Well, it isn't Nostrum, but it's something

Over the years I’ve found that one of the hardest things to do as a coach is to get parents involved as LD judges. Regardless of one’s position about so-called lay judging, it’s pretty much a given that at the starter and local levels we need parents to adjudicate because there’s really no one else. (And I’m not even thinking about Pfffft at the moment.) If we lived in a world where, by snapping our fingers, we could instantly summon a cadre of ex-TOC debaters to adjudicate every novice round (for free), it might be a different thing, but at events like our Mid-Hudson League meets for freshmen and sophomores, or at local tournaments likewise serving a non-$ircuit audience, especially those offering varsity-level competition, somebody has got to sit in the back of the room with a pen and a ballot, and parents are it. Throw in the need to chaperone on occasion (how many weekends does the average coach have events at multiple venues?) and there you are. So I’m not arguing in favor of parents in the bubble rounds determining TOC bids (although I could), I’m simply stating that in lots of places in the activity, we need ‘em. And, as I say, it’s not easy to get them.

In the past I’ve offered one or sometimes two evening seminars on LD judging each year. The attendance at these has steadily declined, a fact which I do not blame on the seminars themselves, which for many would be the social highlight of the season. I think what happens is that, early in the year, when their little freshman have only recently signed onto the debate team, parents don’t realize yet that they are needed, whereas from my point of view, this is the best time for me to train them. It’s not as if I could offer seminars every week of the year, there being a real world one must also live in. Lately we have integrated training into our local MHL and CFL events at the beginning of the year. This is pretty effective, actually. For the first round of the tournament we send in the parents as observers, usually of JV rounds, with an experienced varsity judge, with whom they can discuss the proceedings. After that round, we have a little seminar where we explain the whole process. Then we send parents back into the fray; maybe we’ll even give them a round to judge (in the bottom novice bracket). They should come away from this a little less paralyzed than when they went in. Watching newbies debate is not complicated; few are the first-time novices who are so up on their Habermas that they need to be tossed out of the window of one of the upper floors. Judging easy rounds is good training for new judges; they gain both confidence and experience so that at some point they would be able to comfortably judge more difficult rounds. As far as I know, no one is born a good judge, and experience is absolutely required. If you’ve won TOC yesterday and never judged, I would be hard-pressed to see you as anything better than a potentially good judge. There’s a big difference between debating and judging, and I have often seen little relation between the two; that is, many is the merely okay debater who proved to be an excellent judge, while good debaters have often acted as if they’re still advocates rather than adjudicators, becoming the worst of interveners.

By now I’ve collected all sorts of judging materials, including what I’ve written as handouts, the condensed instructions on the MHL ballots, my own lecture notes, sample flows, etc. What I’ve decided to do is tie it all together with a lecture/podcast. I’ve been updating and reorganizing my old lecture notes, and polishing my website judging page, and I hope to get to it this weekend. It won’t be a shortie, by any estimate. When I’ve given the lecture to Sailor parents, it’s gone on until the point where even I’m looking at my watch, but my guess is that doing it as a podcast will allow people to listen at their own speed, taking in what they need to at their own self-determined chunkage pace rather than as judging overload. Tying it into the written materials will augment it, and the whole thing should stand alone fairly nicely. Of course, it will be available to anyone who wants it, but at the very least I’ll push it through the local CFL and MHL venues. Some parents are happy to see their kids disappear into four years of debate somewhere other than home, but a large number are also interested in their kids’ activities and want to help out, and this should be a useful tool for that latter group. Judging isn’t that hard when you start out simultaneously with your own homegrown novice, but parents don’t necessarily realize that. They need all the help they can get (especially in a culture that often derides them as mommy-daddy judges, while at the same time insisting only on MJP, i.e., judges predisposed to accept whatever arguments are being run not because they’re inherently convincing arguments but because the advocates and adjudicators are both cut from the same sociological cloth). I’ll keep you posted on how this works out.

Demo: Smorgasbord vs. McNuggets

WTF, Cali. — The Association for Keeping High School Students Out of Prison During the Long Hot Summer (AKHSSOPDLHS, or as it's friends call it, Norm) again featured a demonstration round featuring the word feature twice in the same sentence. Actually three times, but who's counting? Debaters were from two of today’s top food groups. Hamletta Smorgasbord of Holoview School in Texas — the affirmative — placed at the PBJ Round Robin and was a somnabulist at Emory. Chicken ("Chick") McNuggets of Edema High School in Minnesota — the other affirmative — was tallest speaker at the Iowa Caucus and a finalist at the Irish Lottery if only he would respond to this email within 24 hours. The moderator? Craven Savage of South Eugenics High School. (Note: the photograph was taken prior to the round, as Jon Cruz, wearing his traditional but not very convincing Leonard Nimoy drag, attempts to remember what episode this came from.)

[Okay, I couldn't resist just one more...]

Codified morality

There would appear to be a school of thought that law is codified morality, a school of thought to which I do not subscribe. Having been writing on morality lately, this came up, and I realized an obvious link that had eluded me in the past.

One of the things that I do early on with novices is, not surprisingly, discuss morality. In debate, when the subject arises, we need a method of measuring right and wrong that is somehow objective, and although we may never light on the perfectly objective measurement, we can reasonably look at consequential and deontological approaches to right and wrong as decent enough working models. There are those who, because of the inherent imprecision of our models, disregard the possibility of any moral action, but this presumes that morality is an absolute, and that we can’t choose among different actions as more moral or less moral, a practical necessity in real life. This is the same as saying, since I can’t be good, there’s no point in getting any better: it is at the very least illogical, because the one does not follow from the other. And, well, maybe there is an ultimate, categorical good. As Fats Waller might put it, one never knows, do one?

In introducing those novices to this subject, the first thing I ask them is how to tell the difference between right and wrong. Since most of us act on moral models received from authority, first parents and then religion, one would expect an answer along these lines, but that is seldom forthcoming. No one ever tells me that the Bible (or the Koran or the Gita) is their source of right and wrong, or their spiritual adviser, and certainly not their parents. The almost inevitable answer is that, somehow or other, the majority of people determining that something is right or wrong is the way that we can tell the difference. That is, we somehow get to vote on it.

If you stare at them long enough with they point this out, they eventually come to realize the inadequacy of such a system. We go on from there to the more satisfying and traditional models.

Still, when you come to think about it, in a democracy law is the will of the people writ in statute. Law is the list of things we can’t do and the things that we must do, and one way or another laws exist because of the will of the majority (even if you follow the torturous path of representative democracy in the US). If you look at that and squint just the right way, it might be hard to differentiate that democratic legislative provenance from the idea of law as morality. My problem with this should be clear: I don’t think we get to vote on what’s right and what’s wrong, and that that is how we tell the difference between the two. That would presume that the majority must always be correct in distinguishing right from wrong, or that right and wrong actually are a numbers game, which seems to me the same as saying that since the Yankees have more fans than the Mets, the Yanks are therefore a better team. A better team might warrant more fans, but more fans don’t warrant a better team. Something being morally correct might warrant its codification into law, but codification of something into law does not warrant its moral correctness. I’m pretty sure that most of your conscientious objectors would agree with this line of thinking.

I only point this out because, hey, it’s summer, and what else is going on? After you scour the daily published lists of which schmegeggies at WTF are studying ill-conceived theory part three and who’s studying stultification in the aff, what else is left to fill the empty hours?

We bid farewell, probably, to WTF; a new hope (?); alarming episodes; next year, Miley!

All right, that was fun, but it’s time to get back to the real world. Even ten-a-day updates from O’C get old after a while. There’s a regular existence that needs tending to.

CP and I have been in discussions over a certain school that shall, for the moment, remain nameless. I’m relatively willing, but I have some issues that need to be resolved first. At times I feel as if we’re the tournament SWAT team, and when we come in, we don’t take any prisoners, and the forensic universe is a better place for our having been there. But I also get the feeling sometimes that we’re seen as merely an advertising tool to make any tournament look better because, hey, how bad can it be if the Usual Suspects are running it? But in the actual event, all we can do is insure professional tabbing. It takes more than that to make a good tournament (although you really can’t have a good tournament without it). CP’s great contribution has been getting schools to do all those other things, and the continued growing strength of the Bullpups is one manifest result of that. And speaking of which, I have to admit that I am very much looking forward to the Pups again this year. If we get that building we had last year, and if they get decent hospitality for the judges, this is going to be a high point of the season. But I’m also looking forward to a bunch of others. Big Jake, for instance, because I love watching O’C run around going crazy because there’s not enough chrome on the 23rd place traveling trophy. Anyhow, as information breaks I’ll pass it along. For the moment suffice it to say that negotiations are taking place, and if they work out, the forensic universe will be a better place for our having been there.

