Some comments on Care and Feeding

I have not lost my interest in the issue of newspaper reading. Far from it. It is something I have spent a lot of time sorting through, for an obvious end: If I am going to coach students who need a certain knowledge of current events, I need a way to provide that knowledge. And at the same time, an expectation on my part that that knowledge should be provided by physical newspapers is, at best, wildly optimistic. I do come from a generational bias, of course. When I was coming up the ranks, reading the newspaper was the only way to conquer current events. There was no alternative. And I should add to that the idea that reading the newspaper smacked of adulthood. Kids didn’t read the newspapers, but kids believed that one day, when they were adults, they would. Reading the newspapers was a mark of adulthood, much like getting a mortgage and listening to Sinatra and eating olives. All adults seemed to do these things, but no kids. If you wanted to be an adult, you would have to train yourself. So, you did your best. You started to read the comics and the movie reviews, you opened a bank account with a little book that told you you were earning $1.23 interest a year, you didn’t grimace when “High Hopes” came on the transistor radio, and you kept trying to eat olives no matter how icky they tasted. Through this cloud of initiation, somehow, someday, you’d be a grownup. And, I will add, it worked for me. I can read the paper while simultaneously listening to Sinatra and eating olives, and my mortgage is paid automatically out of my checking account. You can’t get any older than that!

What we need to do in this discussion is cut through to the goal, then decide the best way to achieve that goal. That is, we have to get past the idea that students need newspapers to get to the idea that students need a broad base of information on current events—a general knowledge of the news—that they can draw on when they analyze resolutions. You certainly wouldn’t want to be in a position of never knowing anything that’s going on, and always having to begin research at a point of total ignorance. But if you know, say, the general political picture in the hottest African hot spots, like Zimbabwe, and a resolution comes along about African hot spots, well, at least you’ve got a clue about one horror story, and maybe more than one (in this case, how Zimbabwe has fed into South Africa’s problems). Mere intellectual curiosity is reason enough to want to know, a driving need to acquire knowledge plus maybe a concern for one’s fellow humans, but my goal is not creating that concerned, intellectually curious individual whole cloth, because the education system as a whole has that responsibility. I have only one part of that responsibility (and an extracurricular one to boot). I’m a debate coach; I’m just trying to save some steps when resolution analysis time comes up.

One of the things I’ve been touting about the physical newspaper experience is its serendipity. Serendipitous discoveries of stories lead us where we weren’t expecting to go, and we learn things we weren’t expecting to learn. But again, my goal cannot be the transmittal of all information, serendipitous or otherwise, or the total responsibility for molding the concerned citizen. I’m the debate coach; I’ve got to stay on that track. Still, there is more to debate information than the news per se. There is also, at least in LD, schools of thought and analysis that operate outside of specific events. Ethical concerns can be about some specific item, or can just be about ethics per se. If I can get that sort of information across to my students in addition to the news, that is a good thing in general but more importantly, a part of my job. So what I’m beginning to see is that the serendipity that I can provide is of this nature, so if I’m not attempting to replicate the newspaper, I can still nonetheless provide more than just a cut-and-dry news-clipping service. You can get that anywhere.

So I took on the idea of the Feed a month or two ago with the idea that I’d see how it went, and see if it fit the goals I was setting, which was to provide some material access to information akin to what I had been previously relying on newspapers for. At the same time, it would have to be something that was literally accessible to a plugged-in student, entertaining enough but mostly because of its continuing relevance, good enough to draw back the student despite other demands on his or her time.

Although I had followed the odd feed before, I had never attempted to create one. So I did have to figure that out as I went along. The temptation to throw in too much, to throw in interesting stuff outside the realm of the debate world, was initially strong. This might have been due partly to starting off with relatively limited resources of RSS material, and a feeling that I had to fill things up. Over time, however, I’ve refined my sources, and found plenty of new ones, so that the stuff that’s coming to me raw is at the very least potentially LDish (or, of course, Pffftish). Lately I’ve had no problem coming up with all sorts of articles, almost all of which would be valuable to the debater, even though I hardly expect every debater to want to read all of them, just as I personally don’t read the entire newspaper cover to cover. But even to the casual glance, the Feed should look relevant enough for someone to visit it regularly, and to be more likely than not to get hooked on it. And since there would be no point in my continuing to create it if I didn’t think it had value, I decided I would ultimately assign it officially to my own team if I thought it was working out, so it did really have to deliver.

The feed itself, in the final analysis, would tell us if it were worth reading. So, slicing into it at any moment ought to tell the tale. So let’s look randomly at the last few items and see if we’re doing what we need to do.
1. Giraffes are now kosher. Okay, that’s just interesting, and highly unlikely to come up in a debate. But it’s only one sentence. And Jews on safari may need to know this.
2. A think piece on the essentialist aspects of race. Unquestionably valuable analysis in our multicultural universe.
3. A map of the universe conceived by Homer. Totally useless, but again, interesting. I usually resist the temptation on these sorts of useless yet interesting things, but sometimes… I should have fewer of these in the long run.
4. Article on Apple’s business vis-à-vis the iPhone. It’s a good business article, and the sort of thing a Pfffter should have in the Pfffting head.
5. News article on (bad) farm outlook for the year. Given the international food shortages, we need to know this.
6. Opinion piece on unemployment on underclass youths. Obviously useful.
7. Transcript of Rowling’s Harvard commencement address on the imagination. Interesting but hardly essential.
8. What gay marriages say about gender roles in marriage. A news item, very useful given the gender politics themes of many cases nowadays.
9. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” going to the Supreme Court? Always a chestnut.

And that’s the top page, taken at random. 3 of the 9 could go, but they are serendipitously interesting enough to break the monotony. 3 of the 9 are essential. 3 of the 9 are useful. Overall, that’s a pretty good count. Any serious debater looking at this page (all the articles were added within a few hours of one another) would pick up at least a couple of important headlines, and maybe read one or two of the articles at length. And I think it’s been like that regularly.

So, yeah, I’m touting what I’m doing, looking at my handiwork and declaring it good. But it is good, and it keeps getting better as I refine the RSS feeds I get on my end, and curb my silliness instincts (and my taste for kosher giraffe). As I said in an earlier post, I am an editor by trade, after all. I’m simply plying that trade in a different medium than normal. And more importantly, I am achieving my goal of providing useful general knowledge for debaters. Does it replace the newspaper? Well, to tell you the truth, it’s a different sort of beast altogether, so the original issue of newspapers doesn’t matter anymore.

What I’m hoping for is, beyond the students to whom this will be a mandatory assignment, that others will have it in their bags of computer tricks, and consult it. If only half of the VCA looked at it fairly regularly, it would have an effect. So I will be sticking with it. And I hope you will too. Even if all you do is glance at it every day to catch up on the latest entries, I guarantee you will find something useful that you might not have otherwise seen, or gotten to so readily. If not, I will give you double your money back.

Good deal, eh?

Palmer, Chumps, Gaudi, Dewey, Updike and Goy, Attorneys-at-Law

Ensign Palmer and I have been agonizing over the 2009 Chumps date, and I was just studying a calendar a bit more, trying to suss it out. The problem, as with any new tournament, is finding somewhere to put it among all the pre-existing tournaments. Throw in that March and April teem with qualifiers and holidays and state events, and the soup is overflowing with depth-charge crackers. I will round up the usual suspects shortly (although many will be wilting in Las Vegas) and see if we can figure out the least egregious possibility. No date will be perfect; it will be a matter of finding the least imperfect date.

I’ve posted links over on the right to the Spain pictures I posted on Facebook; my understanding is that people without a face can gain access to them (but I’m too cookied up to know for sure). Then again, who isn’t on Facebook these days? I mean, if I am, who isn’t? Anyhow, check them out, if you’re interested, especially the Gaudis, some of which are extremely haunting.

I should point out that I’m RSSing (it’s amazing how something like that so easily becomes a verb) the various blogs I know of among Sailors, mostly just out of personal interest, but also to cross-post to the Feed if there’s anything of transcendent value. If anyone of the debate persuasion has a blog that is non-debate-oriented, let me know, because I’d love to track it (and Feed if, if warranted). I’ll read anything, as ought to have become apparent by now. Speaking of which, I ultimately bailed from Dewey’s Art as Experience. I got a bit of value out of it, but art has gone to such odd places since its writing that, while it holds worthwhile truths, its relevance is, at best, off-and-on. Ultimately I think that my reading needs on the subject are more objective, for instance the lecture Updike just gave on American art (which I probably should have fed but didn’t). I’d like to read his art books, although the first one seems to be out of print. Shocking though it may be, he’s a better writer than Dewey, hence more accessible to me, plus he’s deep into the details. Whatever. I’m just breezing through short stories at the moment, casting about for something meaty. To be honest, it’s too hot to read anything serious. It’s too hot to do much of anything. But you don’t need me to tell you that, because it’s been hot everywhere. The good news is that it will cool off everywhere soon enough. Except in Vegas. Hey, you’re the one who wanted to qualify. By the way, the usual NYS suspects were reelected to the District Committee, plus new Usual Suspect Sabrina Graham from Monticello (a right addition). Which means I once again get to be the world’s worst district chairman. At least the Goy will be all improved, including the requests for error-fixes I requested. Oh, wait. No one ever acknowledged my requests. Whatever. It was free, and you get what you pay for…

So I guess that, slowly, we’re getting back into the swing of things. Not a hundred percent yet, but close.

Anonymous makes a name for himself; Under the Sea; more Chumps is better Chumps; "All hands on deck!"

Well, that’s enough of that, eh, sports fans? Well, don’t worry. Chico is closing up the piano, Groucho is lighting his cigar, and once again we can get back to business as usual. Why a duck? Why not a chicken? I thought you’d never ask.

