Schedule: 1. Clearly outlined times for all rounds, meals, housing, awards, etc., at a tournament. Usually fictional.
Novice debater: 1. Student in first year of debate. 2. Student in second, third or fourth year of debate, whose coach doesn't understand the meaning of "first year of debate."
Junior varsity debater: 1. Student in second year of debate. 2. Student in third year of debate that should have joined the chess club.
Varsity debater: 1. Disreputable gangsta with research (policy). 2. Junior varsity policy debater (LD). 3. Mean-spirited high school senior with exceptionally poisonous sneer (PF).
Flow: 1. Notes taken during a round, often but not always reflecting what was said by one or the other of the teams debating.
Disclosure: 1. Learning the decision after the round directly from the judge. (NOTE: Judges who disclose before the round has ended, while being honest, are not necessarily being tactful, and should be warned to wait until a more suitable moment.)
Pre-registration: 1. Entry of names, usually fictitious, at the first possible moment, to insure more slots at a tournament than a school needs. Usually performed online, often by students masquerading as coaches, and occasionally by coaches masquerading as coaches.
Hired judge: 1. Hungover college student, at either graduate or undergraduate level.
School lavatory: 1. Mildly noxious bathroom facilities located throughout the building (day one of tournament). 2. Seriously noxious bathroom facilities located throughout the building (day two of tournament). 3. If there's a day three of tournament, hold it till you get home.
Regional debate: 1. Second rate debate, when referring to regions other than one's own. 2. Top-rate debate being consistently ignored by the TOC committee, when referring to one's own region.
TOC committee: 1. Satanic cabal, possibly non-human, working out of an undisclosed location somewhere in the state of Kentucky.
NFL points: 1. Measurement of how often a debate coach goes online to register that the members of his or her team actually showed up somewhere in a forensic capacity. 2. Mathematical paradox where debaters who lose get more points than IEers who win. 3. What you get for your hundred bucks a year.
Schematic: 1. List of who's debating whom, where, and with which judge. Usually posted online or distributed throughout a tournament hot off the printer. (NOTE: It is generally believed by debate judges that reading a schematic will cause scabies, dengue fever or the yaws, and therefore it is preferable to stand in front of the ballot table trying to find your name in the pile of ballots. Since the number of debate judges who can find their names in a pile of ballots, even when that pile is sorted alphabetically, is woefully small, this usually slows down a tournament by about half an hour per round.)
Monday, February 13, 2012
Sunday, February 12, 2012
Coachean Debate Dictionary, Installment 3
Judge obligation: 1. The requirement to judge a certain number of rounds as a contingency to your registration. AKA, “Since I’m such a bad judge, you won’t really want me in out rounds,” AKA, “We have to drive a long way to get home, so can we pick up our ballots now,” AKA, “When I didn’t read the registration, I didn’t read that,” AKA, “I’ve never heard of such a thing, but then again, I’ve never been to a debate tournament before and/or I’m a total idiot.”
Mutual Judge Preferences: 1. Both teams rank the judges, and tab finds them their most preferred judge for a round, thus guaranteeing the tragic death of debate as we know it in the US, Canada, the Philippines and the open market.
Community rankings: 1. Everyone attending a debate tournament ranks the judges, and tab places the judges in brackets according to majority rankings, thus guaranteeing the tragic death of debate as we know it in the US, Canada, the Philippines and the open market, albeit at a slower rate than with MJP.
Coin flip: 1. How all sides are determined in break rounds; in LD, if one wins the flip, one can choose to debate either negative or on the losing side. 2. How all sides and precedence in all rounds of PF are determined, except under the purview of the Pope, where sides and precedence are strictly prescribed. (NOTE: In some CFL tournaments other than Nationals, bingo can be substituted for the coin flip.)
Presumption: 1. In Policy debate, the burden of proof that the system must be changed falls on the affirmative, hence the status quo is presumed to be okay as is until determined otherwise in the round, hence there is a “presumption” for the negative. 2. In LD debate, the mistaken idea that LD is policy.
One-clap rule: 1. Instead of people hemorrhaging and participating in virtual orgasms after the announcement of each of their teammates in an award ceremony, the assembled multitudes are limited to one clap per name, except in response to the naming of the winners of an event, in which case hemorrhaging and virtual orgasms will be allowed for up to thirty seconds.
Trophy strut: 1. Ability to walk from one’s seat in the auditorium to the podium in no less than five minutes, moving every part of one’s body except one’s feet, in order to savor the moment, or more to the point, moments.
Bracket: 1. Breakout of who is scheduled to meet whom in which round, so that teams that are larger than the population of North Korea can send troops in to scout the upcoming competition.
Coach-over: 1. When two teams from the same school are scheduled to meet in an elimination round, the coach can choose which team advances. This is usually the team with the better speaker points, unless there is a seniority rule in effect, or some team that is larger than the population of North Korea is trying to break this one and not that one into TOC.
Speaker points: 1. In rounds where the speed is so pervasive that no one understands a word anyone is saying at the time, the random assignment of numbers rating the oratorical ability of each speaker. 2. In rounds where the speed is not so pervasive that no one understands a word anyone is saying at the time, a numbering system from 0 to 30 without any objective criteria, where only some of the numbers are used, often including half points and even tenths of a point, in order to rate the oratorical ability of each speaker. Really. I'm not making this up.
Speaker awards: 1. Recognition of oratorical prowess in activities mostly devoid of oratory.
Bagels: 1. Doughy bread products available only in New York; if a tournament isn’t in New York, whatever that thing is that looks like a bagel, isn’t.
Caffeine: 1. Primary fuel driving the judge pool, available in coffee, tea, carbonated beverages and that stuff like Red Bull that tastes like human waste that costs twice as much (as soda, not twice as much as human waste, which most people can’t even give away). 2. Secondary fuel driving the competitor field, as above. (NOTE: Primary fuel = adrenaline.)
Sleep: 1. What judges do whenever they can, including during rounds. See also texting.
Arrogance: 1. Air breathed by pretty much everyone in the activity.
Individual events: AKA speech. 1. The other stuff people in forensics do, none of which has any value except extemp.
Speech: See Individual events, if you really don’t know what speech is, but why do you care anyhow?
Speechies: 1. Vulgar nickname for participants in speech events.
Speecho-Americans: 1. Correct nickname for participants in speech events, except in other countries, where they would be Speecho-Italians or Speecho-Frenchies or whatever.
Bye: 1. Free win. The later in the tournament you are given one, the more you suck.
Forfeit: 1. Automatic loss, usually given for showing up half an hour late (and blaming everyone but yourself), breaking down in tears halfway through cross-examination, throwing a chair at the judge, throwing a chair at your opponent, throwing a judge at your opponent, texting your coach during prep time and asking for an answer to util, etc.
Util: 1. Water works or electric company.
Rand, Ayn: 1. A name you don’t hear much in debate anymore, so there’s at least one positive result of so-called progressive debate.
Progressive debate: 1. The way I debate, which is the latest thing and way smart and clever, as compared to the way you debate, which isn’t.
TOC: 1. Tournament where you have to pay even if you don’t get in, an idea that you’d think would catch on among cash-strapped schools. 2. Only competitive event held in Kentucky that doesn’t feed its participants bags of oats. In fact, it doesn’t feed its participants anything, another idea that you’d think would catch on among cash-strapped schools.
CFL Nationals: AKA CatNats. 1. Annual speech tournament with marginally different rules from NFL Nationals. (Debate events are also rumored to be offered at CatNats, but so far no objective data has been submitted to support this claim.)
NFL Nationals: AKA NatNats. 1. Don’t know: never been, never gonna go. Don’t ask.
Catholic Forensic League: 1. League for forensics students of all religions to participate in competitions that open with a prayer, to which the correct response, people, is “Amen,” not a round of applause.
National Forensic League: 1. League for forensics students throughout the country, except the northeast.
Mutual Judge Preferences: 1. Both teams rank the judges, and tab finds them their most preferred judge for a round, thus guaranteeing the tragic death of debate as we know it in the US, Canada, the Philippines and the open market.
Community rankings: 1. Everyone attending a debate tournament ranks the judges, and tab places the judges in brackets according to majority rankings, thus guaranteeing the tragic death of debate as we know it in the US, Canada, the Philippines and the open market, albeit at a slower rate than with MJP.
Coin flip: 1. How all sides are determined in break rounds; in LD, if one wins the flip, one can choose to debate either negative or on the losing side. 2. How all sides and precedence in all rounds of PF are determined, except under the purview of the Pope, where sides and precedence are strictly prescribed. (NOTE: In some CFL tournaments other than Nationals, bingo can be substituted for the coin flip.)
Presumption: 1. In Policy debate, the burden of proof that the system must be changed falls on the affirmative, hence the status quo is presumed to be okay as is until determined otherwise in the round, hence there is a “presumption” for the negative. 2. In LD debate, the mistaken idea that LD is policy.