I have added an alarm to my calendar to remind me to keep posting Nostrum pdfs. I should get one or two a week up henceforth.

And—ta-da!!!—I have finished updating the Hillary Duff, which is now posted and ready to go. There’s good new information on justice and morality, and some Frenchies ported over from Caveman. I was going to toss Rand and Maslow as old-hat, but I decided to leave them in. These two old chestnuts have definitely been replaced in the cycle of materials run in LD, to which most of us say, “Thank God,” but they still have their relative points of interest. Anyhow, with this behind me and checked off on my to-do list, I can move on to a few other projects. I do need to get a bunch of stuff done before summer is over. So far, I feel that I’m on track. But registration for the Pups is in a couple of weeks, the resolutions come out in less than a month, and who knows what-all will be needed after that.

In that warm California sun...

All work and no play is not our motto. Nosirree Bob! We here at the WTF LD concentration camp camp concentrating on LD know that if there’s nothing in a debater’s mind other than spikes, turns and random snippets of Jacques Derrida, then that is a debater who needs a life. Our staff, which is expert on the subject of needing a life, can make a difference. So this weekend we take a break from practice rounds, practicumming and baloney surprise in the cafeteria, and head out for some much needed FUN!

These are the options available to our campers:

The Jean Baudrillard Disneyland Adventure: A full day’s visit to the Disneyland parking lot (under the Grumpy sign), led by our own Craven Savage. Campers who choose this option will see the very spot the Old Baudleroo claimed was the one atom of reality in the otherwise culturally deadening theme park, and will stare at it for a few hours until it’s time to get back on the bus and go home. It will definitely be “a small world after all” for this happy group!

Howard the Duck tour of Los Angeles: A tour of all the real life locations throughout the L.A. area used in the 1986 George Lucas classic film, led by HTD scholar Jon O’Cruz. Many WTF alums call this tour the high point of their camp adventure, especially since the film was, in fact, set entirely in Cleveland.

You-Call-This-An-Hour-With-Mike-Bietz? Recording Adventure: Revisit the recording studio from which the legendary podcast was broadcast for, what, three whole episodes? See the microphones, now thickly encrusted with dust, where many a good idea was floated out into the internet tubes. Hear the sound check of those hearty do-it-yourselfers going “One, Two, Three, is anybody there? Testing?” over and over and over. See the original model of the magnificent Sam Dubious Award.

The Closed-Door Cabal (seniors only): At some point this weekend, the muckamucks of Camp WTF will be meeting in camera to decide what to do about this blog, which simply does not seem to be taking the whole business seriously enough. Seniors who select this option will be allowed to sit in as O’C leads the executive session, carefully explaining to Lord Jeesh who it is behind Coachean Life and why we just can’t send some hired assassins to the East Coast to do him in. Each attendee will receive a small bald voodoo doll souvenir, which they can torture by running cases that have nothing to do with the resolution. WTF staff members who even hint that they have found any of this funny will be summarily dismissed. Even I might give it a rest from this point, except something tells me that not too much time will pass and I’ll see another posting, and I just won’t be able to help myself…

Practical practicum

It may sound vaguely pornographic, but we here at WTF are all about practicum. We take nasty, brutish and short high school students and, through rigorous training, turn them into nasty, brutish high school students who seem to have grown a couple of inches over the summer. Here are some examples of our patented techniques guaranteed to make better debaters out of anyone.

The Wheel of Cross-Ex.
While many of our students prefer flex prep, thus eliminating the need for cross-ex altogether, we here at WTF feel that a good bracing cross-ex is the best part of a debate round. The Wheel of Cross-Ex is used exclusively in WTF labs (eat your hearts out, NDF!) to make sure that when we ask a question, we get an answer, dammit! There’s no beating around the bush in our rounds.



The Mumble Box.
No one can understand a word you say? Haven’t had a straightforward communication with another human being since as long ago as when Al Gore was thin because you talk like you have a family of ferrets parked in your mouth? Fear not. A few hours in WTF’s West Coast exclusive Mumble Box (eat your hearts out, Kentucky!) will turn you into James Earl Jones. The next time you say, “Luke, I am your father,” people will sit up and take notice.



Six-Minute Abs Cases.
Have trouble writing a case to take up all six minutes of your aff time? Here WTF instructor Craven Savage (AKA the Iron Maiden) demonstrates the case-stretching rack on one of our novices, Flute Freihoffer from Holy Moly Tech (Wa). A couple of days in the rack and Flute will be cutting his cases down rather than filling them up as he has been prior to joining our camp with quotes taken at random from his copy of Jacques Derrida and the Way of the Cowboy.



Fluffy the Rabid Kitty.
Fluffy may look gentle, but be warned! Inside her blood stream is enough rabies virus to eliminate the entire state of North Dakota, not that anyone would ever notice. Fluffy is only used by our top, specially licensed practicummers for training rising seniors in spreading, spreading seniors in rising, budding cake chefs in icing, and icing sheik chefs in budding.*



The Comfy Chair.
The crack heads heads of our crack staff demonstrate our latest exclusive addition to our labs (eat your hearts out, Iowa!), a comfy chair acquired directly from the BBC, guaranteed to have been used not only by Monty Python but also by the Duchess of Cornwall, Nicolas Sarkozy and Liberace’s brother George (but probably not all at the same time). Students whose practicum takes them to the comfy chair are never heard from again, except in YouTube videos of Frederich Nietzche’s (TOC co-champion of 1879) annual vacations in Baden-Baden, Pago Pago and Walla Walla. Woo-hoo!



* Coachean secrets revealed: I actually did come up with Fluffy's picture on an image search for torture devices...

We beat them at their own game!

One of the hardest things to do in LD is win CatNats. Not only do you have three judges in each round—only one of whom realized before they sat down that this was a debate round, only two of whom speak moderately acceptable English, exactly one and a half of whom made up their mind and a half on the topic before they even heard what it was, and one of whom is just thrilled that it's finally Memorial Day weekend which means it's okay to wear white shoes again—but you must also debate according to the strict rules established in 1965 at Vatican II. To insure your success in the CFL, we here at WTF have brought in the world famous K-Nuns, the kritikingest, theoryishest, postmodernest sisters since Mother Teresa invented the flex neg! Each of our religious instructors, all members of the Sisters of the Holy Cross-X, is fully trained in CFL guerilla techniques, and is guaranteed to make our campers into an army of Christian Soldiers like no others. And we even offer un-Christian studies, for the infidels at the camp. Another reason why WTF not only rocks, but rocks in the name of God!

Stay tuned for more exciting updates of life in the WTF LD concentration camp camp concentrating on LD.

Picturing WTF

Phood Phor Philosophers Program

Sign up now for our special Phood Phor Philosophers Program. Each day we will share a special lunch at the WTF abattoir cafeteria and discuss an article of distinguished merit.

Please pick one of the phollowing phor our phirst session:

Is Goofy? Jean Baudrillard's classic treatise on the semiotic meaning of the big dawg.

The Underpinning Superstructures of Inherency: Are They Really Necessary? The Habermas work that was instrumental in launching "Gossip Girl" in the USA.

The Metaphysics of Lunch Meat The recently discovered Nietzsche essay that took the legendary German philosopher's bull-oney to new heights (with a startling new theory on the eternal recurrence of chopped liver).

Stay tuned for more news of our LD concentration camp camp concentrating on LD.

Anesthetizing the topic

LOS ANGELES, Kali. — Clad in themed costume, Off Case and Wesley Craven (a name that defies parody) presented the topic analysis for the resolution we’ll be confusing for the first two or three minutes here at Session I of the WTF Institute. The topic? Ah, good question, young apprentice. “Resolved: Military conscription is uncool, when all you have to do is sign up voluntarily and they give you a gun, a helmet, and really good hiking boots, no questions asked.”

This lovely presentation — complete with the participation of the How 9000 computer, vaguely reminiscent of Dr. Strangelove, WarGames and Howard the Duck Goes to Hawaii, but nonetheless the latest hardware available on the market, which we use to run all the audioanimatronic figures here at WTF — followed the camp’s formal welcome assembly. What Theblank was on hand to provide the students with breathing apparatus during a nine-hour exegesis on the history of WTF, while institute director Always Remember You Ate Fresh Bietz (or else the next morning you’ll think your insides are falling out) coordinated the goings-on while modeling an evening gown designed by Thierry Mugler especially for our camp. Also speaking were Tommy Makem and the Clancy Brothers, or Tom Clancy, or someone like that, and Astronaut Neil Conrad on the curriculum, Mega Hertz on “Phood for Philosophers,” and Noble Savage and Adam Twelve on…the rules (a speech given entirely in German in order to really impress people that this year we mean it)! As per tradition, Jon “Orange County” Cruz did the staff introductions but, given the sheer size and talent of the faculty, had to give up after three days of ceremoniously forgetting everyone’s name except for Boom-Boom the Wonder Mole and Mitzi Gaynor, and was last seen rattling off incoherent and totally inaccurate debate trivia while doing the Macarena and singing a solo version of “Would You Rather Be A Colonel With an Eagle on Your Shoulder or a Private with a Chicken on your Knee” in perfect harmony.

