethnic. The end result of this elevation of traffic from the streets is, literally, the death of the streets. After walking the skyway I did the same trip on ground level. Mostly there's empty storefronts. Whether or not the skyway has killed downtown Milwaukee, it has certainly killed downtown Milwaukee's streets. They are dead. I would guess that they are also rather frightening at certain times, since all the "safe" working people are up above, these dead streets are inhabited by the hare krishnas, the homeless, the teenagers and the dubious ethnics. (There's an essay in Variations on the Theme Park about all of this.)

Las Vegas, of course, is the theme capital of the universe. Arabian souks, Parisian streets, St. Mark's square, ancient Luxor, Manhattan... You've seen the commercials for Steve Wynn's new hotel, the hook of which is, it has no theme; this being Vegas, you would have to say that its theme is themelessness. You can write your own analysis here of the city as a whole, or reality versus unreality, whatever. One analysis is as good as the next. Either you find the place fun or you think it's hell only hotter; it's almost the same thing with WDW: either you find the place fun or you think it's hell only hotter and more humid.

The more interesting place, caveman-wise, is my third city, Santa Fe. This is one of the oldest cities in the western hemisphere. It's got an "old town" that is, allegedly, the old part. But is it? All buildings, young and old, are built to look as if they're old adobe. The new buildings look just like the old buildings which means, in fact, that the new buildings are themed to resemble the originals. Are those real Indians selling real artifacts or real Indians selling what tourists like, and has what tourists like replaced what Indians make? Maybe they're just not real Indians. The whole shebang represents to some extent all those horrible things you hate about commercialism, but then again, some of the stuff is nice. I bought some. And as for all that adobe, why is the rest of the city also adobe? Or more to the point, built to look like adobe? Has the alleged unreality of the old city spread into the new city? What is the bright dividing line?

Fun stuff to think about. These three cities, one after the other, had Menickean juices flowing, anyhow. Which means I'll probably finish Part 5 of Caveman in the year 2008.

Resolved: Apples are the best fruit

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One imagines that the contestants at CatNats were all complaining about the judge pool. This is only fair, since the judges were all complaining about the contestant pool. Curiously enough, however, the elimination-round contestants were uniformly a strong, experienced group representative of elimination rounds everywhere. So this judge-pool-lite that is CatNats must have somehow managed to figure out, despite its incredible randomness, who the strongest contestants were. Which is a tribute to the contestants, who must have appropriately adapted to their general audience. The Old Farts maintain that this is one of the underpinnings of LD's value, the need to adapt to audiences (it is an important aspect of any speaking gig, throughout life). The OFs don't say that you should have to adapt to someone who's never heard of LD, but you should be able to pick up ballots from someone other than a former TOC debater. The more parochial the activity becomes, the less catholic it will be (if you'll allow a little vocabulary borrowed from the moment).

Meanwhile, there were those other contestants. I was judging up a storm (for me, which means I still probably managed to get more time off than anyone else), and I was astounded by some of the things I saw and heard. My average points were about 24. I saw some good debaters, but seldom in the same round. [Note to the kid who came up to me afterwards and said he read my blog, I thought you were good. If you had told me ahead of time that you read my blog, I would have thought you were great.] [Note to everyone else going forward: If you're not on my team and you read this blog, keep it to yourself. It's bad enough that my life is empty, but for you to be with me in it does not reflect well on you. Log off and read "Moby Dick."]

What bothered me the most was the almost uniform lack of negative advocacies. I was even told once that the rules of LD place the burden of proof on the affirmative, while it was hit or miss whether the negative would tell me that all the neg has to do is prove the resolution is false (or the affirmative wrong) in order to win, or whether it would simply be implicit in the argumentation. Now I've been down this road in the past, but that never stops me from taking another trip. As you know, I am cursed with a rather profound innate understanding of the English language. Not only can I interpret straightforward sentences such as debate resolutions, but I understand with hardly any need to be bopped in the head the implicit aspects of these resolutions. Often a topic, like CatNat's "imparting of knowledge ought to be the primary goal of formal education." looks to the uneducated, non-English-speaking eye like it is about one thing, in this case, the imparting of knowledge. But Menick, recognizing the clever trickery of those Catholic resolution makers, sees that the focus is, in fact, the question of what should be the primary goal of formal education, with the imparting of knowledge posited as the affirmative advocacy. (Some CatNatites argued on the aff only that education was a good thing; these folks obviously had had little, at least insofar as debate theory was concerned.)

But this is too hard to understand. So let me try something else.

My point is that there is no such thing as a topic where all the negative has to do is prove the affirmative wrong, where the affirmative has an advocacy and the negative doesn't. Just because the neg advocacy is not explicit doesn't mean it doesn't exist. I mean, you could debate this way, but it doesn't make much sense. If the negative advocates no postion on a topic, then if any piece of the affirmative advocacy survives the round, the affirmative wins. In the unlikely event of no pieces of the affirmative surviving, since there is no alternative offered, we have a draw; however, since we can't have a draw, we rely on the judge to intervene. How, strategically, does this make any sense for the negative? Unless they argue perfectly, they lose, and if they do argue perfectly, they ask the judge to toss a coin. If the negative does have an advocacy, however, an alternative position to the affirmative, then the neg has an alternative to offer after having shot down the affirmative. Now the judge smiles and writes NEG on the ballot in big letters (unless of course the affirmative shoots down the neg advocacy, and we're back to the coin flip again, but that's another matter altoegether).

Let me provide an example that is metaphorically identical to CatNats. Resolved: Apples are the best fruit.

The aff value is health, with a criterion of varied ubiquity. Contention 1: Apples provide more vitamins and minerals than any other fruit. 2. Apples are easy to come by in a variety of flavors, more than any other fruit. 3. Apples can be made into a lot of different products, more than any other fruit.

The bad neg value is autonomy, with a criterion of protection of rights. The neg's sole contention is that some people don't like apples, and making them eat apples dehumanizes them.

