Part the First, Geopolitics; Part the Second, I Just Can't Stop Myself

So I settled in with my copy of The Conspiracy of Art last night, only to be immediately taken by the concept of pataphysics. I find it curious that, given my interest in the Old Baudleroo, I’ve either never come across this before, or else managed to circumvent it when I did. Anyhow, it’s the science of imaginary solutions. In Baudrillard’s case, of course, one would use pataphysics to solve problems that do not exist.

No wonder I wake up screaming in the middle of the night.

I decided to go with the OB because talking about him vis-à-vis nukes reminded me that this book was on the to-read pile, thanks to a recommendation from HoraceMan, TSWAS. The OB’s theory, in a nutshell, is that possession of nuclear arms negates their use, which I don’t necessarily agree with, but if there isn’t someone running the OB at least at, say, the Lex RR, then something’s wrong with the world.

One big issue of Jan-Feb is our general lack of accepted authority, or accepted ideas, on the geopolitical level, as compared to our abundance of rather accessible orthodoxy on the political level. That is, I start out the Plebes with Locke, and maybe a side order of Rousseau, and see no reason why they can’t go quickly from there to the readable parts of Rawls. Voila, an instant introduction to social theory via the social contract, the general will and fairness spread across an entire society. Throw in a little JSM “On Liberty,” and you’ve got one hell of a philosopher in the 9th grade. (There are those who sneer at such orthodoxy, but as I’ve discussed in the past, and will no doubt reprise in the future, one learns to play scales before one plays Liszt’s Sonata in B minor). These standard texts in fact inform most thinking on the nature of government and society, even when the thinking is in opposition. (That is, you can’t have Marx without Locke, or at least not Marx as he is. You can’t make claims that the individual is not the core unit of society if that has been the presumption so far, without knowing that you’re undermining that presumption.)

As far as I know, and I admit I’m no expert, there is no similar canon for geopolitics. I’m sure there are standard texts, and probably even a canon as such for the subject area, but not with this level of accessibility and acceptability. All the Founders of the US were familiar with Locke, in other words, but I wonder what all the members of the UN General Assembly are familiar with. Because of this lack of standard thinking, of a normative, if you will, we’re pretty much on our own when a subject is of a geopolitical nature. We cannot draw on shared knowledge, and shared expectations, to the degree that we can with issues concerning one single national polity. This is reflective, no doubt, of the reality of the planet on which we live. We have established various rules for managing our societies on a local level, and we mostly do that pretty well, but we have yet to establish accepted rules for managing our societies on a global level. We do not all play well with others, and our rather meager attempts to define rules and boundaries don’t stand very well. The US, for instance, defies the Geneva Convention with Guantanamo, so it’s not just some backwater nations thumbing their noses at what is considered international common law (except insofar as Mr. Bush has turned the US into a backwater). Some theorists, like Rawls if I’m not mistaken, have determined that for all practical purposes the various nations of the world are in a virtual state of nature with one another. Until we are willing to subsume national interests into overarching global interests (imagine there’s no countries) the way we subsume individual interests into overarching societal interests on the local level, this is probably not going to change. As a result, topics that we argue that cross national, sovereign borders require addressing the reality of the world in which we live, both from the perspective of what we ought to do (and maybe we ought to be a global village instead of a globe of villages) and what we have to do (survival in the global state of nature).

Which brings us to the big question: What, exactly, comprises justice on a global scale if we have no generally accepted standards of justice? Jan-Feb asks us to determine the justness of certain actions of a global nature, yet we have no normative scale for weighing those actions. What do we do?

Well, what I do is continue this line of thought in the next installment of this blog.

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Frequently Asked Stumpers: A Very Special Episode of Stump the Chump

My friend Herman over at WTF has sent me an early copy of their new FAQ section, which I hereby share.

What did the Chump do before Star Wars came out?

Nothing.

The Chump takes great delight in victories of the Bronx Science team in the years before his arrival. Why is this?

There were no years before his arrival. The Chump has been at Bronx Science since the creation of their first debate team in 1927. He just looks different now.

Why does the Chump go to every tournament every weekend, even when his team stays home?

The Chump has a sworn responsibility to report on every debate round that takes place throughout the country, regardless of where, when, how or why. His credentials specifically allow him entry onto the grounds of any institution of learning where two people are not agreeing with each other, although he seldom wears his official “Debate Sheriff” badge in open view except in the deep South.

Where did the Chump debate before he became a debate coach?

The Chump represented The Long Island School For the Terminally Depraved for the years 1997-2001. He participated in Remedial Declamation, Extemp for the Home Handyman, Defense Against the Dark Arts, Lincoln-Douglas and Upholstering. During his years at the Donald Trump Virtual College of Really Kool Knowledge, the Chump majored in vestigial appendages with a minor in the gold rush, representing his school in Parli, barley and Farley Mowat. His win/loss record of 0/521 has never been equaled, much less surpassed.

Where did the Chump spend his junior year abroad?

A broad? Rumors of the Chump's sex change have been wildly exaggerated. Nevertheless, he does traditionally summer at Lake Titicaca. And yes, his favorite food is cockaleekie soup, and some day he hopes to live in Tuckahoe. Meanwhile, he's working on his W.C. Fields impression so that this paragraph will be a lot funnier when he says it than when you read it.

Where does the Chump get his vast supply of debate trivia?

At Vast Supply of Debate Trivia ‘R’ Us.

What does the Chump do with all the old schematics he collects?

The vast majority of the Chump’s old schematics are available for sale on eBay. The occasional rounds of special merit, where one schmoe the Chump has heard of was debating some other schmoe the Chump has heard of, are displayed on the wall of Chump Central, the Chump’s museum/domicile.

Does anyone read the Chump’s column who isn’t either insane or trying to butter him up before he judges their next round?

Not bloody likely.



Why is the Chump’s picture different on WTF and CL?

The picture on WTF is a pseudonym, while the one on CL is an alias.

Why is the Chump’s new computer called Herpes?

You might as well ask why a rock is called a rock. Don’t you know anything about linguistics?

Why does the Chump’s have such an affinity for Disney princesses?

Orphaned at birth due to a freak lawn bowling accident, the Chump was raised by a series of wicked stepparents, dwarfs, renegade nuns and the odd parish beadle. And we do mean odd. On his sixteenth birthday, while polishing the iron maiden in the basement of his current foster family, the Lecters, the Chump was visited by John Goodman, his fairy godmother. The Chump was told that the key to his freedom was hidden either in the vestle with the pestle, the chalice in the palace, or the flagon with the dragon. Unfamiliar with Danny Kaye movies, the Chump escaped captivity and ran away to the Bronx, also known as Prairie Dog City (Where the Grass is Green and the Girls are Pretty), where he was finally adopted by a now aging Cinderella and her husband, Prince Not So Charming Anymore But Still Marginally Acceptable, who had been unable to have children of their own due to sun spots and a steady diet of talking mice. It was at this point that the Chump swore his allegiance to Mama Sin, as he called her, and all the other Sins. He was officially inducted into Disney Princessia at the traditional Ceremony of the Boning Knives, conducted in Orlando in 2003. (NOTE: The ceremony was officially witnessed by the Celebration, Lake Highland and Nova debate teams, none of whom have ever recovered from the ordeal.)

Will the Chump ever run out of debate trivia for his five-a-day column?

We certainly hope not, because when we can’t think of anything to write ourselves, we need a source of inspiration.

Why do you refer to yourself as We?

We don’t.

Part the First: Jan-Feb. Part the Second: The Chump Returns.

“War. Oof! What is it good for? Absolute nuthin’.”

These lines (not penned by Cole Porter) always run through my head when we look at a topic like Jan-Feb. “It is just for the United States to use military force to prevent the acquisition of nuclear weapons by nations that pose a military threat.”

War. Oof!

This is, to put it mildly, one of the most important geopolitical issues of our times. Students learning about and evaluating this issue is of great educational benefit. It matters. Testimony v plea bargaining, on the other hand, like many topics, is interesting enough on a “Law and Order” level, but it’s not one of the pressing issues of the day, and of little concern to people in general. Realistically speaking, we expect our courts to act both fairly and expediently and, well, for the most part they do. None of us are sitting around worrying that Sammy the Bull somehow committed an immoral act nailing the Teflon Don, or that the prosecutors were immoral in their use of old Sammy, or that Sammy lied, or that Sammy got off too easy. And of these may or may not be true, and may or be not be arguable, but they are sterile issues insofar as they affect our everyday lives. On the other hand, we may have just stepped back from the brink of yet another war yesterday, a war of yet a new series of unforeseen damaging consequences directed by proven incompetents already mired in more war than they know what to do with. Iran not actively developing nuclear weapons may be the best gift they could have given the United States. I applaud their pro-Americanism, because it was merely a roll of the dice whether at some point before being drummed out of the White House Cheney and Co would lead the troops down the streets of Tehran to the accompaniment of the young children throwing rose petals in front of our tanks and grown men and women weeping as they welcomed their liberators.

What a crock. But don't worry. Iran isn't going away any time soon.

Needless to say, my interest in running non-resolutional material is at its highest low, its greatest nadir, its furthest ebb, whatever. To diddle with arguments such as, there’s no such thing as justice, or there’s no way of determining the posing of military threats, or some nonsense that pretends the question is unanswerable is a waste of time because the question is being actively asked by our government, and has been for at least a generation, and has real answers with real consequences. It is the real world. You can address your answer through lines of real world argumentation as practical as Realpolitik, or you can address your answer through Just War analysis, but you do have to answer the question because the possession of nuclear weapons is both attractive to non-possessors, and threatening to their enemies. Coaches who urge that we duck the question are urging their students to ignore a serious issue that will haunt their entire lives. Oh, yeah, there’s no such thing as justice, so we can’t argue this.