The last stragglers arrive

As always, there are a few latecomers to Camp WackiKrit. This morning we cranked up the WTFmobile and drove out to LAX where we collected the last of our happy campers. So now everyone is here, pencils sharpened, chinos pressed, and brains cleaned and empty, waiting to learn everything there is to learn about [writers note: EDITOR—please fill in some description of whatever the hell it is we're supposed to be teaching these fish, 'cause I can't think of anything that will convince the parents that they're even remotely getting their money's worth. DON'T FORGET TO ERASE THIS BEFORE PUBLISHING!!! Thanks.]

Extracurricular Activities Matter at WTF!

We here at the WTF camp pride ourselves on our belief that a sound debating brain requires a sound debating body, or at the very least a photograph of a sound debating body carried in a student's wallet along with Mom's phone number at work and a clipping of the playing times of Howard the Duck II at the local Cineplex. In the accompanying photo, it's a "heil time" for all as the shirts prepare to take on the other shirts in our daily game of some sport not normally played in America.

Stay tuned for more exciting WTF came highlights!

The staff arrives at WTF!

The crack teaching staff of the WTF (shown in the accompanying candid photograph, taken at the novice corral) has arrived for LD Concentration Camp 2008. As their first official act, they unanimously agreed that this year the official camp song would be We Are the Champions Another One Bites the Dust Fat Bottomed Girls.

Stay tuned for more news from the nexus of the summer debate universe!

Arriving at WTF

The summer session of the WTF LD Concentration Camp Camp concentrating on LD is about to begin. This weekend people will be pouring in from the four corners of the globe, as well as other likely geographic locations such as Cleveland and the Hindu Kush. We here at Coachean Life promise that you will not miss one single minute—nay, one single second—of the mind-boggling inaction that is our institute. Our graduates have gone on to purchase caffeinated beverages at some of the most important tournaments in this or any other country. Stay tuned for updates! This is your one and only source for all the latest news, except for those other places that also have a lot of the latest news.

Great Forgotten Debaters

We here at Coachean HQ have come to realize that while other websites document the glorious and illustrious history of our wonderful activity, we are usually skulking around trying to find a pen and wondering if we can sneak out and pick up a double latte. Well, no more. Today Coachean Life inaugurates a new feature: The Great Forgotten Debaters. It is our feeling that anyone can recognize greatness in a student who wins the TOC five times in a row in both policy and LD, but what about the great unwashed, the army of little gray debaters who make up the bulk of this incredible activity? While others may sing of arms and the man, we will sing of the common schmegeggie, the Myrmidon without whom Achilles would be just another slugabed. (And to be honest, we’re just happy to see that both Myrmidon and slugabed made it through our spell-checker unscathed.) So raise up your hearts and your minds now as we celebrate our first in a series:

THE GREAT FORGOTTEN DEBATERS

Theodore P. Moon, Valley Hillsdale Mountain Glen Academy, Various locations in the tri-state area

Teddy Moon was born to debate. He never agreed with anyone on anything, much to his parents’ dismay, and is credited by the Guinness Book of Verbal Records as the creator, at the age of five and a half, of the classic rebuttal, “Am not,” which he used in response to unfortunate and regular verbal assaults by his kindergarten classmates. (Crediting Teddy with the invention of the classic turn, “I know you are but what am I?” is still considered controversial; Guinness cites the possibility that this phrase may in fact go back to the childhood of one J. W. Patterson, who overheard it as a second grader at Bluegrass Country Day School and immediately thought to himself, “You know, someday people might come to a tournament of champignons.” Young JWP had been raised by the French and was taught to venerate the mushroom; this changed during the de Gaulle administration.) Although there was a JNFL chapter in Teddy Moon’s school district to which he would have been perfectly suited, Teddy, a Unitarian, understood this to be the Jewish NFL and not the Junior NFL, and thus deprived himself and a waiting world of what would no doubt have been a distinguished middle school debate career. Upon reaching high school, Teddy immediately signed up for the debate team, only to be flummoxed by his first assignment, which was to read selected works by John Locke, John Stuart Mills and John Rawls, whom he hopelessly confused thenceforth. “The problem with philosophy,” Teddy famously announced, “is that every Tom, Dick and Harry is named John.” As his first official competition neared, Teddy, knowing that he was ill-equipped for the event, purchased three cases online, an affirmative, a negative, and a whatever-just-in-case, for the sum total of $23.87, thus depleting his PayPal account. The tournament was held at the school known familiarly as Bronx Science, which moved Teddy to remark, “What’s the difference between Bronx science and regular science?” No answer to this question was forthcoming, and then tragedy struck. Between rounds three and four, at exactly 2:22 BST (Bronx Standard Time, which is forty-five minutes earlier than EST, or any other ST you can think of for that matter), Teddy Moon, at the bottom of the down-three bracket, disappeared on his way to debate the negative position in the Bronx Science Parapsychic Wing. His disappearance was not noticed by his coach or his teammates until two months had elapsed, at which point Teddy was declared lost at sea. He is said to occasionally be seen haunting the hallways of Regis High School in Manhattan, which makes no sense whatsoever as Teddy didn’t even know Regis existed, but then again, Regis didn’t even know Teddy existed, so there is a certain logic to the whole enterprise if you manage to squint at it just right.

Debbie Muckle, Hoopdedoo School, Dallas, TX

Debbie Muckle had not intended to become a debater. In fact, Debbie Muckle had not intended to take up any extracurricular activities at the Hoopdedoo School whatsoever. Come to think of it, Debbie wasn’t all that excited about the curricular activities either. Debbie, who was given the nickname Throckmorton in the fifth grade after an unfortunate incident regarding a Sony Walkman, a calico cat and a package of frozen lima beans, did her best to get through life without being bothered by anyone, which anyone would agree was the best situation all around. But in 9th grade Debbie Muckle met Bruce (“Not That One”) Lee and instantly fell in love. Bruce, a student at the all-girl Hoopdedoo’s brother school, Upsydaisy Prep, was the opposite of Debbie in many ways, a straight A student and a member of practically every team and club and society the elite school could come up with. For reasons no one could explain, the two were smitten at first sight. And for reasons no one could explain even less, or more, the beginning of their relationship also marked the beginning of Debbie’s Goth period. The young freckle-faced all-American girl suddenly dyed everything she could black, and spent most of her time away from Bruce maintaining her temporary tattoos and patiently waiting to be old enough to get real ones, despite the fact that her mother kept trying to get her to take up knitting, or for that matter any activity that was not quite as obsessed with death as Debbie’s preferred Gothicness. But Debbie was unshakeable. In order to spend more time with her beloved Bruce, who soon became the star novice on the Upsydaisy debate team, Debbie joined Hoopdedoo’s own legendary debate squad and, to the surprise of one and all, sort of took to the activity. It was not until her sophomore year that Debbie was banned from the CFL for sucking all the light out of any room she entered and, according to the court papers, “an unremitting commitment to Satan and his black minions.” The NFL, not to be undone by the CFL, banned Debbie for “not displaying body piercings in keeping with the Ripon standards.” The final blow to Debbie’s debate career was the Texas Forensic League banning her for inadvertently downloading an Abba song, which the state board considered “conduct unbecoming to Goths everywhere.” After graduating high school, Debbie went on to Vassar, where she became a member of the Catholic Sisters of Charity and finally married her longtime love, Bruce Lee. Debbie now teaches earth science somewhere in Kansas where, as she puts it, they have a lot of earth.

She-Ra Varaswamariakulliarumian, Edema HS, Edema, MN

Despite being one of the hardest workers on the legendary Edema HS debate team, She-Ra Varaswamariakulliarumian, known familiarly to her teammates as Varaswamariakulliarumian, had perhaps the most depressing record of any debater in her home state, which, given the weather there, is hard to imagine. If a tournament broke to double octos, Varaswamariakulliarumian was the thirty-third seed. If a tournament broke to octos, Varaswamariakulliarumian was the 17th seed. If a tournament broke to quarters, Varaswamariakulliarumian was the 9th seed. In fact, at one tournament, Varaswamariakulliarumian was the only person in her division due to an accounting error in the physical education department, and she still didn’t break. Rumors abounded throughout her debate career that Varaswamariakulliarumian’s lack of success was directly attributable to the tab rooms’ fear of having to announce her name from the podium to accept an award, but no proof was ever offered to support this claim. In any case, Varaswamariakulliarumian spent four years of heartbreaking loss after heartbreaking loss, but this had no effect on her acceptance into Harvard, where she immediately changed her name from She-Ra Varaswamariakulliarumian to Tiffany Varaswamariakulliarumian, and where she went on to graduate with high honors, provided she didn’t show up at the ceremony and make the dean have to pronounce her name from the podium.