One-clap rule: 1. Instead of people hemorrhaging and participating in virtual orgasms after the announcement of each of their teammates in an award ceremony, the assembled multitudes are limited to one clap per name, except in response to the naming of the winners of an event, in which case hemorrhaging and virtual orgasms will be allowed for up to thirty seconds.
Trophy strut: 1. Ability to walk from one’s seat in the auditorium to the podium in no less than five minutes, moving every part of one’s body except one’s feet, in order to savor the moment, or more to the point, moments.
Bracket: 1. Breakout of who is scheduled to meet whom in which round, so that teams that are larger than the population of North Korea can send troops in to scout the upcoming competition.
Coach-over: 1. When two teams from the same school are scheduled to meet in an elimination round, the coach can choose which team advances. This is usually the team with the better speaker points, unless there is a seniority rule in effect, or some team that is larger than the population of North Korea is trying to break this one and not that one into TOC.
Speaker points: 1. In rounds where the speed is so pervasive that no one understands a word anyone is saying at the time, the random assignment of numbers rating the oratorical ability of each speaker. 2. In rounds where the speed is not so pervasive that no one understands a word anyone is saying at the time, a numbering system from 0 to 30 without any objective criteria, where only some of the numbers are used, often including half points and even tenths of a point, in order to rate the oratorical ability of each speaker. Really. I'm not making this up.
Speaker awards: 1. Recognition of oratorical prowess in activities mostly devoid of oratory.
Bagels: 1. Doughy bread products available only in New York; if a tournament isn’t in New York, whatever that thing is that looks like a bagel, isn’t.
Caffeine: 1. Primary fuel driving the judge pool, available in coffee, tea, carbonated beverages and that stuff like Red Bull that tastes like human waste that costs twice as much (as soda, not twice as much as human waste, which most people can’t even give away). 2. Secondary fuel driving the competitor field, as above. (NOTE: Primary fuel = adrenaline.)
Sleep: 1. What judges do whenever they can, including during rounds. See also texting.
Arrogance: 1. Air breathed by pretty much everyone in the activity.
Individual events: AKA speech. 1. The other stuff people in forensics do, none of which has any value except extemp.
Speech: See Individual events, if you really don’t know what speech is, but why do you care anyhow?
Speechies: 1. Vulgar nickname for participants in speech events.
Speecho-Americans: 1. Correct nickname for participants in speech events, except in other countries, where they would be Speecho-Italians or Speecho-Frenchies or whatever.
Bye: 1. Free win. The later in the tournament you are given one, the more you suck.
Forfeit: 1. Automatic loss, usually given for showing up half an hour late (and blaming everyone but yourself), breaking down in tears halfway through cross-examination, throwing a chair at the judge, throwing a chair at your opponent, throwing a judge at your opponent, texting your coach during prep time and asking for an answer to util, etc.
Util: 1. Water works or electric company.
Rand, Ayn: 1. A name you don’t hear much in debate anymore, so there’s at least one positive result of so-called progressive debate.
Progressive debate: 1. The way I debate, which is the latest thing and way smart and clever, as compared to the way you debate, which isn’t.
TOC: 1. Tournament where you have to pay even if you don’t get in, an idea that you’d think would catch on among cash-strapped schools. 2. Only competitive event held in Kentucky that doesn’t feed its participants bags of oats. In fact, it doesn’t feed its participants anything, another idea that you’d think would catch on among cash-strapped schools.
CFL Nationals: AKA CatNats. 1. Annual speech tournament with marginally different rules from NFL Nationals. (Debate events are also rumored to be offered at CatNats, but so far no objective data has been submitted to support this claim.)
NFL Nationals: AKA NatNats. 1. Don’t know: never been, never gonna go. Don’t ask.
Catholic Forensic League: 1. League for forensics students of all religions to participate in competitions that open with a prayer, to which the correct response, people, is “Amen,” not a round of applause.
National Forensic League: 1. League for forensics students throughout the country, except the northeast.
Coachean Debate Dictionary, Installment 2
Kritik: 1. Case you only have to write once in your entire debate career that demonstrates that every possible affirmative on any conceivable resolution is utterly laughable.
Flex prep: 1. Only opportunity you’ll get during the round to literally read your opponent’s case and try to make sense of it, since it was read aloud so fast in between multiple gaspings for breath that no one in the room, including your opponent, has the least idea what it’s all about. 2. At circuit tournaments, opportunity to sit down and take a load off your feet.
Cross Examination: 1. Alternative to flex prep, preferred by novices, lay judges, and coaches born during the Polk administration, where you have to ask your opponents to answer questions. 2. Alternative to flex prep, preferred by novices, lay judges, and coaches born during the Polk administration, where you have to avoid answering your opponent’s questions.
30: 1. The number of speaker points you thought you should get. 2. The number of speaker points you didn’t get. 3. The number of speaker points given to both teams in the down-four round by judges who, in their own debating careers, spent a lot of time in the down-four rounds.
Judge training: 1. A bad sign, if you’re waiting for your judge to arrive from it.
Judges lounge.: 1. Declarative sentence explaining what judges do during most of a tournament. 2. Imperative sentence telling the judges to cool their heels for a few minutes.
Judge’s lounge: 1. Sad attempt by novice debater to label the room where judges should go for cold coffee and whining about tab/debates/education-in-general. Misuse of punctuation assures that only one judge will be allowed in the room.
Judges’ lounge: 1. The room where judges should go for cold coffee and whining about tab/debates/education-in-general.
Education: 1. In theory arguments, that thing that your opponent’s case does not support, that you carry on your shoulders while it’s wearing laurels and doing the Queen Elizabeth royalty wave to its minions.
Topicality: 1. The ability of a debate case to reflect the resolution. 2. Argument that your opponent’s debate case bears no relationship to the resolution, including the words “and” and “the.” (NOTE: Not to be confused with “tropicality,” the ability of a debater to make you wish you were on a warm sunny island with a cold drink in your hand and a good-looking native by your side, rather than sitting here listening to this drivel. Also not to be confused with "Tropicana," purveyors of fruit juices that you'll never be served in the judges' lounges, where Tang is still the liquid of choice.)
Award ceremony: 1. Allocation of accolades from the tournament, where the top participants receive trophies. 2. [Usage, Big Bronx, always plural, “Awards Ceremonies”] Series of regularly occurring events between rounds where debaters, alumni, coaches, bus drivers, trophy manufacturers, pastry chefs, drum majorettes, chicken farmers, coal miners, door-to-door encyclopedia salesmen, Oscar Meyer Weiner truck drivers, Las Vegas showgirls, George Lucas, axe murderers, dictators from third world nations no one can find on the map, school administrators (who wear special badges to distinguish them from dictators from third world nations no one can find on the map), theremin marching bands, the inventor of the clothes pin and other forensics dignitaries are given trophies thanking them for their service to the community. Recipients who haven’t gotten a clue why they received this award are allowed to turn them in for fifty cents on the dollar and take a cash prize instead, while the trophy is recycled for the event following the next round where another hundred people will be honored.
Trophy: 1. Physical recognition of a tournament job well done.
Trophy wife: 1. Spouse of a trophy. If a trophy is female, then the correct term is trophy husband. If a trophy is of indeterminate sexual orientation, it is sent to the nearest speech tournament.
Flex prep: 1. Only opportunity you’ll get during the round to literally read your opponent’s case and try to make sense of it, since it was read aloud so fast in between multiple gaspings for breath that no one in the room, including your opponent, has the least idea what it’s all about. 2. At circuit tournaments, opportunity to sit down and take a load off your feet.
Cross Examination: 1. Alternative to flex prep, preferred by novices, lay judges, and coaches born during the Polk administration, where you have to ask your opponents to answer questions. 2. Alternative to flex prep, preferred by novices, lay judges, and coaches born during the Polk administration, where you have to avoid answering your opponent’s questions.
30: 1. The number of speaker points you thought you should get. 2. The number of speaker points you didn’t get. 3. The number of speaker points given to both teams in the down-four round by judges who, in their own debating careers, spent a lot of time in the down-four rounds.
Judge training: 1. A bad sign, if you’re waiting for your judge to arrive from it.
Judges lounge.: 1. Declarative sentence explaining what judges do during most of a tournament. 2. Imperative sentence telling the judges to cool their heels for a few minutes.
Judge’s lounge: 1. Sad attempt by novice debater to label the room where judges should go for cold coffee and whining about tab/debates/education-in-general. Misuse of punctuation assures that only one judge will be allowed in the room.
Judges’ lounge: 1. The room where judges should go for cold coffee and whining about tab/debates/education-in-general.
Education: 1. In theory arguments, that thing that your opponent’s case does not support, that you carry on your shoulders while it’s wearing laurels and doing the Queen Elizabeth royalty wave to its minions.