It’s been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my home— No, wait a minute, that’s not right. It’s been so long since I’ve done this I’ve almost forgotten how.

There now seems to be a national movement afoot to break the contestant codes at NatNats. Like CatNats, for some reason the people in charge prefer everyone to go by numbers rather than names. This is always a curious process at small venues where everyone already knows who everyone is, and you have to wonder what is gained by the illusion of anonymity. Given that the usual suspects inevitably rise at the national events, those become virtual small venues, so one wonders what is gained there as well. I mean, it sounds good I guess, that no one will be in the slightest way swayed by knowing whom they’re judging, but how often is that the case? We’re not that big a community, and while NatNats may be humongous compared to other events, it’s still going to have the same old familiar cream rising to the top, for the most part. Even I usually know the players without having to have a scorecard, although I will admit that occasionally I’ve judged someone unfamiliar to me at a $ircuit event and afterwards someone has told me that so-and-so is the number one rated debater in the known universe, a fact of which I was completely ignorant. (As a rule, one does inevitably and for obvious reasons pick up so-and-so in those anonymous situations, but my favorite incident of this nature was back in the Dark Ages when so-and-so, a senior who had won the previous year’s NatNats, was in a bid-level break round. So-and-so was one of those debaters who liked to argue with the judges, and he just couldn’t believe—at great length—that he hadn’t won. It was a 3-0 against him. How much more convincing did he need? To be honest, if we had known who he was, it would have been 5-0 against him, he lost so badly.) If you are going to NatNats, check out these code-breakers. I’ve seen postings from both Georgia (I’ve published that to the Feed) and NDCA, and I gather they’re all connected. Unless you want to remain under the radar. By the way, they’re predicting a high of 99F in Las Vegas for today. Tomorrow it will creep up to 101F. You’re the one who wanted to go to Vegas, bub. Try to find an air conditioner, regardless of what name you travel by.

Meanwhile, there are issues with next year’s calendar that we’ve been working on. First of all, the traditional CFL on Halloween weekend, simultaneous with Manchester-Under-the-Sea, cannot transpire this year because of a conflict at the venue. So a couple of changes, first, a debate CFL earlier in October, on 10/4, including a varsity division (why not?), and secondly, I’ll have no earthly reason not to visit Manchester for the first time in ages. O’C and I are trying to convince Jonathan P that novice divisions in debate would be a good idea for him, rather than JV (sophomores can go varsity). We’ll see what happens. It is a bit early for novices, but then again, only because we have MHLs. I like the idea of throwing novices into the tank and seeing how many survive the sharks. Then again, how many sharks are there during their first month? In any case, I probably won’t need to corral the usual poor parent chaperone for the Manchester, so there’s one less begging session I’ll have to put the Sailors through.

There’s also some moving on the Mass front that conflicts with the Northeast Championships. That’s more complicated to solve (taking minors across state borders being a federal offense), so I’ve got to get shaking on that. An early resolution of TNC is important to keeping the numbers up. And we do want Mass Chumps to be part of the overall Chumps picture.

At least we all do talk about this stuff nowadays, as compared to creating calendars in secret and hoping they don’t conflict. Sometimes things are beyond our control, but they shouldn’t be beyond our knowledge. Of course, when I have an issue I prefer vilifying people in my blog to actually talking to them, as CP would be happy to report. He’s now referring to me in his blog as Admiral Menick, so I must be getting through to him. Of course, the usual term is #^$*@ Menick, which I guess means I haven’t annoyed him enough yet. But there’s a new year coming, and plenty of time to catch up. The way he’s been beating me in Scrabulous allows me no alternative; there ought to be a rule that you can’t use a word in the game that you haven’t used in conversation sometime in the last seven years. Being good at crosswords is no great leg up for Scrabble, either. I always think I should be winning all my games without any sweat. Good luck with that one…

Spain, Part Eight

It’s taken me forever to sort out the travel pictures, although by the time you read this I should be done, and a nice selection should be on Facebook (the iPhoto-Facebook interface is peachy, although I hate admitting I use iPhoto when all the grownups use PhotoShop). Mostly it’s been pictures of Barcelona that have been slowing me down; it’s a truly photogenic city.

There’s a main thoroughfare called Las Ramblas which is packed with tourists and those who feed on tourists, including a lot of street performers, if you call dressing up like a car or a plant or a gorilla a performance. I will give them credit for remarkable outfits, although you have to wonder what mental processes led them to the decision to choose dressing up as a pirate and standing on a box and going Aaarrgh when someone tosses a coin in their hat as a career path. I mean, it’s a real commitment, because some of these outfits are incredibly detailed, and give you a sense that the choice of this way of life was both insane and irreversible. And there’s not just one or two of them, there’s dozens, each with presumably their own spot on the street, day in and day out. Anyhow, this street is the first magnet of the place, but one quickly learns to be attracted elsewhere. It’s like walking down Fifth Avenue. It’s the first thing that comes to mind, but there are better places once you find them. And, if you’re in town for any length of time, you will.

Occasionally our paths which were not beaten were exceptionally unbeaten, especially given their overall closeness to the middle of things. We’d be walking along some back street and we’d see nothing but people in Middle East or African outfits, and feel as if we’d somehow jumped continents. Cultural identities remained strongly original rather than melted in, apparently, a thoroughly non-American immigrant experience.

In terms of art, aside from the Gaudi and Modernist stuff, which is pervasive, you have the Catalan museum in the 1929 fair palace, which once again was wonderfully revelatory, plus the Miro and Picasso museums. As for Miro, this is one of those acquired tastes, and his career spans all sorts of styles, culminating in quite minimalist works about the gesture of the brushstroke, and there is no question that he challenges you and makes you think. If art can be about the moment of its creation, then Miro and Velasquez have very different things to say about what that means. In any case, Miro has to be one of the least accessible artists who nonetheless one believes is probably a good artist; I enjoyed the exposure (especially as I was reading the Dewey at the time; still am, for that matter). The Picasso museum concentrates mostly on his early work up to cubism, which means that it is his most esthetically accessible material, and I learned a lot about him. He was sort of born with a sketchpad in his hand; I hadn’t realized that he had been such a prodigy. And almost universally I love his early work, including much of the cubist stuff. And he did a whole series, which I mentioned before, of theme and variation on Las Meninas, which is great fun, because the man is such a chameleon and as he comes on this repeated subject he does so in so many different ways. Needless to say, this museum is a hot draw, but they keep the crowd manageable, so it’s easy to enjoy it. Realistically, the works that make Picasso Picasso are elsewhere, in major museums around the world, but this museum at least makes Picasso human, and that’s a very good thing indeed. You can even by a striped tee shirt, if you’re so inclined, so that you can look like the man himself. I’ve got the hairline, but I did manage to skip the temptation.

We did take one day trip to Monserrat, which among other things is where Parsifal/Percival is supposed to have found the Grail. It’s a great mountain structure, very photogenic (again) and you take a train up, and then a funicular, and then shank’s mare, until you get to the peak and you can see people in Florence waving at you from the top of the Duomo and people in Paris waving at you from the top of the Eiffel Tower. Given the weather (it is generally one cloudy or at least hazy country, especially in the spring) you get about three clear days a year; we were fortunate enough to be there on one of them. Fabulous stuff.

I’m sure other things will occur to me over the next few weeks, and I’ll mention them when they do, but that’s the main story. We can now get back to the business of being off for the summer, which means NatNats, Camp WTF, calendar juggling (which has indeed been going on with some interesting results), personnel changes (I’m waiting to hear about a couple of spots especially), gossip (I have to get together with O’C before he heads for the hills and updates every three minutes on who had the hot dogs in the institute cafeteria), and all the usual stuff that concerns us here. Meanwhile I have been keeping up the Coachean Feed, and once again I urge you to check it out. You need to know everything that’s in it. Really. I wouldn’t bother otherwise.

Spain, Part Seven

Barcelona is a feast for architecture buffs, especially turn-of-the-nineteenth-century architecture buffs. Antoni Gaudi is the key name, introducing all sorts of great ideas into the architectural dialogue, including the study and incorporation of organic shapes and designs. Some of his stuff is downright spooky, some of it is silly, all of it is fascinating.

There’s a great walk that begins a little out of the old part of town. You take a subway a couple of stops to Hospital St Pau, designed by Lluis Domenech i Montaner (everybody in Spain has a lot of names). Domenech was rather revolutionary, believing that bright and pleasant surroundings would make for a healthy environment as compared to the current breed of hospital (read Foucault if you want to really get a sense of old medicine). And that’s exactly what you get with St Pau, early Modernism (as its referred to in Spain; Secession in Vienna, good old Art Nouveau most other places), incorporating lots of natural motifs in the designs. If you must be in a hospital, you’d want to be in this one.

Then you walk down to Sagrada Familia, which is the Gaudi-designed cathedral, probably one of the most famous buildings in the world. Now, Gaudi started building this in the 19th Century, so I expected that, even though it’s not yet finished, it would be sort of finished. No way. What is completed is the first phase of the exterior; there are plenty more spires to go up. As for the interior, well, they’re working on it. Which means that when you go to it, you are seeing a classic cathedral very much under construction, the kind of cathedral you thought was a thing of the past, taking multiple generations to build, a construction of such magnitude and complexity that it may not be completed in your lifetime. Yes, you. If you’re in high school now, you’ll probably be around for the first mass (predicted now for the late 2020s), but you’d better get some seriously clean living habits if you want to see all the final exterior put together. Nevertheless, there’s plenty to see now. The exterior is literally encrusted with more artwork than you can absorb. There’s storytelling sculptures, symbolic sculptures, multiple sculptors in multiple styles—chiefly the Passion to the rear behind the altar (presumably the East, if it’s a traditional cathedral) and early years above the main doors on the other side (you know, it may have not been on the traditional east-west axis, which allows the most light through the windows). I’ll post some pictures. Seeing Sagrada Familia (which includes a large informational display in the basement) is an amazing experience. It alone is worth the trip to Barcelona.