Benny “The Flash” Sparks, Heimlich Maneuver Tech, CA

Benny Sparks, better known as The Flash, has been long celebrated in debate circles as probably the slowest talker in the history of the activity. While many judges, especially parents, appreciate a reasonable rate of speed when trying to adjudicate a round, as this occasionally allows them to understand at least some of what is being said, Benny Sparks let out all the stops when it came to not being too fast, driving all of his judges, parents and coaches alike, into states of often irreversible catatonia. Whereas some students are known to spread, running dozens of lines of argumentation in a six-minute presentation, Benny was known never to finish even one line of argumentation, much less multiple arguments. In fact, he was often known not to finish even his opening quote before the timer went off marking the end of his speech. Needless to say, Benny’s greatest dread was the 1AR, in which he would have to cover both sides of a round in only four minutes. Benny was usually unable to even find his notes in four minutes, much less argue them. As a general rule, judges tended to write up their ballots, giving Benny the loss, and twenty speaker points max, somewhere halfway through his first speech, regardless of which side he was defending. Losing every single round of his career did not deter Benny Sparks, however, who ran for debate team president in 1997. As far as anyone knows, he is still somewhere in the middle of his initial campaign speech.

Look for more exciting Great Forgotten Debaters, coming soon!

Philosophy, art, and movies, with only the slightest swipe at You Know Who

It’s quiet out there. Too quiet.

It being the off season, I once again want to direct your attention to PhilosophyBites (which is not a noun and a verb). You’ve certainly got the time for it now. Their podcasts have to be the best examination of philosophy out there for the general audience (i.e., us). I was just updating myself on “Cogito” yesterday (I like calling it Cogito, like a real expert; it’s “Cogito ergo sum” to the rest of you pikers). One learns where Descartes was coming from (I know, you think he was coming from the place where they keep Descartes before de horse, but that’s not what I meant) and see the connection to the old mind-body conundrum. All in a fifteen minute interview. Not bad. Not bad at all. You can do a lot worse trying to fill up your vacation hours.

Over the weekend I ordered up a bunch of art theory books, having been inspired by the collection at the Clark museum in Williamstown. They have a Whistler-themed special exhibition that I wanted to see, so we moseyed up there last weekend and quite enjoyed it. Their main collection is also not unimpressive; it’s one of those private collections gone public, like the Frick (except, of course, nothing is quite like the Frick, which has to be the best of this breed). Anyhow, I look forward to attacking these books and then misinterpreting them here for the VCA. At the moment I’m reading about 20th Century World’s Fairs, or more specifically looking at pictures of them in a new photo book I just got on the subject (which is one of my favorites). I like not even having to pretend to do serious reading, which is what summer is all about. For me, beach reading is anything that isn’t French.

Oh, yeah. Loved Wall-E. What’s not to love? Summer is also the time for me to go to the movies, since debate season leaves virtually no time for such frivolities. Unfortunately there aren’t that many movies around that seem worth getting up out of the home theater to bother seeing on the big screen. Wall-E qualified, though. With luck, so will the new Batman. And a couple of others I can’t remember offhand. (On the little screen I did just watch Jet Li in Fearless, which was quite entertaining. Haven’t watched much else, though, that I can remember. Again, there’s other things to be doing.)

If you’ve read this far, you know I have nothing to say. But if you read, ahem, other blogs, you know I’m not the only one in that predicament. On the positive side, the Feed remains new and active and full of good material. When we start zeroing in on topics, it will get that much more specific, but in the meantime, it’ll keep you smarter than most other things you’re doing.

JASON, ALEC, ADAM AND BILLY BALDWIN WIN THE TOURNAMENT OF CHAMPIONS

LEXINGTON, Ky. — The 1929 Tournament of Champions inaugurated the Great Depression by concluding with a soporific final round between Vestavia Hills High School’s Jason, Alec, Adam and Billy Baldwin and Christopher Columbus High School’s Nina (“Pinta”) Santa-Maria. The final panel consisted more or less of Phillips, Sueknow Whentolaff, and Kate-on-Hamm. On a 3-3 decision that could easily have gone the other way, Jason, Alec, Adam and Billy defeated Nina (“Pinta”) to wrap up a perfect tournament, except for the food. And the bugs in the motel. And the recently manured plants at the university. But who’s counting? Congratulations to both, or however many of them there are!
(As part of my ongoing project of institutionalizing the erasing of the memory for Lincoln-Douglas debate, I have been carefully copying materials from WTF and ritually burying them. Many have since been found in the Chellgren Center Debate Office at the University of Kentucky, which is reason enough to avoid like the proverbial plague the Chellgren Center Debate Office at the University of Kentucky. Until the lawsuits are settled, no names will be mentioned in connection with the University.)
Jason Alec, Adam and Billy were coached by Unmerrily Duking Itout; Nina (“Pinta”) was coached by the Lee Myles Transmission company.

Underachievers Ann Miasma of Pago Pago Alto High School and Roy Rogers of Whodehowa High School advanced into the elimination rounds and quickly turned around and ran home out of fear for their lives, despite having received auto-qualifications to the 1930 through ‘38 Tournaments of Champions.

La Cueball High School’s Leif Erickson, who won the TOC as a toddler, was mercilessly defeated in octafinals. Sticks and Stones Will Break My Bones but Holy Names Will Never Hurt Me Academy’s Laura and Ferdinand, a ventriloquist act, who advanced into the elimination rounds while being sophomoric, were the seventeenth seed(s), and thus earned, well, not much.

—
The first judge listed on each panel refused to get out of his or her chair.
(17) Holy Names LF (Laura and Ferdinand)

OCTAS

(1) Vestavia Hills J,A,A&BB over (16) Vestavia Hills DTB (Damn That Baldwin! Note: DTB was coached over by J,A,A&BB 182 times over the course of his debate career)
(2) Hockaday MA def. (15) Albany JA (Jonathan Axlegrease) 3-0 (Cheery Os, Rickie Nelsen, Atom Ant)
(3) Christopher Columbus CG def. (14) Isidora Duncan JS (Justin Sockittome) 2-1 (Kate-on-Hamm, Tinker Taylor, Paying Tenant)

(4) Bishop Kearney CR def. (13) Pago Pago JT (Jamie Tush) 3-0 (Ralph Richardson, Charlie Chan, Nancy Walker [the Nancy Walker?])

(12) Vestavia Hills JC def. (5) Thomas Jefferson BB (Bedden Breakfast) 3-0 (Eric Di Michele of all people, Big Mac, Heather Gloamin’)
(11) Palo Alto AM def. (6) Centerville BG (Brother Gibb) 2-1 (Shoe Sheinman, Tarnish Jutmoll, Ala King)

(10) South Plantation JS def. (7) La Cueball ME (Leif Erickson) 2-1 (Pete Spaghetti, Unmerrily Duking Itout, Pat Metheny)

(8) Scarsdale JB def. (9) Whodehowa RR (Roy Rogers) 2-1 (Clark Kent, Dick Grayson, Victory Jeesh)


QUARTERS

(1) Vestavia Hills J,A,A&BB def. (8) Scarsdale JB (Jennifer Beals) 3-0 (Jeffrey Dahmer, Fred Robertson, Richard Speck [the only all-serial-killer panel ever assigned to a TOC round])

(7) South Plantation JS def. (2) Hockaday JA (Jack Armstrong the All-American Boy) 3-0 (How Wry, Mahatma Kane Jeeves, Harold Bisonette)
(3) Christopher Columbus CG def. (6) Pago Pago AM (Ann Miasma) 2-1 (Roger Thornwood, Lars Thorwald, Norman Bates)

(4) Bishop Kearney CR def. (5) Vestavia Hills TB (Tanner Butwherestyler) 2-1 (Harry S Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Al Gore)


SEMIS

(1) Vestavia Hills J,A,A&BB def. (4) Bishop Kearney CR (Cordelia Regan) 3-0 (Jon Cruz, O’C, The Birthday Boy [who is/are the only person(s) in the world who will read this far])

(3) Christopher Columbus CG def. (2) South Plantation JS (Josh Sheepdip) 2-1 (Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, George W. Bush)

FINALS

(1) Vestavia Hills J,A,A&BB def. (3) Christopher Columbus CG (Nina (“Pinta”) Santa-Maria) 3-3 (more or less of Phillips, Sueknow Whentolaff, and Kate-on-Hamm)

TOC CHAMPION

(1) Vestavia Hills JB (Jason, Alec, Adam and Billy Baldwin)

—
TOP SPEAKERS

1. Jason, Alec, Adam and Billy Baldwin — Vestavia Hills High School (AL)

2. Leif Erickson — La Cueball High School (NM)

3. Jennifer Beals — Scarswegian High School (NY)

4. Roy Rogers — Whodehowa High School (NY)

5. Jack Armstrong the All-American Boy (who always wanted to go to an all-girls’ school)— The Hockaday School (TX)

6. Josh Sheepdip — South Plantation High School (FL)

7. Nina (“Pinta”) Santa-Maria — Christopher Columbus High School (FL)

8. Roasted Lamb — Cypress Grill High School (TX)

9. Ann Miasma — Palo Pago Alto High School (CA)

10. Michael Ellis — The Monty Python School (CA)

11. Stephen Oyster — The Bivalve School (NY)

12. Cordelia Regan — Bishop Kearney High School (NY)

13. Wicked Witch — Omigod Westside High School (NE)

14. Tanner Butwherestyler — Vestavia Hills High School (AL)

15. Little Carmen — Charlotte Haze High School (AL)


Popularity: -29%

Happy Birthday, Jon.