Get real.

We talked about this last night aboard the USS Hud. As one looks at it, one starts seeing a clear historical line all the way back to October 1962 (which, curiously enough, brings up what you're looking for if you merely plug “October 1962” into your Google search box). Then look at the casus belli (with apologies to “Seinfeld”) of Iraq, the war that took the acronym WMD from Policy debate and gave it to the masses. Look at North Korea. Iran, of course. From Carnegie.org: “It is estimated that some 27,000 nuclear weapons are divided among eight nations, five of which (the United Kingdom, the United States, France, India and Israel) are regarded as stable, democratic allies. The other three—China, Russia and Pakistan—are regarded with some uncertainty. The ninth member of the Nuclear Club is almost certainly North Korea and Iran is likely to join in the next few years. The newer members pose the continuing threat of destabilizing regional or global politics.” Look at the Osirak strike; give some thought to the US using Israel as a proxy to attack Iran (not happening anymore, with the recent news, of course, or at least not for a while). Look at South Africa’s nukes (as in, whatever happened to them). The more you look at all this stuff, the more you can begin to create a profile of a situation that fits the resolution. You can understand that certain nations have certain characteristics that make them want the bomb, that drive them to develop the bomb, and that make their possession of that bomb a serious problem. You can’t argue total nuclear disarmament because the genie is already out of the bottle. No matter how you slice it, we can easily face a nation sworn to enmity of the US, doing its damnedest to get its hands on nuclear weapons.

(As an aside, you could of course run the Old Baudleroo’s approach to nukes, but I wonder how well he’d hold up under serious analysis. Then again, running the Old Baudleroo sort of sidesteps serious analysis in an LD round, wouldn’t you say? Still, pure analysis of nuclear gamesmanship is on the table.)

Anyhow, the gauntlet has been thrown down by our choice of this topic. Students who actually learn about it will gain incredible benefits. Probably even students dedicated to kritiking it will still gain the benefits, if only from their need to block against debaters who actually care about the subject. But will it make for good debate, regardless of how it is argued? I have no idea. But debate is about a lot more than debate. And you knew that already.

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Herman Melville over at WTF informs me that the Chump is changing his content, and will henceforth be addressing personal questions of a Dear Abby nature. In other words, he has gone from debate trivia to debate self-help. Herman kindly send me a beta copy of his first such column, which I attach below.

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Stump the Chump

Dear Chump:

I keep forgetting to provide an underview for my opponent’s overview when I’m running off-case framework arguments that subsume both cases and leave an unsightly mess in the boys’ locker room. What should I do?

Theoretical in Wisconsin

Dear Theo:

Take two spikes and call me in the morning.

The Chump

Dear Chump:

Ever since I joined the debate team I spend half my day fighting off the young women who now find me immediately attractive, unlike previously when if they gave me the time of day, it was Daylights Saving in January. What should I do?

Too Sexy for My Shirt

Dear Too:

It is a well-documented fact that debaters have an irresistible appeal to members of the opposite sex. Some people call this GDS (Good Debater Syndrome); others refer to it as IYDYB (In Your Dreams, You Bozo). To eliminate this problem, at WTF Institute we recommend memorizing whatever you watch on television the night before and then repeating it word for word to anyone who is attracted to you, ending each descriptive sentence with “Remember that?”. This guarantees they will never want to be in the same state with you again, much less have the hots for you, even if it’s a small state like Delaware.

The Chump

Dear Chump:

My parents say that ever since I’ve joined the debate team, everything with me is an argument. In response, I cite McArthur 1997 “Adolescent Behavior Modes” as evidence for my claim that it’s not an argument, it’s simply a contradiction, at which point they complain that if I’m going to steal material from Monty Python, I could do better than that, which does not link back to their original argument, but still they send me to bed without any supper, the only saving grace of which is that both of my parents are the worst cooks in our state, even though it’s a small state like Delaware. What should I do?

Just Say No

Dear Just:

In situations like yours, where you parents never want to engage you in lively repartee, much less belabor every little facet of your existence, I recommend disowning them and taking up with the Kiwanis. Also, keep the phone number of a good Chinese delivery restaurant among your speed dials.

The Chump

Dear Chump:

What’s the best way to defeat evidence your opponent makes up on the spot?

Slow-footed Sue

Dear Slow:

If your opponent makes up good evidence on the spot, I recommend copying it and using it in your next round. However, if your opponent’s evidence has no inherent ability to win rounds, your best bet is to point out to the judge that his fly is open, and let nature take its course.

The Chump

Dear Chump:

What should I do with my hands when I’m giving a speech?

Mitt

Dear Mitt:

Anything but that.

The Chump

Dear Chump:

If the fire alarm goes off while I’m speaking during a round, what should I do?

Smokey the Aff

Dear Smokey:

This problem comes up often, especially during gang warfare season in Celebration, Florida (the Mouse Bloods versus the Duck Crips). We recommend stopping your timer and telling the judge you’ll be right back, and running like you’ve never run before to the nearest exit. If the alarm proves to have been real, you will have saved your life, and won the round by default for inspiring your incredulous opponent and judge to likewise seek an immediate change of venue. If it turns out to be a false alarm, however, just walk back into the room, mumble something about fire wardens, and start up where you left off. This will usually work with parent judges.

The Chump

Dear Chump:

I get nervous even thinking about speaking in public. My hands sweat, my knees knock and my head twitches uncontrollably. What should I do?

Heebie the Jeebie

Dear Heebie T. J.:

First take a jump to the left, then a step to the right, with your hands on your hips you bring your knees in tight—you get the idea.

The Chump

Dear Chump:

Are you ever going to get tired of writing these stupid parodies of poor Mr. Cruz who is obviously suffering from some horrible disease that twists his face up like a demented pretzel, if that picture is anything to go by?

Outraged in the Small State of Delaware

Dear Out:

No.

The Chump

P.S. And go back to Delaware where you belong, and stay there.

Au Revoir, Iran; au theatre; O'C's Herpes; oh cetera

I practically fell off my chair at the breakfast table this morning as I was reading the paper. Oh, Iran isn’t building nukes. New intelligence, sorry about that, please go about your business. Jeesh. Of course, NPR reported that Dick Cheney is still holding out some hope that this intelligence will be overturned at some future date, as he knows in his heart of hearts (okay, his gut of guts, given the unlikelihood of his having a heart) that those damned Iranian A-rabs need a good whacking to set them straight, just like we have with the damned A-rabs in Iraq. The only thing they understand is a good shot upside the head, confound it. Fortunately everybody in the universe other than Dick Cheney can sleep easier tonight knowing that at least one senseless war has been averted on George W. Bush’s watch. On the other hand, so much for the Iran evidence in Jan-Feb…

So what else is going on? Well, you probably surmised by now that I like the Stoppard “Rock ‘n’ Roll” play. Actually, make that blown away. I’ve seen most of Stoppard, and this was easily the best. Anyone with any interest in theater needs to see this; the performances of Rufus Sewell and Sinead Cusack are phenomenal. I don’t know where it will go after NYC, but it’s worth coming here! Curiously enough, it was playing in Prague last time I was there. That has to be a kick, to see a play about freedom and the end of Communism in a country in that very country. Anyhow, the play asks all sorts of questions, for instance do social systems determine character or vice versa, and where are we in the epistemological understanding of mind vs body or the ghost in the machine. And it tells a damned good story. God, I love good theater. We almost got shut out by the strike, and it would have been a shame. I never would have known what I was missing.

O’C and I have been musing over our tab job upcoming at Ridge. Judges are in short supply (if you can read this and are looking for a few extra simoleons, let me know), and then there’s the absolutely seamless relationship of the Goy of Tournaments and E-TRPC—

Let me try that again. “And then there’s the absolutely seamless relationship of the Goy of Tournaments and E-TRPC.” You know, the problem is, I’m not quite sure how to demonstrate the irony I am wishing to express. Let’s try it this way.

—And then there’s the absolutely random relationship of the Goy of Tournaments and uploaded E-TRPC data. One whole division of judges was lost, other judges were marked incorrectly, and that’s just the stuff I saw comparing the pool/field to my own entry. Oh, well. O’C is in charge of data entry, which he’s doing on Herpes, his new MacBook. Why he calls it Herpes is beyond me, because I warned him that wouldn’t be the best idea of the week, but you know how he is. When he isn’t fielding the real hardball questions that debaters inevitably ask when they’re under the influence of mind-altering drugs or emerging from a coma, he’s watching Howard the Duck and calling his new computer Herpes. What can I say?

Meanwhile I’m registered up for Lex and working on judging issues, and rounding up Sailors for the other winter tournaments, and reminding everybody about next week’s MHL at Newburgh and trying to pin down the location of the NYS District tournament (running with Goy software, I hesitate to remind myself), and lining up January buses and paying NFL bills and finally realizing that their homepage has to be the absolute worst since the invention of white type on black backgrounds with pirated Green Day mp3s playing in the background. And, of course, thanks to Herman for keeping us apprised of the activity at WTF. I don’t know what I’d do without that guy!

Coachean Log supplemental: Breaking news!

Our WTF correspondent Herman Melville has provided the following early release of this week's column.

Stump the Chump

Dear Chump:

Is it true that Texas debaters spread so much that if a student has fewer than 27 responses to every argument he or she is sent to Guantanamo Bay?