Now, you should be able to see the problem here for neg. Aff has had 6 minutes to declaim on all the positive virtues of apples; neg will no doubt use a lot of its NC time to refute these claims, but some of these claims are pretty good. And all neg says in its own constructive is something that is, well, not constructive. Think about that good old English language again. Both sides give a constructive case. But this neg didn't construct anything, this neg simply attempted to tear down the affirmative construction. The likelihood of tearing down the entire construction is slight, and even if you do tear it all down, every last apple branch crushed in the dust, without any construction to consider, what is a judge to do? Not only that, but the neg has put the entire debate on affirmative ground. All we're ever arguing is apples; apples is catnip to the affirmative, and the affirmative wants nothing more than to discuss apples. Yeah, great strategy, neg: keep the entire argument on aff turf. Do you think the US would be independent of Great Britain if Washington had had to fight in downtown London?

You can boil what I'm saying down to something so elemental that even a CatNatite can understand it.

"Sith is the best Star Wars movie because of its special effects."
"No it isn't."
You be the judge. Based on the argument above, what is the best Star Wars movie?

Negative positions are always implied in the resolution. A comparison is suggested even if not clearly stated. Some of those implications are easier to divine than others, but they're there if you do a little research. But, come to think of it, there are even times when there is a clear comparison in a resolution, and some debaters STILL don't offer a true negative position. Remember, this isn't only about theory, it's about practicality. The odds of winning on the neg without a clear constructive position are against you, and certainly your odds of winning on the neg are always better when you propose a clear position of your own. This is pure strategy. It's obvious.

And Sith is so far from the best Star Wars movie that I don't even have to offer any arguments. I dare you to refute this.

Funny, you don't look Catholic

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CatNats is an experience that has been compared by some to having your teeth pulled by a sadistic Nazi dentist with a severe case of the shakes.

The comparison is unfair to sadistic Nazi dentists.

This year we kicked off the festivities with a Brewers/Astro game at Miller Stadium. Milwaukee’s entire economy is, apparently, based on Miller beer. Everything is Miller this or Miller that, and many of the downtown buildings are topped by Miller cans the size of, but not serving the purpose of, water towers. I am told that the streets are lined with microbreweries, something I cannot personally verify (and not for lack of trying), but which sounds to me like a fifth column of the first order. Then again, if you have to have a fifth column, they might as well hand you a beer as they bore from within.

Anyhow, speaking of boring, the next day the local rag referred to the baseball game in question as “ugly.” A well-known sportsman myself, I have no choice but to agree with this analysis. I haven’t seen this many balls since Scarlett rebuilt Tara. I went to buy a hotdog (or more accurately, went to invest in a hotdog, since the amount tendered was beyond my previous wiener imaginings) and came back and found that I had missed two entire innings, complete with no runs, no hits, no errors, and as far as I can determine, no strikes, no balls and no outs. As far as the hotdog was concerned, it took me longer to put mustard on it than to eat it, so I went back and bought another one. By this point it was the seventh inning stretch, every single player was 0 for 4, I was still hungry, and I was practically broke. Still, it was fun, in some outré concept of same, and it was the last fun we were to have for the next twenty-four hours.

We all assembled at the local technical college the next morning for the seven o’clock meeting, which started punctually at about a quarter to eight. The journey to hell had begun, and our seats in the hand basket were assured. At CatNats they preset the first three rounds, if I’m not mistaken, but definitely the first two, which didn’t stop them from having another meeting between preset rounds one and two so that the conductors of this fine event could tell us what idiots all we judges were. Now, when I get bogus ballots, I yell at my tab table; I can provide witnesses to this. I do not bring the tournament to the realm of what is now a three-hour delay so that I can berate the judges, on whose good graces the entire enterprise rests. I guess I know that the problematic judges are incurable, and the non-problematic judges will simply become problematic when you tar them with the brush of problematicity. But the conductors of this event, who apparently have never been to a tournament before, much less run one, blithely set us up for total schedule disaster without any of us having to lift a finger. Ultimately meals were a hodgepodge, we were lucky to get out by ten o’clock, there was no coffee after 9:00 a.m. (!!!), and the Lexington team and I were forced to resort to playing poker for peanuts. I went all-in on two pairs, 9-10, to lose to a suited 9-10 that flushed. Damned Lexington kids! That’s all they do up there in Massachusetts. They’re notorious cardsharps, and they are now playing with Menick peanuts, except for the ones that everyone kept eating because we were all starving to death. Finally we managed to get to Benihana before the doors were locked, where a splendid time was had by all, Kate H had her first sushi (an experience she addressed with grace and determination), and no one was killed by a flying shrimp.

And, of course, Crichton McClean broke (he’s a well-scrubbed debater for Hundrick Hedson), and the New York diocese took the sweeps award, so I guess it was worth it. Plus certain smug coaches proved their infallibility in one swift, winner-take-all round of speechie bingo. This is where experience comes to the fore. Anyone who’s been around for a while will always put his money on the congressman in the orange suit. I must point out, however, that this was only earning my money back. I had put out a side pot that the first award would not be distributed until a full half hour of self-congratulations, prayer and let-us-not-forget-the-little-people had ensued, whereas in fact, the first tin traveled in less than 15 minutes. It was a bet I was happy to lose. (I later lost the quarter yet again betting on the elevators at the Hyatt. It's that kind of weekend.)

After a fine dinner Sunday at an Italian restaurant with the Monticellans, some of us supposedly went off to see if multiple viewings made the opening scene of Sith any more intelligible, while others of us went to the top of the hotel and toasted the end of the whole thing (CatNats, not Star Wars, although I’m happy to see that one ended too; the Sithers ended up bowling, by the way, if you're keeping score here). One very good aspect of the affair (CatNats, not Siths or bowling) is the renewed tribalness within the coaching world. The old farts spent a lot of time polishing the schedule, promoting the MHL, readjusting some events, etc., etc., etc. I was even invited to join an official collection of OFs in aid of preserving LD as a worthwhile event. Is this an activity that should encourage clear and reasonable argumentation, they ask. I have my doubts. I mean, isn’t it an abuse of power for the coaches to attempt to force their self-perpetuating and innately biased discourse on under-aged and socially impotent children? Aren’t all metaphors equal at the moment they become metaphors, and since all we have of reality is the metaphor, and even the concept of metaphor is suspect when examined against the hermeneutics of— Wait a minute! That’s not me! Sign me up, guys.

Anyhow, word on the street is that the new pope will be working to correct the deficiencies in the running of the NCFL tournament. If this is true, I am with him all the way.