While waiting for the BBQ sushi to cook...

You know what's really interesting about WTF posting old TOC results?

That's funny. Neither do I.

In keeping with this new tradition of providing old news when there's no new news, I am announcing here that Hillary Clinton has withdrawn from the Democratic nomination process, Liberace is dead, the Eagle has landed, and George Lucas fans everywhere are eagerly looking forward to the release of his exciting new motion picture Howard the Duck.

Okay. Back to the BBQ.

A guaranteed, no-content posting!

I am selling O’C’s autograph online. To the highest bidder. Just send me money; if you win, I’ll send you back his autograph. How can you resist?

I am going through a bit of a phase of doing stuff other than debate, said phase kicking into overdrive over the holiday weekend. The Day Job has released us for four days, so I won’t be back here again till Monday. What computer time I will be spending, if any, will be spent on the aforementioned phase. I am petitioning for more hours in the day, but so far I haven’t gotten enough signatures. When you send me that autograph money (see above), enclose a signature or two. That’ll help.

Anyhow, there isn’t much going on. Either you’re at camp or you’re not, and if you are, you’ve already got plenty of things to keep you occupied, and if you’re not, you’re probably not thinking much about forensics. So, have a good holiday, and maybe next week we can get into something really meaty. Maybe we can auction off O’C’s Ewok-patterned Hawaiian shirt.

May the Fourth be with you.

A woman without a bicycle; we are not adventurers anymore

We’ve all got our little peccadilloes:


WTF has pointed out that we can start to think now about voting for the LD rezzes for next season. They’re due early September to Rippin’. This is a tough one, first because I like most of the topics, and second, because this matrix business makes your head hurt, especially since you know it’s sort of meaningless. If your third pick for the fourth slot is the same as Bietz’s second pick for the first slot, does this mean that we’ll end up with O’C’s second pick for the second slot? I know that what it boils down to is that Rippin’ loves preferential balloting, and, let’s face it, who doesn’t? It’s always the top job everyone fights over behind the scenes at Districts congress, because it’s a little like Sudoku but without the dice. (Okay, I stole that joke. Famous soccer jokes: soccer is like chess but without the dice. Or, the score was one to one but it easily could have gone the other way.) Anyhow, I will consult the Sailors for their expert advice, and then I’ll proceed accordingly. Last year most of my top choices ended up on the boards, so I can’t really complain too much.

On a non-forensics note, I am a little sad that Pleasure Island, and more specifically the Adventurers Club, is going the way of Horizons. PI isn’t much now, aside from AC, but in the day it was a separate admission with some great shops, daily fireworks, a fun sense of a relatively kid-free party and, of course, a place to pledge “Kungaloosh!” Downtown Disney is moving toward, I gather, mostly themed restaurants plus shops, and while I certainly don’t mind either, they’re not quite the same thing as an actual Disney Imagineered attraction. Oh well, stuff comes and stuff goes. The economy being what it is, I don’t expect much to happen over the short term with the Mouse, but sooner or later they will feel the hot breath of Universal’s Harry Potter on their necks and get around to a little E-ticket blockbusting. We’ll see. I still have my WDW widget: 1409 days until my next trip. I am not holding my breath.

Oh yeah. One last little peccadillo:



Yeah, yeah. Someday I've got to learn Photoshop.

O'C promises lap dances; the chez is hot; all the WTF news that fits

I’m confused. Apparently Big Jake is running pornography for the eighth time? Or something like that. O’C just sent out some message about the XXX version of the VIII tournament. This hardly sounds like forensics to me (except for You Know Who and the All Girl Band, about which the less said the better). I guess pretty soon I’ll have to send out a Bump invitation if I want to keep up. This will be our NC-17th year of operation, if you’re wondering. O’C’s message does solve the biggest mystery of the weekend, however, which is why he couldn’t respond to my urgent argument-solving text asking if there were undead in Indiana Jones IV. He was just too busy making VIII into an XXX vaganza when, in fact, he’s supposed to be training Kentuckwegians on how to refute Habermas. I’ll bet you Habermas answers his text messages.

Once again this weekend I saw demonstrated why Apple is Apple and everything else isn’t. A few weeks ago I installed an AirPort base station, and it was as easy as cake. Unfortunately, while it did for the first time get a signal to the furthest reaches of the chez, it wasn’t much of an one, as G&S might say, although it was better than the previous nothing. I tried using my old Belkin to extend the network, and I’m sure it would work, provided I was willing to take a few months of night school training in advanced metaphysics at the local Diplomas ‘R’ Us, but I couldn’t get it to do anything but blink in impotent snideness. So I bought another AirPort, and 5 minutes later, there’s a green light glowing in the hinterlands of the chez and enough strength-of-signal bars to energize WTF’s minute-by-minute analysis of the arrival of the novices into LAX for years to come. I love Apple. They do really make products that work well and they build them so that you can figure out how to use them. On the down side, the signal is so strong that a lot of homeless people are now hanging out in my driveway, using the chez for free internet access. I never should have sent my network password to those Nigerian Viagra salesmen…

Not much else of note. We’re seriously figuring Massachusetts for the Northeast Chumps (I don’t know if I’ve mentioned that yet), and we’ll probably have the First-Timers MHL at the Bronx, in aid of attracting more Manhattanites. Everything is still up in the air, though, although the dates are settled. I would expect much quiet on the forensic front for the next couple of months, as schools are out and institutes are in, and mostly people will be doing mental target practice. But that doesn’t mean I’ll stop writing. You should be so lucky. I never stop writing, because there’s always something going on, even if only in my mind. And I’m sure you’ll be looking here for WTF updates in between their minute-by-minute reports. Some folks, I know, want to read about every second of the event. If you’re one of them, then you’ve come to the right place.

SCOTUS shoots the moon

Heller certainly gives us something important to think about. There’s some good pieces abroad; keep an eye on the Feed for some of the best. I’m not quite sure how I feel about this in a legal sense; I need to study it in depth. But I must say that I do not favor the idea of there being a fundamental right to private weaponry in the year 2008. It just doesn’t track, much as, for me, the right of society to perform acts of capital punishment just doesn’t track. I do not feel that the Constitution is absolute; it has often proven itself inadequate to a particular situation, and fortunately an amendment process exists for fixing those inadequacies. I mean, after all, the thing did once explicitly support enslavement of human beings, and there was that ping pong game over the use of alcohol; some locales, by the way, are still dry, although none still have slavery, for the most part. Questions of law as morality, or morality as law, become very interesting in this light. Anyhow, people will be barking up this tree for some time to come, as they have for some time past. Students of the game should, if nothing else, learn a lot from it regardless of their personal opinion. And, let’s face it. It’s not as if we didn’t know it was coming.

On the positive side, the next time O’C has a forty-day awards ceremony, I can just shoot him. Scalia will defend my right to this. (Come to think of it, who wouldn’t?)

Do you take this rez to be your lawful wedded something-or-other?