From here you stroll back to the main part of the city on what is called the Modernism walk, because it’s a part of the city that has an abundance of these wonderful Nouveau buildings, mostly apartment houses or, originally, one-family houses. Among these are a couple of Gaudis, one of which we went into. The incorporation of shapes and structures from the natural world at times makes the building seem like a living thing, like that spaceship from Farscape. There are still people living in the building, but one apartment is open for a walkthrough, so you get a nice feel for upper middle class living back in the day. The high point of the building (no pun intended) is the roof. If you’re going to have vents, why shouldn’t they be fun? Again, I’ve posted pictures to Facebook.

So there’s one whole day in Barcelona devoted just to Modernism, if you’re so inclined. We certainly were. We definitely walked our legs off in this city, which is what I love doing on vacation. But don’t worry. We did stop regularly enough for coffee, tapas, gelato, etc. The mind can’t function when the body is out of fuel.

Spain, Part Six

I think I come to my interest in world’s fairs honestly, if not necessarily uniquely. When I was a kid, the Disney TV show was a Sunday night fixture, and I trundled off to bed immediately afterward (it was a school night, after all). Walt was talking up Disneyland (the original name of the TV show) from day one, and the show was structured along the same lines as the park, so how many little kids weren’t pulled in by the whole thing? Of course I wanted to go to Disneyland, which was on the other side of the country, and seemed some combination of Paradise and Eden and eternal summer and quintessential kidness. Even Nikita Krushchev wanted to visit Disneyland, and he was some old Commie apparatchik, while I was a little kid, the absolute target audience. Walt had no trouble hitting that target.

And I did go. My mother insists we went the year it opened; I demur and claim it was a few years later, but I was a kid, so what do I know. In any case, the target having been hit, the bell was rung, and Young Menick (a concept not unlike Young Indiana Jones) went to Disneyland. A few times, off and on, as it turned out. My father worked for an airline, which meant free travel, usually first class. Nowadays most of my travel is on school buses. My just desserts, I guess.

I was a teenager in the 60s, so if I was ripe for the quintessential kidness of Disneyland a decade earlier, I was just as ripe then for the quintessential futurism of the 64-65 World’s Fair in New York. Instead of being far away in California, it was right across the street from (its contemporary) Shea Stadium, an easy trip for a Westchester kid. (Same site as the 1939-40 Fair, by the way, and same site as the garbage dump in THE GREAT GATSBY; eliminating the dump was one of the infrastructural goals of that earlier event). I went, I don’t know, maybe a dozen times over the course of the fair’s two years. Saw everything over and over. There was, of course, a Disney connection, so the two ideas are clearly united in my mind, and I still look forward to the Carousel of Progress as some sort of teenage nostalgia, while I do demur a bit from claiming that It’s a Small World or the Lincoln robot evoke quite the same sense. World’s Fairs of the 20th Century often talked about the future, and usually they attempted to provide a blueprint for it. Sometimes those blueprints are amazingly accurate (1939’s blueprint for 1964 was right on) and sometimes they’re totally inept (1964’s blueprint for our times missed almost all the boats completely, including the internet, atomic energy and the environment in general). Historically World’s Fairs have also acted as barometers, allowing us to collect all the stuff we have as nations to show it off and share it. The 19th Century fairs were boasting exercises to a great degree: Look at our technology. Look at our art. Look at our exotic colonial natives. They were not so much forward-looking as present-proud and pointed toward whatever future might arise. The Smithsonian in Washington used to house a recreation of the 1876 Philadelphia fair, the closest you could probably ever get to the sense of the real 19th century thing, and it was all machinery and tools, the arrival of the last blast of the industrial revolution, where everything was possible thanks to engineering. Futurists of the 20th century kept to that idea, claiming that future engineering would solve all our problems, but went further and attempted to describe that future. Disney was certainly that kind of futurist himself, and that kind of futurism was rife in the 1964-65 fair, and simultaneously in Disney’s original plans for the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. The EPCOT that actually came about, while no longer a city, did still reflect that brand of futurism. (That kind of thinking today is long past its expiration date.) One can visit EPCOT with a nostalgia for the future, if you will, not as with Tomorrowland (The Future that Never Was) but as with the old World’s Fair promises that never came true.

One thing I like about fairs is their aspiration. In their attempts to stake a claim on either the present or the future, they have always made big statements in their physical presence, either symbolically or in toto. The Crystal Palace of 1851 (Prince Albert’s idea) was grand in its execution, its exhibition hall itself symbolizing an architecture of modern times. The White City of Chicago in 1893 is a classical revivalist version of Christmas morning. The Eiffel Tower, the Tryon and Perisphere, the Unisphere, the Atomian, the Space Needle—they are all symbols that (mostly) still stand long after their fairs have gone, symbols that have taken on new meanings; signifiers with new significations, if you will. Talk about grist for the Caveman mind! The original reason for the Spain trip in 2008 was the possibility of going to the fair in Zaragoza, but that just didn’t work out. However, there was a fair in Barcelona in 1929, and the grounds are still there, looking very world’s fairish. The picture above, from the period, could almost have been taken yesterday. Additionally, there was the Barcelona Olympics in 1992, much of it taking place in the same area, and Olympics infrastructure is a close aspirational cousin to fair infrastructure.

So you get to walk down the boulevard of a real World’s Fair from eighty years ago, which is, for me, an absolute thrill. It still feels like a World’s Fair. The big castle on the hill housing the Catalan art museum is from that fair! Mies’s pavilion has been recreated, one of the very first Modernist buildings! On weekend nights, the fountains play water games for hours (take that, EPCOT). Plus there’s a Calatrava sculpture from the Olympics towering over the mountain, plus an entire Triumph of the Will looking stadium to go with it! There’s even a simulacrum sort of SpainWorld where all of Spain is shrunk into one little walking park!

In other words, reason number 132 why Barcelona, for me, was hog heaven.

Spain, Part Five

While our possession of a language does not limit us from ideation beyond the extent of that language, language does certainly provide certain cultural parameters for individuals, a shared pool if you will of often unconscious connections that help define and separate cultures from one another. Often even closely related languages don’t sound alike, and for that matter, occasionally even dialects, which are simply subsets of a language like breeds of dogs are all still dogs, can be incomprehensible to speakers of that same language. Just try listening to a full-on Yorkshireman: if he’s in a movie, you’ll want to turn on the subtitles. The French famously have their official academy that guards their language from non-Gallic invasions, and presumably the gendarmes will pull you in if you start ruminating about “le weekend” or the like, but for the most part, language is a living thing, and no amount of fretting about it can overcome the fact that actual usage trumps orthodoxy. The word momentarily, for instance, means “for a moment.” This is its age-old meaning, the first in the dictionary. But common usage has virtually eliminated this meaning, replacing it with “in a moment.” I will do something momentarily used to mean I would do if for a while, whereas now it means I will do it a short while from now. No amount of grammarian tooth-gritting can stop this tide of redefinition. Hopefully? Lost cause. At this point in time no longer makes one wonder about different kinds of points in other things, like this point in chocolate pudding or this point in lycanthropy, as if all concepts like time can be boiled down to points the way all matter can be boiled down to atoms. Not too long ago—in the last couple of weeks, in fact—the combined speakers of Portuguese languages have, miraculously, dumped the Portuguese language. Brazilian, an offshoot of Portuguese, will henceforth be the official version of the Portuguese language. The Portwegians in Portugal will lose all their accents (there’s one or two on just about every letter, which the Brazilians wisely eliminated, probably because their typewriter ribbons were wearing out too quickly in the jungle), but in return the Iberians will gain two new letters, bringing their alphabet up to 26 characters. Remarkable stuff. Needless to say, there was much gnashing of teeth over this in Portuguese cultural circles. Usage, as it will, apparently trumped orthodoxy, however; to those of us in the cultural analysis business, a price will definitely be paid for this. Whatever cultural conflict may or may not exist between Portugal and Brazil, it is our friends in South America who have emerged victorious.

This is prologue to the fact that Barcelona does not speak the same language as Madrid. The latter speak Spanish, the former speak Catalan. When you’re traveling in the same country, a change of language can be rather disorienting. Just when you get used to ordering a couple of cups of coffee and a sticky bun and receiving from the server a couple of cups of coffee and a sticky bun, all the rules change. Literally, in the case provided, since café con leche becomes café amb lett. The separateness of the Catalans is hard-won, and worth your own private research. It isn’t easy surviving the tendency toward cultural hash, especially in an authoritarian regime. For the casual observer, i.e., the tourist, you might as well have gone to a different country where Spanish is now the second language. The menus are Catalan, the signs are Catalan, the maps are Catalan. But Catalan is a romance language, and in some ways, if you know a little French, more accessible than Spanish. I love the way languages work. Italian piazzas become English plazas become Spanish playas become Catalan placas (with a cedilla under the c, pronounced plah-thas). If language is a function of culture, or culture is a function of language (take your pick), then you know you are in a different culture when you travel from Madrid to Barcelona. The former seems determinedly Spanish, while the latter is determinedly Catalan. The former is obviously a business center that tourists might go to while the latter is a tourist haven with plenty of business. Aggressively so, always pushing World’s Fairs and Expositions and Olympics, all that sort of big-idea thing that builds international recognition and improved infrastructure. At the same time, its core of old city is large and vibrant, and you instantly get a sense from the place that this is the arty part of the country, which is underscored by the collection of artists who have historically gravitated there. It’s jaunty fun as compared to Madrid’s seriousness. It’s a great place to vacation provided you like to eat and drink (which was certainly also true of Madrid) and just generally roam around discovering stuff. And, especially, if you love architecture. Madrid has plenty of interesting architecture, but Barcelona has Gaudi, who is a touchstone of the art form. Madrid has Velasquez, Barcelona has Picasso and Miro. Madrid has a palace, Barcelona has a beach.