Cowboys and Indians

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Traveling through the southwest is a race to the point at which you become really, inescapably, ineffably, at your personal breaking point for dealing with cowboys and Indians. If you see one more piece of Pueblo pottery, one more boot, or one more Tony Hillerman novel, you will tear into the Rattlesnake Museum and break all the glass cages and hope at least one of those soporific serpents is lively enough to spring forth and clear the streets just a little bit. As you walk through Old Town after Old Town you wonder about the moment each of these entrepreneurs turned to their significant other and said, "You know, this would be a perfect spot for a shop selling Indian goods." You know how just about every Ramones song sounds exactly the same, but there are experts out there who can somehow tell one from the other? It's the same with these cowboy and Indian shops. They all look the same to me, but presumably there are experts out there who can tell them apart. Not that I didn't enjoy a little of this. As a matter of fact, I really liked Santa Fe, which has great restaurants in addition to its cowboy and Indian shops. It also has the GOK museum, whence I pulled some interesting tidbits on modernism to add to the ever-present Caveman (part 5 of which, the crusher, is still in the hopper). Taos began to pale a little, as something of a Santa Fe Junior, and then by the time we took that left turn at Albuquerque, there was simply nothing an Old Town or a cowboy and Indian shop could offer. Of course, this was the home of the Rattlesnake Museum, and that was worth a trip. But at this point in the journey, we were ready to mix it up a little.

Getting into and out of these places was marked by three noteworth sites. First, there's Monument Valley. Now I know for a fact that when I say John Ford to you, you think that maybe he was Edsel's younger brother, but to me it's a motherlode of American mythology. Driving through Monument Valley, you relive every Pappy film you've ever seen, and you even begin to think that, yes, maybe, perhaps, all right fine, even "The Searchers" should go into the old Netflix queue once again (and if you call yourself a Star Wars fan, and haven't seen Searchers, than you aren't fit to trim an Ewok's toenails). Secondly, there's Chaco Canyon, the ruins of a long-gone civilization. It is to marvel, shall we say. Thirdly, there's Acoma Pueblo, the oldest continuously inhabited city in the New World. High up on a mesa, the City in the Sky, you walk around in the wake of an Indian guide and fill in the complementary blank from the Chacos. We northeasterners don't think much about this part of our history. It's good to let some of it sink in.

I did, of course, succumb to a few items in the cowboy and Indian shops. In a way, it's like going to WDW. You enter normal, and before long you're covered in Mickey Mouse souvenirwear. Same thing here. I found a few things I simply had to have of the sand painting variety, plus the odd ceramic or two. So I wasn't totally immune as much as worn out, when all was said and done.

You will recognize me a Catnats by my spurs that jingle jingle jangle.

My life as a park ranger

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It's only a couple of hours from Las Vegas to Zion National Park in Utah. I recommend the visit. We stayed in a cabin on the grounds, with a nifty little instant fireplace to take off the incredible chill following our initial introduction to the Vegasian desert heat. The thing about Zion is that you're at the bottom of a canyon, and there are numerous jumping off points (figuratively speaking) for all sorts of different hikes. Mostly you find yourself climbing up, eventually to find signs for numerous other jumping off points (literally speaking). These signs are classic icons, and there are two of them. The first says Danger, and there's a picture of some schmegeggie falling off a cliff. The second says Danger, and there's a picture of some schmegeggie falling off a cliff but bouncing on every protuberance on the way down. Pick your choice of demise. In either case, the signs are posted at various one-foot-wide stretches of the path where, in fact, you will fall to your death either in one swell foop, or with a lot of little foops along the way.

That's entertainment!

Gorgeous country, though. All of it. Lots of spontaneous waterfalls, beautiful little lakes, breathtaking vistas. At some point, I found myself in a corral being eyed up and down by some squinty be-chapped cowboy who ultimately broke through his disdain and announced, "Kitty." As in, I was being assigned to the horse named Kitty. Now you know as well as I do that I should have gotten the mule named Buttercup, or the horse named Old Red, a nonchalant nag older than my mother that went instead to my daughter. But oh, no. I got Kitty. For those of you unfamiliar with our equine cousins, horses are these incredibly uncomfortable creatures that enjoy nothing more than speeding up, slowing down, eating every shrub from here to Arcadia, and doing whatever it takes to get the saddle, with the rider initially poised at twelve o'clock, to somehow reposition roughly at about a quarter past three. So, hanging on for dear life, progressively listing further and fuurther to starboard, and pulling Kitty's head back from the on-the-road brunch every two seconds, I made my way with the regiment for three hours of muscle torture that you simply can't imagine, because who knew you actually had muscles in any of those places? Of course, halfway there (such there as there was), it began to hail. Fortunately we were pummeled with these golfball-sized ice missiles for only about ten minutes or so, and it cleared up. Until, about five minutes from the corral heading home, the sky opened with good-old-fashioned American rain, just enough to soak one and all (and which, I'm sure, was the final example of Kitty's personal spite against me). We never saw another cloud for the entire trip. Or, thank God, another horse.

Not far from Zion is Bryce, which is Zion's opposite. At Bryce, you start at the top of the canyon, around 8000 feet above s.l. Which means that you're out of breath simply opening the door of the car. But what a sight! There are these things called hoodoos, rocks eroded by thousands of years of wind, that are one of the most amazing things I have ever seen. Unfortunately, all the trails down into the canyon had been washed out by recent rains, except for the horse trail, which at this point was not an option. This was a little too bad, because I would have loved to have gone down in there.

So, strong recommendations for Zion and Bryce. If you're in Vegas anyhow, add 4 or 5 days to the trip and see something (presumably) real.

Do you, High Falutin, take this Nostrumite?