Regarding the new rezzes, CP sez: “I'm pretty sure the marriage one [United States law ought not recognize marriage] is trying to say that marriage shouldn't be enshrined in law anywhere in the US. thus it becomes a cultural, religion-separation, etc issue. I rather liked that one...” You’ll no doubt not recall that my take was that it was differentiating between federal and local law. There is, of course, a belief among some that there should be a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, or more specifically limiting marriage to one man and one woman of the human persuasion, I gather because gay marriage challenges the very concept of marriage (whatever that is). This would provide a legal entry into the debate. And there are the issues of whether gay marriage, allowed in one state, must be recognized in states where it isn’t allowed, and although this is the sort of nice point of law that doesn’t allow for much interesting discussion, it nonetheless is a constitutional concern. I’m rather interested, actually, in the differentiation of state and federal polities. What belongs to one and not the other? This is one of the core issues of any federal state, and in our own, has led so far as to four years of civil war. I enjoy tracking the roots of the war between the states back to the Revolution, and earlier. There’s an inevitability much like reading a Shakespearian tragedy, the fatal flaw that isn’t going to work out well. But, of course, that’s just my particular hobbyhorse. Anyhow, aside from gay marriage, I haven’t heard anyone much say, damn, let’s do away with marriage (except, on a case-by-case basis, their own).

This was my least favorite rez of the bunch, and if CP’s interpretation is the one that takes root, that would not change my feelings about it. There are certainly interesting aspects of the civil-izing of naturalistic rituals, and one could take a hermeneutic/structuralist view of marriage and study how it fits into secular societal structures, or, for that matter, into non-secular societal structures: marriage is not at its core an act of religion, despite many religions’ claim on marriage as sacramental; i.e., marriage is more elemental than religion. Thinking along these lines, one starts to track back on a chicken/egg continuum: in the social context, was marriage first a civil act or a religious act? Not that this would determine what it ought to be, but the idea of marriage as something different from mating for life makes one think along those lines.

Anyhow, since we’d be talking about US law in general, i.e, law in the US, one would be hard-pressed to suggest that marriage should not be recognized as a legal action. It is, by any definition of the thing, a contract agreed to by consenting parties, and as such has the intrinsic legal aspects of any contract. (Coincidentally, I have just been polishing up the contracts section of the Hillary Duff, so I’m buff on this stuff.) So on the affirmative we would either have to argue that marriage is some other kind of contract that doesn’t really exist in the wild, or that it is no contract at all. A negative might get up and show the relative portions of the lectures from “The Paper Chase” to make his or her point clearly enough. And I won’t begin to enumerate all the civil issues that radiate from marriage (shared ownership of property, rights of survivorship, child-rearing—damn, I just did begin to enumerate them; I am so untrustworthy!).

Not that I ever disagree with CP, of course. Or anyone else, for that matter. This activity is about unity and fraternity and—no, wait. That’s not this activity.

If marriage makes it as a topic, I owe CP a drink. If I have to judge any rounds of it, he’s going to owe me drinks for life.

The injustice of justice; -273.15 degrees Celsius; the Summer of Love

I spent a little time with Justice last night. The problem is complex. People have been thinking about justice since what seems the beginning of time. At best, we can come up with a general sense of what it is, but the minute you start pinning it down, it looks up at you as if you’ve got a hole in your head and points to something you just said and shows you how that is entirely wrong, which is soooo frustrating. Normally the fact that a concept is slippery would not bother me all that much. Plenty of philosophical concepts are slippery, so what’s new this time? Well, the thing about justice is that it seems to inform practically every LD resolution. We are constantly saying that we are attempting to achieve justice, which forces us to explain what it is that we are achieving. While we all, perhaps instinctively, have a sense of what justice is, that’s not always good enough for a debate round. Certainly the fly-by phrase doesn’t capture it, i.e., “giving everyone their due” or “defined as fairness.” And at the point where we’re trying to achieve something that we can’t categorically define, even though we clearly know and agree that the thing exists roughly a certain way, there are people who will take advantage of your lack of a categorical definition, easily going so far as to say that your concept of justice must therefore be false, and often going to the extreme and saying that justice itself is a false construct. Show of hands, ladies and germs: how many people noticed that the new list of LD resolutions only uses the word “just” once? (All right. Actually, it’s the word “unjust”.) Maybe the committee is tired of nailing this particular jelly to the wall? Could be, folks, could be. It’s been explicit so often in resolutions lately, maybe they’re hoping that someone will finally come up with a new value or two in the rounds themselves. Now for a while, I don’t think. We’ll have to shake off a lot of old justice dust first.

In any case, I will end up with a working definition, plus some historical analysis and some applications. At the point at which a debater can argue successfully that there is no such thing as justice, we have performatively proven the existence of justice by performing an act of injustice (picking up that argument), thus confirming the positive by confirming the negative. Can’t have cold without hot, in other words. For that matter, all you need is colder; even if you can’t prove the existence of absolute zero, you can demonstrate one thing is colder than another, and the colder one is the closer of the two to the absolute. If cold is the goal, the colder one wins. Same thing applies to selling your soul to the devil, which never happens with an atheist. I mean, if the devil came up to an atheist and said, sell me your soul, the atheist would immediately see that the existence of the devil, the negative, proves the existence of God, the positive, and therefore, would keep his (un-)damned soul to himself. (What? Selling your soul to the devil is a metaphor? Now they tell me!)

I see that institutes have started up, along no doubt with the annual drive by instituters to get passed the resolutions they trained on during the summer. There may be a cart/horse situation here in terms of why they chose to train on those rezzes in the first place, but this practice does afford undue theoretical advantage to institute students above and beyond the sheer act of having gone to the institute. The good news is that almost every case written on a rez at an institute sorta sucks. A self-correcting machine of sorts, then. In the past one of my hardest coaching jobs has been demonstrating to campers the errors of their institutional ways. Occasionally they haven’t believed me and debated their summer loves, and the resulting heartbreak, while predictable, has still brought a tear to the eye. Summer loves are chimerical. Trust me on that. Not that I’m not in favor of institutes: I rather like the idea, actually. It’s just the cases themselves that are problematic. Wait till Yale. You’ll see.

The joy of techs; the joy of Vegas; farewell to the summer of 08; Feed thoughts

I managed to send Little Elvis into an uproar yesterday by downloading a bunch of TV shows from iTunes. When you have little or no hard disk space, the last thing you need is too much new data. Fortunately at some point I remembered the raw podcast files, and cleaned up five—count ‘em, 5—gigs of space, and the problem was solved. A new Airport base station arrived yesterday, adding another joy to the electronic life of the chez, but I didn’t install it yet. I need to extend the network to the upper forty; it seems a simple enough deal according to the Mac support docs, add to which the ease of doing, well, almost anything on the Mac versus doing that same thing on the PC. Of course, maybe everything is peaches and cream on the PC side now that Vista is out there. (That’s meant to be a humorous statement, if you were wondering.)

Things are pretty quiet on the forensics front, of course. NatNats is over, although I gather a few coaches stayed behind to actually enjoy Las Vegas without the handicap of minors transported across state lines distracting them from the city’s main attractions. I admit I enjoy Las Vegas for the gestalt of the place, which can pretty much fill your brain for three or four days before you even realize it. I like to gamble, but I don’t, much, because aside from statistical deviation, you are guaranteed to lose your money, which is not all that much fun. And on a more level playing field, so to speak, I’m not a good enough poker player to attempt it against strangers (although I’m intrigued by the idea of a backroom game some day against JV and maybe a few other sly dogs). I do like shows, however, where the spectacle outweighs the content (i.e., 17 different iterations of Cirque de Soleil). And who doesn’t want to get beamed aboard the Enterprise? And there’s plenty of good restaurants, unlike the olden days where it was all $1.99 buffets featuring all the filet mignon you could eat (most of which tasted as if you had gotten it from a $1.99 buffet, if you could get to it after pushing all the senior citizens out of the way, which isn’t easy because those walkers give them an extra purchase on their chosen turf). The first time I went to Las Vegas was in the 50s, so I’ve seen it change many, many times. And vice versa. Anyhow, as soon as they announce a debate tournament there for coaches only, I’ll be the first one to sign up.

I have been chiseling away at the Hillary Duff. Some of it was in better shape than other parts of it. I’ve also got some other projects I’m working on of a non-debate nature, so the evenings are filling up pretty quickly. Summer is always so short. I mean, it’s already practically over. The 4th of July is next week. That’s about half of it. And then, well, it’s September. Whew. That was fast. Damn. I didn’t get half of the things done that I needed to do. On the plus side, all that time elapsing so quickly means that there’s that much less time remaining in the Bush presidency. So, there’s a positive side to everything.

This whole Zimbabwe story, while sad, is fascinating. It’s got everything: freedom, tyranny, racism, globalism, violence. The Policians have studied Africa at great length, which is something we haven’t done in LD (or in Pffft, at least on topics I recall, but my experience there is more limited). I fed (feeded?) a story yesterday demonstrating growth of nations, and I was listening last night to an interview with Fareed Zakaria, author of The Post-American World. We see growth on the globe everywhere but Africa. Why is this? Why has this one continent missed out on so much? It is, as I say, fascinating, but also sad. And I don’t see any big change coming in the short term. Or, for that matter, the long term. Maybe the growth of China, and their need for resources, will ultimately make the difference. I have no idea.

