On the Nature of Lincoln-Douglas, Part 4

Lincoln Douglas Debate Event Description

Event description – Lincoln Douglas debate is designed to center on a proposition of value. A proposition of value concerns itself with what ought to be instead of what is. A value is an ideal held by individuals, societies, governments, etc. Debaters are encouraged to develop argumentation based upon a values perspective. To that end, no plan (or counterplan) will be offered by the debaters. In Lincoln Douglas Debate, a plan is defined by the NFL as a formalized, comprehensive proposal for implementation. The debate should focus on reasoning to support a general principle instead of particular plans and counterplans. Debaters may offer generalized, practical examples or solutions to illustrate how the general principle could guide decisions.

This is the top of the description in the district manual. It tells you, briefly, what LD is about. Since the activity did evolve from Policy, it is not surprising that, to some extent, although implicitly, it describes the activity in terms that separate it from Policy.

The activity is described as revolving around a question of what we ought to do as a “proposition of value.” This is a way of saying that we are dealing with ethics and/or morality. In the traditional study of ethics, we are very much discussing what we ought to do, against a background of some overarching rationale for doing it. That is, you can’t determine right actions in a vacuum. You need to see them as they relate to a notion of rightness actually held by some people and/or achieving benefit for some people. The specific idea of value, “an ideal held by individuals, societies, governments, etc.” takes in a lot of territory, but it is inclusive of the broad ideas of morality and justice and any other big concept we might have of right and wrong action. So we will say that we are going to argue what we ought to do to achieve some specific ideals-based end. We are going to achieve justice or morality or whatever by doing these things. We are arguing that something is right or wrong, and using capital V Values as our guiding principles.

There is no assumption that we are or are not already doing that thing that we are being asked to consider—“what ought to be instead of what is.” We might be doing it, or we might not be doing it. “What ought to be instead of what is” does not necessarily allude to logically fallacious arguments that what we are doing is right because we’re doing it (although that is nonetheless true). Nor does it mean that resolutions should not be interpreted as being about whether a situation is extant because the word “is” is in the resolution (although this is also nonetheless true). This is more to separate it, albeit implicitly, from Policy. In Policy debate, the resolution is a proposition of change. This year, for instance, the resolution is “Resolved: The United States federal government should substantially increase alternative energy incentives in the United States.” The burden of the affirmative is to demonstrate that we should do this thing. The affirmative can’t say no, let’s not do it. On the other hand, the burden of the negative can be a number of things, including that we should not do this thing, or that we’re better off with the status quo, that what ought to be is what is. (Or, at least logically the negative can take that position. I gather they usually do other things altogether.) Most importantly, in Policy, there is a stated, rules-based, presumption for the negative, that the status quo is ok. This phraseology in the event description of LD is the first to indicate that there is no identical presumption that the status quo is ok, much less a presumption for the negative (which we’ll get into later).

Given that we are looking to “develop argumentation based upon a values perspective,” i.e., argue what we ought to do based on broad principles of social right and wrong, “no plan (or counterplan) will be offered by the debaters.” We are arguing the underlying correctness of an action, not its “implementation.” Implementation, or plans and counterplans (some other way of implementation), is the bread and butter of Policy. Plans are what they’re carrying around in all those tubs. That’s why there’s these sentences here that make it pretty clear that LD is something else. How something would or could be done doesn’t matter. That it should, or shouldn’t, be done, is the issue at hand.

Which brings up two side points. First, there are often arguments in LD about how, because something can’t be implemented, we shouldn’t do it. These are not my favorite arguments for a variety of reasons, chief among them being that they are just not the strongest arguments that people can come up with. They presume too many preclusions for my taste, and they aren’t really addressing the core rightness or wrongness of an action; they’re tricky arguments, and because of the nature of LD (no plans/counterplans), fairly loosey goosey. These are the kinds of arguments that appeal to, well, mostly lazy debaters who don’t want to dig too deeply into the literature surrounding a topic. Secondly, a counterplan, if I’m not mistaken, is a different way to achieve the same goal. Which means that, in Policy, if someone wins with a counterplan, they’ve out affirmed the affirmative, so to speak. But in LD, isn’t it analogous that running a counterplan means that you are inherently accepting the affirmative position of what we should do, and simply saying that we should do it some other way? I’m no theorist, but if you ask me, if you accept your opponent’s position of what we should do or not do, I’m not left with much reason to vote for you, since you’ve already conceded the core argument. So while this language in the event description is relevant as much to LD’s Policy roots (and differences) as anything else, there’s other perfectly good reasons to consider it relevant.

From here the rules go on to state:

The hallmarks of Lincoln Douglas debate include:
1) Parallel Burdens
2) Value Structure
3) Argumentation
4) Cross Examination
5) Effective Delivery

We’ll look at parallel burdens next.

Interlude from the snowy reaches of New England

I realize that the VCA waits with bated breath for some idea what, exactly, the rules of LD might be, but we need to take a short break and look at last week’s Bigle X. I have no great narrative to relate, but there were some magical moments worth reporting.

Weaver was formerly known as “The Weave.” If this is not bait for the usual tab room suspects, I don’t know what is.

Speaking of “The Weave,” he and O’C were participating in their own private Ridiculous Character contest by wearing their Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes to the RR. Then again, it was Sunday. Apparently the 87 inches of snow should not be taken into consideration, although the look on “The Weave’s” face when he had to choose between the drift and the schmutz was priceless.

In a game of bean trivia, if the question is so simple that everybody knows the answer, the reality is that everybody knows the answer except the person who was asked the question. Following this realization, there is much guffawing and comradely ribbing. (The answer, by the way, regardless of the question, is FDR.)

Panivores do not like being prepped out against, and will complain to anyone, including biting the hand that feeds them, except that they never eat.

Menick is always right. (Apply this as necessary.)

I was not absolutely stark raving mad when O’C took my picture with CP. The look of frenzied evil is a delayed reaction to learning about the online octos pairings posted overnight at Princeton, for which CP must be held accountable.

When people ask me for the elims pdf, and I tell them I already gave them the prelims pdf, the fact that the P and the R eluded me does not negate the point made two paragraphs above.

Strikes disappear from TRPC like crazy even crazier in a round robin. Subnote to this: if strikes have disappeared, nine will get you ten that O’C has wandered off. In his suit.

The Beauty Queen PF judge panel may return for The Northeast Championships.

Modnov will go with civil disobedience.

It is never too cold to eat really good ice cream, provided you’re wearing gloves.

It turns out that there is a bowling alley somewhere in the vicinity of the Notorious B.I.G. Lex.

Monti Matt favors the women’s small to the men’s extra large.

Certain people can’t possibly be that dumb, but, then again, they probably are.

Tomorrow we return to our regularly scheduled programming.

On the Nature of Lincoln-Douglas, Part 3

We’ve argued that there should be rules for LD, and that the rules should be set by the NFL. Curiously enough, until recently, even if you subscribed to these ideas, there wasn’t much you could do about it. Material explaining the rules of the activity, if any, were not disseminated by the folks at Rippin’ aside from the broadest outline. Whether this was from a lack of certitude, a sense of non-necessity or a failure of organization is unclear, but my guess is that the league, in providing what little guidance it did, felt that this guidance was clear and sufficient. Further, an initial orthodoxy reflective of the league’s notions of what the activity ought to be took hold at the start in actual competition and at the leading camps, so probably people felt that the ship was launched, it wasn’t leaking and it was headed for the correct ports of call. All was well in Wisconsin, and they went back to their day jobs, which for most of them is shoveling snow off their cars.

Without going into an analysis of “what’s wrong with LD,” it was certainly clear to everyone in the last few years that whatever the initial conception of LD was, the practice of LD had become something different. So the NFL got together an assortment of coaches and sat them down and charged them with clarifying the activity in writing. In effect, it asked them to write up the rules. In a way, waiting twenty-five years to getting around to formulating what LD was all about was rather clever, because the assembled minds could look at that quarter of a century of history and analyze what they liked and what they didn’t like, and cherry-pick the best material. At the same time, anyone who reads the resulting rules will feel that, while many things are clearly set out, many others are open enough to interpretation that the activity isn’t completely put into a straightjacket. (And, of course, there are some that argue that total rule control has its benefits too. In Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe mysteries, for instance, the detective—who weighs a quarter of a ton—has extremely strict rules of what he will and will not do. He will not be interrupted twice a day when he is tending to the orchids on the roof of his brownstone. He will not discuss business at meals, which are as sacred as teachers’ desks. He will not shake anyone’s hand. And he definitely will never, under any circumstances, leave the brownstone. Much of the fun of the series is watching how Stout gets around the rules he has set for his character without actually breaking them, or else how he breaks them and gets away with it. And I don’t intend this as a pure digression simply to illustrate a minor point. There are people who can eloquently explain how the movies of the thirties and forties, which were produced under a strict code of “decency,” were sexier than movies where everyone is naked as a jay bird. A marvelous rhyme in poetry fulfills a particular rule of that form and provides a special joy not inherent to non-rhyming poetry; if you think that rhymes in poetry are a silly, old-fashioned idea, go through your iPod and figure out how many songs in there with really great lyrics are the ones that don’t rhyme. It is a classic thought, even a truism, that some of the best artistic work done in almost any field is done best with rules, which the best artists use to their own advantage.)

The rules that the committee laid down for LD after much conferring and hobnobbing are in the NFL’s district manual. There are those that argue that, because these rules are in the district manual that they should only apply to district tournaments, but this is analogous to claiming that the rules of baseball should only apply to the world series, or the major leagues, or some other part of the whole. I don’t question the mild logic of this claim, but it’s pretty silly. If the rules only apply to district or NFL tournaments, then logically they don’t apply to any other contests, which means that there are literally no rules whatsoever except at NFL events, which is just goofy. Still, one wishes that there were some other place that the rules were posted as overall strictures so that those among us who are genetically inclined to argue about everything under the sun (which is, I estimate, roughly 93% of the debate universe) wouldn’t be able to pick them apart with this sort of argument. But, they are where they are.

Let’s take a look at them. (Finally!)

On the Nature of Lincoln-Douglas, Part 2

I guess we could ask if LD needs rules. We made that assumption a priori, and maybe that was mistake.