Curious about Lone Star

Dear Curious:

Yes.

The Chump

Dear Chump:

How many times have novice Declamation entries won TOC by mistake?

Thinking about Double Entry

Dear Thinking:

1988 was the closest when Glob Morgenstern, a freshman from Peoria, thinking he was entering his local CFL tournament, mistakenly got on the wrong plane and ended up in Lexington, Ky, where he simply picked up a schematic and walked into a round and started declaiming. He proceeded to win all his rounds, although he was declared ineligible to break because he had eaten kielbasa for lunch for three weeks prior to the tournament, and no one was willing to go on breathing the air in any room in which he was exhaling. Back in Peoria Glob was declared co-state champion in Dec, Policy and Afterdinner Yammering.

The Chump

Dear Chump:

How many mutants have won NFL?

Watson Crick

Dear Watson:

All of them.

The Chump

Dear Chump:

What is the square root of 17223?

Mathematically Disinclined

Dear Math:

Bronx Science, in 1982, 1994 and 2002.

The Chump

Dear Chump:

Has a heretic ever won CatNats?

Torque Yo Mada

Dear Torque:

Heretics are not permitted to debate at CatNats, although in 1997 three agnostics, seven Scientologists, four Essenes and a gypsy did participate undercover by pretending to be the Mormon Tabernacle Choir; at that time, Mormons were officially considered to be Catholics by Pope John Paul II. Only the gypsy made it into late rounds.

The Chump

Dear Chump:

Why doesn’t Michael Bietz like normal music?

Wolfgang Amadeus O’Malley

Dear Wolf:

When Bietz was in second grade, he was abducted by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir (the real one, not the faux MTC at CatNats) and subsequently raised by the Osmond Family. This worked to the benefit of all concerned until Donny introduced little Bietzie to Megadeth. Bietz found thrash metal a little too much for his young ears, and escaped the family to live in Seattle with Courtney Love, at which point he auditioned for the part of the Olsen Twins in the band Nirvana. He lost out to Kurt Cobain, and decided instead to become a debate coach.

The Chump

Dear Chump:

Are copies of your Chump photo available for sale as t-shirts, mugs, dart boards or other items of general use?

A Total Fan

Dear A:

Photos of the Chump are not available on common household items or casual clothing, but the Chump will come to your house and sit around looking pensive for $6 an hour if you throw in a bag of chips and unlimited rights to watch “Howard the Duck” on any HD players you may have handy.

The Chump.

Structure

It used to be that you could find plenty of magazines to read on your train ride home from the city on a Saturday night, magazines being the medium of choice for such travel. But nowadays my magazine reading is down to the bare minimum: The New Yorker, of course, MacLife, Publishers Weekly, Rostrum (!) and Gourmet. And if I miss the latter two, I am not overcome with grief. But this particular train ride last Saturday (after seeing “Rock ‘n’ Roll,” about which I’ll probably comment soon) commences with a visit to the magazine shop at Grand Central, so you theoretically have the world to choose from, but the only magazine in addition to those above that I ever come away with (and those I actually subscribe to, so I wouldn’t exactly be buying them at a shop) is Wired. There’s stuff available along the lines of Critical Theory Today and various political and literary quarterlies that put you to sleep just reading the covers, and some guy that wouldn’t move was standing in front of the comic books (and looked as if he intended to read each one, in sequence, until the next issues of each came out, and he would just keep going on, forever) so there may have been something there but nowadays comics really are all part eleventy of a forty-seven part series so that’s pretty unsatisfying, so, Wired it was.

Now here’s the deal. Structure, in architecture, is whatever holds the building up. It is the framework of the building. Look here: http://www.wired.com/culture/design/magazine/15-12/mf_baker_sb
What Baker is able to do, and what he’s doing with Burj Dubai (which, according to the article, has already set the record as the tallest building/tower in the world, although it’s still under construction and steadily growing taller, to some unspecified height), is dwarfing other tall buildings because of the footprint of his structure, the buttressed core and the three wings. Look at the illustration. In the (real) Sears tower, you see usable space around a core, and crisscrossed structural elements. The problem at the top, and why you can’t go any further up (in the imaginary Sears), is that you need an immensely larger amount of structure to keep the thing from falling over or swaying so much that you get nauseous on the upper floors. Baker’s building doesn’t sway because of the three sides providing counterforces and counterbalance. It’s also fast and easy to build, with lots of space that isn’t structural.

So, what’s the point? There’s a quote in the article to the effect that the bigger and more complex you build, the more the framework takes over, until there’s no room left for anything else. This is an architectural truism. And a building that’s all framework/structure is no longer a building, it’s a sculpture. There’s no room in it anymore except for whatever it is that is holding it up.

And I’ve seen LD cases like that. All framework and no room left for anything else. They may be interesting, like sculptures, but they are not useful, like buildings. They can’t hold anything up except themselves. Which may be why I find theory debate so uninteresting: it might be aesthetically pleasing, but it has no content. It is jejune. It’s useless in a practical sense. And what is the point of an argument that is useless in a practical sense? A framework that structurally supports…nothing.

Architects of necessity fight this battle of engineering and art and practicality with everything they build. So should LDers. At the point where we’ve moved away from the resolution and simply concentrate on the structure, we have failed as architects of argumentation. And I’m not quite sure what we’ve become instead.

Judge Chicken

Here’s the problem. You can’t be in two places at once, and you can’t do everything. Or at least I can’t. I’m pretty good at a lot of things, but I can’t both be at a tournament and go home from that tournament at the same time. And I can’t cover for everyone on my team as far as judging is concerned. Whether I’m in tab or at the back of the room (Quick, Henry, the strike sheet!), I cover the traditional 3 debaters. If I were to judge at Lex, to tell you the truth, I’d put myself into the PF pool simply to see what’s going on in the activity. As a matter of fact, I’ll probably go into a couple of rounds regardless, for that very reason. I’m also planning on checking out a bit of PF at Ridge. Why not, eh? Most of everything I know about LD I learned from watching LD. Why would PF be any different?

This is all as prelude to the fact that registration for Lexington opens tomorrow, and while I have a battleship load of Sailors wishing to participate, I am likely to only arrive with a dinghy full when the time comes. I’ve already eliminated a couple of my main judge possibilities (and need to still figure out the last, who will be juggling exams at Beet Central at that time, although according to CP Harvard is revising its terms starting next year, and getting with the rest of the known universe, so this problem is finally going to end). But more importantly, there seems to be an absolute work stoppage on the part of the team’s parents. Or maybe it’s some cabal of parents and students both. I’m not quite sure. But if you coach a team that includes LD and/or PF, you know this, and I don’t have to tell you: If you don’t have parents volunteering to judge, you’re not getting very far.

Here’s the thing. I get the impression that most parents simply don’t realize the absolute need for their services, even though I certainly do tell them that if they show up to the orientation meeting. But, that’s one hearing of the plaintive cry. After that, the plaintive cry is only whined at the students themselves. And this is what I don’t get. The students realize this. They’re not stupid. The responsibility for getting parents is entirely theirs, for the simple reason that it’s their parents, and they’re the ones who need those parents if they want to debate. And if they’ve been to a tournament or two, they realize that it’s not as if their parents will be in their face all weekend; far from it. (And the adults who can’t take a day off now and then to support their kids are few and far between, so don’t tell me you work unless you work 24 by 7 and never take a day off for any reason whatsoever. Given that I work and take days off for the activity all the time means that this excuse falls into the pretty punk category.)

Occasionally there’s a parent or two who really get a kick out of judging, and they’re with us practically at every tournament. Or they’re just resigned to doing what they feel they have to do, kick or no kick, so there they are. In those situations, the pressure is off everyone else. The team gets spoiled, I think. And, I will admit, I did graduate a few incredibly dependable stalwarts recently. Ah, those were the good old days.

Anyhow, what we’re left with is the game of Judge Chicken. As the deadline approaches, the Sailors all wait for someone else to provide the judge. I’m not sure what effect this has on anything aside from pissing me off, but I guess it’s a factor of them not wishing to explain to their parents that this isn’t an option, but rather a necessity of the activity. And if a parent indeed has done a good share already, then maybe the feeling is that it’s someone else’s turn (which is indeed true). Or maybe they think I’ll pull something out of a hat, and all will be well. In any case, they wait till the last moment and then, with any luck, finally the poor parent is put forth, and the battleship can set sail.

But you want to know something? This time I’m hoping that this particular game of Judge Chicken is a bust. I have threatened them now regularly with the prospect of only bringing the handful I can cover myself. In a way, I think it’s time that this actually happen. I’ll pack 3 of my own choosing into my car, and the rest of them can read about it on Victory Briefs. Give those of us in the trenches a few shout outs from the home front, you know?

The bottom line is, of course, that I started out as a parent judge in this activity myself. I hardly ask that my parents get carried away enough to take on the coaching job, but I simply can’t figure out what the problem is.

Sigh…

Well, Did You Evah? and other thoughts up to and including etc.

Aside:

I’m rather taken by that handful of people who write both lyrics and music, and manage to do them both fairly well. There are even those who perform their own music, which is a hat trick that virtually guarantees that somewhere, something will be lacking. I mean, I’m okay with (some of) Neil Young, for instance, but he’s no Irving Berlin. For that matter, even Irving Berlin is no Gershwin (George on the piano side or Ira on the pencil side).

Anyhow, the case in point is, I hasten to point out, not Whitesnake (I shudder at the thought) nor the Five Satins.