LD wording committee takes a long enough break from the slot machines to present next year's topics. Huzzah!

Ahhhh. The new LD resolutions have been sent out to a waiting world. I love watching people dicker about them on WTF. Someone will list the absolute best, and the next person will list those same ones as the absolute worst. Of course, often we can’t tell about the mechanics of a resolution until we get into the trenches, but why should I not contribute my two cents just like everyone else?

R: Military conscription is unjust.

Interesting subject, although, well, it’s not. Unjust, I mean. Oh, it could be handled unjustly, I guess, but not inherently. Still, this rez would force people to evaluate what responsibilities we have as individuals to society, and it also might raise questions about just/unjust wars, so it could be interesting.

R: On reservations, sovereignty claims by indigenous peoples ought to be prioritized above the plenary power of the United States federal government.

Again, interesting subject in a new area for a lot of students. Awfully wordy, though, but apparently of necessity. Anyhow, sovereignty to me is one of those subjects that is wide open, and therefore interesting to argue.

R: In a democratic society, felons ought to retain the right to vote.

Curious subject area, but I’m happy to admit that once again it opens the door to some interesting research about the rights of the disenfranchised, or maybe more specifically the limits of disenfranchisement.

R: A parliamentary form of government is preferable to the United States presidential system.

Come on. If this isn’t the NatNats topic, I’ll eat your hat. Or else it will not be any topic, because it is way too complex for a short debate round. Still, you could feed off this one all year if you wanted to.

R: United States law ought not recognize marriage.

What? Oh, well, every deck has a joker. I guess what they’re going for here is the limits of federal law, but marriage (gay, straight or just marginally askew) is a local—and not a constitutional—issue, unless we were to make it such, and why would we. I can’t see this one getting off the ground at all. (Even if this one was a typo, and it should say “gay marriage,” I’d still not think much of it. We’d still only be arguing federal versus state statutes, which is awfully precious for two months of argumentation.)

R: United States immigration policy ought to prioritize admitting skilled workers over reunited families.

This is sort of an apples and oranges resolution with a rather forced conflict. I’d like to study immigration, but I don’t think the rounds would be too good on this one.

R: The United States ought to submit to the jurisdiction of an international court designed to prosecute crimes against humanity.

Again, sovereignty, international law, all that good stuff that is so vague in our standard texts and our standard approaches to resolutions. I’ve got a feeling, though, that arguments would go off that track into analyses of crimes against humanity per se, but this one might be okay.

R: Public high schools students in the United States ought not be required to pass standardized exit exams to graduate.

One of the biggest hot-button issues in the US today. My only issue is that it is so likely to go stock so quickly, there being not too many positions on either side beyond the obvious big ones.

R: The United States ought not issue torture warrants.

Again, wording is a little curious, but who doesn’t want to argue torture?

R: Vigilantism is justified when the government has failed to enforce the law.

I can’t see this one working out. I like analyses of law qua law, as in the old resolutional chestnut of civil disobedience, but CD is one of those things that could conceivably be relevant in one’s own life, whereas vigilantism hardly ever comes up at the dinner table, at least in my house.

If you’re keeping score, this has to be one of my most favorable critiques of one of these lists ever. Good work on the part of the committee. They should be commended for it.

Meanwhile, who are the Jonas Brothers; there's something out there; calendar gel

As soon as you start looking at something to edit it, you end up rewriting it. Or at least I do. By the time I’m done with the Hillary Duff, it will be the Miley Cyrus. Oh, well. It’ll be better. That’s what matters. (Not that I’m saying Miley Cyrus is better than Hillary Duff, mind you. This is not a theological discussion. Then again, I wouldn’t know either of them if I saw them in a police lineup. I mean, be realistic here.)

I’ve been Feeding a lot of metaphysics pieces, it seems, and I am struck by the number of leading lights (going back to Plato) who have suggested that, since our senses are limited, there is probably some whole ’nuther thing out there underlying reality, which they maintain exists because they can’t know through sensory data that it exists. What??? Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t this the same thing as paranoia? Then again, paranoia would be, I can’t see them, but I know they’re out there, while in this case it’s because I can’t see them, I know they’re out there. I was obviously not cut out to be a metaphysician. I just hope my Ethicist License doesn’t expire any time soon.

Next year’s calendar remains in flux. It’s looking as if Newark will hold two-day novice divisions as part of their invitational, which is something we discussed back at Northeast Chumps. We were all very much behind this; it would eliminate the MHL that weekend, but everyone would benefit from more rounds. O’C and I would tab the event, probably at a separate school for both LD divisions. However this works out, I like it. From my perspective it makes Newark so much easier than trying to shuttle down two separate groups on different days. Another weekend starting to take shape is the one before Bigle X, with an expanded ALJ event and possibly a conjunction of NY and NJ UDLs somewhere else. We’ll see how that works out, but it, too, might end up MHL-less, but with all the MHLers debating elsewhere. More to come on that, but probably not soon, as school years are coming to a crashing thud all around us.

And I see that we are now going into round 382 of the NatNats hostage situation in Las Vegas. WTF reports that the event is predicted to end by Labor Day. With any luck.

C-3PO down and out; Hillary Duff alive and well

I see that NCC-1701 and THX 1138 have broken in Duo. Or something like that. I’ve always liked T-1000 (although his teammate T-1003 used to dip the girls’ pigtails in the inkwell). HAL 9000 is my BFF. And as for 666, why, I even keep the number of the Beast as a cell phone speed dial. I find it soooooo useful that WTF is publishing these lists of random numbers. I don’t know about you, but I print them out and paste them on my bulletin board as keepsakes for all time.

Except, well, I don’t really print them out.

And I don’t have a bulletin board.

But you knew that.

Last night I began the updating of the Hillary Duff, which is one of my summer goals. I really haven’t looked at it in a while, and I always did like it. There will be a general editing, including better material on justice, plus a few imported famous French people. It’s interesting how styles of lesser lights change over time. The concepts set forth by Locke and Mill and Rawls remain essential ideas that one must master to understand basic social philosophy, but someone like Maslov, whose name used to pop up three times a day and twice on Sundays back in the 90s, hasn’t been heard from in years. He was never particularly enlightening, of course, except insofar as he easily exemplifies the rather banal nature of safety as a social value. I would say that Derrida is the Maslov of today, someone no one ever seriously reads (can you name a book you’ve read cover-to-cover by either; or, if that’s too hard, a book either of them wrote that you’ve even heard of?) but who comes up now and then in aid of…something. The Old Baudleroo also fits that limited context, but at least he’s fun to read, regardless of the fact that he’s full of bull-arkey. Anyhow, styles change, even though most people think that they’re serious diggers into the mother lode of brilliance rather than just fashionistas studying the latest mental hemline height. (Except, of course, your theory people are becoming pretty déclassé even in academic circles these days; $ircuit judges may be the last holdouts wearing these particular mental leisure suits.) And who am I to prevent people from keeping up with the times? So, a fresh coat of paint on the old HHLDPH, and thence to the Cur for a similar refresh.

Speaking of HAL 9000 (and we were, about 83 paragraphs ago), did you know that HAL is the NYSE symbol for Halliburton? Now there’s a useless piece of information for you. And THX is Thor Explorations Ltd, which I gather is some sort of mining company. NCC is National City Corporation, whatever that is; presumably they buy and sell cities. But forget all that; you’ve got to get a load of this: http://www.cyberdyne.jp/english/index.html. Need I say more?

Viva Las Ripon (including bonus extra: "Where's my BF?")

A tournament that takes an entire week, being held during a crucial (and mandated) exam period, and ultimately in competition with graduation—what’s not to like? While I’m not as hard on the Riponwegians as CP, I certainly agree with him that their organization is simply not as important around here as either they think it is, or as it is in other areas. I run a tournament a month under the auspices of the MHL, plus I run LD for 3 or 4 other events under the auspices of the NYCFL, and if we just went around and did some name changing, I’d be running 10 or so events a year for the NFL, and I’d have enough stripes on my NFL sleeve to command a battleship, but to what end? We’re a small district in a relatively busy forensic area because there’s no reason for us to be otherwise. If going to the big party is not a realistic goal, why spend a lot of time at the tux rental store? This doesn’t criticize the people who can and do go; it’s just that we mostly can’t, so we don’t. In our battles over our district’s redness, we kept trying to make this point, but Ripon really didn’t want to hear it. It was their way or the highway, to the detriment of those few programs in our area that, for whatever reason, actually can and therefore do. Fortunately the Wunn and Only helped us out of our Ripon-induced funk—I think he’s a good egg—but officially, we were road kill. And the only ones suffering as that road kill were the ones who most wanted to run across the highway. Something was, and is, definitely wrong somewhere.