There are a number of possibilities. First, that there should be clearly defined rules of engagement. Second, there should be no rules of engagement. Third, a middle position, there should be some rules, or the rules need not be clearly defined, or some combination of the two.

Given that LD is an academic competition between strangers, conducted under the auspices of a national league implicitly charged with creating academic standards (NFL is strongly involved in scholarship programs, merit acknowledgments, etc.), the first possibility, that there be clearly defined rules, would seem to fit into this understanding of the activity. Education, while often free form, is a goals-based business. We want students to learn stuff. How they learn is subject to different approaches, but that they should learn is inarguable. In addition to classroom work, secondary education offers a variety of extracurricular pursuits, some of which are competitive. One can certainly do athletic things that are non-competitive, for instance run daily on the track for 3 or 4 miles to stay in shape, and this is a perfectly wonderful thing, and it may make you smarter by making your body stronger and your brain more receptive, and a school might even reward this activity, or support it with trainers so that students learning to run don’t hurt themselves by, say, not stretching first. Similarly, you can argue with people all you want to, from morning to night if you’re a disagreeable enough human being. You can argue with your parents, you can argue with your teachers, you can argue with your friends (a quickly diminishing number, no doubt, if all you ever do is argue with them). You don’t need rules for this, although a little helpful advice might not hurt (e.g., lay off when the person you’re arguing with is holding a meat cleaver). However, once you begin to run competitively, or argue competitively, rules seem to make sense. By definition, competition means that you are pitting people against one another for the purpose of rewarding some measure of success. Rules clarify what that measure of success is. In running a mile, for instance, the rules are pretty straightforward. We all start at the same time, we don’t take any shortcuts, we don’t bop the runner in the aisle next to us with a rolling pin, we don’t hop on a motorcycle halfway through. As I say, pretty straightforward, but rules nonetheless. Because of these rules, we get a clear winner at the mile mark.

In arguing competitively, we have a harder time measuring the winner because we don’t have anything as simple as a mile marker with a tape that one person breaks first. (I wish we did.) But we do have the aim of making the competition fair for the competitors, in running and in debating. In debate, the more one knows about what is expected in order to win, the more one can direct one’s efforts toward that win. A set of rules outlining what needs to be done, and the format in which it should be done, provides that information of what one has to do to succeed. Academic debate has a special burden, because of its academic nature, of providing not merely competition but education as well, much as sports activities in an academic environment are more than strictly competitive (they create healthier students and a more engaged student body, both very valuable in the management of young scholars). When the New York Giants play, it’s strictly for money and entertainment. When the Hen Hud Sailors play, it’s for something else altogether.

The benefits of clearly defined rules in the scenario presented above is obvious. If there are no rules of engagement at all, there is no way not only of determining a winner but of preparing yourself to become a winner. The academic goals of the activity are more in that latter bit—preparing yourself—than in simply winning. Preparing to debate means learning all about a subject area, studying different lines of thought on a particular problem, perhaps studying philosophers and theorists who have written on that subject in the past and applying their thoughts to the issue, etc. If debate were merely about winning, we’d still need to do all that, but we would traffic even more in the specifics of rhetoric perhaps to the detriment of content (e.g., critiques of resolutions, where once a student has grasped enough of, say, Nietzsche to run amorality off-case, that student can run that same amorality off-case against virtually everything and never learn much except that Nietzsche was a self-contradicting albeit fascinating and literate fruitcake, plus enough of a particular resolution to apply fruitcake analysis to it). Rhetoric, insofar as logic is concerned (not to mention presentation) is important, of course, but not to the exclusion of content if we accept that the point of high school LD is to learn about the content and not the container.

As for the third overall possibility about rules, the idea that rules should be vague or few is much closer to no rules whatsoever than to a better way of handling rules. The fuzzier we are in establishing goals, the fuzzier our approach to reaching them. Simply apply what I’ve been saying above, but in a fuzzier way.

So why, then, do people suggest that rules are problematic? The chief reason seems to be that rules somehow limit the activity. That is, they tie their claim down to the existence of a (mis)conception of what the activity ought to be that can never change, and that therefore harms the activity by not allowing its natural evolution. There is certainly truth to this supposition, that the activity won’t change much, and probably some truth in its underlying concern, that the activity could be improved. But the suspension of or dispensation with rules isn’t the solution to this possible tendency for the activity to, for lack of a better word, stagnate. Rules can be changed. Once upon a time baseball didn’t have a designated hitter. Good change, bad change? Beats me, but I can’t imagine a sport more bound by rules than baseball, but even there those rules aren’t static. (Speaking of which, those rules seem to help the umpires decide if a player is safe or out, or if a pitch is a ball or a strike, in a uniform way, rather than allowing each umpire to publish his or her strike-out paradigm before each game.)

So, we argue that there should be rules, because they will enhance the academic aspect of the activity as well as clarify the competitive aspect of the activity. As we said yesterday, those rules should come from the NFL.

What rules, exactly? I’m pretty sure we’ll start examining them tomorrow.

On the Nature of Lincoln-Douglas, Part 1

The question arises, often within rounds, as to what, exactly, are the rules of LD. In fact, sometimes the question is raised whether there are any rules at all. There is occasionally even a hint of the idea that there shouldn’t be any rules, as this somehow limits the reach of the activity. The VCA knows where I stand on these questions, but it may not be a bad idea to review things as we begin debating the topic that will be haunting some of us up all the way up through TOC. (And by the way, those who still haven’t bought into the Modest Novice must at least admit that the idea of a longer term resolution is already walking amongst us thanks to TOC and Jan-Feb…)

First of all, we need to establish not the rules, but the source of rules, if any. That is, if we can locate an oracle, we don’t have to do our own divination. I would suggest that the National Forensic League is the de facto source of the rules of the activity. I am not being coy, here, because once we accept that the NFL has ruling authority over the activity, then we must accept their rules; that’s what ruling authority means. So the first question is, does the NFL have ruling authority over the activity? From any perspective, the starting point has to be that they invented the activity. LD was designed by and disseminated by the NFL as an official activity of their organization. Certainly individuals argued one-on-one prior to the creation of LD, and perhaps even participated in ad hoc academic debating sessions, but LD, with its timings, ballots and the like, came from the NFL. They can claim paternity.

Secondly, NFL provides the ongoing resolutions for the activity. Although occasionally we veer from their specifics, running cases slightly out of sync with their designated monthly timings (TOC and Jan-Feb, for instance), we generally accept their resolutions throughout the year. Even when we don’t like the wording, tournaments don’t to my knowledge announce that they will run the resolution but worded differently. The resolution is what the resolution is. Nothing stops tournaments from posting their own resolutions (Big Bronx used to, as did NY State Finals, as does CatNats still), but in general, we accede to the NFL’s authority in this area.

Thirdly, most students who debate in an official academic capacity do so as members of the NFL. While certainly there are debates out there in the odd class or even extramural situation that are not NFL, which by their nature they are not concerned with NFL resolutions, the vast majority of academic debate is, indeed, conducted by NFL members.

If I am a dues-paying member of a group, debating an activity designed by that group, and specifically arguing a resolution posted by that group, I have to believe that I have demonstrated a de facto submission to the authority of that group regarding that activity. This does not say that I have to agree that all the exercise of that authority is good or correct; I am entitled to my opinions, which I don’t sign away when I receive that certificate from Wisconsin with my name on it. I don’t have to agree that all the laws of the US are good or correct either, but nonetheless I have to obey them, or suffer the consequences. That’s the way it is with ruling authorities.

So the next question is, what rules, exactly, has NFL established?

They call their sports teams the Eukaryotes

I’m still trying to figure out this whole Crossroads of the Revolution thing. That seems to be what Clark, NJ, home of Arthur L. Johnson HS, likes to call itself. Maybe there was some really big battle here in 1777. Maybe Clark used to originally be Trenton, or Yorktown, or whatever, but then they moved it. God knows that just about every city in the northeast was the site of some battle or other, with the appropriate caps: The Battle of White Plains. The Battle of Long Island. The Battle of Greenwich. The trouble is, every town can’t be Lexington or Concord or Trenton, and the others don’t want to be left out. The Battle of the Middle of Nowhere. The Battle of the Sticks. The Battle of Resume Speed. I’m pretty good on the Revolution in general, but I will admit being stymied by Clark and ALJ. Maybe one of the ALJies (Algae?) who are members of the VCA could enlighten me.

The distinguishing characteristic of the 2008-9 season seems to be serious weather, and ALJ was no exception. The process begins with the withdrawal of the Montwegians from the field, which has become the inaugural for every tournament so far this year. A tournament cannot officially begin until the arrival of the email from Monticello announcing that they will not be coming. The Montwegians had even at one point considered not attending the Monticello tournament, but this was too much even for them. I will admit that they do have their own weather systems up there (for those of you without a map, Monticello is slightly north of Juneau; on a clear day, and with her best binoculars, Sarah Palin can see it from her attic window). And there was, indeed, snow predicted for one and all this last weekend. Going into it, I had arranged with the Sailors’ bus folk that, if worse came to worse, we’d take a train, which has to be the most idiotic idea I’ve had in some time, but I really didn’t want to abandon ALJ in its inaugural year, starting friction always being greater than moving friction (which is true, unlike my previous scientific remark about pi R squared, when everyone knows that, as Gracie Allen once pointed out, pie are round). At least the traveling down on Friday was fine. Our driver, who managed to take the wrong parkway (not that it matters all that much), had a GPS that corrected our error, and to tell you the truth, the back roads were so much nicer than the Garden State Parkway, and didn’t take all that much longer. It’s about an hour and a half from Sailordom, not a bad trip at all. About the same distance from us as Brigadoon Monticello, come to think of it.

The tournament was set up a la Scarsdale, with varsity in one flight and novices in the other, with some of the members of the former field judging some of the members of the latter. To work, this requires a 2 to 1 judge ratio, but Cooper managed to dig up plenty of judges, and work it did. There were some glitches in the operation of the tournament, which were understandable given that it was the team’s first attempt, and a lot of the Algae were Speecho-Americans not used to the idea of pulling the ballots out of the judges’ hands, even if it means cutting off those hands with a machete, but mostly it ran quite well. In answer to the question, doesn’t judging and debating both make things a bit burdensome for the varsity, one answer might be that the top 8 in the field after elims had all judged prelims, so probably not.