In the still of the night,
As I gaze from my window,
At the moon in it’s flight,
My thoughts all stray to you.
In the still of the night,
While the world is in slumber,
Oh, the times without number,
Darling, when I say to you;
Do you love me as I love you?
Are you my life to be,
My dream come true?
Or will this dream of mine
Fade out of sight
Like the moon, growing dim,
On the rim of a hill
In the chill, still of the night?

I’m especially taken by those last three lines. Dim/rim, hill/chill/still. Talk about clean. And this is a song, of course, meant to be sung, and setting it in the rather unlikely music practically breaking out from its early contained handful of notes is what makes this a classic. The music without the lyrics is pretty good, the lyrics without the music are pretty good, the two together are pure art. I was listening to it this morning, sung by Helen Merrill, who has a voice like an icicle, perfect for Cole Porter. God, but I do love to shuffle music. (Next up was Midnight Oil’s “Beds are Burning.” I live my life sorting out juxtapositions.)

Not Aside:

Meanwhile, back at the ranch… The Sailors have elected the co-captain team of Robbie and NoShow, a fine choice among many fine choices. I popped over to Greeley yesterday morning to mislead them on Nov-Dec, as they are right across the street and do have a standing offer of befuddlement simply for the asking. I spent this morning doing the happy dance that my “Rock ‘n’ Roll” tickets will actually get me into the play on Saturday. Numerous tournament dbs have been posted for the Sailors to sign up, although they are engaged in a serious game of Judge Chicken (who will wait the longest to volunteer a parent to chaperone, because they don’t believe I’ll strand their little butts back in Montrose as I drive off merrily with 4 of the ones I’ve chosen at random, but then again, they actually do believe that I’ll strand their little butts back in Montrose, so it’s mostly a matter of, hey, it’s not my parent that’s the problem, as I doubt if my mother is interested in either Columbia or Lexington, but maybe you know her better than I do and can convince her to at least do PF and to tell you the truth, she’d probably jump at the $150, but parents don’t get paid, not even mine, and right now you’re asking yourself, are you telling me that old fart Menick’s parents didn’t die about a hundred years ago). I’ve got to answer 20 questions to be one of the District Chairs du jour in January’s Rostrum (How has NFL made you a better person?). Stump the Chump is instantly my favorite part of WTF: it should be every day, and replace all other postings. I almost wish I was going to Princeton, but not a lot. I think I’m calming down regarding Facebook. If you have a Wii, I will come into your house in the night and steal it, leaving broccoli crumbs behind so you’ll suspect some random vegan. Etc.

Why digressive debate wins rounds

So here’s the deal. I have no idea how many judges in the world are prejudiced in favor of NFL-style debate (i.e., you debate the resolution, you achieve your value), but the number is not insubstantial, and at many tournaments represents the majority of the pool. Yet even at those, shall we say, conservative tournaments, digressive debaters doing anything but arguing the resolution and defending their value do very, very well. How could this be?

There are a number of possible answers, but I’m only going to present one of them.

A small but not insignificant number of debaters are intrigued by fashionable argumentation, which at the moment includes theory, kritik, off-case discussions, etc. This material, whatever its inherent value in the activity, is seen as hip—fashion is called fashion for a reason—and there is unquestionably a strategic advantage to running this sort of material in front of college student judges (who, in fact, may be responsible for much of it). As the same time, you would think that there’s a strategic disadvantage to running this sort of material in front of traditional judges. It is not unusual for major tournaments to be chockablock with those college judges, many of whom are being paid for those services, who are perceived as knowledgeable about the activity by tab (which is highly unlikely to be ranking them according to their paradigms—God knows I never have), and who are therefore in round after round, but there are plenty of those other judges in attendance as well, who are as inclined to think as poorly of digressive debate as these college judges are inclined to think positively of it. Yet the digressives are picking up the conservative ballots. How is this happening?

First of all, not all of the digressive debaters are necessarily good, and not all the digressive debaters are picking up all their ballots. The material they have chosen as the basis of their strategy is complex, and it’s easy to get lost in the intricacies of theory (debate or critical) and the like. We’ll exclude these schmegeggies.

But there is a select group of digressives who are good. The thing is, this is tough material, and some of the smartest people are attracted to it, and because they’re smart, they master it. Logical enough, regardless of your opinion of the material. (And if a debater is thinking strictly $ircuit, there’s hardly a down side to digressive strategy at all.) So, right off the bat, we have some of our smartest debaters attracted to material of a nature we’ll call Parmesan Debate, so as to skip the linguistic offensives of either pro- or di-gressive. We’ll call the kind of debate they’re not doing Romano Debate.

Switch to the tournament environment. Things are going hot and heavy. In a particular round we have a Parmesan Debater versus a Romano Debater. But here’s the thing. The Parmesan Debater is very very good and very very smart, while the Romano Debater is merely very good and very smart. The judge, despite his particular taste in cheese, will vote for the debater who wins on the grounds set by the debaters. In this contest, the Parmesan Debater has the natural advantages of skill and smarts, and wins the debate not because they are Parmesan but because they are, intrinsically, the better debater. Their cheese didn’t win, their brain won.

At many, many tournaments, it could be that the best and the brightest at that tournament are, by their own choice, Parmesan Debaters. Any tournament field will be dominated by its best and the brightest, and if that best and the brightest are Parmesan Debaters, Parmesan Debate will dominate the tournament. (Some of the best and the brightest may also be Romano Debaters, and in that case, flip a coin, but as long as they’re outnumbered as percentage of the field, they’ll be outnumbered as percentage of the elimination rounds.) My point is, obviously, not that the style of debate is winning, or even responsible for the win, so much as the people who choose to do it. They’re picking up even Romano judge ballots, not because their cheese is better, but their cheese making is better.

From here, you can look at all the various reasons/influences/whatever that are responsible for Parmesan Debate in the first place, and address them separately. But don’t address them as being responsible for more victories in the debate arena. It just may not be true, even if every single round at a given tournament is won by Parmesan Cheese. It could have been Romano. Hell, it could have been Provolone. The cheese isn’t what’s doing the job here.

Still, it’s incredible that so many of the finest would be attracted by mere fashion. Where are the iconoclasts when you really need them?

A timely message from our correspondent at WTF

Dear Mr Menick:
I am fine, and I hope you are too. We have been extremely busy here at WTF HQ, as you can well imagine, what with holidays and and upcoming tournament and a general lack of harassment from the debate community at large. (Has Smilin’ J gone on sabbatical?) Nevertheless, we have found the time to create a new feature which I’m sure will appeal to you. I’m attaching a copy to this message.
Thank you.
Your friend and colleague and general well fellow hale met,
Herman Melville
Quartermaster, WTF

Stump the Chump

NEW YORK, N.Y. — I’m excited to introduce a new feature on WTF in which I will seek but seldom find answers to perplexing questions of debate trivia sent to me by members of the debate community or else made up by me and masquerading as having been sent in by members of the debate community. I mean, let’s face it, who else actually gives a flying fig? Anyhow, I’ll start with a set of questions that I wish, indeed, I had been frequently asked.

You can post queries right here on WTF when you run out of incoherent shout-outs to your teammates and reasons why we’re going to hell in a handbasket, and I’ll select a few to answer in my next installment. Alternatively, you can come to my house and plunk yourself in my living room and just start blathering.

Has a debater ever won the Tournament of Champions?
Yes. I was mistaken about this for some time—after all, who would believe it—but My Man Gus gave me the heads up, and R.J. Reynolds supplied the evidence in an unmarked brown wrapper sent directly via Parcel Post along with some racy French postcards we’ll discuss in a future column. Actually, for the sake of full disclosure, the evidence was supplied many months ago, and I should have double-checked, but it’s very hard to get past all those racy French postcards. R.J. reminded me of this via e-mail. (Ooh-la-la!)

1992 featured the only actual debater final round in the history of the TOC. (I am confident of this now that I’ve done a little double-checking.) Leif Ericsson of Mexico’s Hasta La Vista High School defeated Vesuvius Hills High School’s Smilin’ J in finals. Smilin’ made the only repeat final round appearance in the TOC’s history and stole the trophy as a senior while everyone else was at the breakfast trying to figure out what the grits were. All the other TOCs were won by bricklayers, proctologists, carny trash and Trappist monks.

The evidence with which R.J. provided me was a microfiche stolen by the CIA from the 1992 New York City Invitational (AKA Big Brooklyn); the tournament is held in October, and both Leif and Smilin’ were in the field. (Neither won Big Brooklyn that year, by the way. The title went to Lana Miami of North Israel Beach High School.)

So, for those looking for history this season, it’s happened already. But history is always happening, except when you look for it, and then it’s already happened and you’re too late. Deal with it.

Who was Malcolm A. B. Ump, the namesake of the annual tournament at Hendrick Hudson?
Malcolm A. B. Ump was an earthy debate coach at Hen Hud — considerably predating his various unearthly successors — and was, with Richard B. (“Hum a Few Bars and I’ll Fake it”) Sodikow at Bronx Convent for Lapsed Scientologists, a co-founder of the Dim Hudson League.

Did Petey-Pete get married? What is the deal with the “Petey-Pete-Pate-Cake-Mmllddrr” moniker?
You won’t believe how many times I’ve been asked this! No, Debate’s Most Eligible Bachelor has not wed. (Petey’s mother, who was my Spanish teacher in high school, asked me to call him that. Actually, she didn’t, but I needed to figure out a way to work in the fact that his mom was my Spanish teacher, since I tend to work that into conversations with great frequency.)