Topicality: 1. The ability of a debate case to reflect the resolution. 2. Argument that your opponent’s debate case bears no relationship to the resolution, including the words “and” and “the.” (NOTE: Not to be confused with “tropicality,” the ability of a debater to make you wish you were on a warm sunny island with a cold drink in your hand and a good-looking native by your side, rather than sitting here listening to this drivel. Also not to be confused with "Tropicana," purveyors of fruit juices that you'll never be served in the judges' lounges, where Tang is still the liquid of choice.)
Award ceremony: 1. Allocation of accolades from the tournament, where the top participants receive trophies. 2. [Usage, Big Bronx, always plural, “Awards Ceremonies”] Series of regularly occurring events between rounds where debaters, alumni, coaches, bus drivers, trophy manufacturers, pastry chefs, drum majorettes, chicken farmers, coal miners, door-to-door encyclopedia salesmen, Oscar Meyer Weiner truck drivers, Las Vegas showgirls, George Lucas, axe murderers, dictators from third world nations no one can find on the map, school administrators (who wear special badges to distinguish them from dictators from third world nations no one can find on the map), theremin marching bands, the inventor of the clothes pin and other forensics dignitaries are given trophies thanking them for their service to the community. Recipients who haven’t gotten a clue why they received this award are allowed to turn them in for fifty cents on the dollar and take a cash prize instead, while the trophy is recycled for the event following the next round where another hundred people will be honored.
Trophy: 1. Physical recognition of a tournament job well done.
Trophy wife: 1. Spouse of a trophy. If a trophy is female, then the correct term is trophy husband. If a trophy is of indeterminate sexual orientation, it is sent to the nearest speech tournament.
Coachean Debate Dictionary, Installment 1
Turn: 1. Another name for any argument whatsoever (novice only). 2. Way to get your opponent’s argument to work either in your own favor or against your opponent. Care must be taken with arguments that turn both your own and your opponent’s cases, following which neither of you is better off than when you started (varsity). 3. That thing which, when correct, is what your bus missed two hours ago.
PF (Public Forum): 1. LD for dummies.
LD (Lincoln-Douglas): 1. Policy for dummies.
Policy (P): 1. LD for schools without an LD program.
Congress: AKA Legislative Debate, Congressional Debate, Chloroform on the Hoof. 1. PF for dummies. 2. Extemp for dummies.
Extemp: 1. Complicated dance which begins with dropping hand into hat and drawing three slips of paper, throwing two back, running to desk to research, scratching out case on index card, walking through hallways to round talking to oneself, standing still and telling same empathetic personal story in no way related to subject for the one thousandth four hundredth and eighty eighth time while demonstrating how it relates to subject, two steps to the left, contention one, two steps to the right, contention two, two steps to the middle, spin your partner, do-si-do, summarize, walk out of room, whine to coach. 2. Repeat.
Theory: 1. Thing one may lose on, but never in.
PIC: 1. Argument which, if you have to wonder if your judge will understand it, your judge won’t understand.
RVI: 1. Affirmative argument that judges inevitably a) do not understand, and b) will cite as key in their RFD.
RFD: AKA Reason for Decision. 1. Why a given side won a debate. Example (college judge): “Oral.” Example (parent judge) “The aff was more persuasive.” Example (high school junior judge): “Your argument isn’t what I’m running, so you lose.”
Ballot: 1. Explanation from the judge of what happened in a round and why a particular decision was rendered. 2. Missing item from any crucial round where the decision was not clear.
Minorities in debate: 1. The majority of people in debate.
Tab room: 1. Secret location at tournament where pairings are cooked up out of the imaginations of coaches too removed from the activity to actually adjudicate, using their private little cadre of demonic judges promoting their hidden agenda to ruin [insert LD, PF or Policy] debate for all time, to which entry by students is strictly limited to those who are bleeding profusely and entry by adults is strictly limited to those who are not here to complain, hang out with the cool people or generally exist in the same universe. 2. Place where the door is always open, and everybody knows your name, and whatever you want comes before what they want.
Tab room staff: 1. 1. Nastiest adults at any tournament. No, really. You should watch these people in action.
Ballot table: 1. Literally, a table where tab room staff put the ballots. 2. Place at which, if a student is sitting there, said student mistakenly believes he or she is running the tournament. Advent of preprinted ballots eliminated need for students to sit at ballot table in 1992.
Debate ziti: 1. Large tubs of formerly hot pasta available, usually for free, at debate tournaments. 2. “Tastes of the Mediterranean” or “Pasta Bar”. But no, really, it’s still formerly hot pasta, no matter what they call it.
PF (Public Forum): 1. LD for dummies.
LD (Lincoln-Douglas): 1. Policy for dummies.
Policy (P): 1. LD for schools without an LD program.
Congress: AKA Legislative Debate, Congressional Debate, Chloroform on the Hoof. 1. PF for dummies. 2. Extemp for dummies.
Extemp: 1. Complicated dance which begins with dropping hand into hat and drawing three slips of paper, throwing two back, running to desk to research, scratching out case on index card, walking through hallways to round talking to oneself, standing still and telling same empathetic personal story in no way related to subject for the one thousandth four hundredth and eighty eighth time while demonstrating how it relates to subject, two steps to the left, contention one, two steps to the right, contention two, two steps to the middle, spin your partner, do-si-do, summarize, walk out of room, whine to coach. 2. Repeat.
Theory: 1. Thing one may lose on, but never in.
PIC: 1. Argument which, if you have to wonder if your judge will understand it, your judge won’t understand.
RVI: 1. Affirmative argument that judges inevitably a) do not understand, and b) will cite as key in their RFD.
RFD: AKA Reason for Decision. 1. Why a given side won a debate. Example (college judge): “Oral.” Example (parent judge) “The aff was more persuasive.” Example (high school junior judge): “Your argument isn’t what I’m running, so you lose.”
Ballot: 1. Explanation from the judge of what happened in a round and why a particular decision was rendered. 2. Missing item from any crucial round where the decision was not clear.
Minorities in debate: 1. The majority of people in debate.
Tab room: 1. Secret location at tournament where pairings are cooked up out of the imaginations of coaches too removed from the activity to actually adjudicate, using their private little cadre of demonic judges promoting their hidden agenda to ruin [insert LD, PF or Policy] debate for all time, to which entry by students is strictly limited to those who are bleeding profusely and entry by adults is strictly limited to those who are not here to complain, hang out with the cool people or generally exist in the same universe. 2. Place where the door is always open, and everybody knows your name, and whatever you want comes before what they want.
Tab room staff: 1. 1. Nastiest adults at any tournament. No, really. You should watch these people in action.
Ballot table: 1. Literally, a table where tab room staff put the ballots. 2. Place at which, if a student is sitting there, said student mistakenly believes he or she is running the tournament. Advent of preprinted ballots eliminated need for students to sit at ballot table in 1992.
Debate ziti: 1. Large tubs of formerly hot pasta available, usually for free, at debate tournaments. 2. “Tastes of the Mediterranean” or “Pasta Bar”. But no, really, it’s still formerly hot pasta, no matter what they call it.
Saturday, February 11, 2012
Friday, February 10, 2012
Who’s in Charge Here? Or, what does E.G.G. stand for?
I’ve been working with AB lately in tab, trying to break in a little new blood. One of the big lessons is that the tab room is not in charge of anything. I point this out to the boringly named commenter John (thanks to whom I now know what H.A.M. means). (I will also point out one of my favorite Goldwynisms: When the legendary Hollywood producer was told about a new potential film, and what the name of the main character would be, he replied, “John? What kind of name is John? Every Tom, Dick and Harry is named John.”) He asked why there’s no MJP at Scarsdale. You’re asking the wrong person. I don’t run Scarsdale, or Newark, or most tournaments I tab. Instead, I tab those tournaments. There is a big difference.
Tournaments definitely have personalities, which is reflected in a lot of my commentary here. They are not all the same. Some of them are dreadful, but most of them are perfectly acceptable. Some are exceptional. But whatever makes them what they are all stems from the tournament directors; tab is just one piece of the machine that the tournament directors manage. When there are problems, it is the TD who solves them, not tab. One of the things I’ve been demonstrating to AB is what problems are not in our domain. If people don’t want to judge certain rounds, or in certain divisions, or whatever, this is not our business. Of course, we can technically make the switch, but the decision to make the switch comes from the TD, not us. When a round is in dispute, we can look at the ballots (which is the only guide we use in tab for determining a decision), but if there is something not on those ballots it is the TD who must listen to the arguments from both sides and make a determination. When someone wants to complain about a judge, they need to do so to the TD, not to us. (By the way, that person you’re complaining about has usually been complained about so many times before that you should just take a number: your real complaint in these cases should be to the coaches who drag inept people to tournaments to judge week after week, which is the only thing the TD can do, and it never really takes, to tell you the truth.)
The TD does everything. The TD decides what kind of food will be served (if any). The TD decides the nature and prices of the concessions. The TD decides if there’s housing, or special hotel arrangements or transportation. The TD hires (or doesn’t hire) judges. The TD sets fees. The TD decides how many rounds there are, what will determine team rankings, if judging will be preffed or random or ranked. The TD knows how to get the rooms unlocked. The TD secures tab staff. The TD staffs the ballot table and trains the runners. Et cetera, et cetera.