Needless to say, we spent much of our tab time watching the weather forecasts, which kept changing from minute to minute. It was impossible to predict what Saturday might be like as the collected adults gathered at the motel for some uncharacteristic conviviality (not that we are not characteristically convivial, but rather that we are seldom together in a place where we can express that conviviality). Even on Saturday morning, it was hard to get a fix on things, but as soon as the sun was up I buzzed the Sailor bus folks and worked out that our bus would come at noon. Byram Hills did likewise. Leaving after prelims seemed to be the thing to do, and as the weather panned out, it was exactly right. As we pulled up the last stretch of HenHudLand the roads were getting definitely treacherous; we had made the right decision. Given the weather, and the need to bail out, there was one elimination round—quarters—to sort out the honors, although octonians were acknowledged and trophied (which is the opposite of being atrophied), as they would otherwise have debated. The Sailors had a pretty good weekend—LPW did not HPL and thus had his best tournament of the year, for instance, and the Panivore got home before she ran out of bagels, and ForWhomTheBen, who is allergic to all the things the Panivore could eat but won’t, went home with enough victuals left over to supply the family until the 2010 off-year elections—and from my perspective, ALJ got off to a good start despite the frightful weather. I like the idea of a tournament right after the break to try out the new topic, and I’m happy to pass the torch from the MHL to this invitational, which services roughly the same market.

This coming weekend, Bigle X. Or, it’s one damned thing after the other!

Musings from a wall

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you CAN make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that's all.”

That’s the germane part for today’s sermon, but the whole Humpty Dumpty chapter is an exercise in logic and linguistics that all debaters should know by heart. (“MUST a name mean something?” Alice asked doubtfully. “Of course it must,” Humpty Dumpty said with a short laugh. And there’s plenty more where that came from.)

I am taken by a number of issues that attract debaters to the Dark Side for one reason or another. One issue is the “unique” argument.

The largest number of debaters, by definition, deal in stock arguments on a resolution. This is not because a small number of issues are stocked and sold by some virtual WalMart of debate ideas, but because most people facing a batch of words tend to interpret them the same way, and to respond to them the same way, and those responses, which are the vastest in number, become the stock arguments. That is why I say most debaters traffic in stock arguments by definition, because “stock arguments” is defined as whatever most debaters are running. Stock arguments are not intrinsically bad, dull, banal, or any other pejorative you wish to apply, any more than the impulse to stop at a red light, which is a rather stock response to seeing a red light when you’re driving your Edsel down the Lincoln Highway, is somehow bad or dull or banal. It’s just the most common reaction.

One could say that, because resolutions repeat, if not literally but at least in essence, there are arguments tucked away on certain topics that are always pulled out of the drawer again, and that these too are stock but in a different definition of the word. That is, we’ve argued about sovereignty in the past, and Jan-Feb will no doubt have many arguments about sovereignty again, and many times we will be arguing the same material albeit to a different end. I won’t disagree with that, but I will point out that every argument perceived of as stock today was at some point an original argument. That we remember the last time we had that same argument and pull out our trusty and true responses from the last time does not negate the idea that stock arguments are the general response because they are what people generally do respond.

Still, not everyone responds to topics the same way, and not everyone runs stock arguments. Some topics are rich in potential arguments, and some debaters go deep, finding unusual approaches that nevertheless are squarely within the bounds of the resolution. By this I do not mean that they torture some paragraph they’ve lifted out of Derrida or the like into something that apparently applies to the subject at hand, but that they’ve studied the material of the resolution, they’ve read books and articles on the subject, and gone beyond just a simple understanding of the topic to a more expert understanding, generating a more expert case as a result. The rounds I’ve seen at TOC over the years, where there is a lot at stake, and where debaters have had plenty of time to analyze the resolution, are where you are most likely to see this sort of case. Curiously, TOC is also where you are most likely to see fairly straightforward, traditional—stock if you will—arguments. Orthodoxy has its place. Come to think of it, though, doing a lot of research and learning a lot and expounding what you have learned is as orthodox as the application of simple solutions to the Gordian knot. Sometimes doing a lot of research and learning brings one back to the beginning. It depends on the person, and it depends on the subject.

Anyhow, so far, so good. But there is another breed of case altogether that is problematic. In an effort to create a unique case, presumably on the misguided belief that orthodoxy and stock cases are anathema, one goes off on a tangent that is, in a word, nuts. I know I could come up with a better word than that, but you get my point. And this particular tangent (and there are other tangents, i.e., other ways of creating cases that are equal parts unique and bad) requires the redefinition of common words. And that is never a good idea.

In language, there are all sorts of words that are arbitrary. Most nouns, for instance. If I call the thing I drink my coffee out of a cup or a tasse, it doesn’t really matter much, although I’ll be more likely understood with the latter in Quebec than in Edmonton. The word cup is entirely an arbitrary sound (or, when written, collection of letters) that we agree will refer to things that are cup-like. If I were to refer to my cat as my cup, or my cup as my cat, I would not make a lot of sense to a lot of people, because we associate catness with one group of objects and cupness with another group of objects. My clarity as a communicator depends on my ability to use words in such a way that my auditors understand what I want them to understand. I need to select my words carefully, based on a shared understanding of meaning. I cannot, as Humpty Dumpty asserts, have a word mean what I want it to mean, if it already has a pre-existing meaning. I am not the master of the meanings of words. The meanings of the words are already set. I am a master of words only if I am a master of their already inherent meanings, which, as I say, are initially arbitrary. It is usage that removes the arbitrariness from the equation.

(Semioticians should feel comfortable with the above analysis. One could point out that usage is not static, of course. The word momentarily used to mean “for a moment” and now, because of what copyeditors might have called misusage, it means “in a moment.” Language is a fluid business, but not with every single word. Some words are more fluid than others. But that is not our main issue here.)

So, getting back to the nut case I was talking about, run perhaps by a nutcase (and how’s that for clever manipulation of language?), the uniqueness here depends on taking a common word or phrase that is normally used in debate such-and-such a way, and using it in some other way altogether. Sometimes this includes using a word or phrase that has centuries of accepted philosophic meaning in some way that is counter to that accepted meaning. It is a postmodern critical trick to turn words upside down, although not a particularly good trick, but at least the professional critics who do this are aware of what they are attempting to do. But how am I to respond to a definition of, say, morality, that specifically states that morality is not an attempt to determine what we ought to do, or of justice, stating that it is not the attempt to adjudicate conflicting claims in a manner accepted by all? Values are slippery enough concepts already, but they do come with almost instinctive understandings on our part (or perhaps real instinctive understandings, if some of the experimental philosophy these days is to be believed). Any educated adult, never having heard of LD debate, still has an intuitive understanding of morality and justice and all the other big-ticket value items. So if we set out to redefine these values right off the top, don’t we immediately confuse the people we are attempting to communicate with?

And, trust me, debaters do argue these counterintuitive definitions. They take what we all agree are meanings, throw out those meanings, put in new meanings, and ask us to forget the old meanings. But the problem is more than just substituting one word for another. Or, actually, it’s the opposite problem. They’re keeping the word and changing the meaning. If I start calling circles magubus, they are still round objects where the circumference is pi*r*squared 2 * pi * r. But if I start saying that circles are not round, then I’m getting into some seriously muddled linguistic if not metaphysical territory. Circles are defined by their roundness, no matter what we call them. At the point where we deny their roundness, they are no longer circles. The claim that they are circles despite their lack of roundness has little traction in the mind of the auditor. It goes beyond wordplay into nonsense. Nuttiness. And yet, there are nut cases out there. Morality, justice and other values, stripped of their meanings, are their non-round circles.

Why are these cases being run? My guess is that the debaters are simply too clever by half. As was Humpty-D. They really do believe that they are the masters of words, and they are encouraged in this by some modern critical writing (in theory), not to mention judges who are willing to accept any damned nonsense in a round (in practice). And there is no question that these nut cases are being run by superior debaters, who can sell the proverbial matches to the devil, and their skill as arguers overcomes their misguided belief in their skill at cognitive creation.

Is this any way to win a debate round? Probably not. It may succeed based on the natural skills of the debater (lots of nonsense will), but wouldn’t that debater be better off with the starting point of meanings everyone already agreed to? I’m not saying that you should run stock arguments, only that you should run normative language. Anything else is just too confusing.

In which, if you make it to the end, you'll see something snide about debate, but mostly you'll realize that this is an off week forsensics-wise

I’ve been enjoying The Long Tail quite a bit. Listening to the audiobook, actually, although I don’t maintain there’s much of a difference between reading and listening in the long run. It’s like watching a movie with subtitles. You forget pretty quickly that you don’t speak Italian or whatever, and a week after you’ve seen the film, you can’t even remember that there were any subtitles at all. Prego! Anyhow, it’s a pretty good read/listen. I had thought I wouldn’t go far with it, that I got the idea and that all the book would be was various examples, and before long I’d try the next book in the queue (I acquire a bunch of this sort of thing at random from the DJ, as anyone who has ever received a crappy prize can attest), but in fact, it’s as much an up-to-date history of the web as anything else, and right up my alley. Rather thought provoking, and highly recommended.

Anyone wondering about #44, speaking of the web, is advised to listen to last Sunday’s year-end wrap-up edition of Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, in which, in a blast from the past, a newly seated senator answers questions that are not his job. We voted for the right guy!