[The above paragraph was found to be unimprovable from the original. Sometimes even the greatest among us are stunned into silence.]

“Pate-Cake-Mmllddrr” has always been Petey-Pete’s last name. The Tawny Port school district, of which Scribbler High School is a part, has a computer system that won’t accept either alphanumerical or non-alphanumerical symbols, so he was lucky to be called anything. Go figure.

Has any team ever fallen asleep during finals at Nationals in Lincoln-Douglas debate?
Despite what the tournament handbook presented each year by the NFL would have you believe, yes, many teams have not only fallen asleep, but some have gone into long term comas. In 1986, John Warthog and Renee Hammond Eggs — both of St. Michael’s New School in High Mexico — advanced to the final round of Nationals while sleepwalking. The two — former policy partners as well as boyfriend and girlfriend, mother and son, and brother and sister — were made to regain consciousness for the national title. Prior to the round, John handed Renee a rose on stage, while Renee attempted to stab John with a well hidden dirk. Apparently, at the awards ceremony and after much serious drinking among the national committee, the wrong victor was announced (hey, they had a fifty percent chance of getting it right), though this was later clarified when Renee was whacked by a band of hired extemp assassins. Currently, only John is listed in the list of champions presented annually at the tournament, although his whereabouts remain unknown.

What were the early TOC-qualifying tournaments in Lincoln-Douglas debate? Is it true that one could qualify to the TOC by merely showing up at one’s state tournament?
This isn’t a list from the first year — 1386 — but it’s an early one, from 1591. (I have the list from an old Nostrum, which included an advertisement for the TOC, with JW Patterson kicking sand into Charles Atlas’s face.) I know that the University of Pennsylvania Liberty Bell Repair Kit was a TOC-qualifying tournament prior to 1891.

OCTAFINALS BIDS: The Barking Forum for Top Dogs, the Beverly Hillbilly Invitational, the Harvard Beet-Packers Convention, the New York City Invitational (Brooklyn Science), the Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness Invitational, and the Wake Up and Smell the Early Bird.

QUARTERFINALS BIDS: The Homeboy Classic, Crayola Marmot, the Malcolm A. B. Ump Memorial Tournament, Pince Nez Invitational, the University of Massachusetts Uninvitational, the University of Oregon Woodchopper’s Ball, and the Village of the Damned Tournament.

SEMIFINALS BIDS: Apple Pan Dowdy East, the De Gustibus Invitational, Bishop Heal Thyself Invitational, Calhoun, the Meadow Dell Dale Lea Glen Creek Ril Pond Rapids River Brook South West East North Invitational, the Iowa Couscous, Isidora Duncan Classic, the Roger Rabbit Washington Classic, the Valley of Mid-America’s Cup O’ Noodles, the Vesuvius Over the Hill Classic, the Johnstown Speech & Debate Flood, and the Wes Crusher Classic.

FINALS BIDS: The Skitch Henderson Invitational, the Crestfallen, the Florida Blue Ridge Mountains, Specific Lutherans, the Ratrace Invitational, or any tournament with more than fifty entries from three or more states, or more than three entries from fifty or more states. Qualifying to Nationals or to the NCFL also earned a debater one bid, as did placing first or second at one’s state tournament, provided the state was a bona fide member of the Union. Debaters could not use two finals bids to qualify to the TOC, but could trade them in for a latte at their local Starbucks.

I am actually in the final stages of conducting a lengthy interview with J.W. Patterson, owner and chief franchiser of the TOC, so we’ll have more on this in a bit.
—
If anyone cared about the National High School Tournament of Debate Trivia Champions, it would be Jon Cruz.

Monday, with a full week ahead: we settle in for the long haul

I’m ready for new horizons. I have no more steam on Nov-Dec LD or Dec Pfffft. As far as the former is concerned, if the Sailors don’t have a fix on in it by now, they never will. And as for Iran, well, we’ve collected evidence and outlined an approach that should stand, so there you are. At Little Lex Tim “The Beard” Averill promised that January’s topic would be the cat’s pajamas. I certainly hope so. We’ll know on Saturday, of course, when the topics are released. I’ll be looking to WTF to break the wind news as it happens.

Tomorrow night the Sailors will elect their new captain. Unlike national politics, where campaigns last longer than terms in office, we posted a db for nominations right before Thanksgiving, and tomorrow we have a vote, then immediately following we run off the top two or three, depending on the numbers. I used to appoint captains, back where there was one person in each class and there were few challenges to my Solomonic wisdom. But as the group grew, it seemed a better idea for the tars themselves to decide who should carry the honor of leadership. It’s their leader; let them be the deciders. As a rule, this tends to result in co-captains. Personally I prefer a clearer path of responsibility, but given that the captain’s burdens do not require sending novices into battle or anything like that, sharing the blame/credit is probably okay.

Other than that, tomorrow will be general discussion. Things pulled from the recent novice ballots, for instance. Don’t pick your nose during cross-x. Don’t slurp your soup during prep time. Don’t wear white after Labor Day. All the usual items that come up year after year. Then maybe more specific how-to material for everyone in an open forum. Since no one’s debating this weekend, that ought to hold them for a while. Usually we have a sprout or two that insists on heading down to Princeton, but this year there was simply no fire in the New Jersey belly. Whatever. I haven’t been down there in so long, I hesitate to comment on the tournament at all, since all I have is my failing memory. I do recall enjoying the atmosphere more than the debating, but as they used to say about the Automat, you can’t eat atmosphere. Atmosphere fans this season will have their shot at the Gem of Harlem.

The one thing that seems to be marking this year is the rather spare amount of signing up for tournaments on the part of the Sailors, especially the plebes. I’m getting a sense that they’re waiting for the real season to begin, despite various protestations to the contrary explaining that, if they don’t sign up now, they’ll be dreaded Intermediate debaters with no starting or end points to intermediate. I’ve almost given up. Maybe if you talk to them, it will have some effect. Where’s that old fire in the belly, the girding of loins, the once more unto the breach little touches of Harry in the night? Oh, well. Christmas is coming. Maybe the December arrival of new topics will give us all a new lease on life.

Let's get back to normal

What a week.

First of all, I was sick, and took at day off, and then that night I got the news about Michael, and like everyone else, I didn’t know what to make of it. It just came out of nowhere. Kaz asked me to pass it along to everyone, and I did, and then I just sort of went into some state of suspended animation for a little while.

Tuesday, though, I decided it was a good idea to have a meeting. We needed to talk about this—hell, I needed to talk about it. Michael was in Bump tab a couple of weeks ago, and got close to a lot of kids, and then reunited with a lot of the alums, to whom he was one of the constants of the activity. So we talked a bit, and then went on. That is what you do, you go on. You don’t learn much from it, and you don’t come out any better for it, you just get through it. And the closer you are to a person, the harder it is. For Sheryl and the NFA kids, it will probably take a lifetime.

But, as I say, you go on. So I did some Christmas shopping the day before Thanksgiving (the Day Job gave us the day off), and that was productive in getting me into the spirit of doing some Christmas shopping, without actually doing much Christmas shopping. Starting friction for something like this is very strong, and must be overcome. And it’s not even as if there’s that much to buy (although Pip has left a very long letter to Santa that must be attended to). It’s more the thought of it than anything else.

Thanksgiving was, no doubt, much like everyone else’s. Relatives come, turkeys are eaten, games are played. I dug up my old Disney Trivial Pursuit. Kt and I beat the pants off all comers, but that was to be expected.

I spent a lot of the weekend cleaning up computer stuff and organizing and doing things I’d been putting off. Put some pictures on Facebook, posted a collected debriefing from here on the Bump page as a guide for future coaches thinking of running a tournament, connected with some people I haven’t seen for a while, including Olivieri, who I ran into at Circuit City. I updated my jimmenick.com home page so that CLG could find the Amazon link (lord knows somebody needs to find it). Got started on a writing project that’s been in the back of my mind. Had a lot of trouble making CDs from my Christmas tapes, so I gave up and went for MP3s. Played poker and won three whole dollars. Took some naps, read some old magazines (I’m caught up with the Thanksgiving 2006 issue of Gourmet). Recorded a Nostrum. Etc. In other words, I didn’t do much of anything, but it seems like I did a lot, or vice versa, and I guess now it’s back to normalcy.

Take a deep breath. Hold it a minute. All right. We’re ready.

Bump debriefing, part six: What Would Menick Not Do

This is the final debriefing on Bump, which I hope will be of interest/use to others hosting tournaments.

While I concentrate during the event on what I consider the chief job of a tournament director—keeping the tournament running—there are other aspects of a tournament that also need to be run. I don’t believe that I could handle those in addition to managing the running of the rounds, so I ask for parent volunteers to handle these for me. These parent volunteers are every bit as important as the tab room in making a tournament work, except that their contributions are a little more indirect. That is, a tournament can run without housing and good meals nicely served and comfortable judges’ lounges, but it can’t be run well. To say these things are non-essential, therefore, would be true. But to attempt a tournament without them would be absurd. And considering the amount of work involved in them, for a tournament director to attempt them personally would be impossible and/or insane. In other words, if it weren’t for hardworking, committed parents, there wouldn’t be any Bump. There wouldn’t be many high school tournaments at all, probably. The world of forensics would be a bleak, uninviting place.

I seek volunteers to head up each of those areas: housing, meals and judges’ lounges. Each is a job in and of itself. Each is a lot of hard work, over long hours. Let’s look at them.