What makes a tournament good, bad or indifferent? How well the TD does all of these things. What gets prioritized? How organized are things? How friendly are things? I make a big issue of that one. I remember early in my career going to a tournament where I felt that the tournament director literally hated everyone in the place. I did not enjoy that tournament, and subsequently acted accordingly. I do not want to feel like an unwelcome guest.
To be honest, I feel that all the high school tournaments I go to get high marks on all of these counts. The TDs work to the best of their abilities to run a good show. Colleges, on the other hand, can be hit or miss, which is something that CP helped improved by taking on TD responsibilities himself at so many of them. As he’s slowed down, some of the rest of the traveling tabroom have filled in, so things have overall held firm (I’m especially pleased with how Columbia was revived this year).
So you can fault me as TD at Bump, the MHLs (unless O’C is in the vicinity, in which case, it’s his fault) or the couple of college tournaments I’ve stepped up to. As for the rest, talk to the TD. Tab is just a cog in the machine. We’re just following orders. As the saying goes, we’re not being paid to think.
Tournaments definitely have personalities, which is reflected in a lot of my commentary here. They are not all the same. Some of them are dreadful, but most of them are perfectly acceptable. Some are exceptional. But whatever makes them what they are all stems from the tournament directors; tab is just one piece of the machine that the tournament directors manage. When there are problems, it is the TD who solves them, not tab. One of the things I’ve been demonstrating to AB is what problems are not in our domain. If people don’t want to judge certain rounds, or in certain divisions, or whatever, this is not our business. Of course, we can technically make the switch, but the decision to make the switch comes from the TD, not us. When a round is in dispute, we can look at the ballots (which is the only guide we use in tab for determining a decision), but if there is something not on those ballots it is the TD who must listen to the arguments from both sides and make a determination. When someone wants to complain about a judge, they need to do so to the TD, not to us. (By the way, that person you’re complaining about has usually been complained about so many times before that you should just take a number: your real complaint in these cases should be to the coaches who drag inept people to tournaments to judge week after week, which is the only thing the TD can do, and it never really takes, to tell you the truth.)
The TD does everything. The TD decides what kind of food will be served (if any). The TD decides the nature and prices of the concessions. The TD decides if there’s housing, or special hotel arrangements or transportation. The TD hires (or doesn’t hire) judges. The TD sets fees. The TD decides how many rounds there are, what will determine team rankings, if judging will be preffed or random or ranked. The TD knows how to get the rooms unlocked. The TD secures tab staff. The TD staffs the ballot table and trains the runners. Et cetera, et cetera.
What makes a tournament good, bad or indifferent? How well the TD does all of these things. What gets prioritized? How organized are things? How friendly are things? I make a big issue of that one. I remember early in my career going to a tournament where I felt that the tournament director literally hated everyone in the place. I did not enjoy that tournament, and subsequently acted accordingly. I do not want to feel like an unwelcome guest.
To be honest, I feel that all the high school tournaments I go to get high marks on all of these counts. The TDs work to the best of their abilities to run a good show. Colleges, on the other hand, can be hit or miss, which is something that CP helped improved by taking on TD responsibilities himself at so many of them. As he’s slowed down, some of the rest of the traveling tabroom have filled in, so things have overall held firm (I’m especially pleased with how Columbia was revived this year).
So you can fault me as TD at Bump, the MHLs (unless O’C is in the vicinity, in which case, it’s his fault) or the couple of college tournaments I’ve stepped up to. As for the rest, talk to the TD. Tab is just a cog in the machine. We’re just following orders. As the saying goes, we’re not being paid to think.
Thursday, February 09, 2012
Google+
Saddled as I am with all this extra time on my hands, I figured I'd sign up for Google+.
Oh joy. Oh rapture. I now have a program that looks just like Facebook, although I gather that if I want I can make it look just like like Twitter.
It's a good thing I don't have Facebook or Twitter—
Oh, wait a minute. I do have Facebook and Twitter, which I already underutilize to the fullest.
Isn't technology great?
Oh joy. Oh rapture. I now have a program that looks just like Facebook, although I gather that if I want I can make it look just like like Twitter.
It's a good thing I don't have Facebook or Twitter—
Oh, wait a minute. I do have Facebook and Twitter, which I already underutilize to the fullest.
Isn't technology great?
Marginalization of black music / Michael Jackson
Having lost (at least momentarily) my DJ outlet, I still keep finding things I want to share. Like this:
Historically, this dismissal of black artists (and black styles) as somehow lacking substance, depth and import is as old as America. It was the lie that constituted minstrelsy. It was a common criticism of spirituals (in relation to traditional hymns), of jazz in the '20s and '30s, of R&B in the '50s and '60s, of funk and disco in the '70s, and of hip-hop in the '80s and '90s (and still today). The cultural gatekeepers not only failed to initially recognize the legitimacy of these new musical styles and forms, they also tended to overlook or reduce the achievements of the African-American men and women who pioneered them. The King of Jazz, for white critics, wasn't Louis Armstrong, it was Paul Whiteman; the King of Swing wasn't Duke Ellington, it was Benny Goodman; the King of Rock wasn't Chuck Berry or Little Richard, it was Elvis Presley.
The article is about Michael Jackson in particular, and the importance of his music. The Misunderstood Power of Michael Jackson's Music
Historically, this dismissal of black artists (and black styles) as somehow lacking substance, depth and import is as old as America. It was the lie that constituted minstrelsy. It was a common criticism of spirituals (in relation to traditional hymns), of jazz in the '20s and '30s, of R&B in the '50s and '60s, of funk and disco in the '70s, and of hip-hop in the '80s and '90s (and still today). The cultural gatekeepers not only failed to initially recognize the legitimacy of these new musical styles and forms, they also tended to overlook or reduce the achievements of the African-American men and women who pioneered them. The King of Jazz, for white critics, wasn't Louis Armstrong, it was Paul Whiteman; the King of Swing wasn't Duke Ellington, it was Benny Goodman; the King of Rock wasn't Chuck Berry or Little Richard, it was Elvis Presley.
The article is about Michael Jackson in particular, and the importance of his music. The Misunderstood Power of Michael Jackson's Music
NOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!
We recorded a TVFT last night. Started with me and CP and Ryan Miller, and shortly thereafter Pajamas Wexler showed up. It was very interesting. You would have loved it. I would have too, if I had actually recorded it. Alas, I screwed up. How doesn't matter; in the future CP will back me up. Can't hurt.
Anyhow, we talked about the topic cycle, and didn't necessarily come to any conclusions, aside from the fact that better resolutions is a good idea.
Here's something Ryan posted when we had our original discussion:
LD should have two resolutions a year, one released August fifteenth and the other December first. Resolutions should be drawn from a very long list which has five added to it every June by the topic committee. Advantages:
1. The list can grow very long (a hundred?), thus making current prep on the entire list infeasible for even very large teams, and lowering the edge provided by going to a summer camp which luckily picked an important topic (and the resentment from paying a lot of money to a camp which failed to do so). This also means that resolutions will tend to spend a long time on the list before being picked, allowing campaigns against those with poor or offensive wording.
I just love this idea, or something like it. As it stands now, the topic people (who, we all agreed, do a great job under the circumstances) come up with some topics in a couple of days, and then a list is posted, and then when most people aren't even really at school we vote, with no chance for input or real analysis, and there you are. This may make sense in the age of the buggy whip, but we have the interwebs nowadays. Why can't NFL come up with a system like Ryan's suggestion that allows the community an opportunity to really study and polish the resolutions? There is no rush to run LD topics, as they are inherently timeless, as compared to PF topics, so giving them a chance to get good, so to speak, far outweighs any needs of immediacy. I wouldn't suggest eliminating a dedicated committee, because someone digging in on this is a good idea. But why do they have to get it done at NatNats? Don't any of them have email?
Lots of things are done a certain way because that's the way they are done. LD topic selection need not be one of them.
And, lucky you, I've saved you over an hour of your life listening to CP curse like a sailor (and not a Henhuddian one, btw) and me try to find PJ on Skype; you can use your iPod for more satisfying pursuits, like finding all the Madonna songs you've acquired and feeding them to the crocodiles.
Anyhow, we talked about the topic cycle, and didn't necessarily come to any conclusions, aside from the fact that better resolutions is a good idea.
Here's something Ryan posted when we had our original discussion:
LD should have two resolutions a year, one released August fifteenth and the other December first. Resolutions should be drawn from a very long list which has five added to it every June by the topic committee. Advantages:
1. The list can grow very long (a hundred?), thus making current prep on the entire list infeasible for even very large teams, and lowering the edge provided by going to a summer camp which luckily picked an important topic (and the resentment from paying a lot of money to a camp which failed to do so). This also means that resolutions will tend to spend a long time on the list before being picked, allowing campaigns against those with poor or offensive wording.