Also speaking of the web, I seem to acquire half of the music I own through free downloads from Amazon. (There’s a weekly subscription letter regarding MP3s that I’ve signed up for.) I am probably the perfect target audience for such marketing, because I don’t spend much time trawling for music otherwise, but I do love finding and listening to new music, a not unusual trait in a Baby Boomer, but one that atrophies as senescence settles on the brain. Amazon sends me free tracks and lists of stuff, and before the night is over, I’ve bought some stuff just from clicking around, plus I’ve added a couple of albums of free stuff (I still think in terms of albums, again, a not unusual trait in a Baby Boomer). As for more adventurous trawling, I do live in fear and trembling of the ride back from Lexington next week, on which Matt R will unleash his top 40 of 2008 for me. Then again, he did remind me that last year on the same trip I was playing the soundtracks of Disneyland rides, so turnabout is fair play and all that. And while we’re on the subject of music, I picked myself up some of them thar’ Bose speakers and plugged them into an Airport in the kitchen so that, with the aid of the Remote app on the Touch, I can control my complete iTunes library on the computer in the family room. Ah, technology! And I love nothing better than running through my collection of the latest Gangsta stuff while cooking up the night’s gruel. (Actually, come to think of it, if there is one song even remotely hippity-hoppity-ish in my library it would come as quite a surprise, but you knew that.)

And, of course, last night’s Sailor meeting was cancelled, and today the Sailors have no school which means no meeting tonight, and I myself am dubious about my availability tomorrow… Oh, well. They do better without me. What do I know? Thank God they don’t send me their cases or anything! Then again, come to think of it, they’ve only had a month and a half or so to write them, including the long break, so what am I thinking? No doubt they’ll get started on them some time tonight, if they happen to be going to ALJ. If not, there’s always the bus ride up to Lexington on which to catch up, as long as they remember to bring the crayons and the construction paper, that is. Of such is greatness made, eh?

Maybe Monticello is really Brigadoon...

Arthur L. Johnson is this coming weekend. I’ve got a small group of Sailors lined up. Given that ALJ shows up everywhere else, I feel it sort of behooves us all to show up there. The alternative—washing my socks—comes in a poor second. They’ve got decent numbers of LDers and Pffffters (ALJ, not my socks), but couldn’t get any policy traction for some reason. Oh, well. I may not have clean socks, but I’ll be able to add Clark, NJ, to the list of places I have been in for more than eleven minutes. The big question is, will Monticello get there? They’ve been snowed, iced and generally inclemented out of every tournament so far this year. I’m beginning to wonder if there really is a Monticello. Is it time to take T&T and co off the invitation list? Is this somehow related to Favre and the Jets? We’ll know this weekend.

Meanwhile, Bigle X is kicking around issues like community rankings and strikes. O’C wants 119 strikes, which strikes me as a few over the line, whereas I was pushing for -9, per school, whether they come or not. I imagine we’ll sort it out by the end of the day; I’ve asked CP to give me access to the data so I can see just how many people we’re actually talking about. Community rankings are no big deal, since you just toss them into a spreadsheet and take ‘em as they come, but strikes always open the possibility of screwing up. If a judge is added late, if a team is added late, if the moon is in Pisces, things won’t necessary work right, although lately I have to admit that, since I’ve been keeping hard copies of who wanted to strike whom, and when they’ve come to tab to complain that they didn’t get their strikes I’m able to show them that, in fact, they were the only team in the tournament NOT to strike O’C, well, maybe this part of TRPC isn’t working as badly as I once thought. Big Jake was the high point of people complaining that they didn’t get the strikes they hadn’t made, by the way. Curiously enough, even there, O’C was the number one strike, and he wasn’t even on the list of judges. For that matter, he wasn’t even on the list of non-judges. People had to go really out of their way, but, well, debate is serious business in these here parts.

I’ve got all sorts of interesting stuff lined up for the Sailors’ meeting this week, but the weather seems to be conspiring against us. As for next week, we’ve scheduled a Jan-Feb-topic demo round between Stealth and the Hardware Engineer, both of whom will be getting the kinks out this weekend at ALJ. Word is that the early betting out in Vegas is both heavy and fairly equally split, even though there are never any winners or losers in these demos. But that doesn’t stop the whales, as they say out in the desert. If you’ve got the money, you’ll bet on anything. Any side bets on whether the HE will pull a reverse theory argument on the off-case pre-standard spike? For that matter, any side bets on whether there is such a thing as a reverse theory argument or an off-case pre-standard spike? It’s going to be one exciting evening, I can tell you that. Standing Room Only. Woo hoo!

We return to our regularly scheduled programming

All right. Vacation’s over. Back to business.

I’ve put the Modest Novice stuff onto a web page, http://www.jimmenick.com/modnov.html. CP has promised to work up the odd wiki for things like lessons and the like. The plan is to select the topic at Bigle X and then refine the wording and then go for it. Simple as that, once you make your mind up. It was curious, the question brought up in the comment to the previous post, that somehow coaches and upperclassmen might unscrupulously overdo the training and case-writing for the newbies. Curious, I say, because that’s almost the point. Case-writing is a long-term skill, and not the first thing one needs to learn. Fewer people have a fear of the white page than a fear of public speaking, and much less adrenaline is expended in typing than in actually debating. The most important things one learns early on is how to listen, how to take notes, how to respond in a meaningful way, things like that. And, of course, one of the points of the plan is to have a topic that is relevant to the agreed-to early training of novices, so even if a case were handed to the poor newbie, he or she would be learning to draw from the reserve of information underlying it that has been gleaned from early team meetings and readings. Plus that information would inform many other topics in the future. It all connects. (The commentator also assumes that novices aren’t already given cases by their upperclassmen or coaches, which is far from true in my experience. And as I said in my response, something like this is rather standard in the policy world.) Anyhow, the Modest Novice is on track. Toot toot, as they say in railroad circles.

I spent a lot of time over the break doing things like cleaning up my hard drive and polishing my websites, boring stuff that nonetheless needs to be done on occasion. While Little Elvis seems to have, at least as far as the Mac’s Disk Utility is concerned, disk errors beyond one’s wildest imagination and/or repair (I guess I’ll seek out some third-party software), my expedition into the bowels of my stuff did uncover a copy of V2 of Safari, which I immediately installed in place of the latest version, Safari DITW (Dead in the Water). I just seem to need two browsers, logged in as different users, especially with the Feed going. What can I say? Anyhow, things have been perked up a little, in preparation for what I imagine will be a hardware upgrade sometime this year. My Dell is falling apart, and Little E is getting creaky, so what else is there to do? I hate spending the money, but if the Day Job keeps those paychecks coming, I won’t have much choice.

Saturday night we had the annual alumni dinner. It looked somewhat like the judges’ lounge at Bump: quite a fine assortment of former Sailors, if I do say so myself, representing both debaters and Speecho-Americans. As one might expect, the usual subjects were discussed, among them film and music and the like, but at some point we got around to Famous Former Sailors. One story was told that pretty much was untoppable, about someone we will call Sailor X. Sailor X had been, to put it mildly, somewhat problematic as a team member, but somehow he had made it into the ethereal realms of upperclassmanness without really putting in much serious time as either a novice or a JV. He did show up at occasional meetings, however, and at the odd tournament when the spirit moved him. Newcomer McLean, in this particular instance, was a young newbie, fresh as a peach on a Georgia summer morning. McLean had just written his very first cases, and announced this at a meeting. Sailor X, hearing this, told McLean to send them along to him for review, and McLean obliged, hoping to get the wisdom of the ages from experience forged in hard debate labor. But as time passed, no reply was forthcoming from the old veteran to the young Turk. Sailor X has essentially disappeared, until finally showing up on the bus to head to the next tournament. Somehow emboldening himself to the task, McLean asked Sailor X for his opinion of his cases. “Oh, they were fine,” Sailor X replied. “I’ll be running them this weekend.”

Of such are debate legends made.

Modest Novice Lives!

I'm sending this out today to everyone in the known universe: the final Modest Novice document.

Regarding four-round MHLs

Someone who had attended the Monticello MHL complained afterwards, in a constructive way, about our changeover to 4 rounds. It was a policy judge, now in college. His beef was primarily that there wasn't enough time to do what needed to be done, like provide constructive criticism and eat lunch, not necessarily in that order. He had some other issues as well, but the general sense of being too rushed in a bad way was his main thrust.

The cool, calm and calculated heads of the MHL meditated on this for some time (there being no particular pressure to act, since the subsequent MHL at Byram Hills was, by default, a three-rounder, since it started in the afternoon). But I think our immediate reaction was, you know, this guy has got a point or two. The thing is, we were so all-fired proud of our ability to conduct the event speedily that we sort of lost track of the down side of speedy (which would make a great title for an independent film: "The Down Side of Speedy"). Just because we could move things along at a hectic clip didn't mean we should move things along at a hectic clip. An entire division might have to go without lunch, and who wants to turn a disad on an empty stomach? On reflection, our goal--to get out roughly when we would have gotten out after 3 rounds--was sort of dumb. It wasn't as if we were doing anything that night anyhow, since we'd still get home at 7 or 8 o'clock, or maybe later when a school from the furthest reaches of the region was attending at the opposite furthest reach. Why all the rush?

So, in the future, we will continue to have four rounds. But we will not lag pair. We will allow a full half hour between the last ballot of 2 and the pairings distributed for 3, and a 15-minute break between the last of 3 and the announcement of 4. If we continue to start with registration ending at 9:00, we'll still be reasonable, but no, we won't get out by 6:00. Big deal.

We'll have to contend with a similar problem in CFLs, but I don't expect much demurral there from this approach. The last CFL we did, at Regis last week, was a three-rounder due to weather and some lost schools from the north, so the issue never arose, and that is the last of the debate CFLs, so there is time to get our Catholic ducks in a row.

The bottom line is that 4 rounds is, competitively, a better tournament. But it's not a better tournament if it turns the debaters into frustrated little puddles of debate goo, which can happen with novices, especially. Our new rule of No Frustrated Little Puddles of Debate Goo should help keep us on the straight and narrow.

Another Christmas present

First there was the adventure story (check it out on my podcast page if you haven't already; be sure to pop some corn first). Now this, a photo of your average high school teacher threatening his students to do their homework or get stabbed. Who else thinks of you around the holidays the way I do?

Dagnabbit!!!

There's this damned virus on my ISP that they told me was gone, but it isn't. It showed up if you clicked the links I posted yesterday, so I removed them.

To enjoy (or not) "Tales of True Debate Adventure," please download the files from my podcast page: http://www.jimmenick.com/podcasts/index.html

An update and a promise

Update: The frightening weather outside may not prevent us from visiting the Regis tomorrow. Fingers are crossed for one last shot at giving felons the vote, or not, depending.