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Las Vegas is, I guess, the wedding capital of the world. The thing is, it's not just quicky elopement weddings, which you would expect, a Britney type, spur-of-the-moment, find-me-an-Elvis-impersonator-with-a-JP-license-fast type of affair. (For the record, btw, I counted 3 EPs during the trip: one straightforward, one seven-year-old and one pretending to be a statue.) That's what I would have expected: The Wee Kirk on the Strip, with topless bridesmaids. But in fact, Vegas is a perfectly normal (in the American sense of the normative) wedding destination. Countless venues capable of handling hordes of revelers. If they can take in Comdex without batting an eye, imagine how well they can handle your special dream day! Easy transportation from around the globe, hotel rooms as far as the eye can see, plenty of Elvis impersonators with a JP licenses. You can't walk through a single casino in the entire burg without getting knocked over by three or four brides in full white-veiled regalia, each with some purple sharkskin-tuxedoed Gobo in tow, both often belting down a three foot margarita special as they head for the penny slots, trailed by a fog of the bride's minions in complementary orange organdy.

It was the perfect place for Odelie and the Mite to tie the knot.

Of course, the reason for Vegas was, indeed, accessibility. Odelie's immediate family is in Georgia, with the extended soeurs et cousines et tantes in various Paris suburbs, plus at least one branch in Milan. The Mite's folks are Californians, while most of his friends are Bostonians and New Yorkers. I guess they could have as easily done the deed in Atlanta, but the Mite feels that one Emory trip a year is enough for anyone, and Odelie is pretty game for an Episcopalian minister; I mean, let's face it, she did just marry the Nostrumite.

The wedding was at the Bellagio, which is pretty classy. The decor is simulacrum Italianate (as compared to the Venetian's simulation Italian), all the gamblers wear shirts and shoes without needing signs on the doors to remind them to do so, and the food (at least as this affair was catered) was to die for. About a hundred of the nearest and dearest were in attendance, split fifty-fifty between rels and buds. A live band of some true quality was running the proceedings (as if it should be hard to find a musician in Las Vegas; the only difficulty was selecting which other musicians they should be imitating, but in this case, they were just plain musicians—they must have come in from LA). Dancing till the wee hours, the champagne flowing like champagne. You would have liked it. When the festivities flagged, you could mosey off and toss a few sheckels into the video poker machines. (I should have had a wedding like that, except when I got married, I think Bugsy Siegel was still running things. Speaking of which, in my family, the difference between men and women is that men throw away their money gambling with great abandon while women stand around looking over their shoulds saying, "You know, you're just throwing your money away." This is not to allude to a specific difference between men and women—I'll leave that to the people running Harvard—but merely to point out the general dialectic of my existence outside of the debate universe.)

Anyhow, when all was said and done, the Nostrumite was in a state of permanent elation, I would hope at least untill the honeymoon is over. He and Odelie headed off to the Caribbean, while the assembled horde headed back to its various origins atwixt California and Milano, and the Menick clan proceeded on its journey through the southwest. At some point while still in Vegas we saw O, rode the NY NY roller coaster, and got injected with Borg nanoprobes, among other Vegasian pursuits. From then on, well, we'll get into that tomorrow.

Back in the saddle again

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We did, at some point, listen to a CD I bought of Riders in the Sky singing cowboy songs such as BITSA. I really like the Riders. I recommend them, if you like cowboy music. Even if you don't. I actually have a history with Ranger Doug; some day I'll go into it.

Anyhow, we are back. Mostly I'm getting back into the swim at work, thinking about getting organized for NCFLs, and even giving the odd nod to worrying about NFLs. Nonetheless, I do wish to report on a few of the happenings of the two weeks out West, and will do so as time permits over the next few days. Among them are such highlights as the Nostrumite's Las Vegas wedding, Menick on horseback, ruminations about Captain E0 brought on by ruminations about George Lucas, the quintessential postmodern novel, the state of health in Arizona, and various other this and thats. I will point out, just for a start, that opening day of Sith in Flagstaff (in which we partook after the odd amble through the Grand Canyon, a day of juxtapostion to put it mildly) was attended by one lone lorn Boba Fett character (although, let's not be unkind, he or she was a very good Boba Fett character) and was a nice bookend to opening day of an old film once called simply Star Wars (somewhere in this blog I've already mentioned that I attended that opening, way back not only before you were born, but almost before I was born -- in other words, I had hair at the time).

Aside from Milwaukee, I am here for the duration, and beginning to outline the plans for next year's MHLs. I will resume wasting my time (and yours) by posting here regularly once again starting tomorrow.

One last thing. It was 105 degrees when we flew out of Vegas yesterday. It was half that (if such a concept makes sense) when we arrived in New York. I leave you people alone for a couple of weeks and you forget completely that the weather is supposed to get warmer as we near Memorial Day. Jeesh!

Enough already

My bag is, indeed packed, and has been since Wednesday, since last night we took the Aged P to dinner, and tonight is poker, so when else could I do it? Liz says my bag is too big, and Kate claims she'll bring maybe two tee shirts and just be smelly for a couple of weeks. I believe in never having to launder anything, aided by bringing clothes beyond their prime and simply leaving a trail of them behind in the various motels of the Western world. I am not a fashion plate while on vacation (but unlike Kate, the air around me is breathable). But who needs to be a fashion plate in Utah?

Of all the stoppers I have run into in my debate career, the NFL PF topic takes the cake. "When a choice is required for public high schools in the United States, government funding should prioritize vocational education over college preparatory education." In other words, fed money should deliberately be spent in such a way as to keep the proles in their place. Oy. This simply is not an issue I have ever bothered my pretty little head about. I've worried often about education, but never in terms of this false dilemma.

The vacation will include Las Vegas, Zion, Bryce, various John Ford movie backgrounds, Santa Fe, Taos, that left turn in Albuquerque, the Grand Canyon and Penn and Teller, in that order. A nice mix of outdoors and indoors. We're even riding a horse one afternoon (actually, three horses, if you want the whole truth). Liz rides a couple of times a week, but me and horses, I can take 'em or leave 'em. I don't mind betting on them, though (and maybe this year, for once, I'll actually get to see the Derby rather than sitting in the LD Advisory Committee during the Run for the Roses).

So, I'm packing up the tent, turning off the email and heading into the hinterlands. The fact that I suggested that LD will weather the storm of Ks and pomo and DOD was met with great disdain, but I hope I'm right because the alternative is a slow and painful death. I've always been an optimist. I'm a cheerful fellow, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. I'm like one of those people that other people say, he never had anything bad to say about anyone, except of course I usually do. Somewhere inside of me there's a nice guy trying to get out, and losing miserably.

We'll meet again / Don't know where / Don't know when...