Housing is, apparently, something of a uniquely northeastern custom, but it’s a good one. It allows us to go to tournaments all the time. If we had to pay for hotel rooms weekend after weekend, well, we wouldn’t. The money simply isn’t there for it. I guess we’d redesign our universe to more one-day events, with the predictable decline in the quality of our debaters. (Yeah, the northeast sucks, except they seem to be everywhere in the country doing pretty well, so I wonder which northeast the legends of impoverished LD are about, anyhow.) But housing is a bear. If you have a big enough team, you could conceivably offer slots solely from your own parents, and that would be it, but few schools have that big a team. Hen Hud certainly doesn’t. And some schools may have the numbers, but not the facilities, because they’re city schools with long commutes that don’t translate into a five-minute ride home, or they're lower income schools where situations may not be amenable to a boatload of extra people spending the night. At Hen Hud, we now will guarantee only 150 housing slots. The housing parent has to come up with these by, essentially, pounding on doors. Telephone calls, emails, begging, more begging. Connecting with team families, former team families, team former families, friends, friends of friends, people walking into WalMart looking especially prosperous. Whoever. Then, once you get 150 slots covered, you’ve got to handle the roiling sea of registrants to be housed. Why do we start imposing fines? Not only because of my extra work, but the houser’s extra work. Names are attached to housing, then the name changes, so a new name has to be attached. There’s drops and adds. Changes every time you turn around. Next year, the fines will be higher, and the housing limit absolute. Add someone after the limit is reached? That’s your problem. You can’t get blood from a stone, or housing from a tapped out houser, but you can get rooms at a motel. It was Benjamin Franklin who first pointed this out, I think. In any case, there’s the housing list sent when registration closes. There’s the housing list when people actually turn up (or don’t). Then there’s the matching of names to slots and getting all the information to the right people in the hubbub of people showing up at 10:00 to pick up their charges for the night. I’m usually in tab pumping out the morning’s pairings while this is going on, but I’ve been in the housing area, and it’s like bedlam, only crazier.

Thank you, Ms. Raptoulis, for handling this for the team in 2007. (That’s Peanuts’s mom, if you’re wondering.)

Meals are, at least, predictable. You get what we had last year, unless I tell you that there’s going to be an appreciable difference in numbers (which I couldn’t really tell, this year, as we were offering fairly different events). You’ve got to deal with three suppliers: 6-foot heroes on Friday, dessert cakes on Friday, pizzas on Saturday. Food has to be ordered, paid for, delivered, set up and served. Parents are enlisted as volunteers to help the volunteer in charge, and kids are pulled in for the heavy lifting. A good food parent keeps an eye on the concessions table (thank God) and keeps that supplied if your concessionaire isn’t around at the moment. And a good food parent coordinates with the judge lounge parent to keep that site stocked. A good food parent is a godsend. You know this if you’ve ever tried to feed three hundred or so people a couple of meals served around their rounds and flights and coming in from two buildings.

Thank you, Ms. Theodore, for handling this for the team in 2007.

Judges’ lounges are stocked from contributions from team parents, which must be sought and processed in advance of the tournament, and then supplemented as necessary. Food must be laid out pleasantly in two venues (although next year it will be only one, as there are few adults in the grammar school) and kept neat and stocked for an entire weekend. There must be enough coffee for everyone including Erin, who drinks 6 gallons herself before the first Saturday round is even posted. As I’ve said earlier in this series of debriefings, if you have a place where judges enjoy hanging out, where they’re treated well, they’ll come back, and when you’re hiring, the word will get around. Plus there’s simply the question of hospitality. One ought to be nice to one’s guests, and treat them well.

Thank you, Ms. Gofman, for handling this for the team in 2007.

When I say these folks handled things, I mean they handled them. With little or no help from me. I’m from the delegation school of management: Here’s the job, you do it, if it goes well you get the credit, if it goes poorly I get the blame, what do you need from me to make it happen, see you when it’s over. As I say, it would be impossible for me, or anyone, to run a tournament any other way.

So there you are. I’ve written up this series to give you an idea of what goes on at a tournament, maybe just because you might be interested, or, heaven forbid, you’re thinking of running one yourself some day. Every year I try to improve things from the previous year. I’ve been doing it for over a decade and there’s still areas for improvement. There will be areas for improvement until I stop doing it, and then there will be areas of improvement for some other poor schmuck tournament director to take on.

And so, back to the business of everyday coachean biliousness.

Remembering Michael Bacon

One of the Sailors wrote this.

"I am honestly stunned. In the countless hours I spent with Mr. Bacon during Bump, I quickly grew to admire him. His undeniable kindness and how quickly we hit it off two weekends ago did enough for me to exemplify the kind of guy he was. I had the honor of being judged by him - even then I was fortunate to notice how constructively he critiqued what could've easily been labeled an abhorrent performance on my part - just again showing how much he surely loved what he was doing. In talking with him and seeing him communicate with his NFA pupils, it was clear he was passionately involved in debate and took much pride in improving those who he taught."

I cannot add to it. We all miss, and mourn, a friend.

Bump debriefing, part five: The ballot table

I’ve been to very few tournaments that were neatly contained. Aside from local events like MHLs, where we might acquire a small building for a hundred teams or so (I’m thinking mostly of the Newark venues), usually we’re in a very large building, or in some cases, a number of very large buildings. People are on different floors, in different wings, in totally different locations. Somewhere there’s a tab room, and somehow the ballots from all those different people in different locations have to get to that tab room. This can be quite a poser.

Different tournaments address the issue different ways, depending on the scope of the distance. At Yale, for instance, we’ve resorted to cell phone call-in results on the Friday night, which is a pretty good idea when people are split up seven ways to Capistrano. In most places, though, it’s one building, but a very complicated building. There seems to be a rule in the construction of high schools that demands that the room numbering system be done only in primes, imaginaries, or hack-proof file encryption. You’ll walk down the hallway and it’s 101, 102, D-42, 2888, C3PO, A-V Room, Boys, More Boys, Nurse’s Office, 103, 301, 031, Nurse’s Other Office, 013, Even More Boys, Keep Out This Means You, and 104. In that order. You know you’re in trouble when the person asking you for a map is the assistant principal. As mentioned earlier, it’s a fair assumption that many of your judges have some reason to start their rounds late, and some other reason to end their rounds late. And meanwhile, the tab room is playing endless games of You Don’t Know Jack and just praying for ballots. There are times, of course, when there really is not much to do, but when it’s time to do something, and there’s nothing there to do, then the clock is ticking away and nobody—NOBODY—is happy.

[This is the point where, if you’re working in tab with him, O’C wanders off. He is, simply put, one of the greatest wanderer-offs of all time. Or maybe that’s one of the greatest wander-offers. Whichever. If you’re working with him, make sure he has his cell phone with him if you see him grabbing his pith helmet for another excursion into the bush. Otherwise, you’re on your own.]

The ballot table is a combination concierge desk and command center, and it is often the most poorly planned of the basic elements of a tournament, because I think that some TDs underestimate its importance, or just run out of steam when it comes to thinking about it. It’s sort of the default thing people come to last when they’re organizing their events, and it’s given a priority way lower than it deserves. On the one hand, it is the interface between all the attendees of the tournament and the staff of the tournament. It is the official site to which all have access, of which all will ask questions, where all will come when all else fails. On the other hand, it is the radius of the wheel of ballots, whence runners extend with their orders (“Get the ballots out of Becker’s hand if you have to slash his throat with a Torture Me Elmo doll to do it!”) and return with their hot little ballots. I think of the runners as a part of the ballot table, although this does not mean they should all sit around the ballot table so that none of the attendees of the tournament can get near it (a regular problem). I organize the Bump table with people whose job is ballot checking and distribution, with a Runner Wrangler whose job it is to keep the runners running (think Master Sergeant), and the runners (the Myrmidons). [I’ll wait a minute while you search for Myrmidon in Google. FYI, the Runner Wrangler is their Achilles.] This whole combined unit’s job is to get the ballots to the judges when the schematics are released (which includes, and this comes as a surprise to many people, getting schematics into the judges’ lounge), check that all the rounds have started (each runner is given a list of rooms to verify), and collecting the ballots when the rounds are ending by posting runners outside each door or in each strategic area (every judge who saunters back with a ballot rather than having a runner run back with that ballot is a delay in the tournament).

There is a series of rules that I think all ballot tables need to enforce, and some suggestions that should help, and some general thoughts worth considering.

1. Runners are not paid to think. Runners run. End of story.
Problems arise when runners are lazy, too good for the lowly position, try to fix things themselves, or don’t know what to do. Lazy and lowly need to be noted by the TD; these are the students who will be sidelined from any important work at your future tournaments, and if they’re bad enough, sidelined right this minute. I have sent people home for being too much of an obstacle. Your uncommitted runners are, mostly, your uncommitted debaters. You won’t miss them when they’re gone, and they’ll be gone soon, one way or the other. On the other hand, I’ve seen my senior captains running through the hallways with ballots in their hands. That’s why they get to be captains. Then there’s the ones who try to solve problems. A debater or a judge is missing, so the runners think they’ll find another debater or judge. This is the sort of thing that has tab storming out with their Torture Me Elmo dolls. If there’s a problem, runners have to know to bring it back to the table. (And, of course, the table has to know to bring it to tab.) The runners do what the table tells them to do, which is run. Anything comes up, have the table solve it. And not knowing what to do is a problem easily solved by having experience at the table. I try to put in new people every year, but I also carry over experienced people every year. This time out, with the incorporation of my varsity into judging, I was starting from scratch to a great extent, but there were reliable wranglers/assistants in both buildings, so problems were minimal.