I just love this idea, or something like it. As it stands now, the topic people (who, we all agreed, do a great job under the circumstances) come up with some topics in a couple of days, and then a list is posted, and then when most people aren't even really at school we vote, with no chance for input or real analysis, and there you are. This may make sense in the age of the buggy whip, but we have the interwebs nowadays. Why can't NFL come up with a system like Ryan's suggestion that allows the community an opportunity to really study and polish the resolutions? There is no rush to run LD topics, as they are inherently timeless, as compared to PF topics, so giving them a chance to get good, so to speak, far outweighs any needs of immediacy. I wouldn't suggest eliminating a dedicated committee, because someone digging in on this is a good idea. But why do they have to get it done at NatNats? Don't any of them have email?
Lots of things are done a certain way because that's the way they are done. LD topic selection need not be one of them.
And, lucky you, I've saved you over an hour of your life listening to CP curse like a sailor (and not a Henhuddian one, btw) and me try to find PJ on Skype; you can use your iPod for more satisfying pursuits, like finding all the Madonna songs you've acquired and feeding them to the crocodiles.
Wednesday, February 08, 2012
How MJP Really Works
JA was pretty adamant last weekend against MJP and its effects on LD, as is Pajamas W. They are far from alone in this.
They are also wrong.
First of all, in theory, all MJP does is allow people to rank the judges. Then tab assigns judges based on those rankings. That is, we try to give you 1-1s, or else 2-2s or whatever, the best number we can, always equal. We are not giving you the judges you want as a debater; we are giving the judges you and your opponent both prefer at the same level of preference. Granted, this means a lot of 1-1s, but it also means 2-2s and 3-3s and even, occasionally, 4-4s. The point is mutuality, not guaranteed bests.
Doing this, the argument goes, somehow prefs certain judges who are detrimental to the practice of LD. Well, no. If people all want certain judges over other judges, that’s going to happen anyhow, MJP or no MJP, because tournaments wanting to succeed financially will hire those judges, and teams who only have experience of those judges will bring those judges as their adjudicators, and MJP has nothing to do with it. Beyond that, I really don’t see the link between MJP and the Decline and Fall of LD. I have rants about various in-round practices going back over a decade, and rants about college judges pushing sketchy agendas, way before MJP was even a twinkle in the tabroomian eye. The claim that MJP pushes those practices and agendas has to stand against the alternatives, which are either community ranking, tab personnel ranking, or no ranking. Let’s look at each one individually.
No ranking at all means that a tournament is judged at random by whoever is in the field. I know some people like this idea, but they are not at the tournaments I am at, where every week some new, totally untrained judge (actually, usually more than just one) wreaks all sorts of havoc. By untrained I don’t mean they haven’t sat in one of our training sessions; I mean they have no idea that their kids were even on the debate team until they got dragged into this this morning, they have no idea what will happen in the rounds, and they spend more time in tab trying to get out of their obligation than they do actually judging. If these judges didn’t exist (and believe me, they do, and they are in endless supply), and if all the judges were at least trained to some extent, the idea of dice-toss assignments would be acceptable according to a certain vision of LD. But kids who work hard on their cases and their presentation deserve better than some whiny parent who literally—in the correct sense of the word literally—knows nothing about the activity.
By the way, these untrained judges ruin it for the trained judges. I see it week after week. There are plenty of parent judges who are fine adjudicators, well-trained and capable. Good debaters can easily develop strategies to pick up their ballots. But no debater wants to be judged by parent judges because of the fear of those untrained ones. All parents get tarred with the same brush. It isn’t MJP that is tainting these capable parents; it’s the schools that repeatedly bring raw, worthless adjudicators (the blame for which can be either at the coach level or the student level, because there’s no reason why coachless teams like YouKnowWho can’t train their own damned parents, coach or no coach). (My favorite worthless adjudicator whine, by the way, is that somehow the tabroom is responsible for training them. Hello? The tabroom is responsible for tabbing the tournament along the lines set out by the tournament director. I’ve published all sorts of documents on how to judge; what do you want me to do? Stop tabbing and read them to you aloud, and then tuck you in with Teddy in your arms and a smile on your lips? Grow up.)
If we can’t go totally random, we can have some sort of rankings. The tabroom can rank everyone, or we can have the community rank everyone, from which rankings assignments are made of the highest ranks first on the bubbles. The thing is, tabroom rankings simply perpetrate the beliefs of the tabroom, however right or wrong they may be. I think that certain people are good judges, and that others aren’t. What gives me the right to assign on the basis of my personal beliefs? As for community rankings, they simply do the same thing on a grander scale in what is perceived as, but in fact isn’t, a more democratic fashion. I have a lot of experience with community rankings, and they inevitably worked out to give the highest rankings to the college/circuit judges. Why the mechanics of this worked out that way could be because a lot of schools didn’t vote, or maybe because familiar names always win. I’m not sure, but in any case, tabroom staff is biased and so is the community as a whole, which is democratic only insofar as voting is open to one and all, but closed in that the results are predictably parochial.
MJP theoretically removes the bias of both the tabroom and the community. The thing is, people who are against MJP often don’t rank. If you don’t rank, we put you in as a blank, and give you the highest ranked judge of the opponent. If neither of you rank, you get whoever is left over after all the preferences are adjudicated. When I say we I mean the software; there’s less hands-on in MJP than any other tabbing, at least in large fields. And that is the core of one of the best arguments in favor of MJP, that it is automatic and non-biased by outside influences.
Here’s the thing. People who don’t “like” MJP don’t rank. People who don’t rank get the judges of the people who do rank. The people who do rank tend to prefer college/circuit judges. Therefore, at most tournaments the college/circuit judges direct the results.
This can be changed. If everyone ranked, then every judge in the pool would be up against every other judge in every round, and tabbing really would find the judge that both debaters mutually prefer. There would be a lot fewer nix-1s and a lot more 3-3s. As it stands now, if two non-ranking schools hit, they get the leftovers, whereas what they might really want is a long-time coach or some really experienced parent. If you want those sort of judges to adjudicate your rounds, fine. Vote for them with your feet, so to speak. Sneering at MJP as the tool of the devil, on the other hand, simply relegates it to the position of the tool of your opponents. It is a useful control over practices you don’t like, whatever those practices may be.
So that’s the real issue here. At any given tournament, maybe a third to a half at most of the teams pref. MJP is better than all the alternatives in terms of the least biased and the most likely to favor competency. There is no inherency in MJP toward the Evils of Modern LD. But as long as most schools, through misguided philosophies, don’t pref, those who do will indeed call the shots, and move LD in whatever direction they prefer, with the judges they prefer. If you want to see LD go some other way, actively preffing judges that agree with you may be the most important thing you can do. (That, and getting your friends who agree with you who aren’t members of the VCA to do likewise.)
They are also wrong.
First of all, in theory, all MJP does is allow people to rank the judges. Then tab assigns judges based on those rankings. That is, we try to give you 1-1s, or else 2-2s or whatever, the best number we can, always equal. We are not giving you the judges you want as a debater; we are giving the judges you and your opponent both prefer at the same level of preference. Granted, this means a lot of 1-1s, but it also means 2-2s and 3-3s and even, occasionally, 4-4s. The point is mutuality, not guaranteed bests.
Doing this, the argument goes, somehow prefs certain judges who are detrimental to the practice of LD. Well, no. If people all want certain judges over other judges, that’s going to happen anyhow, MJP or no MJP, because tournaments wanting to succeed financially will hire those judges, and teams who only have experience of those judges will bring those judges as their adjudicators, and MJP has nothing to do with it. Beyond that, I really don’t see the link between MJP and the Decline and Fall of LD. I have rants about various in-round practices going back over a decade, and rants about college judges pushing sketchy agendas, way before MJP was even a twinkle in the tabroomian eye. The claim that MJP pushes those practices and agendas has to stand against the alternatives, which are either community ranking, tab personnel ranking, or no ranking. Let’s look at each one individually.
No ranking at all means that a tournament is judged at random by whoever is in the field. I know some people like this idea, but they are not at the tournaments I am at, where every week some new, totally untrained judge (actually, usually more than just one) wreaks all sorts of havoc. By untrained I don’t mean they haven’t sat in one of our training sessions; I mean they have no idea that their kids were even on the debate team until they got dragged into this this morning, they have no idea what will happen in the rounds, and they spend more time in tab trying to get out of their obligation than they do actually judging. If these judges didn’t exist (and believe me, they do, and they are in endless supply), and if all the judges were at least trained to some extent, the idea of dice-toss assignments would be acceptable according to a certain vision of LD. But kids who work hard on their cases and their presentation deserve better than some whiny parent who literally—in the correct sense of the word literally—knows nothing about the activity.