Get your pipe and slippers; this is a long one.

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The question everybody was discussing: is LD going to hell in a handbasket?

Prior to TOCs, the discussion was on whether there was a progressive movement in LD. Was the activity somehow changing, and was the change, as the “progressives” would have it, some real sort of progress? Was this progress in conflict with a conservative traditionalism that may be limiting the activity? It is nice to think that you are part of a new wave, the vanguard of change, the latest synthesis in a teleological dialectic. But curiously enough, it wasn’t just a small vocal minority voicing the idea that the activity is changing. At TOCs, which is something of a forensics summit conference, everyone was talking about it. And it’s a tripartite conference: the most aggressive and successful debaters in the country, a cadre of college students who to some extent set an agenda for the activity by actively promoting certain styles and case positions (either as short-term coaches or as adjudicators), and established long-time coaches. These groups probably exchanged few ideas outside of their own boundaries, except in the actual performance of the tournament. That is, high school mavericks didn’t meet with dinosaur coaches to compare notes on the subject, but at some point the debaters debated and the judgments were cast. But one serious question that arose was whether the performance was rigged. Had the Mutual Judge Preference acted to promote a single “progressive” concept of LD over some other concept by limiting the adjudication to judges predisposed to the idea of the progressive?

These are great questions. And I think there are some interesting answers.

There is no question that LD has evolved. Everything evolves. Policy has evolved, Public Forum is evolving, probably even Declamation has evolved. A clear trend of the last decade has been that the LD topics are more specific than general (the general no government vs bad government as compared to the specific separation of church and state, as one random example), and the argumentation of these topics is comparably more specific. In the early 90s you could master a handful of classical ethics ideas and apply them to just about everything. As the topics changed, these applications really didn’t work anymore, or at least weren’t sufficient of themselves. I remember the capital punishment topic. Sooner or later everyone had to argue the moral rightness or wrongness of executing wrong-doers, but before we ever reached that part of the argument we had to debate recidivists vs. the innocents. That is, every round had to point out that sometimes we executed innocent people, which would moot out against the fact that sometimes we don’t execute guilty people who kill again. Real numbers were tossed around, some small percentages of the whole death-row population, which were roughly equivalent. In effect, half of every round addressed body count. Then, and only then, if we actually got that far, could we directly address the values/ethics aspects of capital punishment.

Topics continued to move away from the general. We still get a general now and then, but on the present list, we have judicial activism, SOCAS, jury nullification, gov regulation of business, community/national stds, immigrant rights, progressive taxation, and regulation of sexually explicit material – all specific – and scientific knowledge for the common good, which is, perhaps, old-fashioned (at least, I could see it on the list 10 years ago). None of these specific topics will respond to Locke and Rousseau, or any other philosophers, for that matter, because they’re not philosophical. They are questions regarding very specific applications of ethics, germane only in that area of application. That is, you’d be hard-pressed to develop a categorical rule that applies equally, and clearly, to judicial activism and progressive taxation. They are apples and road apples. Different rules apply.

Why have the topics changed? I don’t know. Maybe we all got tired of Locke and Rousseau and Mill. To my perception, the choice of topic through the NFL process is generally reflective of the LD community as a whole, and while we may all have different particular preferences, and some of the resolutions really don’t work too well because of the wording or because the subject proves to be not all that interesting or debatable, I can’t say that the selection process itself seems unbalanced or unfair. We get what we deserve, in other words, because we are all equal in the creation of the topics and the selection on the topics.

The next big question is, has LD style evolved? That is, has the presentation changed? Has the style of argumentation changed? And you want to know something, I think the answer here is, not really.

There has been speed as long as I can remember. And it’s been regarded similarly in that time. First of all, speed only works if the audience is capable of handling it. Secondly, pedagogically speaking, speed is antithetical to oratory or, more quaintly, public speaking. I’m a firm believer that LD is intended to include learning to be a good public speaker, that learning to be a good public speaker is a valuable skill, and that blazing speed ain’t it. And third, most debaters, if they are speedy, aren’t necessarily better debaters for it. Often speed is in aid of spreading more material around in multiple arguments rather than developing one or two arguments more deeply. And, if it only works if the audience is capable of handling it, speed is self-defeating if you face a parent judge or a coach whose paradigm is anti-speed. No debater with half a brain will attempt speed in those situations. So I don’t think we’re developing a new model where speed is ramped up across the board. Nor has speed shown itself to be any more valuable in 2005 than it was in 1995. Or more prevalent. It’s an old story that, as long as there are poky paradigms and parent judges and debaters with more than half a brain, will stay in the same corner of the activity that it has inhabited for ages.

So has the style of argumentation changed? Are people somehow debating better these days? I don’t think so. Put all the TOC champions since day one into a new tournament and set them loose on each other, and the results, I think, would be random. The concept of a good argument hasn’t changed all that much since Aristotle, although maybe we can articulate the concepts of argumentation better. There’s no new logic that I’m aware of that makes more sense than the old logic.

One thing that is new to LD is the use of critiques/kritiks. It’s rather amusing to see LDers acting as if they’ve gone to the edge of the envelope with Ks, when in reality, Ks are rather old-hat in the policy world. And about as well accepted there as in LD. My understanding is that in policy the teams that run Ks often do so because they do not have the resources to compete with big powerhouse teams. If you have fifty novices cutting cards, as compared to three freshman sharing two teeth between them, you are definitely at a tactical disadvantage; the K is a strategic move to neutralize that disadvantage. Presumably there’s other reasons for running Ks in policy, but there is certainly no comparable resource disparity in LD. So people only run Ks in LD for strategic advantage absent a disadvantaged starting position.