I’m glad we started in Madrid, because it was strict and formal and very nice, but it was a pleasure afterward to let go a bit and relax. Barcelona is a let-go-and-relax kind of place. I wouldn’t tell you to put it at the top of your travel list if you’re new to European travel, but do get to it eventually. You’ll like it. No doubt about it.

Spain Part Four

Nick the Greek. I mean, I guess that’s what El Greco’s name boils down to. Domenikos Theotokopoulos. That’s the kind of name I dread reading aloud during an award ceremony. If he were a Sailor, he’d be The Greek from day one. Of course, every time I see one of his paintings I want to turn to the artist and say, “Hey, Nick, why the long face?” but that’s the kind of joke that has no place in this blog, so I’ll skip it for now.

In one’s Spanish travels, one quickly comes up against El Greco, especially in Toledo, his home town. His work is relatively easy to spot; as I say, all those long faces. There’s something rather modernist about it, or at least he’s influenced a lot of modern Spanish artists. One thing about seeing one after the other of his works is that you realize he had, maybe, about five models that he used over and over. The painting of Saint This looks exactly like the painting of Saint That which looks exactly like the painting of Saint Whosey Majoosey. The only thing that separates them is the iconography, at which point one remembers that, A, literacy was far from rampant at the time, and B, every saint or angel seems to have a symbol set attached. You can recognize St. Jerome a mile away, for instance, by the book (he translated the Bible into Latin), the lion (he removed a thorn from the poor dear’s foot) and the red hat (he was a cardinal); often he’s also looking like quite the hermit. The evangelists each have their special icon (eagle, lion, angel, bull). And so forth an so on. And, of course, an El Greco would not be painting all his pictures for the same venue, so no one would notice the repetition of faces. But when one does, one does remark on the unremarkableness.

But when it comes to repetition, Velasquez is the one who takes the cake, because over and over again as official court artist he painted the members of the royal family. The portraits all bear a family resemblance, and I hate to say it, but if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. He’s hard not to love, though. His other portraits are much more varied, and all of them are full of life and vigor, and the whole set had a very direct influence on Manet (who had a very direct influence on everyone else in his day, up to our own), who traveled down to Madrid to check them out, and whose own work is a strong reflection of what old Diego was up to a couple of hundred years earlier. Compare the two when you get a chance. On top of that, the moderns claim that the painting “Las Meninas” may be the first great modern work in its attempt to capture the moment, much as a photograph does (or ought to). Draw your own conclusions, but if there was ever a picture that at least captures the imagination, and that you want to see in person (at the Prado), this is it. Meninas is something of the icon of Spain, or at least of Spanish art. You can buy the Infanta’s image (the little girl in the middle) on everything imaginable of the souvenir persuasion, which I have to admit I resisted until I came upon Picasso’s Meninas series in Barcelona—he did innumerable theme and variations on it—where I finally succumbed to a postcard.

The third of the Big Three, historical division, is Goya. I’m afraid that we didn’t get very Goya’d up because a lot of work that one would normally come upon was removed to a special exhibit that we didn’t get to. But I know enough about Goya to ultimately come down as a Velasquez kind of guy when given my druthers about which artist to pursue.

My favorite museum in Madrid was not the Prado, however. Sure, there’s plenty of important work there one wants to see, but to a degree there’s a sameness to it, as in, all major capital cities have some big mother of a museum with collections amassed by their royal families at some point, and here’s another one. Nothing wrong with that, but it sort of transcends nationality, beyond the obvious (i.e., more Velasquez in Spain, more Rembrandt in the Netherlands). The place that blew us away was the Thyssen. Lots of good stuff, but especially the late 19th and early 20th stuff collected by the Missus, which was room after room of surprises, art you’ve never seen before by artists you love, or artists you’ve never heard of and instantly fall in love with. I want her collection for my house. If I get it, I’ll let you come over and see it, much as she does. (http://www.museothyssen.org/thyssen_ing/home.html)

Finally, the third major Madrid museum is the Reine Sofia. Lots of modern stuff, including most notably Picasso’s Guernica. When I was young, Guernica hung at MOMA, and you saw it easily enough, and it was one of many. At Reine Sofia, it is something of a tourist magnet, much like, say, the Mona Lisa at the Louvre. You can’t get near it, and it’s surrounded by nattering chatterers and you just thank your lucky stars you already know it well from your youth because this is just no way to see art.

You can do worse than Madrid, obviously, for seeking out great art. Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights” will amuse the most art-hating type, while Velasquez will get the blood and brain boiling, plus there’s all your usual Renaissance and Middle Ages stuff, a startling Antonello da Messina ("Cristo morto sostenuto da un angelo": look at that angel's face; this is right up there with his Annunciate) all the way up to some amazing Monet and Van Gogh… It’s worth a trip. I’m glad I took it.

Spain, Part Three

I have never before been so flummoxed by food. The Spanish simply don’t eat like everybody else.

The monkey wrench in the peninsular digestive system is tapas. Tapas is small plates of food that one consumes at bars, presumably while drinking. But it’s much more complicated than that. There seems to be about four different versions of tapas relative to plate size, from a couple of bites to a pile o’ grub, with various stations along the way. You can pay by the toothpick inserted in the food, or by the plate, like a normal restaurant. Tapas range from a little bowl of olives to various fish prepared in a myriad of ways to (very occasionally) vegetables to pretty much anything that can be served with a drink. But the thing is, it is not hard to scope out what tapas are, and which ones you’ll like or not like. They are not particularly complicated. I mean, a meat ball is a meat ball is a meat ball. The problem is, when is one supposed to eat all this stuff?

In examining Spanish food, let’s start with lunch, perhaps the most standard dining experience. Businesses shut down from 2 to 5 in the afternoon, which is when people are supposed to eat a big meal. You go to a restaurant and have whatever, like any restaurant. Often there’s a menu of the day, offering three courses at a reasonable price. So, when in Rome… you have a big meal in the afternoon. Followed by a little siesta, if you can swing it.

Now the next thing is, the Spanish like to eat a big nighttime meal at around 11:00. 11:00 at night. (In debate terms, that’s round 2 of CatNats Saturday.) If you stumble into a restaurant at 9:00, my friend, you stumble in alone. They’ll serve you, but the place is deserted (unless it’s a tourist joint, in which case it will be packed with Brits and Germans, which is even worse than an empty restaurant). So you have big meal #2 at 11:00 pm. Figure that from this you’ll go to sleep, at the earliest, at 1:00 or 2:00 a.m.

Now in the morning, you got up, after a long night’s digestion, in time to have that first eye-opening cup of cafe con leche at around 10:00 a.m. Maybe a sticky bun at most, and maybe another café at around 12:00 to keep you going till lunch. So that’s breakfast.

So where do the tapas come in? I mean, you've pretty much had a normal three meals by this point. Well, tapas are available all day long. And it is misleading to refer to where they are sold as bars, because it seems as if everyone selling practically anything sells liquor and tapas. While you’re having your first cup of coffee on some morning when you had to get up early for a day trip to Toledo, the yabbo standing next to you is on his third beer of the day. There are some breakfasty foods like tostados (great toasts) and tortillas (which are like Italian frittatas) and the like. But after the sun is over the yardarm, the real tapas come out, everything from sandwiches to every version of cod and anchovy the human mind can conceive, right up to those bowls of meatballs. But at 1:00 you don’t really want much in the way of tapas before your big lunch at 2:00, so maybe you have the tiniest plate of something, as an appetizer. But traditionally, I am told, tapas is what is supposed to get you from the big meal in the afternoon to the big meal at night. I mean, the collective roar of Spanish stomachs growling at around 8:30 in the evening does, I understand, block out their ability to hear who’s going for what on their version of Deal or No Deal. (Every country has a version of Deal or No Deal. It’s in the U.N. Charter.) So once or twice between the first big meal in the afternoon and the second big meal late at night, there is a trip or two to the tapas bar for a drink and some snacks. Honestly, looking into the windows of the tapas places in the early evening, it’s lots of drinks and lots of snacks.

And, as I say, it’s hard to get one’s naively American stomach around this paradigm shift in eating. It’s easy enough to slip into a light breakfast, and a big lunch, but for the rest of it, it seems like about three meals too many, too late. We tried everything. Lighter lunch simply meant starvation before the restaurants opened at night. Tapas, or alternatively sweets between meals, were overkill. And as you start bloating out you start to wonder why every single Spaniard does not weigh at least five hundred pounds. At which point you begin to suspect that it’s a trick, some sneaky Iberian plot to confuse the French, and you’ve just gotten caught in the undertow.

Still, best foods: roast suckling pig, cocido (a stew, where you get the broth as a first course), Iberian ham (like nothing you’ve ever tasted), good paella (there’s plenty of bad paella, which is okay, but a really good paella will make you happier than the proverbial clam), every kind of fish. We didn’t succumb to the avant garde foods—infusions and essences, foods faux-cooked in nitrogen, all that stuff at $1000 per person—because, well, who’s got $1000 per person? We also had some good Middle Eastern food (some of the Moors are still around). And gelato (because Spain is Spain but Italy is Italy and if you want ice cream, you’ve got to know how to get it). And chocolate (although we never went the hot chocolate and churro route; churros are these sausagey looking donutty things that get dunked in the chocolate in aid no doubt of an instant heart attack). Fresh foods from the market, including wonderful cheeses. Overall, you can eat pretty well, but you’ve got to parse the meal system out for yourself and work your way around the arcana of their unique hours of operation. If you’re on vacation, you’ll probably figure something out eventually. But you can’t help but wonder how people who live there manage. It’s just too much food and not enough sleep. Or maybe I’m just not the sybarite I used to be.