By the way, these untrained judges ruin it for the trained judges. I see it week after week. There are plenty of parent judges who are fine adjudicators, well-trained and capable. Good debaters can easily develop strategies to pick up their ballots. But no debater wants to be judged by parent judges because of the fear of those untrained ones. All parents get tarred with the same brush. It isn’t MJP that is tainting these capable parents; it’s the schools that repeatedly bring raw, worthless adjudicators (the blame for which can be either at the coach level or the student level, because there’s no reason why coachless teams like YouKnowWho can’t train their own damned parents, coach or no coach). (My favorite worthless adjudicator whine, by the way, is that somehow the tabroom is responsible for training them. Hello? The tabroom is responsible for tabbing the tournament along the lines set out by the tournament director. I’ve published all sorts of documents on how to judge; what do you want me to do? Stop tabbing and read them to you aloud, and then tuck you in with Teddy in your arms and a smile on your lips? Grow up.)
If we can’t go totally random, we can have some sort of rankings. The tabroom can rank everyone, or we can have the community rank everyone, from which rankings assignments are made of the highest ranks first on the bubbles. The thing is, tabroom rankings simply perpetrate the beliefs of the tabroom, however right or wrong they may be. I think that certain people are good judges, and that others aren’t. What gives me the right to assign on the basis of my personal beliefs? As for community rankings, they simply do the same thing on a grander scale in what is perceived as, but in fact isn’t, a more democratic fashion. I have a lot of experience with community rankings, and they inevitably worked out to give the highest rankings to the college/circuit judges. Why the mechanics of this worked out that way could be because a lot of schools didn’t vote, or maybe because familiar names always win. I’m not sure, but in any case, tabroom staff is biased and so is the community as a whole, which is democratic only insofar as voting is open to one and all, but closed in that the results are predictably parochial.
MJP theoretically removes the bias of both the tabroom and the community. The thing is, people who are against MJP often don’t rank. If you don’t rank, we put you in as a blank, and give you the highest ranked judge of the opponent. If neither of you rank, you get whoever is left over after all the preferences are adjudicated. When I say we I mean the software; there’s less hands-on in MJP than any other tabbing, at least in large fields. And that is the core of one of the best arguments in favor of MJP, that it is automatic and non-biased by outside influences.
Here’s the thing. People who don’t “like” MJP don’t rank. People who don’t rank get the judges of the people who do rank. The people who do rank tend to prefer college/circuit judges. Therefore, at most tournaments the college/circuit judges direct the results.
This can be changed. If everyone ranked, then every judge in the pool would be up against every other judge in every round, and tabbing really would find the judge that both debaters mutually prefer. There would be a lot fewer nix-1s and a lot more 3-3s. As it stands now, if two non-ranking schools hit, they get the leftovers, whereas what they might really want is a long-time coach or some really experienced parent. If you want those sort of judges to adjudicate your rounds, fine. Vote for them with your feet, so to speak. Sneering at MJP as the tool of the devil, on the other hand, simply relegates it to the position of the tool of your opponents. It is a useful control over practices you don’t like, whatever those practices may be.
So that’s the real issue here. At any given tournament, maybe a third to a half at most of the teams pref. MJP is better than all the alternatives in terms of the least biased and the most likely to favor competency. There is no inherency in MJP toward the Evils of Modern LD. But as long as most schools, through misguided philosophies, don’t pref, those who do will indeed call the shots, and move LD in whatever direction they prefer, with the judges they prefer. If you want to see LD go some other way, actively preffing judges that agree with you may be the most important thing you can do. (That, and getting your friends who agree with you who aren’t members of the VCA to do likewise.)
Tuesday, February 07, 2012
Oscar Wilde: "One would have to have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without dissolving into tears...of laughter."
I am beginning to suspect that I was acting precipitately in my evaluation of my DJ internet work. I say this for two reasons: first, I like using the word precipitately in a sentence, and second, while no one has actually come out and said so, my exclusion from the scene may have been due to oversight rather than deliberate inaction. I’ve been a little lost, not spending every waking minute surfing the interwebs to find maybe 4 good articles a day. It seemed like a worthy endeavor, in its way, the sort of thing the DJ ought to be doing, given the brand and all. Oh, well. Nowadays most people think I’m a teacher anyhow (outside of the DJ, that is; inside the DJ they think I read every book every written), so what difference does any of this make to the VCA? Aside from giving me more time to post here, that is.
Meanwhile, today is the birthday of Charles Dickens. My first experience of the man was in sixth grade. I only recently replaced the little paperback I had of Oliver Twist, which I read hidden behind my textbooks while the class did whatever it was doing that was, truth to tell, dull as ditch water and couldn’t hold a candle to Bill Sikes or Dodger. From there it was on to Copperfield, and that was the end of me. For some reason or other, Dickens wasn’t really taught much when I was in high school, but I do remember that we were greatly expected to read GE, which ultimately provided me the name of the late lamented Pip the Wondercat (we had great expectations for him when we acquired him, as compared to acquiring him to be a cabin boy, if you happen to recall the character in Moby-Dick before the one in GE). While I enjoyed GE, DC remained my favorite until after college (where the only Dickens I encountered, without having the time to actually read it, was Hard Times), when I decided to read Bleak House for the simply reason that I couldn’t imagine a book with a more forbidding title. It became one of my desert island books, unsurprisingly for those who know it, and then I decided it was high time to read all of Dickens from start to finish, which I did, in order, except for Hard Times and Barnaby Rudge, the former because my avoiding it in college started a lifelong avoidance that to this day I have been unable to overcome, and the latter because I couldn’t find a copy in my local bookstore the day it came up next, so I simply went on the to subsequent book in the oeuvre. (I caught up with it later; meanwhile, HT is on my iPhone, if I ever get the urge.)
Sum total of wisdom derived from all this Dickensian reading?
1. Best characters, and best character names ever. (Murdstone? Never topped by anyone.)
2. DC, BH and Our Mutual Friend best novels, the latter two by virtue of objective novel stuff and the former by virtue of CD’s personal investment.
3. It is absolutely better to read these books because you want to, not because you have to. Mark this well, oh high school student, and go back to them in ten years when you have the time to enjoy them. You will. Trust me, you will. The books are filled with humor, for one thing. Great writing for the most part (although, sure, there are a few dry spells, but after a chapter or so it’ll get great again).
4. Perfect memorability of many, many scenes, and many, many lines. “And it was my mother, cold and dead.” “Annual income twenty pounds…” “It is a far far better thing I do…” “She had brought me up by hand.” Et cetera, et cetera.
Having this conversation with high school students is like addressing penguins on the mechanics of hummingbirds. They just don’t get it. Oh, well. I, for one, will celebrate on this day, thanking the heavens for giving us Mr. Dickens, and thanking Mr. Dickens for giving us Scrooge, Barkis, little Em’ly, Quilp, Sam Weller, Pecksniff, Wackford Squeers, the Vaneerings, Jarndyce v. Jarndyce…
Meanwhile, today is the birthday of Charles Dickens. My first experience of the man was in sixth grade. I only recently replaced the little paperback I had of Oliver Twist, which I read hidden behind my textbooks while the class did whatever it was doing that was, truth to tell, dull as ditch water and couldn’t hold a candle to Bill Sikes or Dodger. From there it was on to Copperfield, and that was the end of me. For some reason or other, Dickens wasn’t really taught much when I was in high school, but I do remember that we were greatly expected to read GE, which ultimately provided me the name of the late lamented Pip the Wondercat (we had great expectations for him when we acquired him, as compared to acquiring him to be a cabin boy, if you happen to recall the character in Moby-Dick before the one in GE). While I enjoyed GE, DC remained my favorite until after college (where the only Dickens I encountered, without having the time to actually read it, was Hard Times), when I decided to read Bleak House for the simply reason that I couldn’t imagine a book with a more forbidding title. It became one of my desert island books, unsurprisingly for those who know it, and then I decided it was high time to read all of Dickens from start to finish, which I did, in order, except for Hard Times and Barnaby Rudge, the former because my avoiding it in college started a lifelong avoidance that to this day I have been unable to overcome, and the latter because I couldn’t find a copy in my local bookstore the day it came up next, so I simply went on the to subsequent book in the oeuvre. (I caught up with it later; meanwhile, HT is on my iPhone, if I ever get the urge.)
Sum total of wisdom derived from all this Dickensian reading?
1. Best characters, and best character names ever. (Murdstone? Never topped by anyone.)
2. DC, BH and Our Mutual Friend best novels, the latter two by virtue of objective novel stuff and the former by virtue of CD’s personal investment.
3. It is absolutely better to read these books because you want to, not because you have to. Mark this well, oh high school student, and go back to them in ten years when you have the time to enjoy them. You will. Trust me, you will. The books are filled with humor, for one thing. Great writing for the most part (although, sure, there are a few dry spells, but after a chapter or so it’ll get great again).
4. Perfect memorability of many, many scenes, and many, many lines. “And it was my mother, cold and dead.” “Annual income twenty pounds…” “It is a far far better thing I do…” “She had brought me up by hand.” Et cetera, et cetera.