Promise: A tale of true adventure, derived from real-life events at Ridge, is in the works. It is, in fact, written. My hope is to present it as an audio; I'm going to try to record it on Sunday. It will, of course, go out on The View from Tab. Failing that (or in addition to that, depending), it will appear here as a pdf. A weary world rejoices!

And the answers to yesterday's beans are:
Cast members
George Bizet (and here's one to ruin L'Arlesienne forever: imagine it with the lyrics "George Bizet/Loved Pinot Chardonnay" and you'll never enjoy it again)
Rabbits (from Watership Down)
The Wind in the Willows
Digital Rights Management (boo hiss)

And Mary Blair indeed: go online and check out her Alice drawings (which are in a recently published book). Superb. Although I'm still partial the the Eyvind Earle Lady and the Tramp sketch that the DJ erased from my desktop, the %$#@&*s...

SuperSquirrels you can believe in

In news that redefines the concept of startling, last night SuperSquirrel became the Captain of the Sailors, as Robbie took on the mantle of Captain Emeritus. (It occurs to me that this may be the first official female captain, to which one might respond either that it’s about time or so what, depending on your commitment to identity issues. Back in my daughter’s day, we were too tiny to do officers.) The office of captain, subject as it occasionally is to senioritis, is a calendar-year position; other jobs, including the dreaded role of Hardware Engineer, are assigned in September. As I told S-Squirrel last night, her key job is speaking up when I tell people something that is totally wrong or ridiculous. She is, therefore, expecting a busy year in office.

Now you may be of the persuasion that, if you’re playing bean trivia, it might be a good idea to bring along the beans. I, on the other hand, managed to forget them. Fortunately, the board and markers sufficed, although the lack of the physical bean meant that teams couldn’t surreptitiously break their beans in two for extra points. The Sailors were broken into 4 divisions, by age group, and handicapped accordingly, as in, the freshmen started with more beans than the seniors. In a hotly contested round, the seniors almost immediately went into negative points (watching Peanuts attempting to logically deduce the number of keys on a piano was a wonder to behold). The freshmen got off to a decent start, but their youth ultimately worked against them. Arriving late because she had to attend her little brother’s sousaphone recital kept S-Squirrel’s team on the edge for awhile, but not long enough. In the end, our Hardware Engineer’s fine grasp of non-rock music, not to mention the Panivore’s ability to think on her feet without any visible means of nutrition and the amazing camaraderie of our sophomoric squad in general despite the fact that they detest the very ground each of them walks on including their own, won the day for the class 2011. Joy and rapture was spread throughout Hudville.

How would you have done? Here’s a sample question from each topic.

WDW: What is the official overall job name of Walt Disney World Employees?
Non-rock music: Name the composer of Carmen.
Animals, real and fictional: What are Fiver and Hazel?
Classic books: In what book would you find the Piper at the Gates of Dawn?
Science, inventions and tech: What does DRM stand for?

No fair googling the answers! Those strike me as fairly easy ones. Who the artist is who designed “It’s a Small World,” on the other hand, is meant for professionals only. Don’t try answering that one at home without a trained adult standing by at all times.

More on burdens, or, my petition for bad resolutions

It’s not as if burdens are some dramatically original modern thing that, sadly, we old fogies simply don’t understand. Never forget that when Miranda says, “O brave new world, That has such people in't!” her father’s rather jaded reply is, “'Tis new to thee.”

It has been ever thus in LD that one side or the other will make some sort of claim along the lines of, if I can prove (or disprove) just one example, I win. Often this is true. There are times when a side is making a categorical claim that can be disproven by any single example, which is a simple extension of the concept of something being categorical: If it doesn’t always apply, then it isn’t categorical, pack up your tent and go home now. We can wrap this in all kinds of jargon, but that is not really necessary (although it is somewhat fashionable: despite the facts remaining the same, the language changes from debate generation to debate generation). What I take issue with is not something as elemental as the single disproof of a categorical statement so much as the attempt to impose burdens that are not intrinsic to a resolution. Good debate, as a general rule, is the exchange of ideas in a meaningful way, which usually means fighting over the middle ground. It’s hard to believe that LD should not subscribe to that general rule of what good debate is, but often burdens are posited anywhere but the middle ground. More to the point, people sometimes write cases that clearly state “my opponent’s burden is” something that, simply put, is not intrinsic to the material at hand, and is not a real burden for the other side. Often, it is what a debater hopes the opponent will accept as a burden, because it is impossible to fulfill it, which would put the claimant in the catbird seat. Those are what I call “good luck” burdens, as in, good luck in getting this one to fly.

What seems to happen is that burdens, rather than being actual organic burdens, become straw man arguments that are anything but organic. At the point where you can distract your opponent from the resolution, you ought to be able to pick up, provided that you don’t distract yourself as well. But that, of course, is the natural result of straw men, that everybody goes out and chases them, including the judge. The resolution is left in the dust.

Maybe what we need are really bad topics. You see, the problem with felon voting rights or international courts is that they are interesting, important subjects with a lot of potential arguments on either side. People like me would like to hear debaters argue the merits of their position rather than the position of their position, which is where false burdens tend to lead. I guess it always comes back to this, one way or the other: Debate the resolution. Everything else is just a distraction.

Beans, brics and nets

Inclement weather (or at least the forecast of same) will postpone tonight’s end-of-year bean trivia extravaganza. I’ve asked my hardware engineer to find us a room for tomorrow night, which will make it an extra-extra vaganza. So it goes. If not tomorrow, next Monday? Time is running out for the Sailors to earn their beans in calendar ’08.

For those who follow such things, the new Pffft is out. It’s not exactly another bric [sic] in the wall, but has anybody looked at the financial pages recently? The state of the oil market for Russia and Brazil, the downswing of Chinese manufacturing vis-à-vis the world recession, India about to nuke its neighbor to the west… One can argue about something relevant, given the situation, I guess, but I wonder if the world is moving faster than Rippin’ happens to be aware of. As for me, I’d probably advise people to combine the Jan and Feb rezzes and run that the US ought to outsource jetpack manufacture to the BRIC by 2040. By the way, the exclusion of any language referring to economics in the resolution is, to say the least, rather baffling, considering that’s what BRIC is all about. They’ve got to get away from buzz phrases. On the bright side, at least the rez isn’t about the economies in France, Australia, Romania and Turkey. Maybe they’re saving that for NatNats.

Meanwhile, I’ve been meditating a bit on burdens recently, perhaps as a result of having a realllllllyyyyy long Grateful Dead jam on my MegaPod that’s been carrying me back and forth to the DJ lately. (Normally I listen to podcasts, but I’m winding down a bit in preparation for volume 2 of the Butcher S&S series and a general reevaluation of how I’m spending my listening time, all of which is beside the point, but when have I ever demurred from parenthetical comments?) Burdens in a round, it would seem, are often not inherently valid. It might be dodderingly old-fashioned of me to suggest that the aff only has a burden to affirm and the neg only has a burden to negate, not to mention that this, of course, begs the question of the meanings of affirming and negating (although those ideas used to be marvelously intuitive). But those aren’t really the burdens being thrown around in rounds, I think. What’s being contended is burdens that one side or another announces as essential, either proactively or reactively, either theoretically or practically, in-case or off-case or pre-standard or whatever, and then everyone in the round proceeds to concentrate entirely on the fulfilling of those burdens.

Hmmmm.

I bring to the round a net full of jello. I claim in the round that my opponent’s burden is to juggle a net full of jello. If my opponent proceeds to concentrate on juggling a net full of jello, I have managed to get the round neatly into my pocket. And my opponent is stuck juggling a net full of jello.

Question one: is the burden inherent in the resolution, or merely in the opponent’s case? If the former, fine, if the latter, Question two: can you fulfill the burden? If not, then doesn’t it make sense to demonstrate that, simply put, the opponent is proposing burdens that are not intrinsic to the resolution, and that a decision in winning the round should not revolve around extra-resolutional issues (unless both debaters agree otherwise)? If you can fulfill the burden, question three: can you demonstrate how the opponent is somehow also tied to either the burden or some quantifiable result of the burden, and how the opponent in fact does not fulfill the implied result of his or her own burden? If so, win. If not, maybe your fulfilling the burden regardless of your opponent is enough to win. Worst case is a mooted point.

What I’m saying here is that, just because your opponent claims such-and-such is required to win the round doesn’t make it true. Evaluate the claim. If you like the claim and feel you can win on it, go for it. There’s nothing wrong with ad hoc agreements that this is what the round is about. But if it’s some damned-fool thing that has nothing to do with the resolution, or there’s nothing in your opponent’s actual case that relates it to the resolution (as compared to all the pre-standard rigamarole that’s all the rage these days, i.e., LD’s latest hula hoop), then you’re in a situation where, in a word, your opponent is making it up. How does it not succeed to demonstrate that the imposed burdens are bogus? Does every debater feel in every round that he or she is obligated to juggle every net full of jello tossed over by the opponent?

If I talk nonsense, and you reply as if it isn’t nonsense, we are both talking nonsense. If I talk nonsense, and you can prove that I am talking nonsense and that you are not talking nonsense, all I have left is a net full of jello.

(And I apologize to the creators of the Muppet attraction in WDW, who I guess were the first to use that particular pun, which is a groaner only to people who watched “The Mickey Mouse Club” in the 50s.)

Rigid running; VCA statistics

I didn’t even look at my email yesterday. If that isn’t pure joy, I don’t know what is.

Ridge was absolutely cut and dry, as tabbing goes. The Rigids (is that what one calls Ridge students?) are among the most efficient ballot processors on the face of the planet; they really made the debate trains run on time for the whole weekend. We literally never sat around wondering where ballots were (although we did, occasionally, wonder where the Usual Suspects had disappeared to, but this being a family blog, I am not allowed to name them, but if you’ve ever run a tournament, you know who they are as well as I do). We also used dropbox to share files in advance, and Kaz arrived ready to go, and Kurt has already made the app the de facto storage facility for Jersey policy. According to CP, it was actually Scarola who came up with this and passed it around to the waiting world. I always knew I liked Matt for some reason or other; now I’ve actually got a reason I can point to. Hand that man a Coachean Mensch Award!