Spain, Part Two

Madrid feels like a very big city into which a fairly manageable touristy MadridLand has been plopped into the middle. You feel there’s a straightforward boundary to where you will be, and while it’s not a small amount of turf, it’s circumscribed enough that you know it pretty well after a couple of days. To the west, there’s the palace, which, I gather, is still occasionally used as such. There’s also a rather new cathedral over there, and the opera house. I guess you could visit any or all of these, but the timing of their open hours did not agree with the timings of our rambling over there. To the east, there’s a large park and a bunch of museums, including the Prado, and we were much more inclined to head in that direction. In the middle there is the old city, and a number of squares, one in particular (the Plaza Mayor) which seems to be the main people magnet, filled with restaurant tables and street performers and in the middle, an open-air theater. The Spanish have a sort of operetta called Zarzuela. One night we were strolling around the plaza and at the crack of 10:00, the program began, with orchestra and lights and the people standing behind me singing along, much as I would have if it had been Gilbert & Sullivan. This serendipitous free performance is the sort of thing that endears one to a place. Free music on a warm spring night. What’s not to like?

To suggest, however, that there is only one people magnet in Madrid does not do the city justice. In that middle of the old city there are a number of squares, any and all of which are especially packed in the early evening, the time of strolling around. One night, May 15, was some sort of local festival where everyone dresses up in native attire and no one stays home, which meant that at one point, every street in the area was almost impassable. This flood of quirkily dressed humanity is swirling around you at Force 10, and there’s not much you can do but hang on and hope. For the record, little kids look very cute in old-fashioned Spanish clothes. Older people, on the other hand, make you wonder what you would do if we had a similar tradition in the US. Would I dress up in my native attire once a year and go parading down the boulevards? If so, what would be my native attire? One spends so much time in our parochial academic world disentangling from stereotypes and prejudgments that it’s hard to get one’s mind around people who embrace, if not stereotypes and prejudgments, at least a core essence of their history and whatever that entangles so that, say, if you photographed them, ninety-nine people out of a hundred would respond, Oh, look, Spanish people.

Because Madrid is a big city, it was the least affected by the shutdown between two and five o’clock in the afternoons. While there were certainly some charming little shops all about, there weren’t whole neighborhoods of them, with tourists pounding the spider-web pavement staring into the windows (which was true of Barcelona). It was more like main shopping streets in the middle with rather large stores (one of which had the most fantastic collection of Meccano toys, which if you are not familiar with them are building sets for kids who like to build things like working miniature nuclear power plants and the like; these are not for pikers like me who like to randomly assemble Legos). To the sides, smaller shops indeed, but not in what seems like totally medieval streets closed to traffic. For that matter, traffic seemed to be everywhere, no matter how unlikely the streets on which it was passing. This was especially true in some of the smaller towns we visited, where every truck that passed us by, usually scraping off a layer of skin in the process, caused us to once again comment on whatever possessed these drivers not to just give up and drive a mule. This sort of narrow street leads to a vast population of motorbikers, even more in Barcelona than Madrid, all of them weaving in and out and generally challenging death every moment of their lives. They were not as bad as Italian bikers, however, who insouciantly challenge your life every moment if you attempt to cross the street, or French bikers, who insouciantly challenge your life every moment by ignoring la difference between street and sidewalk and driving anywhere that happens to be in the direction they wish to be going.

Of all the European cities we’ve been in, I would have to say that Madrid is the least welcoming. Which doesn’t really capture what I mean to express. It’s not that they are unfriendly or rude, or that some other people are wildly friendly by comparison. A better word might be a-friendly, or dis-friendly. Even the tourist venues don’t seem to get particularly excited about foreign visitors. Given that EU tourists travel all over Europe all the time (it costs about 8 euros to fly anywhere it seems nowadays), the idea of menus in multiple languages tends to be fairly common, but not in Madrid, where menus were as often as not in Spanish, and there you were. I’m not insisting on English, mind you. I know the names of what I want to eat in French and in Italian (and now, in Spanish), but I wasn’t given much of a choice. I don't really believe that if you wake a Spaniard up in the middle of the night, he automatically speaks English (this is, on the other hand, true of the French), and I don't mean to sound like a xenophobe, but I guess I'm used to a certain touristy norm in which Madrid does not participate. As I said, I don’t offer this as a value judgment, but more of a curiosity. I’m not sure why it would be. I only say that it is.

As with any trip, it pays to learn a little history first. Key things to know about Spain would be the Moors (their influence is stronger in the south of the country, but its seen at least as far north as Madrid) and the Jews (kicked out in 1492, if I remember correctly), which meant that finally the Spanish could drink alcohol and eat pork with abandon. (You will never see so much pork anywhere in the world. Iberian ham—the best—is fed on acorns. One menu listed, precisely:
Iberian acorn-fed ham
Iberian acorn-fed chicken
Iberian acorn-fed lettuce
So you have to wonder, do they force-feed the lettuce? I'm not making this up.) You need to know about all these really inbred royal people that Velasquez painted whose mouths appear anatomically incorrect but they all look the same, and since the non-royals V painted don’t look like that, you figure it’s maybe what happens when the Austro-Hungarian empire ventures too far east. Queen Isabella might ring a bell; there’s a pivotal statue of Chris Colon (as he is known to the locals) in Barcelona. One should also remember the husband of Mary Tudor, and then 1588, if one wants to take an Anglo viewpoint. Nappy, of course, came through these parts. And then, of course, the Civil War of the 1930s, and Franco’s rule, and finally the restoration of the Bourbons (yes, those Bourbons, I gather) not all that long ago after Franco's death. It helps you understand what you’re looking at if you know where it’s been. The Civil War especially keeps coming up, because it wasn’t that long ago. Nor was Franco.

I have to admit that I got completely lost in trying to piece together which King Philip/Charles/Whatever was which, and who married whom, and when exactly they were part of what, especially faced with all those look-alike Velasquez paintings. Fortunately when you travel there is seldom a quiz at any point, and you absorb what you absorb, and you’re that much the better for it. I try to absorb what I can, and I do read up on things. But I do admit that my perspective on Spain is American. I can rattle off all your explorers, where they went, what they wanted, what happened where they were. But the Spanish back in Spain are something else again. But I know more now than I did when I started out. That has to count for something.

Spain, Part One

Everybody probably has their own approach to vacations. Ours is generally urban: we like cities, and we like visiting new cities (or revisiting old favorite cities). To keep things a little interesting, we’ll throw in a little countryside every few days for variety. Some people like to go sit on the beach for two weeks; I can sit on the beach for, easily, two minutes before going totally insane. Given that the Day Job is fairly filled with reading books that most people save for the beach, I’ve already got that part of the deal covered. I don’t need yet another [insert name of popular fiction author here] on the proverbial two weeks off. I do read, of course, on vacation, but always stuff that I don’t normally get to, like SF or classics, or need some time for. Over the last few weeks it was Snow Crash (too didactic, the exposition overwhelms the action), Anansi Boys (better than I expected), The Longest Journey (a disappointing early Forster), and Dewey’s Art as Experience (which I am still working through). So it’s not that I don’t read on vacation, but I don’t want to spend all day doing it. I can get that the rest of the year, and get paid for it. (I know: it’s a dream job. I don’t disagree.)

The preferred day in one of these vacation cities begins with a lollygagging morning, getting up as late as possible, which for someone trained by decades of waking at 6:00 a.m. is, maybe, 9:00, I’ll take what I can get. Usually we’re on the road around 10 or so, never later than 11. This works well in countries that don’t have breakfast, like Spain. You get up, you infuse some coffee and maybe something little but deviously sweet, you go about some business, you maybe infuse some more coffee, you wrap up your business, then at around 2:00, you eat lunch. Our business these mornings tends to be of the intellectual nature. I love art, and I love great museums, but I appreciate them best when my brain is at its peak, first thing in the day. So on the average day, the first thing we do is take in a museum, or something similarly cultural. To some, this would be the kiss of death, analogous to my feelings about lying on the beach. Chacun a son gout, as no one ever says on the Iberian peninsula.

Spain, as you probably know, still adheres to a siesta schedule. From 2:00 to 5:00 almost everything shuts down, and everybody goes and eats. From everything I had read in advance, one ought to plan one’s big meal for this stretch, and that proved to be good advice. After putting away a large amount of food, we’d stumble back to the hotel for a real siesta. That I liked. I’ve always liked naps, since the day I was born. I take them whenever I can. Come into a tab room at about 2:30 on a Saturday, then you’d better tiptoe and keep it quite, bub. Anyhow, after recharging one’s consciousness, one heads out to walk the streets with every other person on the peninsula, with maybe a stop or two for dessert or tapas, until, FINALLY, it’s time for dinner. Now, I’ve been to countries where they eat late, but this place takes the cake. Unless you went to a restaurant you wouldn’t want to go to, you couldn’t find anywhere that had anyone in it before 9:00. We could stretch it to then, or maybe a little later, but not much beyond that. I gather people really eat at 11:00, and I will vouch that when we were leaving restaurants around that time there were usually people waiting to be seated. Good grief! And why aren’t any of these restaurants open in my home town so the Sailors and I would have somewhere to go on our return from tournaments?