Having this conversation with high school students is like addressing penguins on the mechanics of hummingbirds. They just don’t get it. Oh, well. I, for one, will celebrate on this day, thanking the heavens for giving us Mr. Dickens, and thanking Mr. Dickens for giving us Scrooge, Barkis, little Em’ly, Quilp, Sam Weller, Pecksniff, Wackford Squeers, the Vaneerings, Jarndyce v. Jarndyce…
Monday, February 06, 2012
Plus, the view of NYC at dawn from the top floor is spectacular
No matter how hard I try, I end up getting lost in Newark. I can find the school pretty well, once I’m downtown, but I have trouble getting downtown of the turnpike because I always think I know where I’m going, which means I inevitably get off at the wrong exit, get lost, remember being lost here before, find my way out the same way I did last time, and eventually get to the school. Getting to the airport hotel, on the other hand, is beyond me. I explored parts of Newark that even Newark doesn’t know exist on Friday night (thank God for the iPhone GPS), and Saturday morning, despite grabbing a guide with experience actually living in Newark, went every which way but toward the school on our way back. The fact that one of the shuttle buses broke down worked in our favor. Then somebody moved the Dunkin Donuts; actually, they moved the entire street with the Dunkin Donuts. Thus my early morning walk while waiting for the dead shuttle bus to show up went unrewarded. Fortunately I had my car, and once the first round of the morning got off, Abdul and I drove around for a while before finding where they had relocated said street, and all was well and large buckets of latte were secured to get us through the morning. The pair of socks that Abdul picked up in the parking lot, however, we threw back, after I assured him that I had not lost a pair of socks, and even if I had, once they hit the ground in a Dunkin Donuts parking lot, they are hors de combat. It’s sort of like the 3-second rule with dropped food, only more harmful to your health.
After pulling out all my hair over the Round Robin, where my surgically selected judges were replaced by adjudicators picked up by bulldozer, I was sort of prepared for the invitational. You have a very large pool of alums, except you’re never quite sure which alums are in the pool at any given moment. Quantity over specificity, in other words, but there’s worse things. We ran the tournament on-time, and gave O’C enough rounds that he couldn’t wander off no matter how hard he tried, and had some outstanding judges’ lounge food (and a microwave to heat it up—O’C take note). Not bad, overall.
As tournament director, Alston does an interesting thing with novice LD rounds: he has them judged by his non-forensic AP students. As members of the VCA know, when I rank judge quality by group, the ones who come out on top as the absolute worst are high school student judges. My reason for this is simple: often they have decided “right” and “wrong” on a given topic, and adjudicate accordingly. By nature, they are the least inclined to go into a round tabula rasa, because outside of the rounds, they have a metaphorical horse in the race, i.e., their own knowledge and cases. I’m not saying that all high school students are like this, but they are the most likely to be like this, i.e., non-tab-rasa. They do bring other benefits to the table, however. As debaters themselves, they know the language and practices of the moment, and can pass along their tactical wisdom to the noobs, and that’s a good thing. With the Newark construct, you probably get complete tabula rasa, and better decisions, but no tactical/strategic feedback. Theoretically non-forensic types are the lay judges so many people bemoan the loss of.
Alston has other ideas on judging too. He wants everyone who can to pick up a pen to get in there and adjudicate. He wants a broad base of experience. He wants students to adapt. And he uses his invitational as a means to support his advocacies. I like that: it’s his tournament, and he runs it the way he runs it. He doesn’t like MJP so there’s no MJP. He gives some strikes, but if somebody like Nadir shows up, there’s no supplemental strikes; you’ve already had your strikes, and if you can’t pick up Nadir’s ballot because he’s the sort of judge you want to strike, you’re a lunatic. (I’m saying that, not Jonathan, who I’ve never heard say a bad word about anybody, which is probably why he doesn’t like to tab, because we’ve never said a good word about anybody, and nuns in tab are murder, even when they’re only meta-nuns.)
Because of all of this, Newark has developed a unique personality as a tournament. Lots if not all tournaments develop personalities, but some are not so good. This one is a little nutty, at least for me, looking at it from the tabular point of view, but it’s honest and up-front and aimed at educational goals. So what if I pull a few more hairs?
(But I will point out that a couple of alum judges, the ones that are the least likely to show up on time—I put them into the PF pool…)
After pulling out all my hair over the Round Robin, where my surgically selected judges were replaced by adjudicators picked up by bulldozer, I was sort of prepared for the invitational. You have a very large pool of alums, except you’re never quite sure which alums are in the pool at any given moment. Quantity over specificity, in other words, but there’s worse things. We ran the tournament on-time, and gave O’C enough rounds that he couldn’t wander off no matter how hard he tried, and had some outstanding judges’ lounge food (and a microwave to heat it up—O’C take note). Not bad, overall.
As tournament director, Alston does an interesting thing with novice LD rounds: he has them judged by his non-forensic AP students. As members of the VCA know, when I rank judge quality by group, the ones who come out on top as the absolute worst are high school student judges. My reason for this is simple: often they have decided “right” and “wrong” on a given topic, and adjudicate accordingly. By nature, they are the least inclined to go into a round tabula rasa, because outside of the rounds, they have a metaphorical horse in the race, i.e., their own knowledge and cases. I’m not saying that all high school students are like this, but they are the most likely to be like this, i.e., non-tab-rasa. They do bring other benefits to the table, however. As debaters themselves, they know the language and practices of the moment, and can pass along their tactical wisdom to the noobs, and that’s a good thing. With the Newark construct, you probably get complete tabula rasa, and better decisions, but no tactical/strategic feedback. Theoretically non-forensic types are the lay judges so many people bemoan the loss of.
Alston has other ideas on judging too. He wants everyone who can to pick up a pen to get in there and adjudicate. He wants a broad base of experience. He wants students to adapt. And he uses his invitational as a means to support his advocacies. I like that: it’s his tournament, and he runs it the way he runs it. He doesn’t like MJP so there’s no MJP. He gives some strikes, but if somebody like Nadir shows up, there’s no supplemental strikes; you’ve already had your strikes, and if you can’t pick up Nadir’s ballot because he’s the sort of judge you want to strike, you’re a lunatic. (I’m saying that, not Jonathan, who I’ve never heard say a bad word about anybody, which is probably why he doesn’t like to tab, because we’ve never said a good word about anybody, and nuns in tab are murder, even when they’re only meta-nuns.)
Because of all of this, Newark has developed a unique personality as a tournament. Lots if not all tournaments develop personalities, but some are not so good. This one is a little nutty, at least for me, looking at it from the tabular point of view, but it’s honest and up-front and aimed at educational goals. So what if I pull a few more hairs?
(But I will point out that a couple of alum judges, the ones that are the least likely to show up on time—I put them into the PF pool…)
Friday, February 03, 2012
And what circles are those, you may well ask
There are just so many days off from the DJ, so I was unable to accept the invitation to go to the Newark RR and tab it. But I did volunteer to set it up for them.
The thing about RRs is that there’s never enough judges to simply run them straight. You always have to have people judge the same people twice, but on the other side. This means that you dig into some pieces of TRPC that you don’t ordinarily look at much. For instance, you print up the judge cards, to make sure that you haven’t repeated same-side judgings, because when you enter a judge, even on the other side, all TRPC tells you is that they’ve judged the person before, not telling you which side it was. Normally, that’s all you need to know, but not here. The judge cards become your bible. Because of the complexity of the RR animal, even with a small number of participants (8 at Newark), you plan the entire tournament out in advance because sometimes when you get to later rounds it just doesn’t work, but if you go back and switch a judge earlier, you can adjust things. Obviously, if the round has already happened, you can’t go back and have someone else judge it, so advance planning is the name of the game.
I like RR tabbing, because of this complexity. It’s rather satisfying to come up with schematics that represent truly magical back-end analysis. One is proud of oneself for pulling it off with minimal resources.
Which means that rule number one is that all the judges have to be there, as planned, and that the idea of a pushed ballot is comparable to the idea of a pet cobra at a daycare center. In a way, it was probably best that I wasn’t at the RR. It seemed to go off plan somewhere in the neighborhood of round 2…
So I solved it, and forwarded fixes. Grumble grumble grumble.
And solved it again later, and forwarded more fixes. Grumble grumble grumble again, but this time more profanely.
More fixes were still being made the crack of dawn this morning.
As a normally peaceful soul—in some circles I am referred to as Mr. Congeniality—I seldom explode in tabular rage, but as I say, it was probably best that I wasn’t phycially present at the RR…
Something tells me the first thing people will do when I arrive there this afternoon is run for cover.
This will be a wise move on their part.