Speaking of people whom I can’t mention by name, and people whom I do mention by name, I have run some statistics and discovered that the VCA comprises the following:

1. People in the glossary over on the right who want to hear the latest about themselves
2. People I don’t even know who hate the very ground that I walk on and are looking for ammunition
3. People I don’t even know who hate the very ground that I walk on and think that every veiled reference is about them
4. Competing blogs wondering if I’ll ever mention them
5. Competing blogs wondering if I’ll ever read them
6. Matt Thomas
7. The executives of virtually every institution in America that ends in the initials F. L. (many of whom are also covered in #2 and #3 above) although not one of them would admit it
8. Former Sailors who accidentally type in the wrong URL
9. Christian singles
10. This guy who thinks he can tell by our outfits that we are both cowboys

The numbers on these people are still a little unclear (except #6, which is one, and #10, which is also one unless bipolarism counts as two), and there’s a lot of overlap among 2, 3 and 7, but when I look at the stats Google provides I’m usually pleasantly surprised at the actual vastness that does exist.

Who doesn’t read this blog?

1. The Sailors
2. My family
3. Sarah Palin

You now know everything I ever intend to share about my readership.

Beans updated

2 beans if you answer a question correctly
Lose 2 beans if you answer a question incorrectly
It costs you 1 bean to pass a question. If the passee gets it right, you give them two beans plus the pass bean. If the passee gets it wrong, they lose one bean.

I hadn't included the penalty for wrong answers or sufficiently punished passing. This looks right. All the Sailors who dropped out of Ridge can spend the weekend studying for Tuesday night. The topics are:

What exactly is Termite ever actually talking about
Portraits of Mario Cuomo
Obscure functions of former versions of TRPC
The lighter side of Karl Marx
Professional sports that Menick knows something about (tent.)
Popular music from the second week of March, 1965
Factual errors in From Frenchman to Caveman
Matt Thomas
That girl with the team where everyone looks just like her, which is really, really scary

Non-Sailors interested in participating should sign up now!

"When it came time to hit Enter, I was just too exhausted and felt as if it were time for that trip to the Bahamas..."

Your friendly neighborhood traveling tabroom has been getting rather excited lately about Dropbox.com, where we can share files, including TRPC data, before, during and after tournaments. CP was the first to get us onboard, and I’ve been using it for the last month or so for everything imaginable. O’C finally signed up (I’ve been bugging him for ages, but the VCA knows how hard it is for people to go to a website, put in their email address and click enter—life is a bear for debate coaches, people), and I’ve put out invites to Kurt and Kaz in preparation for Ridge. What we have in Dropbox is yet another thing I can’t imagine having living without all these years. We live in amazing times.

The Tiggers seem to have fallen off the map insofar as posting their results go. I think they’ve shut down all their emails and gone fishin’. Jeesh! The tournament wasn’t that all-fired wonderful. I did submit their TOC qual people to JWP and company. (Note to self: Find out what the Ridge team had for breakfast last weekend and serve it to the Sailors.) I’ll pdf my copy of the Tigger results tonight if I get a chance while I’m polishing the Ridge data. At least the VCA will know how they did last weekend.

I also posted the MHL data from Byram, now that O’C finally dropboxed up and passed it over to me. I am such the busy beaver.

For the meteorologists and historians in the group, this is the former Bump weekend, now the Ridge weekend, and the weather report is for some ice storms in the furthest reaches. With luck they won’t affect the tournament. Back in the day, by now I’d be pulling out what little hair I have left, consulting the weather forecast every two seconds and praying for those Santa Ana winds that Raymond Chandler liked to talk about. It is so nice to have moved on.

And yes, speaking of busy beavers, I have been furiously creating trivia questions for the annual December Bean Blast. We’ll also give out a few NFL certificates (don’t give me that look, you spalpeen!) and turn Robbie into Captain Emeritus (which is Captain America’s second cousin twice removed). I’m thinking, new rules:
2 beans if you answer a question correctly
It costs you 1 bean to pass a question. If the passee gets it right, you give them a bean plus the pass bean. If the passee gets it wrong, they lose one bean
That sounds like it will work.

See you in court, and/or, see you in Philadelphia

[Notes from the outside world: A sure sign that you’re in trouble is when PowerPoint is your management’s tech lingua franca.]

[More notes from the outside world: I guess my chances at buying the Illinois senate seat aren’t so good anymore. Damn. I would have been a hell of a solon.]

Last night the assembled Sailors and I brainstormed Jan-Feb. The topic easily withstood our initial scrutiny. One does need, of course, to step away from the actual ICC, but there is still plenty of specific ICC material that applies to international courts in general. You start to sense that, in some sense, the US participating in the mainstream of world affairs seems like a good idea, but then you start to realize that without an overarching analog to federalism in international affairs you’ve got all sorts of problems (down to the most basic, as in, the source of the legislative core of international judicial actions). The more you think about it, the more approaches you can see. A topic with this many entry points will be rather cacophonous early on, but should mellow out eventually. I gather there’s plenty of Christmas institute action in the offing, so that should help sort things out, or maybe make things so confusing that everyone will be totally lost. Once we venture into policy land, as this rez does, even though it is, obviously, not policy-based, one is forced to simply know so much stuff. You can’t just talk about some imaginary court in theory; you’ve got to envision how that theoretical court would work in a real world of Iraq and Iran and Abu Ghraib and Darfur and Kosovo and Henry Kissinger and Alberto Gonzalez and—well, the list goes on. I have one word for everyone: research trip. All right, make that two words: mandatory research trip. All right, three words: absolutely mandatory research trips, plural. You might recall from yesterday’s sermon that the number one of the dozen or so Top Ten tips for debate success among the Sailors is knowing what you’re talking about. That’s going to be a tall order for Jan-Feb. But without it, rounds are going to be extremely sketchy.

In other news: As anyone who has ever tried to get traction on a new debate tournament knows, weekends are hard to come by. The calendar is chockablock with one event after the other, and most weekends have multiple events. As a general rule, calendar conflicts are complementary: if tournaments are similar, they’re separated by geography, otherwise they’re separated by nature. For instance, last weekend there was Princeton and an MHL, with some Venn diagram overlap geographically, but little or no overlap spiritually. Glenbrooks, Villiger and Little Lex (and probably many others) are all on the same weekend before Thanksgiving, with very small and insignificant Venn overlaps. Harvard and Berkeley are the same weekend, and while spiritually they may be similar, as in big mutha college tournaments, their geography overlaps not at all. If one wishes to put an event on the calendar, or move an event around, the correct Venn intersection is required. If a high school in my area were to attempt an invitational on Bump weekend, for instance, they would be hard-pressed to get it off the ground because the similarities would be too great. There would be too much intersection (plus, I’d have to send the Sailors over in the night to break their kneecaps).

Anyhow, it appears as if there will be a Crimson/Quaker matchup come 2010. UPenn has been struggling for ages to find a weekend early in the season, inevitably coming up against Yale, Monticello and/or the Jewish holidays. UPenn’s tournament being what it is, its intersection with any of these is a kibosher. This season they went up against our newbies’ MHL, and even that was deal-breaker enough for many of us in the region. Old Johnny Venn was rolling in his grave.

In various discussions of CP with the Quakers, the possibility of going up Presidents’ Weekend was broached. What seems to have become clear early on was that Harvard is perceived not as any sort of regional tournament, so it wasn’t exactly serving the local area except insofar as, well, it is obviously in our region. But it’s big and expensive, and a local alternative would not be a bad idea. In Venn terms, the intersection of geography is pretty strong, but not murderous, and the intersection of spirit is actually quite small. UPenn, running pretty much as a fund-raiser for unfunded local lower-income high schools, with no TOC bids, will appeal to many on-face who already don’t attend Harvard due to the expense and general overwhelmingness of the thing. Big schools with large teams could split them. NJ and Penn schools would have someplace welcoming, a la Princeton. Granted, there is some risk, but I have to say that I personally was not happy being unable to send kids to UPenn this year because of my inexcusable inability to be two places at once. Next year I would only have to be one place. It may take a year or two to catch on, but my money is on the Quakers making a go of it at this new location. As for the Crimson, I don’t think it will have much affect on them at all. I mean, they already get infinity + 11 entrants at their tournament. If they get infinity -11 they’ll still be ahead.

Let the games begin.

And so to bed. In New Jersey. With Tiggers.

[Bracketly speaking, I love when debaters complain about the judges. A good debater adjusts to any judge. The idea that the judge is “illegitimate,” if one is willing to subscribe to such an idea, applies to both sides of the round. Both debaters have that same judge. You’re both in the same situation. And your opponent managed to pick up that illegitimate judge! Instead of whining that the judge didn’t understand you, make yourself understandable to the judge. One of the most basic rules of public speaking is to adjust to your audience. The arrogance of speakers who refuse to adjust is, as a rule, suitably rewarded. Amongst the Sailors, judge adaptation was, for the longest time, the number one of our twelve or so Top Ten for winning rounds. Lately it has been supplanted by knowing what you’re talking about. Which isn’t bad either.

The more studious members of the VCA might find this somehow contradictory to our stand lately that the relativism of LD judging is a bad thing, vis-à-vis paradigms and the like. But that’s not what I’m saying. Even if there were only one platonic judging paradigm, some people would achieve more of it than others, the way some things partake of more of the platonic form of beauty than others, and are therefore perceived as more beautiful. To know how much of the paradigmatic perfect judge your actual judge matches is your guide to picking up the ballot at hand. It is more profitable to play a better game than to blame the ref for bad calls. And if the ref always calls balls hit to the left a foul, try hitting the ball to the right.]

Meanwhile, back at the ranch…

Tabbing at Whig Hall in Princeton is like fighting the line for whitefish at a popular deli with your averagely vicious Sunday morning brunch crowd: People are often knocked down in the stampede and come out with nothing but a crust of bagel and a half-chewed scallion. LD, PF, IEs and Congress are all fighting it out, reading results, diving for the pizza, telling ribald tales of the great debate coaches of long ago, begging for some judge to cover a Declamation round over at Peter Singer’s euthanasia lab, etc., etc., etc. JV and I trying to do our thing and occasionally listen to a Sondheim album or two just wasn’t happening. Under the best of circumstances tabbing in a crowd is hard; tabbing with the Tigger crowd was somehow even harder. Plus the traffic jam of judges upstairs in the vomitorium wasn’t exactly pretty, and students are banned from the building, and I gather the ceiling fell on a few heads in the judges’ lounge (although, with any luck, they were the illegitimate judges' heads). Next year we’ll hold out for private quarters in a central location. The success of the texted results makes that a real possibility. And not having the ceiling fall on our heads, among other enticements, makes it sound like a really good idea.