A kritik in LD usually does not directly address the content of a resolution in the fashion in which it was meant to be addressed. For instance, in the separation of church and state resolution, a kritik would not argue simply whether there should or should not be separation of church and state. The issue would not arise in that constructive argument. The case would be about something else entirely (for instance, a commentary on the presuppositions of the SOCAS phrase itself through a Foucaultian analysis leading to an indictment of the NFL power structure—that Billy Tate is the Mussolini of his day, I guess). There are two aspects to this that ought to be clear to anyone why traditional educators are mostly not supporters of K approaches. First, most educators highly value all the background work that goes into understanding a topic. I spent a lot of time with the team talking about the pros and cons of separation of church and state. In our country, at this time, I perceive this as an extremely important issue. I believe it should be addressed head-on; it defines the world we live in, not necessarily in ways we wish it to be defined. It also helps us understand what is happening in Pakistan, say, which is your great example of no SOCAS, or in the mind of Bill Frist (shudder!). Where else do we have that discussion in high schools? Secondly, many forensics folks believe that kritiks are merely a competitive trick designed to put your opponent at a disadvantage: if you’re not arguing the topic, you could be arguing virtually anything, and how does your opponent prepare a defense against virtually anything? In this model, the K runner values competitive advantage over education. And while most forensics dinosaurs love to see their students win trophies, few of them value the competition over the education, and certainly none of them value the competition in and of itself. The K seems to be of that leaning, valuing the competition in a vacuum (and valuing winning that competition). It is no great insight that the competition is merely a means to an end in debate. We wouldn’t be here if there wasn’t competition, but the competition is merely a necessary evil. (This is true of any school-related pursuit where there’s competition, including sports.) The competition is a means to the end of augmenting traditional education. And at the point where the competition is valued higher than traditional education, there is a grave parting of the ways. Since there seems to be a small group of debaters who do indeed value competition removed from education, and this group seems to love all the gamesmanship of kritiks and speed, we get a perceived split between this group and the traditional educators. But, as with speed, kritiks are limited by the audience’s willingness to accept them. A parent judge will look at you as if you have a hole in your head, and a known coach will clearly identify in his or her paradigm an opinion on kritiks. So I think that this aspect of the activity, while more prevalent than in the past, can only go so far, unless the educators in the activity begin to disregard the content of topics and the value of teaching that content. I simply can’t see that happening.

The next big question is, are there new tools—new philosophers or philosophies—that make more sense than our classic approaches? More specifically, is critical theory taking over the values side of LD?

This is one of the most interesting thoughts being kicked around. Let’s face it, I’m writing Caveman to address the themes of critical theory that are extant in the LD universe, so obviously I believe that this material has worked its way into our community consciousness. But what does this mean for the activity as a whole?

This may be where we have the broadest split between the various camps. From the perspective of many debaters and many college students, critical theory (by which I mean everything from semiotics to Foucault to Derrida to actual CT, and yes, I know I’m being sloppy by being so all-inclusive, but you do want this essay to end at some time, don’t you?) is fascinating. It’s a whole new way of thinking, it’s modern, it’s (deceptively) fashionable (it’s sort of passé in many academic circles at this point), and it’s certainly a new way to approach LD material. Most high school teachers look at it differently: it is, at worst, a lot of incoherent nonsense, and at best, a body of thought that is beyond the skill set of the average high school student. And here’s where we start getting into an important distinction. There’s certainly nothing wrong with an intelligent high school student taking on any area of study and attempting to apply it to debate. I would hope we would encourage this sort of cutting-edge use of brainpower. But the debate teacher does not have a student with 2400 on his or her SATs (2400???) and a 4.0 GPA. The debate teacher has twenty freshmen who don’t yet know an SAT from and SST, and if the teacher is a true educator, the teacher doesn’t care. Now, I don’t think CT is really all that prevalent in debate (it’s sort of the intellectual equivalent of speed, if you get my drift), but what I’m saying here points to the crux of the rantfest. The debate teachers consider LD to be a combination of reading/research, writing and public speaking. The debate teachers have a responsibility to teach that combination to a broad base of students over a broad spread of time. They need to teach material that is accessible to their students, and which fits in with the rest of the curriculum. They need to maintain a program where the students are able to engage in meaningful competition, which usually means that they will need to enlist the aid of parent judges. And they need to maintain the support of school administrations who must see benefits in the student body gained through the activity.

Additionally, the debate teachers have seen the recession of policy over the years. Policy is an activity comprising only specialists, whereas LD depends to a great extent on generalists (i.e., enlists the use of—I would hoped trained, English-speaking—parents). At the point at which LD comprises only specialists—that is, at the point where only specialized judges can adjudicate the rounds because of either the content or the presentation—LD is on the same road to (near-) extinction as policy.

It would be tempting to underplay the value of parents as judges. I mean, no one really wants most parents at the back of the room. Even the most dedicated and intelligent parent isn’t as up to snuff as a coach or college regular. But I tab an awful lot of tournaments, and here’s the deal. None of these tournaments, zero, zilch, ixnay on the ournamentay, would happen without parents. Usually there’s about 25% parents in a judging pool. But if there’s mostly great judges and few parents (as at, say, Manchester), that’s because that weekend I’m back in NYC at a CFL for novices and intermediates which is being judged about 75% by parents; we’re all connected here, folks, and those varsity debate oaks all grow from novice acorns. Not to mention the parental commitment to aiding the running of tournaments (providing food, housing and general all-round succor). But the average tournament does use parents at the back of the room. And at the point at which I can not enlist parent judges, I will lose at least 25% of my tournament population. And the point at which I cannot enlist parents is the point at which bizarre and/or too speedy argumentation becomes the norm.

And that’s one awful big reason, ladies and gentlemen, to protect the norm, even if you're from the progressive side of things. Reduce the size of your tournaments, and you reduce the number of your TOC bids. Sure, there will still be a handful of unbelievable venues like Lexington or Emory or Apple Valley, but after that, do you really want to put your bid status in the hands of the Princeton/Columbia/Yale parli team? And even the Lexingtons and Emorys and Apple Valleys require adults to get kids there, to chaperone, whatever. Remove parents from the equation, and every program is thence required to support itself entirely from its program resources. Buy all its judges. Chaperone all its students (according to the rulings of all the individual administrations, some of which are Dotheboys in spades, if you get my Nickleby drift). I have historically sent students to three tournaments in three different states on the same weekend. Think I could do that without parents? It’s all well and good that a handful of mavericks travel the country on their own dime, but most debaters don’t, and wouldn’t, and couldn’t. And LD is not about satisfying a tiny minority out of the mainstream of academic concerns. It is about keeping the activity alive and vibrant for the whole community, including that minority. It’s not about right or wrong (and although I maintain there’s nothing particularly wrong with a “classical” approach to LD, I’m not really attempting to make value claims here), it’s about preserving the activity for the greatest number over the long term.