As a general postprandial rule, after more strolling about amidst the teeming multitudes, we’d make it back to the hotel room and have lights out around 1:00 a.m. I have to admit, it did not take long to get the personal system in accord with this schedule. We certainly didn’t always have those big lunch meals (especially in the beginning, when we were still getting used to the place), but we certainly did eat.

As I think of them, more details on some of this stuff to come—the nature of the art and architecture, the nature of the people, the nature of the languages (note plural), the nature of the food, general observances, etc. You may or may not come away thinking Spain is a place for you to prioritize visiting at some point (if you haven’t already). We had a great time, though. You can draw your own personal conclusions over the next few entries.

I'd settle for a comb-over; the writing stuff; vintage whines; Bullpup hostelry; plus the odd et of the cetera persuasion

I will have a bunch to say on Spain shortly, because it’s an interesting place worth talking about. Of course, I think that almost every place is an interesting place worth talking about, but some are more interesting than others. As a case in point, we are talking about the one country in the world where the mullet is not merely not dead, but in fact rules. As my personal mullet days are far behind me (see my photo on the right if you need some explanation for this), you can imagine how this might have affected me. Anyhow, we’ll do detail travel stuff over the next few weeks. What else is there at season’s end, right?

Wrong.

One thing I noticed in that WTF thread on disclosure (to which, btw, I’ve posted my notes, at O’C’s request, which means I can never look at the thread again) was that someone commented that virtually no $ircuit debaters were writing their own cases, a point which no one challenged. I’m shocked—shocked!—to hear it. One of the favorite rounds I ever judged was of a young debater running for the first time a case his college-student coach had written for him, which he understood practically none of. When we discussed it later in the day, he said that as he ran it more often, he was starting to get the hang of it. This particular debater went on to great debate fame and fortune, and as far as I’m concerned, he is still some schmuck running a case he was handed that he didn’t understand, and his coach was more of a puppeteer than a coach. I wonder if they do this in, say, high school baseball. Do the coaches throw the pitches for the kids? Or do they bat for them, because they’ll be better batters than the kids would be? I’m rather religious on this subject. I certainly believe in working with my team to develop arguments on a resolution, usually as many arguments as we can think of. We talk about them all, then they go off and work out the ones they like to make cases out of. They will, therefore, learn to think about the material and then learn to write about the material. I do edit it, but as you know, I’m a professional editor, and one thing we do if we’re doing our job well is get the writers to do the writing; we don’t do it for them. I point out areas in a case that I think need work, and occasionally suggest what that work should be in some detail. I do not do it for them. And I certainly don’t tell them what arguments to run. Quite honestly, I think that if I wrote cases, they’d be pretty good. Hell, I’m a published author and a publishing veteran and relatively intelligent: how bad would I be? But I’m sorry, you couldn’t pay me to write a case for a student. Oh well, one person’s religion is another person’s bull-ogna, and vice versa. If I were to convert, and somehow get the money for travel, it is not inconceivable that I could field a lot more $ircuit debaters. But as I’ve said over the years, if TOC didn’t exist, I wouldn’t have invented it. Time has not eroded my views on this subject.

On the other hand, I like CatNats for a variety of reasons, always, however, excluding their topics. CP’s recent blog (it’s flogged on the Feed, which you should be following religiously if you really consider yourself a serious member of the VCA) explains that in fact the Cats solicit topics from the membership at the beginning of the year, and offers some possible reasons why no one seems to know about this. He will make some effort next year to publicize this solicitation, and perhaps eliminate all the whining about the topic (a breed of whine of which I am a connoisseur). Kudos! In the race for forensic sainthood, CP has, as you know, already achieved my venerable and beatified states for his work in normalizing the college universe. If he can tame the Catholics as well, he’ll be shaking Mother Teresa’s hand in heaven any day now (metaphorically speaking).

But then, on the other other hand, not long ago Chris sent out a notice about Yale explaining that the hotels were filling up—nay, in many cases, had filled up—and that we’d all better get our reservation acts together. So I started calling my usual venue for the last few years, the La Quinta, and got nothing but no replies and leave-a-message messages. I talked to the desk, and they promised action, and then I went to Spain thinking that maybe action would ensue in my absence, but I returned to no action whatsoever, and started calling again, and FINALLY got a human being who told me they were sold out. Feh! So I liked La Quinta because of the shuttle, but I figured at a cheaper price I could bring a bus and driver and get an extra room, so my next step was a cheapo Days Inn up the road, and I talked to someone there of the totally useless persuasion who took some information and told me that the manager would call me back in an hour. Unfortunately, this was not an hour by my watch, so I decided to bite the bullet and go for the Clarion, which also has a shuttle but is a shot or two more expensive. Lo and behold, the person who answered the phone (yes, there was a person who answered the phone) was professional and seemed to have some knowledge of and experience in the hotel business. Working with her was a pleasure and I am now happy to say that my rooms are secure. But oy, what a pain in the patoot. No wonder I’m not writing cases for my team. I’m too busy making (or failing to make) hotel reservations.

And finally, in that catching-up category, tonight we’re going to see Indiana Jones. For the first time. O’C tells me he saw it 38 times just last Sunday alone. Maybe I’m never going to catch up. Thank goodness.

Liberte, egalite, et...some...other te.

There is one basic theme that underlies most good LD topics. And there are two ways to look at it. First, it is the conflict of the sphere of the individual against the sphere of the community. What rights and privileges and responsibilities are those of each, and what do we do when they are in conflict? When they are not in conflict, then neither matters much objectively. I don’t care what some other individual does if it only affects that individual, or at least I shouldn’t. Live and let live, in other words. (There are those who don’t respect this claim of privacy, usually for religious morality reasons, but we are not looking at religious ethics but social ethics, if for no other reason than that religion does not make for good debate while social engineering is quite arguable.) Similarly, if society as a whole somehow takes actions that don’t affect individuals—maybe things like when the Senate declares the National Muffin—it is of no consequence objectively (aside from the time wasted when they could be solving the Iran/Iraq/Africa/Whatever situation).

The second way to look at the basic theme of the good LD topics is liberty versus equality. One of the pieces I posted to the Coachean Feed recently asserted that in the democratic universe at large, individuals prioritize the latter over the former, and that may indeed be true. Perhaps the concept of justice is merely the attempt to balance the two: when liberty and equality are in balance, we have justice. For that matter, when the individual and the community are in balance, we have justice. Same thing, albeit through different mechanisms of thinking. Justice, for once, however, is not the manifest derivative value of the resolution, so maybe we can put that aside.

Like many people, I firmly believe that you need to have something to say before you start saying it*. In debate terms, that means being able to boil down your case succinctly in such a way that if I were to ask you what you are running, you could answer in one sentence that would, indeed, indicate to me what you are running. I’ve never heard any writing instructor (or almost any kind of instructor of anything) telling a student to complicate what they’re doing. Simplify. Always simplify. If you can’t boil it down, there’s something wrong somewhere. Or if you don’t have a starting point to work from, you’ve got that same something wrong problem. You can see my thoughts on this clearly in the how-to-write-a-case material on my team website. Start first with the idea, then elaborate that idea, or thesis, into a case. If you haven’t got the idea yet, keep striving for it, but don’t start typing quite yet.

The point of all this noodling is just to provide another way to look at the NatNats LD rez. While the topic is asking you about the issue within a specific arena, i.e., economics, it could not be any more clearly a conflict of liberty versus equality. Each side is asked to claim that theirs is the one to be prioritized (except of course for the schmegeggie who runs that neither should be prioritized, which, when you think about it, is a bad approach absent the fact that it tries to preempt both sides of the rez and eliminate the conflict: societies probably should prioritize one over the other, although maybe some societies, say the developing nations, need a different approach than an industrialized nation—interesting stuff that probably is beside the point). If you’re still have trouble getting your mind around the rez at this late date, then just start with that. It’s liberty versus equality. Obviously the words are (virtually) already in the resolution, but that doesn’t mean everyone sees them that clearly. For that matter, when you’re listening to your opponent in the round, make sure that this is what they are talking about too. Resolutionality is rather smiled on at NatNats (and rightly so); if your opponent is non-resolutional, you might be able to pick up a win right off of that.

And on to other things. I’ve got pictures to sort, stories to tell, motel rooms to book. Thank God I’ve got you to tell my troubles to, they being so many and varied: we should be able to get through the off-season without a scratch (especially once WTF starts sending hourly updates on the mystery meat they’re serving at the camp cafeteria et al).

*Readers of this blog may disagreed, but who needs you anyhow, you yabbo!

You show me yours and I'll show you mine

One thing I looked at as I tried to catch up with the universe’s activities in my absence was the thread over at WTF on prepping out and case disclosure. Or at least that’s how the thread seems to have started out; over its course, it’s covered many other things as well. Interesting stuff, although the thread itself, like any long and complicated discussion, has a lot of chaff to wheat your way through. Still, some thoughts.

First of all, as an aside, isn’t there something slightly wrong with the admission that a third to a half or $ircuit rounds are so fast that most of the judges don’t understand what is being said? This is ascribed as much as anything else as bad speed, rather than speed per se, and that may be true. One of the worst aspects of LD since as far back as I can remember is its rather inept cooption of various aspects of policy, and this would seem to be another example of that. I’ve watched policy breaks at TOC that I could flow, because there’s more to it than just talking fast. At any rate, I question the value of a speaking event in which the speaking is literally removed from event’s evaluative context. If an aff is going to spew at such intolerable speeds that we have to eliminate (or, excuse me, “flex”) CX so that the judge and opponent can read the cases to find out what was said, we’ve got a problem.