There was, apparently, quite a computer crash on the speech side of things, making the award ceremony a wonder to behold. The Tigs kept trying to stretch it out, while everyone in the cheap seats was itching to get home. I’m a strong advocate of all people suffering through the entire award ceremony as a point of respect (with demurrals at the usually national ceremonies where the first hour or two is a self-thankathon). I felt sorry for the Tigs trying to vamp while the tab staff shuffled whatever it was they had to shuffle. I finally gave up and slipped the Head Tig a hot tip that he could email the rest of the results later, which he accepted, thus putting everyone out of their misery. But all of this was a minor blemish on the weekend. We did, still, get out earlier than any other Tig Tournament in history.

The Sailors did fine, by the way, thanks for asking. The Panivore ate her way through to finals, while the varsity performed with good levels of success, especially considering the sophomoric shade of a couple of them. Our Hardware Engineer engineered familial housing with one of his parents’ old kindergarten buddies, which saved a few bucks but did add a few minutes of driving-around-and-getting-lost time to the proceedings. I never did get my own shot at Halo’s Pub, but given the freezing weather, it wasn’t that much of a loss. I did manage to input about 50 shots of expresso over the three-day spread, so that was something. And I figured the Saturday puzzle (the two letters OR, so Panama = Panorama) at some point. And I did text O’C every now and then to remind him that we were talking about him behind his back.

And this week, we’re back in Jersey again at Ridge. We’re practically becoming New Jerseyites. Which cannot at all be a good thing.

Which raises the question, What dance, exactly? The hula? The fox trot? The hootchie-kootchie?

So, says you, how were the Tiggers?

Fine, says I. Although, as with any tournament, there were amusements and there were bemusements and there were befuddlements.

The Sailors and I arrived around noon (incidentally passing through more auto accident debris and generally horrific driving than one normally encounters on a debate excursion; the whole legendary New Jersey bad-driver thing could account for that). After the tars schlepped my stuff into the registration building I sent them off to entertain themselves, to do things like finding Halo’s Pub for ice cream and finding a plain bagel for the Panivore. Registration was just opening up, and we established a process for getting changes (which seemed to work perfectly) and getting judge info (a little less successful but still pretty good). Unfortunately the registration area smelled like a vomitorium, so getting out of there posthaste was mission number one, and before long we settled downstairs in the tabroom and got down to business. The smell, fortunately, was limited to that one area upstairs. We (literally) breathed sighs of relief.

There are a few things that seem to be prime issues at college tournaments, the first of these being rooms. My memory of Tiggerlands past was rooms all over creation, all of them locked, but this year the Tigs had things under control, and when a locked room popped up, someone quickly popped up with a key, and that was that. Still, people were scattered all over creation. To ameliorate the situation, we gave judges a number to text in their results. As far as we could tell, we generated no particular mistakes as a result of this, and it kept us zipping along in tab at top pace. It also meant that we seldom had a minute to breathe, but that’s why they pay us the big albeit virtual bucks.

A second college problem is control of judges, but once again, things were seriously under control. The Tigs had purchased a boatload of good judges, and those were the ones we hired out. Then we kept another serious boatload of Tig judges for the sake of the tournament. The Tigs who were experienced LDers went into varsity, the less experienced or newbies went into noviceland. We never wanted for judges. JV, who can push a ballot faster than Bill Clinton can chase a skirt, managed to get every ballot off the table before the scheduled starts of the rounds; I sat there with the computer inputting the changes (and occasionally barring one that couldn’t or shouldn’t happen), and everything worked. Of course, although tabbing a big tournament is easy enough on TRPC, tabbing it so that the good judges are where they should be, and conversely, that the bad judges aren’t where they shouldn’t be (including bothering the tab staff), takes a modicum of work. We had the ratings that Zayn and I had done initially, plus I’ve been collating my Big Book of Judge Rankings from all the tournaments I do, which helps enormously. (If you want to know what we think of you, btw, send me $20 and I’ll tell you what your rank is. If you want to know what we really think of you, send me $40 and a liability release form.)

One thing I had worried about early on was the division switch from JV to nov, but that worked out fine, with about 130 or so of the chilluns signed up. We had 161 varsity. These are impressive numbers. My goal was to transform Princeton from a service tournament for the locals to an Ivy-level tournament. This means nothing in terms of, say, TOC bids. That is, this sort of transformation doesn’t mean you will, or should, get a change in qual status. But it does mean that you can set a standard of competition that makes your tournament worthy of attendance on its own merits, rather than opening the doors to first-come, first-served, and three big willy-nilly entries make up half your field. We did that. I remember distinctly Soddie once announcing that he ran Big Bronx for its own rewards, and not as merely a qualifier for some other tournament. Of course, he was still getting octos bids at the time, but still, most people at a tournament are probably not there for bids except, perhaps, at Glenbrooks or Emory, which means that most people at most tournaments want to do well at that tournament, end of story. For the Tigs, we managed to get full entries in from about 10 schools that otherwise would have been shut out by big school entries. In my eyes, that is a good thing, even if a few people who considered attendance an entitlement were forced to see their entitlement disappear for the sake of a better tournament (one school, I heard, dropped their entire registration in a huff, an absolutely perfect example of, A) cutting your nose to spite your face, and B) good riddance). This is not to tar all the big-entry schools from the past with that same brush; I worked with some directly on making sure they got the most that they could out of the tournament, and there are plenty of professionals out there who understand that the world doesn’t end at the end of their own noses. Going forward, Princeton can serve the high school community quite well by providing a balanced, fun, well-run tournament for a lot of schools, provided they stick to the principles set forth this time out. Given how well things went this year, I can’t imagine that they wouldn’t do that.

And yeah, JV and I succeeded unbelievably well on our end. The original schedule had 5 rounds for novices, 6 for Varsity, with breaks beginning with double-flighted double-octos on Sunday morning. The Menick/Vaughan schedule did 6 rounds for everyone and single-flighted doubles on Saturday evening, meaning that we ran the tournament in the fastest time ever. But then again, that’s sort of what we do.

Biggest screw-up? Somehow the pairings for the octos round got posted online Saturday night. This is a mistake of unbelievable proportions, so unbelievable that it never occurred to me that it could happen. It is like hearing that they’re dancing naked in the middle of the judges’ lounge; no one would normally ever even think of it (primarily because no one ever wants to see any of the judges naked, and no one ever wants to see any of the judges dance, much less both at the same time). If someone said that they were going to get the judges to dance naked in the judges’ lounge, you would just look at them as if they were speaking Swahili. As for overnight postings, online pairings for the following day means that judges not scheduled won’t show up, and therefore there’s no fillers for the judges who are scheduled who don’t show up. Worst, debaters get even less sleep than normal as they gather their teams and coaches together to prep out against their announced opponent, a seriously unfair advantage against schools with no team or coach nearby, or teams that didn’t see the unexpected online pairings. To say that Vaughan and I were spitting blood over this understates our reaction. We now know that it is something that can happen, and will act to prevent it from recurring in the future. Meanwhile, our ban against naked judge dancing remains merely implicit until such time as the event transpires and further action is warranted to prevent its recurrence.

(To be continued…)

The week from heck

Some weeks it pays to stay in bed.

This week, in addition to the Pffft brouhaha, I have read a former Sailor’s blog listing the best 25 songs of the year, and the name of only one of the performers was even remotely familiar to me. I mean, it’s not as if I follow the latest music—far from it—but I usually have heard of stuff if I haven’t actually heard the stuff itself. Even if I don’t necessarily go to see the latest movies, I’ve heard of them. Ditto the latest books, or the latest TV shows. Or so I thought. Somehow I’ve fallen through the cracks, at least musically. Unless this former Sailor is a total crackpot whose tastes are so obscure even I haven’t heard of any of his picks. That has to be it. A former Sailor as a crackpot? Obviously.

Also this week, I was told by a Swede that I have a really bad Spanish accent. This is akin to being told by your yoga instructor that you’re not very good at chess. It’s Henny Youngman: The doctor tells a guy he has two weeks to live. The guy says he’d like a second opinion. So the doctor tells him that his suit doesn’t fit very well. [Supply your own rim shot.]

You can’t win.

At some point today I need to sort out getting to Princeton and tucking the Sailors into their family-provided housing. I’ve got to sort out the room data when I upload tonight to TRPC and get the data cleaned up (a lot easier these days with CP putting things into one TRPC-welcoming file). I’ve got pack up the traveling tab room for the trip tomorrow and break out the woollies for the cold snap that’s been predicted for the weekend while hoping that CP in Florida gets sunburned to the proverbial crisp. He is, after all, exceptionally white. And I’ve got to download the new Netflix Mac Play-Now software (not that I’ll ever actually watch anything, but one needs to be prepared). And, oh yeah, think about Jan-Feb somewhere in there.

Somehow staying home and running the MHL that’ll start at noon on Saturday seems to be sooooo much easier.

Coming up next, 101 recipes for goobagoobas!

Jeez, Louise. Next time I’ll mind my own business.

First of all, I do understand the concept of alternative fuels. Give me a break, sports fans. I also, I would add, understand the concept of ketchup as a vegetable, and the fact that the government designating a noun or phrase as denoting something contrary to the noun’s or phrase’s accepted meaning doesn’t exactly change the accepted meaning of the words. But I am well aware that alternative fuels are quite clearly those things you pour into your engine without first drilling for them offshore. Words are only just so objective, however, and if we started calling meatballs goobagoobas, and everyone accepted this new coinage, then eventually every old-fashioned Italian restaurant in the country (and maybe even in some other countries) would start serving spaghetti with goobagoobas, which, not surprisingly, would taste exactly like spaghetti and meatballs.