It’s that educational thing I was talking about before.

Which leads me to what was the disturbing thing of the TOC weekend. It was explained to me brilliantly in the advisory meeting. TOCs is certainly a fulcrum event for the activity. What happens there resonates throughout the activity. And if the elements of the activity such as speed veiling thinly spread arguments, kritiks bypassing resolutional conflicts, and postmodernist analysis generally considered inappropriate to the high school curriculum, are actually seen as winning, then that will resonate throughout the activity. Students will want to emulate the TOC style, whatever it is. And if it’s speed, Ks and pomo, that’s what they’ll emulate. And as I think I’ve made clear, if those elements were to become endemic, they could threaten the very existence of the activity.

There was a personal side to this, too. For all practical purposes, the members of the advisory committee, and for that matter almost every long-term dedicated adult debate coach in attendance, were blocked out of judging the tournament, either as low preferences or strikes. I have mixed feelings about Mutual Judge Preference, but frankly I feel that is not the issue here; it was simply harder for two debaters to agree on an adult coach as a one or a two than on a college student. But since all the adult coaches are the people responsible for keeping the activity alive (all of the students and all of the college kids will be long gone while we dinosaurs are still chomping on the ferns and vines), they were rather miffed that they had been cast aside as useless, and were saying as much to each other. Also, I gather there were comments made at DOA that were not exactly kind, and people were paraphrasing them rather liberally. (Contrary to popular perception, I seldom bother reading anything on the site except substantive discussions like Bietz’s column, about theory and practice; I really don’t give a rat’s patoot about much else, and I certainly have little interest in getting involved in long posting duels, given that the one time I did post I was immediately attacked—did you ever feel like Gulliver in Lilliput?).

So what’s the bottom line to all of this? Well, first, for all the commentary among debaters that there is a vanguard in LD setting up a phenomenal new beachhead of theory and practice that will mark the dawn of a new day, most of what is happening in LD has happened before and seems to be happening in roughly the same proportion as always. Of course, there may be some new ideas feeding into the system that will be of use to the community as a whole: I can see presenting an overview of pomo to my team to apprise them of some of these ideas, and if this material is applied to analyzing topics (as compared to ducking them), there’s nothing wrong with that. But then, there are always new ideas feeding into the system. Rawls had his day, for instance, and now there’s not much direct use for him, but no debater was ever harmed by reading one of the most important ethicists of the 20th century, and now his work is a basic element known to and available to all in the activity, if they are so inclined. (It’s also nice to read Rawls’s wonderfully accessible prose as some sort of evidence that decent prose can be written in aid of philosophical ideas, with logic applied the way it ought to be applied by a philosopher trying to make a complex argument.) And the nice thing about the outcome of TOCs this year was that the 16 finalists included strong representation of a traditional approach to LD. A Derridean K spread at lightning speed did not win the day. Which means that the indirect bully pulpit of the TOC, that fear that the fulcrum would provide leverage for the “bad” aspects of LD, enabled co-conspiratorially by sympathetic college students through MJP, didn’t come to pass. No negative message was sent to the world at large, directly or indirectly.

But there is nonetheless a hit to mindsets. The coaches are worried about what is happening to the activity. What they’re worried about may not be happening, but any pomo will tell you that, if you believe it, it’s true. The VB website aggravates this hit. There is indeed power in something like VB, not in providing a platform for what any vocal minority wishes to bloviate on, but in deciding what is and isn’t important. Inflating the importance of competition only acts to imbalance the goals of the community. Granted that VB is a money-making concern predicated on its personal profit motive, its site has outgrown its intent (selling cases and camps and, lately, its tournament). It must recognize this, and act accordingly. It has, purposefully or not, taken on a position of centrality in the community that I’ve never seen before. With great power comes great responsibility. I don’t see them understanding this yet.

Also, it is important that coaches, like me, remain open to new stuff. At the point where we summarily dismiss anything that we don’t like just because we don’t like it, we run the risk of fulfilling the prophecy the vanguardistas are making, that we are dinosaurs about to be melted into Sinclair oil. We need to address issues as intelligently as we want our opponents to address them. Dialogue is necessary, and presumably a teleological dialectic will result.

And lastly, it behooves students to remember that there is more to competition than meets the eye. There are school districts and budgets and buses and chaperones. Few schools permit students to travel as random unaffiliated teams wherever and whenever they wish to go (and few schools could afford it even if they were willing to do it). Schools have responsibilities to their entire student bodies that usually are prioritized over individual desires, especially in the extracurricular area. But more importantly, LD is an academic activity (often literally taught in the classroom) intended to introduce high school students in a meaningful way to the concepts of values/ethics, to enhance their research and writing skills, and to train them as speakers to make cogent arguments in front of a broad spectrum of adjudicators. The goal of the educators is to balance all these elements. If you wish to remove one of them, for example, limiting the audience of adjudicators to a select specialized few, you challenge the entire enterprise. Even if you are correct in what you are saying, promoting vanguardista ways, what you are saying undermines the community. If you succeed in making LD very fast and very selective and very difficult for the general community, you will re-invent policy, and the growth of LD will dissipate. The venues for LD will disappear because the schools will seek other activities that provide what LD was providing. LD as accessible debate will be a distant memory. And perhaps you will have set up Public Forum as the wave of the future to replace it (because PF, as LD once used to be, is a meaningful way to address the concepts of values/ethics, to enhance research and writing skills, and to train speakers to make cogent arguments in front of a broad spectrum of adjudicators).

I don’t think any of this is going to happen, though. I think we will self-correct what small problems we have, and blithely succeed for the foreseeable future. But we’ll only do it together, not as combatants. If you really want to change LD for what you see as positive reasons, you’d better work with the coaches and teachers you have. There really aren’t any others waiting in the wings to take their place. When they’re gone, the future of LD is gone with them.

Kaintuck

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So, sez you, how was it?

Well first of all, it was colder than usual. Kentucky in the spring should mean shirtsleeves out in the sun, Frisbees flying, the smell of the fresh manure that they always seem to lay down the day before we arrive (sort of like sympathetic agricultural magic, or synecdoche, or however you want to look at it). We started with a raging rainstorm, and although eventually we got sun, we never got Southern Springtime. I was looking forward to that.