But the issue is prepping out and case disclosure. One needn’t be a professional mathematician to figure that a large organization will be able to scope out cases better than a small organization. If I have four or five judges and some loose coaches and whatnot, I can pretty quickly get a bead on all the major competition at an event. If I don’t have that vast backup army, I won’t be able to collect as many flows. So the advantage goes to the already advantaged, obviously. But case disclosure eliminates that advantage (or at least lessens this particular aspect of that advantage). If the goal of a debate is to argue ideas, and not win the round at any cost, then it makes sense that we would want to know that Debater A is running an aff based on such-and-such and so-and-so, or that Debater B is running a kritik based on this-or-that. We wouldn’t need the whole song and dance, of course, but enough so that every opponent goes into the room prepared for the subject matter at hand.

Aaron T sets a simple paradigm that this sort of thing can be done or not done by any tournament that wants to do it, and he will therefore do it at his. This makes sense to me. Given the number of $ircuit folks who travel down to his venue for that Octos bid, there is a logic to their being placed on as level a playing field as possible. And I’m sure the mechanics of the thing, as he’ll do it, will make sense; it’s funny how many people seem to want to quibble about implementation, as if this hasn’t been going on one way or another in Policy for the last thousand years. At the MHL, Kurt was kicking around not only disclosure but limiting novices to a handful of case approaches, simply to train them to figure out what the hell they were doing in the round, without having to worry about prepping out on an infinite number of case possibilities. The point was education, not victory; that would come later.

Most LD venues I’m a part of, I think, wouldn’t really lend themselves to AT’s approach, because the events are informed by other interests. That is, certainly a lot of people go to Yale or Lex or Bump looking for a bid, but the vast number of people are there for something else. The judge pools are good, but they’re not mostly $ircuit. People travel from around the country to the Texas tournaments and to Emory and Glenbrooks, and the field numbers at those tournaments are limited, and it’s a pretty special situation, and it’s a major financial investment. You can send exactly 2 LDers to Emory, by plane, for about the same price as sending 5 varsity LDers to Lexington, plus a herd of your novices, by bus. We tend to be looking for a different debate experience with these events. Not that they’re better or worse, but they’re different. To expect that all tournaments must aim at the same goals would be a rather limited view of the activity, regardless of what goals you would want those to be.

So I wouldn’t suggest that all tournaments be somehow “required” to have a disclosure process, but that some tournaments might require disclosure makes sense to me, especially if they are at the top tier of national events. A more parochial tournament might wish to do this too, and more power to them, but it’s not my particular cup of tea, and I certainly can’t imagine it at a novice or JV level. It probably does make sense that all round robins set up a disclosure process, however, given the nature of those events, their competitors and their judge pools.

So as far as disclosure goes, I’m all for it, where it makes sense. The element of surprise is the only thing gained by running something for which your opponent is unprepared. That’s not debate; it’s an ambush. Even if you win the round, you haven’t done so because you’re a good debater, but because you’re a sneaky s.o.b. Where’s the glory in that? And a level playing field of disclosure makes all teams potentially equal. I can’t argue with that either.

Do what I tell you to do, you yabbo!

There is some joy to being carded at CatNats. Of course, it would have been more fun to hear myself quoted if I had actually been sitting in judging the round, which I gather happened to O'C. There's a conflict for you. How do you evaluate somebody obtuse enough to quote you (from your blog, of all places), when on the one hand, your opinion has no warrant whatsoever, whereas on the other hand, you know you're always right? Tough call. Not the first time it's happened, actually, although usually it's some misguided novice who hasn't yet separated the wheat from the chaff rather than a national qualifier. Then again, I do understand that seven or eight people at TOCs were running flex affs, that virginity is now the standard response to Baudrillard (regardless of what Baudrillard happens to be talking about), and that 62% of the people polled on the question stated that Jon Cruz is a member of the Irish nobility. (In other breaking news, the Irish actually have a nobility?)

Anyhow, we're back from Spain. So far all I've done is sorted through the junk mail to get to the handful of good stuff, and the world does not seem to have ended, nor even come close. I'll restart the Coachean Feed shortly, mostly starting from here rather than trying to catch up, except with one or two strings I've been following, especially the series on aesthetics. I will have a lot to talk about regarding the trip, but I'll just stir it in when it makes sense to do so. Mostly it was great fun, good weather, good food, a good experience overall. The high point is that the hotel we stayed in in Madrid gave away free plastic shoehorns. I lost a shoehorn a couple of years ago, and have been waiting for something like this to happen. Which means that if you see some guy wearing loafers, it's probably me.

Next step: sorting out the photographs.

Hiatus in progress

We'll be back the end of May. And here's what O'C said when he heard we were leaving town.

The NatNat rez

Resolved: Limiting economic inequality ought to be a more important social goal than maximizing economic freedom.

Rob—Zombie? Lowe? Petrie?—asks about NatNats, and I’m happy to (marginally) comply. Of course, you won’t have Coachean Life to kick around in a day or two, as I’ll be on vacation, so I can’t wrestle this one around for day after day after day, but there’s not much we can do about that. Fortunately the topic is so elemental in LD terms that there isn’t much one has to say to have said enough.

Governments exist, at their most basic level, to do a handful of things. Most importantly, and universally, they establish order among individuals. Governments create and enforce rules, which establish order. John Locke talks eloquently about doing this in what has become the democratic model, with representative government enacting legislation, an executive enforcing the legislation, and a judiciary interpreting the legislation. But it is done as well by a totalitarian government. Rules are set, people follow them. The difference is that in the totalitarian state, the people have no say in setting the rules.

Secondly, governments provide a synergistic ability to perform what individuals cannot perform. Governments, by their nature and size, are able to provide infrastructures, for example, things like roads or reservoirs, that serve their citizens beyond what the citizens could have done for themselves. Once humans develop large societies from small tribal groups, a relatively new phenomenon in the history of our species, the individual no longer is able to provide for self and family. Distances become greater, specializations become common, and government steps in to provide what we once provided for ourselves. Pre-societal humans, if they wanted water, plopped down next to a river. Nowadays we turn on the faucet. In other words, governments provide services to individuals that they cannot provide for themselves.

Thirdly, and again derived from nature and size, governments are able to deal meaningfully with other governments. We’ve talked about sovereignty in the past, and that subject is not relevant here (but feel free to listen to the Parsippany Ritz podcast if you’re interested).

And that would be about it. Establishing order, providing organization beyond the individual level and dealing with other comparable polities are what governments universally do, one way or the other, well or poorly, regardless of the type of government.

The NatNat rez looks mostly to the second area of what a government does. One government differs from another government in many ways, including how it provides services to individuals that they cannot provide for themselves, and in what services it provides. And it is important to keep in mind that any government runs on the support of the individuals it governs, in the form of taxes. Money goes in, money comes out. Again, differences exist: a thieving dictator’s handling of the money is different from a democratic socialist state’s handling of the money. In any case, only a government can “limit economic equality.” So we have to be looking at describing the nature of governments in the rez.

Resolved: Limiting economic inequality ought to be a more important social goal than maximizing economic freedom.

The most extreme limiting of economic inequality would be a Marxist system in which there is no such thing as private property. The most extreme maximizing of economic freedom would be a laissez-faire state with no regulations on capital whatsoever. Historically, Marx and his followers were responding to the extant situation, where big forces of capital did whatever they wanted without controls, and pocketed all the profits. The idea of eliminating private property would, of course, theoretically eliminate the big forces of capital, but would also eliminate one of the cornerstones of the West’s received wisdom of Rationalism. Property, many believed, was an inalienable right. The conflict, in other words, was clear.

The real world has gone a great way since Marx’s day in resolving this conflict. On the one hand, the purely capitalistic libertarian state is now subject to government regulation at many levels. On the other hand, the urge to hold private property has proven hard to suppress, and purely Marxist governments do not really exist, and the legacy of totalitarian states devolving out of communism may have demonstrated in the laboratory that these governments never could exist. That, of course, is moot. Still, many socialist ideas have been incorporated into many otherwise capitalistic states, most noticeably in the area of health care, even in the US. So the deep background here, which is what we’ve discussed so far, is that the extremes have for all intents and purposes existed, and we’ve evolved into some middle ground. But that middle ground is vast. Take a look at these ratings: http://www.heritage.org/research/features/index/countries.cfm This is the Heritage Foundation’s index of economic freedom. The amount of income tax is pretty telling from country to country. You could do worse that diving into these figures with notepad in hand.

But we haven’t really addressed the resolution yet, that “limiting economic inequality ought to be a more important social goal than maximizing economic freedom.” If we are going to limit economic inequality, we are presumably going to have either a redistribution of wealth after the fact, i.e., the richer subsidizing the poorer to some extent, or we are going to have a distribution of the wealth before the fact, i.e., the public possession of the wealth and the elimination of private property. One could easily run a completely pro-communist aff, in other words, and be resolutional. I don’t think that is a terrible debate: far from it, the study of capitalism v. communism is very enlightening, and it wasn’t all that long ago that, indeed, cap v. com was literally the NatNat topic. This could be seen as a variation on the theme.

As I say, however, to some extent history has already resolved the cap v com debate, and while just because something happened doesn’t make that something inevitable, I wouldn’t want to be defending communism after looking at those heritage.org figures. Freedom, it would seem, equates pretty straightforwardly with free capitalism. And freedom is an awfully strong benefit of any system, not to mention a system that allows you to keep most of your wealth. An attractive picture, unless you’re destitute in Hong Kong. Or, a couple of notches down, the US.