We live in a strange world.

Secondly, I stand by the Mr. Fusion case. I happen to have a flux capacitor in the box with all the spare district tournament awards that I’ll be passing along to JV any day now (he needs it more than I do), and I do not accept some hastily tossed-off explanation in part 3 of the trilogy for something that is obvious in part 1 of the trilogy. This approach to trilogies has, of course, not put me in good stead when I watch episodes 1 through 6 of Star Wars in sequence, but as O’C reminded me yesterday, in the immortal words of Admiral Ackbar, it’s a trap, and that’s all that needs to be said about it.

Thirdly, apparently while I was simply having some fun with the concept of debating laws that should be passed when everyone reading this blog is a grandparent, others were taking it quite seriously. I gather the PF blogosphere has been quite up in arms. I didn’t even know there was a PF blogosphere. To be honest, I tend to believe that one can debate anything, at least to some extent (and without having to resort to dreaded “theory” arguments, which mostly claim that an argument can’t be argued and that everyone should leave home and move into a condo), including the future of private transportation. For instance, I’d be much happier if the manufacturers of the Tesla were funded for dynamic future research by the feds rather than the manufacturers of the Corvair and the Pinto (to name but two of the most infamous). Battery research, and battery development, are woefully behind the times. I haven’t been hugging trees all these years yet at the same time refusing to imagine alternate scenarios to Bush-like approaches to the environment (i.e., drill it, burn it, dig it or raze it, otherwise sell it to the highest bidder). But still, if a debating activity is, to some extent, supposedly based on research, it is a bit off the deep end to expect meaningful research on the state of the world thirty years hence. For instance, thirty years ago today, there were no personal computers for sale online. There was no online. There were no personal computers. The 1939 World’s Fair in New York promised us superhighways in our (their) lifetime, and by the 1964 World’s Fair in New York, they were a reality. On the other hand, 1964’s General Motors exhibit (and every prognosticator since) has promised us cars that are not directly controlled by the driver, and they are no closer to a reality than they were at the ’64 Fair. (In other news, where’s my jetpack?) In the ‘80s, General Electric, at EPCOT (now Epcot) promised us a machine that would turn useless old rainforests into spanking new highways in one fell swoop! The point being, debating prognostication, while fun as dinner conversation, may fall a little flat in an actual academic debating environment.

But, lo and behold, the stink on this topic in that alleged PF blogosphere has been so strong that the Rippers have officially responded, in effect sticking by their guns. They explain in detail how they came up with the topic, and why it’s peachy, and suck it up, there you are. This surprises me, both that there was a big public stink and that they felt compelled to respond. I think that they’re responding to the wrong thing, though. It’s not this topic so much, although quite honestly my team doesn’t want to debate it, as the somewhat regular flow of topics that are, well, problematic. I get the impression that Rippin’s response is that if you don’t like them, submit better ones. Okay, fine, except, it’s not my job. I’ve already got a job. Two, in fact. Even when I do think of good topics, I never think to submit them by going to their home page and clicking on the “submit topic” button. (Oh, wait. That button doesn’t exist.) Setting up a good committee, as I’m sure the one that exists already is, is mostly what’s needed. I’m sure they are all fine, intelligent, dedicated forensicians. But is submitting the PF topics to review or vote not a reasonable idea? There’s certainly voting on Policy and LD topics (although, as the VCA knows, I’d also like to see more content/wording refinement). They can’t come up with a process for the same thing in PF?

I don’t believe it. And I’ll bet you don’t either.

88 MPH

You’ve got to love Pfffft. For December, Rippin’ changed the topic wording from websites to Web sites, thus proving that their recruitment goal of filling the position of copy editor remains unachieved. Although Pfffters across the country were forced, when the revised wording was released, to toss their old cases into the bonfire, creating a brilliance of a thousand suns from sea to shining sea, a handful of us who happen to be in the publishing business and understand the concept of accidentals* simply shook our heads.

It turns out that the January Pffft topic was also changed from the original wording. Now it’s Resolved: That, by 2040, the federal government should mandate that all new passenger vehicles and light trucks sold in the United States be powered by alternative fuels. But we here at Coachean HQ have learned that originally it was Resolved: That, by 2040, the federal government should mandate that everyone travel by jet pack.

In a word, the Sailors, disappointed that they would not be arguing personal airborne transportation, are refusing to even consider doing Pffft in January. I understand completely.

There are some serious flaws with the rez as it stands now. 2040? I mean, really. All the extant research points to March 11, 2037, as the actual date. Why wouldn’t Rippin’ follow this approach? And then there’s the vagueness of the term alternative fuels. Does this count coasting from the top of a hill? I mean, if Detroit just builds a lot of hills and puts all their passenger vehicles and light trucks on top of them, they’ll make it to the bottom of the hill with no fuel whatsoever. Just release the brake! Does no fuel count as an alternative fuel? Of course, the copy editor in me wants to ask, alternative to what? Petroleum is an alternative to running on steam, for instance. But of course, alternative fuels is a buzz term and should be treated as such. Thank God Pfffters aren’t LDers, because the theory arguments on the abusive burdens of alternative consequentiality are simply mind-boggling. Idiotic, yes, but nonetheless mind-boggling.

Anyhow, here’s my advice if you’re going to Pfffft in January. Rent the “Back to the Future” trilogy, and then run a Mr. Fusion case. That’s what I’d do, Marty. That, or a hoverboards disad. I’d love a hoverboard, and it’s worth ignoring the no-disads rule to get to ride one. Hoverboards aren’t jet packs, but they’re close. Just don’t get hung up on episode 3 of the trilogy. Mule wagons probably aren’t an alternative to much of anything these days.

Jeesh.

And, okay, here’s my other advice. HAVE PEOPLE VOTE ON THESE TOPICS!!! Give schools some value for their hundred bucks’ worth of registration every year, for pete’s sake. Hell, we all know that about 20 people ever vote for topics in the first place, so it’s not exactly that much of a bureaucratic nightmare (although Rippin’ has tried to nightmare up the LD rezzes, with all that periodic table stuff). Float, say, three topics a month prior to release. Have coaches vote by the 15th. Publish it the first of the next month. If this is too open to abuse, cut the time down. Of course, I’d also like to add a short opportunity to fix wordings, but that’s probably too much to ask. I mean, someday they will fill that open copy editor position, and the poor schmuck will want something to fill the empty hours.

Well, I’ve got to go now. My jet pack is all warmed up, and I’m outta here! Up, up and away!!!!!!


* Non-essential properties, which in typesetting refers to punctuation and capitalization and things like that, and which explains why, for instance, sometimes an editor will without hesitation repunctuate a book written centuries ago, and change spellings, so that modern audiences can understand it clearly. The clearest example of this is English v. American, where not only are colors full of colour, but in England, the quotations close before the period at the end of a sentence as compared to Americans finishing things up with the quotes, differences we routinely change in the publishing of transatlantic texts, making absolutely no difference in the meaning of the material.

"Let's go surfin' now, everybody's learnin' how, come on on Safari Firefox with me."

I may be the last person on the face of the earth to have been burned by Apple, but burned I finally was. Safari 3.2.1 is, in a word, unusable. Or at least it doesn’t agree with Little Elvis, who has been known to eat fluffernutters with no ill effects. The version came through over the weekend, and I downloaded it without a thought, as is my wont. Click on a link? Crash. Open a new tab? Crash. Send in a crash report? Crash again (that one was my favorite). I had hitherto been agnostic about Firefox v. Safari. Not anymore. And just try to find a version of 3.2 without the point one that is the kiss o’ death. I like having multiple browsers open for a variety of reasons, but so much for that, at least at home.

Sigh.

On the other hand, the new Touch/iPhone software allows you to eliminate the crappy guess-the-word feature when you type. That’s a serious improvement, as I never once got a correct guess. The upgrade also claims to do better getting onto firewalled systems; at some point I’ll try it again at the day job, previously a futile albeit unnecessary effort, as I do have internet access already, and having more of it does little or nothing to change my ubiquitous connectivity. And, I ordered a new Airport at Black Friday prices to hook to speakers so that I can use the Touch as a remote on my sun porch. Ah… Life can be good. Even without Safari on Little Elvis. Apple: you are such a puzzlement…

I registered this morning for Bigle X, always a favorite tournament of mine, and a lot of other people, for that matter. Hit a minor bump and notified CP, who’s been complaining in his blog that all work and then more work is not at all like play, but I say: Suck it up, bub! Seriously, he does make a good point in his latest post about his importance in the activity. As in, he’s pretty much an outsider, and he’s running everything he touches. I can appreciate that, except I’ve been in it for so long myself that I can hardly claim outsider status anymore, even if I do have a D.J. I think it may boil down to the fact that some people are good at organizing stuff and some people aren’t, and the people that are good at it keep acquiring more of it, until they don’t have any time for anything else anymore. People in debate, especially the really busy ones, need to take a weekend off once in a while. At the very least, limit things to a local one-dayer every few weeks to minimize wear and tear on the psyche. My psyche’s so shot it doesn’t matter, but CP is still young. He’s got weeks, nay, months of productive life ahead of him. Same with some other people I won’t bother to name. Keep up with life outside of this activity. Life in it is worthwhile, but life out of it keeps it in perspective. Seriously. (Same applies to students too, come to think of it.)

This upcoming weekend, meanwhile, is a visit to the land of the Tiggers for the first time in years. Things look under control, mostly. The biggest remaining deal will be sorting out and entering room names Thursday night, which is complicated because each day we’re in a different place, with different conflicts from the other divisions. I’m taking names off the waitlist, as we are in the final stretch, trying to keep things even. As originally registered, about 4 schools would have represented about a third of the tournament. Not good. Now, a few folks will have 8 entries, if they can cover the judging. Much more sane. Plus there’s a pool of solid A judges, which was one of my demands originally from the Tigs, some of which we have not sold as hireds but held as reserves. This, as I’ve said, simply makes a better tournament. Force registrants to find their own judges, and they will. Big programs need to draw on their alums; that’s the only way you get a broad base of decent judging. Programs that buy judging at every tournament, in my eyes often unnecessarily, are not as good citizens of the activity as they should be. Simple as that.