We had Scott B as a fellow traveler, which was nice, a little unifying Northeastern touch. We met him at the airport and drove down from Cincinnati together. The usual quick registration and some sort of traditional argument with the tab room (Scott’s judge prefs had arrived three seconds after the deadline) and then off to Jalapenos for dinner. I actually own a Jalapenos tee shirt, which I “won” one year as a cinco do mayo prize, which may have also been tied into having a party of 103 and being the one who handed in the check. Having this as my TOC tee shirt, I’ve never felt the need to purchase one of JW’s. (He still has an assembly that stops the tournament cold on Sunday in order to hawk the latest edition.)

TOC Saturday is a busy day. 4 rounds for the debaters, a lunch and a meeting for the LD committee. The lunch is a TOC tradition, serving Hot Browns (created at Brown’s hotel in Louisville to calm the hungry crowds on derby day) and Derby Pie. This year it was at some club that was formerly a mansion owned by a nouveau rich couple that couldn’t break into the Whitneyesque Kentucky social horse scene, and then the husband died and the wife remarried one of the stable grooms (or something like that – JW regaled us with the story as an after-dinner impromptu). Every dinosaur in debate was there from both policy and LD, including a few who you thought were not only merely retired but really most sincerely retired. It’s a social event, not a rantfest, and as long as the room isn’t hit by a comet, a swell time is had by all.

Following this is the LD Advisory Committee meeting. The main order of business at this session is always evaluating the bids. As JW says, it’s not about rewarding or punishing tournaments, but satisfying ourselves that the bids are doing what the TOC needs in terms of supplying the right number people who ought to be at TOCs. There was not much disagreement this year; JW will announce his conclusions toward the end of summer based on the discussion (the conclusions are his; we literally do advise). The next order of business was judges, and the fact that although a lot of judges were hired for the tournament, the mutual judge preferences had relegated at least half of them to the status of wallpaper. I’ll talk more about judging (and the rantfest that underpinned the weekend) tomorrow, but there is general agreement that TOC judging needs to be of a certain standard reflective of the nature of the event, as compared to, say, the average weekend tournament where the spread of judges can be much more diverse (i.e., a well-trained parent is fine at a regional tournament, but a little less than what we want at TOCs). The solution(?) to this problem is to eliminate hireds altogether. JW will provide a list of acceptable judges for those bereft of them, but it is the responsibility of the entrants to provide all their own judging. I don’t think this will change the judge pool much, but it will aid in the tournament not wasting money on unusable judges, and there is certainly sense to that. Aside from the committee’s slice of the rantfest, the other interesting thing is always seeing how we individually ranked the at-large bids (JW distributes a spreadsheet of our choices). If O’Cruz offered me enough money, I might consider selling the list to MVP, but honestly, it must needs be private to the committee. I will say, however, that uniformly over the years there is general agreement. We’re not perfectly aligned, and we each have one or two in our own private Idaho, but we all read the entries about the same way, and rank the at-larges roughly identically. This is a good thing.

Dinner Saturday was at a pretty good steakhouse. Our social weekend comprised us, Scarsdale and Monticello (and Peter and Jacob on Sunday and in the poker game that couldn’t possibly have happened). Annie, it turns out, orders nothing but potatoes. The steakhouse obliged with a baked potato that was roughly the size of Pip the Wondercat. This was a Ripley’s Believe it or not potato. A Guinness potato. A potato that Annie would theoretically be eating after she worked her way through a three-foot pile of steak fries.

We left a trail of potatoes in our wake this weekend.

Sunday was a long day, marked by my judging two whole flights. I claim that this is a factor of not being particularly well-known as a judge, since I’ve been in tab rooms all year. Justin claims that it is a factor of being quite well-known and being cast off as a result. Whatever. Either way, I got to go to Starbucks to read the Sunday Times, I had a lovely lunch at that nice sandwich place near the school, I worked on the semiotics section in Caveman, I read the pomo book I’ve just listed over there to the right, I did the puzzles… What more could you ask?

The whole run-off thing was difficult. I bit the bullet for the first time since 1995 and watched the round. As you know, the reason I don’t watch HH rounds is that I get too emotionally wrapped up in them, eventually turning borderline homicidal. This was no different, but I did enjoy seeing the round, and was happy to see that 2 of the 3 judges were flowing the same two people I was.

That day I had charged Rose J-T with the chore of finding the best ribs joint in town for dinner. She did, she claimed, and off we all went to a restaurant whose name I have thankfully already forgotten. You know you’re in trouble when you walk into a ribs place and the first thing that the hostess tells you is that they’re out of ribs. As the dinner progressed, they also ran out of carbonation, French fries, bottles of root beer and ice cream. Joe V, in sympathy, ran out of patience, and as Jordan said, we would have liked to have left a big tip, but we ran out of money. Fortunately Justin forgot his tie, so the poor (literally) waiter will have something to wear if he ever receives his high school equivalency diploma.

Monday is the Breakfast of Mispronunciation, which was pretty much the usual. Then, of course, no matter how unpreferred you are, you still get to judge octos. Having scored on the strike parade once again, I used the time to work on Caveman. Lunch that day was at some drive-in where the waitresses come to your car on roller skates and say y’all (the plural of which is all y’all, by the way) and forget to collect the money. Good burger.

And finally, home to New York, watching my first Curb Your Enthusiasm shows on DVD. A fine ending to a fine weekend, and I hope next year that you qualify and I can do it all again. (I want to see what happens to Larry David.)

Jurassic Park 4: The Revenge of the Debate Dinosaurs

We got back from Kentucky late last night. It was a fun weekend, and there's lots to tell, but I've got to catch up on work today, and tonight we're brainstorming CFLs again, so it may take a while. Plus I'm getting ready for the John Ford Adventure, so my time is pretty much taken.

But this I'll say. Kudos to Justin for breaking at TOCs!!! Poor guy had to go 6-2 to do it, as compared to the lay-abouts who only had to debate 7 rounds. Note to universe: Justin, and an awful lot of other people who broke, were far from "progressive." Solid argumentation and deep research on the topic and an accessible style—who would have expected that these orthodoxies would triumph at TOCs?

Details to come.