2. The further your ballot table is from tab, the greater the number of problems.
All problems need to be solved by tab. This is the basic rule. It’s not necessarily true, but it’s mostly true. The further away from tab the table is, the more likely tab will not be involved in solving problems, and worse, will not even know problems are happening. Bietz wondered why top judge material was manning the tables at Yale rather than judging, but from my perspective, I was thrilled to have experienced tournament people right outside my door. Multiple ballot tables, walkie-talkies, every clever solution to the problem of the complex physical plant is potentially a problem of its own. Keep it simple. One ballot table, as close to tab as possible. Your runners will make sure the ballots get to tab, so don’t worry about making you poor miserable judges have to walk once in a while. Although to tell you the truth, given the likelihood of doughnut surplus at any tournament, the walk will do them good.

3. The ballot table must be totally professional.
The following are banned: card games, any other games, any distraction from helping out your guests at the tournament, if you’re bored, suck it up. As I said, the paradigm is the concierge table. And the people at the tournament are your guests. Think of it any other way at your own risk. I also ban outside food from the table. That is, we’re serving perfectly good food to our guests; if this were your house, would you serve one thing to your guests and something else to yourselves? Rude. Anyhow, they have to be friendly, accessible and knowledgeable. Your best people get to be at the ballot table, as they are your best reflection of your team.

4. Major domo is a unique job, and an absolute requirement.
The major domo is the connection between the table and the tab staff. The major domo is the third check of every ballot before it gets to tab (the runner is the first, the table is the second). The major domo gets to see how the machinery works so that next year, the major domo will be in a position of major responsibility, with an understanding of where all the bodies are buried. Major domos check all the ballots after each round for errors in tabulation. Major domos keep all the packets up-to-date, after the check. Major domos get to eat the tab food (I do believe that the tab staff needs to be fed well; since they’re undercover, I don’t feel I’m breaking my no-outside-food rule to keep them happy). The major domo is always on hand to do whatever tab deems necessary for the entire weekend. The major domo always comes out of it smelling like a rose. Gabe, for instance, has major domo’d at Lex, and now he wins Bump. End of story.

5. The Tournament Director means it.
I do not make threats lightly, and I do carry through on them. I am short-fused at Bump, but this year I only blew up once that I remember. But I saw things. First, I saw a bunch of runners who were running their little patooties off. These are my stars. These are the people who will get good jobs in the future, preference at tournaments if there’s a limit, whatever I can do for them. Second, I saw a couple of people who were obstacles to the tournament. They will never get good jobs in the future, nor preferences of any sort. They weren’t there when I needed them. I will remember this forever. That’s the way my mind works. If you run a tournament and people do a good job, reward them. If they do a poor job, tell them. It’s their team, their school. (This is especially true for me, as an outsider, so to speak.) At the end of the day, it’s the school that gets that good or bad rep, not the Tournament Director, since TDs come and go. I can think of one school I don’t like to go to because the kids just goof off year after year, and the judges and the tournament suffer for it. A little pride in the operation is what’s called for, but I can’t make you proud of your school in a vacuum. You’re either proud of what we’re doing here, for whatever reasons, or you’re not. If you’re not, go away.

Next up, the final, absolutely essential cog in the tournament wheel.

Bump debriefing, part four: Managing the pool

So a tab room staff needs to know how to run the software. If you’re planning a tournament with a tab staff that is inexperienced, you should publish this in your invitation. In big letters. That way, when everything gets screwed up, no one will be surprised.

But a tab staff’s job is not managing the computers, any more than a musician’s job is playing scales. One has to be able to do it, but the music comes from something else.

In the varsity event, we have over 50 judges for the weekend, and what I do is ask the participants to rank them in advance either A, B or C. Then I guarantee that every round will have the right judge for that round. If it’s a clutch, bubble round, it’s an A. If it’s a panel, it’s a mix, and every panel is mixed equally. Curiously enough, when the rankings came in for Bump, there were maybe two that I would have disagreed with. JV commented likewise. In other words, if we had been ranking in a vacuum, it would have come out about the same. It is important that your tab people know the players. While I can walk into any policy tab room and run it so it sings, what I can’t do is know the right judges because I don’t know a single person in the pool. You can say, well, if someone else does the rankings, all you have to do is push the buttons, but even then, that’s not enough. But let’s backtrack a second.

To at least a minor degree, the idea of ranking judges is not without controversy. I have made my opinions well-known about things like mutual judge preference (negative), and the need to use lay judges (positive), but some problems remain with the latter. I demand that a school bring trained judges, but at least one school brought a couple of parents who didn’t know the first thing about a debate round. (Of course, culprit schools like this are well known by tournament directors, as they’re usually repeat offenders, so it’s not as if anyone is getting away with anything, and the reputations of these schools is abysmal, and most of us don’t want anything to do with them. This plays out mostly in the long run. You graduated from one of these schools? Don’t think I’ll ever hire you to judge for me. Meanwhile, don’t think that your school will ever get any special consideration from me for anything. You want a break of some sort? Play the game. Bring bad judges that bring down the level of the pool? You’re simply not upholding your part of the bargain.) The thing is, though, once they’re there, there isn’t much you can do about bad judges except dump them into down-three rounds. Anyhow, the point is that I believe that knowledge of the pool, and manipulation of the pool, is desirable. I firmly believe that a good LDer should be able to pick up just about any ballot, adapting to the judge, provided there’s an idea about what the judge is looking for, but I also believe that in a crucial round, an experienced adjudicator is preferable to a raw recruit. Lots of people come to a tournament like Bump to get a TOC bid. I run the tournament knowing this is the case. I run 6 prelim rounds only because it’s a TOC rule. I have drunk that Kool-Aid. Therefore, I need to carry through on it. At any point where the competition matters, you will have the best adjudication possible.

A good tab staff evaluates every pairing before running off the schematics. The round is organized by brackets, and we can make sure that wherever it matters, there’s an A judge. In order of priority, this is the down ones and the down twos, the undefeateds, and everybody else. The down ones, because you’re guaranteed to break if you’ve only lost one, and the down twos, because you’re guaranteed not to break if you’re down three; as a rule, there’s almost always enough As to go around for both the down ones and the down twos. As for the undefeateds, if you have a few more As, you’ll apply them here, because often these folks are in the running for speaker awards, although since you’re dropping the hi-low points, one ballot won’t matter. The program, by the way, often puts a 4-0 and 0-4 round with the same judge, mostly because you can’t really damage either of them, and there’s a presumption that these won’t be your top As. And everybody else is everybody else, and you get what you get (usually balanced so that people the tournament is paying to judge don’t sit in the lounge all weekend, followed by people who haven’t judged yet, followed by people you want to torture).

It’s harder for the tab staff in the break rounds, where a balanced panel is important. As advertised, we made sure that the strength and weakness was equally distributed. But the Bump staff took it the extra mile. Knowing pretty much all the judges, JV and La Coin were making sure that, to the extent possible, the panel was uniform. That is, you know that some judges are traditionalist, and some are digressive. Mixing them on a panel means that the debaters, if they’re truly adjusting to paradigms, would have to adjust to diametric opposites simultaneously. Not good. The computer does automatic pairings, and we start with that, but then you adjust. That is, you don’t say, oh, these guys need a conservative panel or a digressive panel: that’s cheating. What you say is, okay, the computer has put in a conservative first judge, so if we have to manipulate for balance of rankings, let’s keep the panel conservative. Or vice versa. If you’re a good debater, you adjust to your judge, but adaptation has to make sense. From the tab point of view, you create panels that make sense, with balanced talent, that any debater would say, that’s a good panel, regardless of whether that panel is of that debater’s particular stylistic persuasion. In other words, a round shouldn’t be a crapshoot, especially a break round. Good tabbing insures that it isn’t. At most tournaments, including Bump, the only time the Tournament Director gets involved in tabbing is taking a look at the break round panels. Since the TD is the one ultimately held accountable, tab feels that the TD should approve what happens. Certainly O’C went over all my panels for Big Jake, as I went over all the panels at Bump. That way, if people like or dislike how the panels were handled, the Tournament Director can take the responsibility. This is as it should be.

Down at the grammar school, the issues Mr. Bacon faced were quite different. Needless to say, there’s no ranking of judges, given that most of them are upperclassmen, but there is a knowledge that a couple of people in the field are woefully unprepared, again usually parents dragged in by their teams who seem to feel that these important personages are best kept in ignorance of the proceedings, as if they’re some necessary evil rather than their selfless benefactors. These teams don’t seem to realize that an untrained parent judge not only serves no one well in the pool, but also personally feels lost and confused, which is hardly how you should treat the people who’ve enabled your participation in the event. Anyhow, these folks have to be attended to; often, they need their hands held and their heads patted until you finally find a round they can’t screw up too badly. Add to this that your entire field is novices who, to put it bluntly, haven’t got a clue. They’ve never been to an invitational before. They don’t completely understand rounds and flights and elims. Maybe they’ve debated once or twice before, at most. This is all new to them. And in their midst, is the Dreaded Ben.