Sigh. The World’s Worst District Chair strikes again. What can I say?

Curiously enough, I noticed a spike in the size of the VCA specifically for the post I did on the NatNats rez. It hardly provided arguments, but it did attempt to outline the conflict. I would imagine that, by now, those brevet VCAers who folded it into their cases have been eliminated from the tournament, and are able to spend their entire days at Circus Circus. Sorry about that, folks. Nobody reads this blog to improve their cases. At best you might pick up some gossip about O’C, but that’s about the end of it. Did I ever tell you about the time he didn’t get arrested in Tijuana?

Last night I did indeed begin chipping away at my summer chores, starting with getting reimbursed for some of last winter’s expenses. With my wallet filled to underflowing, I will next embark on something less tangible, like an update of the Cur. And a few more Nostrums wouldn’t hurt, I guess. I do feel a little sorry for the small circle of yabbos who were listening to those podcasts, having cut them off as I did. But then again, how many of them bothered to slip me a Ben Franklin under the table every now and then for my efforts? This stuff doesn’t grow on trees, you know. For that matter, if you’re reading this blog, you probably owe me at least thirty or forty bucks by now. Where’s my money, eh?

Jeesh.

"Have it your way"; bidness as usual; honoring the undead

One thing in Spain that I didn’t understand were the ferreterias. There weren’t a lot of them, but every town seemed to have one or two. I couldn’t figure them out from their windows. I guess they were places where you could get ferret cooked however your little heart desired. But how many ways are there to prepare ferret? I mean, after your basic boiled, broiled, baked and braised, I’m sort of done. Oh, yeah. Ferret tartar; I forgot that one. Anyhow, send in your favorite recipe for ferret, if you have one. Maybe we can put together an online cookbook.

The new TOC bid info is out. There’s nothing particularly surprising about it. It’s good to see Big Jake at the Quarters level; given that O’C plans on running it for 8 days straight (3 days of which will be devoted entirely to ceremonial events), anything less would be a bit of a blow. Bump maintained itself in both LD and Pffft. I would like to see our attendance numbers a bit higher on the latter, but I’m not quite sure how that would happen, as most schools didn’t even come close to the quota. I’m still sanguine about the little activity that could, however, and maybe this year more people in the region will take to it naturally, and it will be their thing, rather than some forensic skeleton in the closet that only gets rattle when the rest of the family has gotten a little too raucus. [Now you see why I ask you to insert your own metaphors.]

(I’ve got to get this out of my system.
Receptionist: There’s an invisible man in the waiting room.
Doctor: Does he have an appointment?
Receptionist: No.
Doctor: Tell him I can’t see him.)

I see that O’C has gotten a service award from the NFL. I do hope they had a long ceremony to give it to him. The Rev BA got his 10th award (!), which is hard to achieve except posthumously. Mine will come when they institute World’s Worst Chair category. I am good at some things though. I just tidied up the Sailor’s schedule for next year, with the updated TOC info. And I started on some of my real summer chores. So, I’m back in (off-season) business.

Farewell to the Bahamas…

So I’ve decided to stop recording Nostrum podcasts. I did a lot of them, roughly two years’ worth, and I feel like enough is enough. I will post the rest of the episodes as pdfs over the next few weeks, though. There’s no reason to let the work of Jules and the Nostrumite fall through the internet cracks. The story never does end, but it does go on for about as much as has already been published. And the ones I did record will remain available for anyone interested.

And so as the sun sets in the West, we bid a fond farewell to beautiful, exotic Nostrum.

Meanwhile I feel I do have to get cracking on the summer chores I’ve set for myself. So far all I’ve been doing is playing with photos and music and generally entertaining myself. But I have a full and rich to-do list in Remember the Milk, and I would like to be able to erase something off of there before the summer is over. Next week. Definitely next week. Or so.

I guess now we all settle back and watch the NatNatters go at it. I haven’t heard of any meetings to renovate LD or PF, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some. I certainly liked what they did to LD a couple of years ago, although I was a little disappointed that it had no specific effect outside of the literal NFL universe. But at the same time, there has been a lessening of tension in the LD universe lately. I don’t get the sense that enemy armies are facing each other from their dark and muddy trenches as they seemed to be a couple of years ago. I’m not quite sure why the tensions have eased, but dedicated soldiers of the VCA will recall that back in the day I was of the persuasion that many mountains were being built out of molehills, and we seem to have retreated from explosive-change-or-die back to evolution. LD, or any activity, should be allowed to evolve if that evolution makes sense. If we believe in the value of what we are doing, then testing it against other ways of doing it is a noble venture. To paraphrase Mill, either we’ll prove we were doing it the right way, or we’ll learn a better way of doing it. Either end is fine by me.

No, I don't own any White Stripes albums

I just spent some time with a friend who has moved from a PC to a Mac. Before he realized he needed someone versed in the ways of this particular world to hold his hand during the treacherous journey, he managed to turn his relatively full Windows-oriented iPod into an interesting technological curiosity empty of any content yet registering as half full. Or half empty. I guess people aren’t born downloading Senuti… On top of that, for reasons that elude me, he believed back in his PC days (last week) that he should rip his CDs as Apple Lossless, which turns out to save each song at about 22mgs, versus 2mgs or so for regular MP3s. Anyhow, I went down into to his cave, and by the time I finished sorting him out, if nothing else he was going to have 20 times as much space on his now Macintosh-based iPod. He was able to import his old music library as is, but unfortunately, as far as I could discover, there was no way to batch-process what he had already ripped down to the smaller versions, which has to be done one tedious file at a time. So what lessons did we learn from this?
1. Buy a Mac in the first place.
2. If you own even one White Stripes album, you probably don’t have the hair cells to hear a difference between Apple Lossless and MP3, so don't kid yourself. The point of an iPod is convenience, not high fidelity. If you want high fidelity, hire an orchestra.
3. The first thing to do when you buy music on iTunes is to burn it to a disk, which removes the DRM, provides a backup, and also allows you to play the music on any old CD player. And when your iPod goes to iPod heaven, you have all your purchased music available for easy reload. (Since you already know my thoughts on stealing music, we won't even discuss that option.)
4. Don’t use a Windows keyboard on a Macintosh Mini; it just annoys old Mac dogs like me. Pay the extra $50.
5. Buy a Mac in the second place, if you were too obtuse to do so in the first place.

In other news, I’ve been listening to an audiobook of one of Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files novels. Never heard of the guy before, and I’m loving it: it's the perfect drive-to-work accompaniment. If all his books were on Audible, I’d have signed up for an account today. I still might. I enjoy audiobooks, especially for things I wouldn’t ordinarily find time to read, like fantasy and SF. But I am also up to here in podcasts, which are not the same but are akin in that they are both talk on an iPod, and one has just so much time in one’s life for that sort of thing. If I set aside commute time for audiobooks, however, and morning exercise time for podcasts, I can probably work this out. I don’t think I could ever just sit in a comfy chair and listen to either, to tell you the truth. If I’m sitting where I can read something, I will, unless I don’t feel like reading, in which case I don’t want somebody else reading to me or yapping me over the pseudoradio. That’s why the DS was invented.

We do live in complicated times.

Since we’re in a technical mood today, I will point out that I just realized that my little cell phone can access the internet. It does this with the grace of [insert humorous metaphor here for some really graceless thing doing something that takes a lot of grace], but the miracle is that it does it at all, as Dr. Johnson might say. I don’t think I have any reason to do it, but it’s nice to know that I can. If I could seriously access my email from it, that would be rather sweet, which is why the iPhone is so theoretically attractive; God knows the phone part doesn't interest me much. Given that the new iPhone is figured to cost $100 or so a month, versus the $5 or so I’m paying now, I really don’t see one of those in my future, although that would solve the problem, such at it is. I was sort of thinking that the Touch would upgrade too, but that doesn’t seem to be happening, and how many iPods does one person need, anyhow? The Touch remains in the back of my mind, though, as the perfect way to watch Diggnation episodes on school buses. But I do need to upgrade my headphones. I’ve got the ones you stick in your ear about as far as the medulla oblongata that block ambient noise but make you feel as if your brain is in a vise; I want some Boses. Of course, everyone wants some Boses. Maybe some day… Provided we still get school buses next year. The price of fuel being what it is, we’ll be lucky if they give us maps.

What looms largest for me on the Man versus Machine front in the short term is a new espresso maker that is now in our kitchen. It came with a big, thick manual, and it looks suitably stern and forbidding. Real espresso, any time of day or night! But I understand that you don't just turn it on and there you are. There's real work involved in the learning. And if it ain't got the crema... You spend your weekend your way and I'll spend mine my way.