So what other debate is there? Well, the first thing I thought of when I heard this topic was not cap v com but Rawls v Nozick. (I very recently posted a Feed piece on these two yabbos that NatNatters ought to take a look at.) The chief question that Rawls poses, the way I see it, is going back to that second purpose of government discussed above, that governments provide services to individuals that they cannot provide for themselves. Given that, in our complex modern society, we seem to be unavoidably faced with a class of economically deprived, for whatever reason, what responsibility, if any, does government, and by association tax-paying individuals who make up that government, have to that underclass? There’s an awful lot of leeway in answering this question, and that leeway could make for a good debate. Rawls tells us that we need to create a society that provides a certain minimum benefit for the least privileged. That is, as we “create” a society, we must fashion it in such a way that the least privileged are getting what they consider to be a fair deal. To achieve this end, we must do our societal creating behind a veil of ignorance: we cannot know our own position in the society, as that might corrupt our decision-making. Not knowing our position will lead us to this minimum benefit for the least privileged position, because for all we know, the least privileged might be us. Needless to say, if we were absolutely fair and incorruptible, we would come up with exactly the same decisions; the veil of ignorance is merely an insurance policy against the fact that, unfortunately, we are not angels.

The end result of Rawls’s thinking is a fairly robust support system for the underclass, and his ideas are associated with liberalism, i.e., a large government system running a lot of programs for the public weal. This kind of system can be seen as prioritizing limiting inequality. Keep in mind that the logic of Rawls is not manifest, and you just can’t walk into a round, say “veil of ignorance” and walk away with the ballot. The V of I for Rawls is a philosophical determining mechanism, not an end in itself. But reading the first hundred pages or so of Theory of Justice should be enough to get your head straight on what the man was talking about. After these pages he goes into the math; I, for one, was not equipped to go with him.

On the other hand is not really Nozick, as the aforementioned article explains, but conceptually we think of it as Nozickian. Ayn Rand, of all people, supported charity for the poor, as a sort of noblesse oblige aspect of the possession of wealth. The botto line of libertarianism is not, therefore, letting the poor rot. Rand is as much a libertarian as Nozick, and not that I’d ever suggest anyone torture themselves by reading Rand’s prose, I will say that once you get her drift, you will understand the neg. The position opposite to limiting economic inequality is one in which the government does not directly take on the responsibility of seeing to its underclass. This is not done out of meanness or parsimony, but out of the belief that the best system for the growth of capital is the system that least attempts to control that growth. Short of crippling monopolies or unfair business practices, including the unfair treatment of labor, the belief is that, since everyone is equal and has an equal opportunity to create their own wealth, it should be their private business to do so, and the government’s job is to keep away from it. In other words, the government is obligated to be laissez faire, because the laissez faire system will result in the most wealth for the most people. The very idea that wealth is obtainable to one and all acts as an incentive, as compared to the welfare-ish Rawls state, where the dole acts as a disincentive. Look, for instance, to the unemployment situation in the UK. At the point where unemployment is about as attractive as low-level employment, you run a large risk of finding a large group who opt out. Why work when you don’t have to?

I think the very interesting ideas of capitalism are in this construct. Despite the fact that I am a dyed-in-the-wool liberal—I know, you’re shocked, shocked to hear it—I think there is reasonableness and potential in that small government, every man for himself idea. I mean, didn’t it work in the US? Doesn’t it potentially build the most prosperous nations, the most vivacious, the most exciting? Where is the financial excitement in the world today? Outside of China (which may be too important to posit an “outside of” argument), it’s in the freewheeling capitalist nations.

Anyhow, this just scratches the surface. And because of the wide open nature of the rez, it’s far from inclusive. It’s merely the starting point of one evening’s aimless noodling.

And now I’ve got to go get Tik (pronounced teek) out of my suitcase.

Leavin' on a j.p.; Guamacites; pre-Pups planning already?

I am now ready to pack. The goal is to bring as little as possible, so I’ve brought the smaller bag down from the attic, and done my best to keep Tik (pronounced teek) from stowing away in it, and begun laying things out. Not clothes, of course. Clothes are easy. A couple of these, a couple of those, and with any luck I won’t be arrested for disturbing the fashion peace. No, I’m thinking assorted chargers and international plug connections, games for the DS, juiced and loaded iPoddery (music, podcasts, audiobooks, video), camera (with manual, in case I want to get creative), teensy tripod for same, magazines, travel materiel, and of course, books. I’m limiting it to John Dewey on art, an early Neal Stephenson (the Baroque Cycle would mean never leaving my hotel room), and a easy-reading player to be named later (either Gaiman stories or a Jeeves novel). As you can tell, I definitely have my priorities straight. All those hours in airports and on planes require weeks of planning. An idle brain is the devil’s workshop…

Speaking of the devil’s workshop, every debate site this side of Guam (which just caucused for Obama, by the way, by a handful of votes; in other news, Guam has caucuses despite the fact that they don’t have electoral votes, and the inhabitants of the place are called Guamanians, not Guamwegians) has been posting minute-by-minute updates on the TOC. I have not bothered reposting them through the C-Feed. Enough is enough. I’m glad to see that Malis is now in their hall of fame, though. He’s a good guy, and has done some seriously clean tabbing for years now. More power to him.

Tomorrow is the last official/unofficial/you-name-it confab of whichever Sailors want to confuse Good Old “Alli” even more thoroughly before CatNats. And then we’re off the charts. After vacation I’ve got a ton of catch-up stuff that I’d like to do before the new season starts. That some of this catch-up is left over from last summer does not bode well, however, so breath should not be held. Still, I’m already thinking of Bullpups signups, and feeling that I’ll stick with the same hotel. It is off-campus, but there’s a shuttle and it’s a nice place and you don’t have to do the Street Criminal Night Obstacle Course to get to it.

I’m almost outta here!

The latest theory arg put to the test; topic envy; pre-ciao

This weekend dozens of debaters at TOC will be attempting for the first time to employ the flex aff in their competitive strategies. My prayers are with them.

Anyone who thinks I’ve been ranting too much over the CatNats topics (LD: education ought to be imbalanced; Pfffft: Native Americans ought to get off their lazy butts) might wish to compare them with the recently released NatNats topics. If you are a non-New Yorker you may not realize that, as a general rule, NatNats are quite problematic here, because they interfere with required Regents exams and/or graduation, which, if not required, is usually recommended for most high school students at the end of their fourth year. People do attend NatNats, but it is an enormous hassle, and often students just don’t bother because of that hassle. But every year it’s the same thing. Topics are released and those of us who will not be at NatNats (and yes, not even going to Las Vegas could overcome the inertia of Regents/graduation) sigh and wish we could debate those topics, or prep for them, or just touch the hem of their garments. Lucky #^$&#s! All we get is CatNats. About which I will now stop whining. (And I have continued to feed education articles to the Coachean Eaters in the audience. There’s plenty of stuff out there. Little of it is relevant to the topic, but at least it’s about education per se. Thence you shall derive your cases.)

This weekend is my final chance to get organized for my vacation. I don’t feel at all ready, but I never do until I return. I’ll be shutting down all Coachean communications, of course, for the duration. Two weeks without an internet. That I’m ready for!

Declaimers versus the Heavyweight Wrestling team; the Platonic K; And you call yourself a Replicant?

For the third time now I’ve heard debate cited as the juxtaposition against athletics in the CatNats resolution. Including forensics in the fine arts is a stretch, to put it mildly. No one defining fine arts in a vacuum, or enumerating the fine arts, would naturally include debate. Of course, even if it were one of the fine arts, it wouldn’t be particularly useful to argue it in this rez, I would imagine, because it would be the fine art most like athletics vis-à-vis its competitive essence, and therefore the least useful for making any distinction between the two sides. Nevertheless, I point this out because it could be something you hear in a round or two, and far be it for me to want to see you taken by surprise.

I got back onto the Cat Track from listening to the latest Loquitor interview this morning. Yet another disinterested observer couldn’t get his mind around a conflict between the two sides, seeing both as essential to secondary education. Which makes one think, wait a minute, what we have here is the absolute, quintessential critique possibility. (And if I remember correctly, JV commented something along these lines as he applauded himself for not having any LDers going to CatNats.) Fine arts and athletics are both requirements for good education. Forcing a choice between the two requirements would be, therefore, bad for education. Hence, accepting the premise of the resolution is bad for education, and presumably the CFL is bad for education, and if you can’t make the quintessential K out of that then you’ve been watching too way many episodes of “American Idol” lately and your brain just isn’t doing the job anymore. This is, of course, different from the abstention neg: the ab neg actually believes that the non-choice position is a true reading of the resolution, and, as I’ve said, a self-delusional clever-devil reading at that. It is more than likely that the clever devil ab neg has, in fact, also watched way too many episodes of “American Idol” and would therefore not know a kritik from a tire iron. Not that I would ever recommend running a K, of course, even when, for once, it is the absolutely correct neg strategy, but I will point out that in this case, despite the perfection of the concept, running that K is a virtually guaranteed loss. Sure: let’s run a case saying that the CFL is anti-education, in front of a panel of three CFL educators. That ought to turn out well.

On another note altogether, I listened this morning (it was a long morning) to a couple of Philosophy Bites. I hasten to point out that it’s Philosophy Bites and not Philosophy Bites. In any case, Stephen Muhall on film as philosophy went into great detail on “Blade Runner,” making it a shoo-in for the O’C iPod. I also listened to Richard Tuck on Free Riding, which is about an area of vagueness that, unlike the frustratingly twee episode I listened to on free will, is both totally impossible and wonderfully fascinating at the same time. I now know what the Sorites Paradox is, or more to the point, I know a heap about the Sorites Paradox. Occasionally philosophy doesn’t bite at all. And remarkably enough, they’re claiming on their website that they’re in the iTunes top 30. You’ve gotta love podcast listeners, if that’s true. If there were more of us there’d be fewer Howard Sternses. And if that’s not an admirable goal, I don’t know what is.

Oh. Wait. I forgot to count down to the TOC. Okay. Here we go: 22. Whew. Almost forgot that. The VCA would kill me in my sleep if I were to be so lax. Coming tomorrow: 21!