The Dreaded Ben became a legend before the tournament was over. Most of the following is true, with only minor improvements of a narrative nature. The Dreaded Ben went into flight A of round one and debated the wrong person. Dreaded Ben then proceeded to go into some other flight B of round one and debated some other wrong person. Fortunately, since his opponents and judges were almost as clueless, they complied. By the time the Dreaded Ben got to round two, he was debating affirmative now for the third time in a row (one round ahead of the rest of the field) and, I gather, debating yet again the wrong opponent. While it will come as no surprise that, before the weekend was over, the Dreaded Ben was carried off in irons by his own coach for reasons having nothing to do with his naïve enthusiasm about debating everyone in sight as quickly as possible, provided he could go aff, this is the sort of thing that Bacon had to face, and solve, for the entire weekend. Novices tend to get sick, in a fairly Kirkegaardian fashion, and disappear completely. The judge pool consists of as many first-time judges as there are first-time debaters, and their youthful exuberance needs to be either dimmed or stoked. Judges are interrogated over their 22s and 23s, or their strings of 30s. Juniors seem to want to insure their pool of Facebook friends remains intact, and go all Point Fairy as a means of doing this. Or they simply can’t grasp that novices are judged on a novice curve, and not compared to the round you saw last week at Big Bronx against people who already had six TOC bids this year even though they were attending their first tournament. There are lessons to be learned all over the place. And Bacon is the one giving those lessons. And keeping things running smoothly over in Siberia where the entire school, absent the spaces devoted to the tournament, is given over on Saturday to a special event involving over 300 people participating in a lunch and basketball game. I went down there at one point and could barely make it down the hallway, it was so crowded with non-Bumpians.

So here’s my advice. If you’re running a tournament, bring in Bacon or Vaughan or Coyne, or better yet, bring in all of them. They will make your tournament solid. There’s just one thing. You can’t have them on Bump weekend. Their mine, I tell you, MINE!!!

You can have the Dreaded Ben.

Bump debriefing, part three: Tab

The second theme of the well-tempered tournament is the tab room. (Forgive me two entries in one day, but I'm on a bagel.)

Needless to say, I am found mostly in tab rooms nowadays when there’s a tournament to be had. This does not come from fear of debate, but simply from evolution. The longer you’re around, the more likely you’ll end up working behind the scenes, if you are so inclined. When I first started helping out in tab, it was at MHLs, and they were still being done on index cards; real old-timers like to regale comparative newbies like me with tales of doing invitationals on index cards, taking up entire gymnasium floors with the pairings and, no doubt, barely making the things happen even remotely accurately. When I started, the tabbing software was Mac-based, and touchy. People would literally massage their machines while the bits and bytes of the pairings were assembled and printed, because the slightest sand in the programming oyster inevitably led to [I can’t imagine where this metaphor is supposed to be heading, but the point I’m trying to make is that all hell would break loose more often than not, so if you have some way of cleverly saying that, have at it]. The software was much more stable after it was ported over to the PC platform, but even today it’s still occasionally touchy, as I have often remarked. But the problem is, it doesn’t look touchy. It looks as easy as pie. Enter the data, press some buttons, print up the schematics, hand out the trophies.

If only.

It has been said, accurately, that around here we have something like a floating tab room, with the same people alternating through it week after week, and this is true. There is nothing you can throw at most of these people that they haven’t seen before (especially now that we’ve gone through the 96 Tears episode a few weeks back). When a problem comes up, someone knows how to solve it. When I first started going to tournaments, there was inevitably at every tournament a point where everything went into suspended animation, where the computer ate the data or something, and everyone just sat around waiting for someone to fix it. Often that meant reentering skadoodles of data while the parents sent out for another round of debate ziti. Those moments nowadays are rare. Even when one of us magically erases the first five rounds, there’s a backup handy on a flashdrive, and even a second computer. We’re always ahead of the game. You can trust us on this stuff.

So the first thing you need to do is have an experienced tab room. And you have to understand that you, as the tournament director, will have little or nothing to do with the tabbing of your tournament, except during the break rounds. If you’re like me, at a tournament you are exhausted before it starts, and you spend two days running around trying to be everywhere, putting out little fires. You have not only no time for tab, but no ability at it, even if normally you can do it in your sleep. Your brain is on hold, while the tab staff does the thinking for you. This is as it should be. I’ll do it at your tournament, you do it at mine. Works like a charm.

In my case, of course, there were two tab rooms. JV and la Coin at the high school running PF and VLD, and Mr. Bacon down at the grammar school running NLD. Two different businesses, actually, with different sets of issues. But here’s the bottom line. These are three people I would trust with my tournament. These are three people I did trust with my tournament. There are a few other people I know I could confidently ask as well, but that number is small. Sabrina and Kaz have been in there for me in the past, and I’m sure will be in there again at some point in the future, and Rose JT used to be the cornerstone of the operation (because we needed someone to complain that the high school library was too cold), and I’d put O’C in there in a minute if I didn’t want to torture him by having him judge declamation rounds in the middle school (never telling him that we don’t have dec, and there is no middle school). But in the event at hand, as I say, it was Joe and Lynne and Michael. I never worried for a second about what they were about. If you’re a tournament director, you really do have to be everywhere at once, but one place you shouldn’t have to be is tab (except, as alluded to above, during breaks). But to be honest, it’s not because these folks can run the software that I have confidence in them. It’s because they can run tournaments that I have confidence in them. A tab staff isn’t about pressing the buttons. It’s about making the tournament happen the best way possible.

I’ll explain how tomorrow.

Bump debriefing, part two: Judge acquisition

The other thing about judges, aside from having them do their job, is having them in the first place. Early on in my debate career, I noticed that the Newark tournament always ended with a final round judged entirely by Newark alumni, which they seemed to reckon by the dozens. The alums came—and gave—back, and Newark seemed to have the monopoly on it. Everyone else had a couple of alums, of course, but nothing like this. I was impressed.

I tend to think that I have a good relationship with the Sailors, and I was very appreciative this year of the number who came back to work the tournament for me. Absent Kate, who turns up to stay in the family will, we went back as far as Noah and Wedro (and might even have had Jared if he knew the difference between November and December), up to pretty much the whole shooting match of ’07 grads. There are no more reliable judges than the ones who were your own debaters. They come because they got something out of debate themselves, and understand that your tournament is an important part of it. I’m far from a tradition hound like O’C, but there is no question that a tournament simply continuing at a school year in and year out is a tradition in and of itself, and all the aspects of being a part of that tournament, from starting out as a runner to ultimately running the tables, is a high point of the academic experience. It’s fun. You know what it meant for you, and you know what it will mean for others, and you want it to continue even after you’re gone, so you come back and give it a little nudge to keep it moving. I’m not much of a fan of former high school debaters who still want to be high school debaters when they’re in college, reliving the experience through actual high school debaters rather than living the college experience that is more appropriate to them, but I am a firm believer in giving back reasonably to the activity that was your most important for four years. When I see the Sailors, Ret’d, doing this, it does my heart proud. Add to this that these judges, this tribe of Sailors, Ret’d, is as predictable a judge pool as you’re going to find, because they were all raised on orthodoxy. Every single one of them will expect you to argue the resolution and achieve your value through your criterion, and every game you play that doesn’t do that will work against you. You can read the new guidelines for LD from the NFL, or you can get a can opener and pull apart the brains of the Sailors, Ret’d, and see exactly the same thing. Of course, there’s variations, and a card-carrier like Wedro thinks differently from a philosopher like Kate, but they’re watching the same round and, ultimately, judging it the same way, with the same expectations of the debaters. No one should be shocked that both semis rounds, entirely adjudicated by Sailors, Ret’d, were 5-0s. And the thing is, if for some reason this style of judging doesn’t appeal to you, nevertheless, the paradigm is clear as a bell. You know going in what they want. If you don’t give it to them, there should be no surprise that they don’t pick you up. (And I’ll have more to say on this at a later date, because some interesting ideas on digressive debate were discussed at the alumni dinner.)

So I have the good fortune of a great group of alums to come back and help me out. I have also, at times, drawn on the debate community at large to hire extra judges. This year, with only a couple of exceptions, I didn’t need to bring in extras, but usually I do put out a call and hope for a good draw, and usually it happens. And herein is an important point. A tournament is as good as its judges. That is, I could draw the best debaters in the universe, but at the point where I don’t have judges who are up to a certain standard, the debaters and their coaches won’t be happy, and the tournament will lose esteem. I am perfectly fine with local tournaments with lots of inexperienced (albeit trained) judges, but at some point, especially if you have expectations of gaining or maintaining TOC bids, you do want to guarantee a base level of judging that meets the standard you are setting. A tournament director must reach out to get the best judges possible, if TOC bids are that standard. It is one thing to lose a round because your judge’s paradigm and your debating were not a match (but that’s your problem, bub, and not your judge’s), and another thing altogether to lose a round, even maybe a bid round, because the skill set of the adjudicators simply weren’t up to the task of figuring out a normal debate round.

There are a variety of reasons why I no longer offer policy at Bump, and one of them is this very aspect of acquiring good judges. Having no real link to the policy world, I could never reasonably draw in the extra judges necessary to make a tournament work reliably year after year. And by the way, the word extra is important. A good tournament needs more than enough judges, not just enough judges. I’ll talk about that more when we get to the tabroom discussion. But my point is, I could barely make policy happen, much less make it happen well, at least as far as judges were concerned. What I did was dump the burden on the attending teams, with heavy judging obligations, but I always went into the policy events with fear and trembling. One year we had exactly one judge for the final round: it was that bad.

So the moral of the story is, one of the chief jobs of a tournament director before a tournament starts is the acquisition of good judges (keeping, of course, within budget). If you’re lucky, you can start with your own alums. Absent that, keep up your community connections. Make your tournament one that judges will want to come to (think hospitality, as mentioned yesterday). Make the whole thing fun, rather than some solemn, mind-numbing, grueling marathon.

If all else fails, give out a Jon Cruz award.