The thing about RRs is that there’s never enough judges to simply run them straight. You always have to have people judge the same people twice, but on the other side. This means that you dig into some pieces of TRPC that you don’t ordinarily look at much. For instance, you print up the judge cards, to make sure that you haven’t repeated same-side judgings, because when you enter a judge, even on the other side, all TRPC tells you is that they’ve judged the person before, not telling you which side it was. Normally, that’s all you need to know, but not here. The judge cards become your bible. Because of the complexity of the RR animal, even with a small number of participants (8 at Newark), you plan the entire tournament out in advance because sometimes when you get to later rounds it just doesn’t work, but if you go back and switch a judge earlier, you can adjust things. Obviously, if the round has already happened, you can’t go back and have someone else judge it, so advance planning is the name of the game.
I like RR tabbing, because of this complexity. It’s rather satisfying to come up with schematics that represent truly magical back-end analysis. One is proud of oneself for pulling it off with minimal resources.
Which means that rule number one is that all the judges have to be there, as planned, and that the idea of a pushed ballot is comparable to the idea of a pet cobra at a daycare center. In a way, it was probably best that I wasn’t at the RR. It seemed to go off plan somewhere in the neighborhood of round 2…
So I solved it, and forwarded fixes. Grumble grumble grumble.
And solved it again later, and forwarded more fixes. Grumble grumble grumble again, but this time more profanely.
More fixes were still being made the crack of dawn this morning.
As a normally peaceful soul—in some circles I am referred to as Mr. Congeniality—I seldom explode in tabular rage, but as I say, it was probably best that I wasn’t phycially present at the RR…
Something tells me the first thing people will do when I arrive there this afternoon is run for cover.
This will be a wise move on their part.
Thursday, February 02, 2012
Friar Pajamas
The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ debate coaches gang aft aglay.
The unfolding of TVFT in the annals of narrowcasting has been a perilous adventure for all concerned. It started with me just talking to my microphone about various subjects, mostly because I liked (and still do like) the idea of podcasting. Actually, I think I started with the recordings of Nostrum, and then after I bought a decent microphone, I branched out. In any case, the idea of getting a bunch of us together to talk about debate issues was a pretty obvious one, and it started with me and O’C and Bietz, which gives a nice cross-section of opinion and a pretty broad base of experience. Somewhere along the way we added CP, which means that if one of us is out painting the town that night, the other three can put together a quorum (unless I’m the one out painting the town, since I do all the dogsbody work of recording and posting and XMLing).
Every now and then we have had a guest star, but not very often. I like the idea, though. Often somebody has a unique perspective on something or other, and it’s good to hear that perspective firsthand. I recently repeated my offer to add anyone who wanted to spew about something onto the show, and got a positive response from Pajamas Wexler, who is always eloquent about debate issues (and who has strong opinions on some of what he thinks are negative trends in LD lately). He also has the world’s worst handwriting, and I have students from 1995 who are still trying to figure out what he wrote on their ballots, but that’s another issue altogether. At the same time, I posted a couple of articles that resonated with Ryan Miller. One of them, on tenths of a point, he posted to Facebook, and never have so many people who haven’t been in a debate round in over a decade had so much to say about the present state of the activity. Since I haven’t been FBing much lately, I just followed it from the comfort of my email account. Then, I wrote about the changing of topics, and he posted a very interesting response, and as far as I’m concerned, this is a great topic (although I’m tempted to change it now that it’s February) and since PJ had also chimed in, that seemed like a good one for TVFT.
Right.
The good news is that I got Ryan on okay, although he wasn’t exactly state of the art in his equipment. As long as he didn’t move his head, he was fine. (He should save up those nickels and dimes and get a headset. Then he could call just about anyone and sound like James Earl Jones, more or less.) PJ, on the other hand, had problems. I had forgotten that he has taken a vow of technological asceticism. He’s like a monk when it comes to computers: he could have the internet, but he chooses not to. Actually, he does have the internet, but only via dial-up. Dial-up? The last time anyone seriously dialed up on the internet, aside from PJ, was when Madison was in the White House. PJ says that if he had a regular connection it would somehow suck all the life out of his brain. Whatever. So, knowing that Skype wasn’t going to work at 16 bits an hour, he went to his school, Lackpig, and tried to access Skype there, and got about as far as anyone ever gets trying to do something remotely outré on a school internet connection. After various failures, he tried to download Skype to his iPhone (where his technological asceticism breaks down, apparently), and as far as I know, he’s still waiting for it to load. (I hope he’s paid up on his data plan.)
So, we gave up. I had a nice talk with Ryan though, about this and that. And then I went on to creating more new iTune playlists, until I was interrupted by the need to work up pairings and panels for the Newark Round Robin.
Which is another story entirely.
The unfolding of TVFT in the annals of narrowcasting has been a perilous adventure for all concerned. It started with me just talking to my microphone about various subjects, mostly because I liked (and still do like) the idea of podcasting. Actually, I think I started with the recordings of Nostrum, and then after I bought a decent microphone, I branched out. In any case, the idea of getting a bunch of us together to talk about debate issues was a pretty obvious one, and it started with me and O’C and Bietz, which gives a nice cross-section of opinion and a pretty broad base of experience. Somewhere along the way we added CP, which means that if one of us is out painting the town that night, the other three can put together a quorum (unless I’m the one out painting the town, since I do all the dogsbody work of recording and posting and XMLing).
Every now and then we have had a guest star, but not very often. I like the idea, though. Often somebody has a unique perspective on something or other, and it’s good to hear that perspective firsthand. I recently repeated my offer to add anyone who wanted to spew about something onto the show, and got a positive response from Pajamas Wexler, who is always eloquent about debate issues (and who has strong opinions on some of what he thinks are negative trends in LD lately). He also has the world’s worst handwriting, and I have students from 1995 who are still trying to figure out what he wrote on their ballots, but that’s another issue altogether. At the same time, I posted a couple of articles that resonated with Ryan Miller. One of them, on tenths of a point, he posted to Facebook, and never have so many people who haven’t been in a debate round in over a decade had so much to say about the present state of the activity. Since I haven’t been FBing much lately, I just followed it from the comfort of my email account. Then, I wrote about the changing of topics, and he posted a very interesting response, and as far as I’m concerned, this is a great topic (although I’m tempted to change it now that it’s February) and since PJ had also chimed in, that seemed like a good one for TVFT.
Right.
The good news is that I got Ryan on okay, although he wasn’t exactly state of the art in his equipment. As long as he didn’t move his head, he was fine. (He should save up those nickels and dimes and get a headset. Then he could call just about anyone and sound like James Earl Jones, more or less.) PJ, on the other hand, had problems. I had forgotten that he has taken a vow of technological asceticism. He’s like a monk when it comes to computers: he could have the internet, but he chooses not to. Actually, he does have the internet, but only via dial-up. Dial-up? The last time anyone seriously dialed up on the internet, aside from PJ, was when Madison was in the White House. PJ says that if he had a regular connection it would somehow suck all the life out of his brain. Whatever. So, knowing that Skype wasn’t going to work at 16 bits an hour, he went to his school, Lackpig, and tried to access Skype there, and got about as far as anyone ever gets trying to do something remotely outré on a school internet connection. After various failures, he tried to download Skype to his iPhone (where his technological asceticism breaks down, apparently), and as far as I know, he’s still waiting for it to load. (I hope he’s paid up on his data plan.)
So, we gave up. I had a nice talk with Ryan though, about this and that. And then I went on to creating more new iTune playlists, until I was interrupted by the need to work up pairings and panels for the Newark Round Robin.
Which is another story entirely.
Wednesday, February 01, 2012
How I Spent My Blogging Vacation
Some advice. If you say you’re going to do something, do it. And if you have something to do that you don’t want to do, do that first. Trust me: if more people followed that advice, the world would be a better place.
I think, but I’m not sure, that the DJ blog has been put on hold. It may have been cancelled. Beats me. In any case, that frees up all that time I’ve been talking about not having. First off, I’ve been updating my music. It started with my old classic iPod being just about filled up. Then—horrors!—the hard drive on my MacBook was just about filled up. Now the old classic iPod was connected to Little Elvis, which is the jukebox in the house. There’s an exterior drive connected to Little E so there’s plenty of room there for more music, and the computer is never turned off. So…
Step one: buy big new hard drive. Attach it to the MacBook.
Step two: copy all the music from Little Elvis to the new hard drive. Connect the MacBook iTunes to the library on the new hard drive.
Step three: upload all of the new hard drive music to Amazon cloud (since I get it for free).
Step four: clean up iTunes on the MacBook. I realize that this should have come before step three, but nobody’s perfect, and how clean does a cloud drive actually need to be?
Step five: purchase new 160 gig iPod.
Step six: synch cleaned up iTunes music, with some new playlists, to the new iPod.
Step seven: coincidentally get Potentially Life-Threatening Burning Nano replacement in the mail. It’s the size of a first class stamp. Decide to turn it into a talking machine, with podcasts and audiobooks. Buy watch base for it because it’s so *(#&%! small I keep misplacing it.
Step eight: figure out what to do with old classic iPod and a portable speaker set already replaced by Jambox. (Pending…)
Step nine: decide that Bluetooth sucks.
Step ten: buy new car with USB and in-dash music access. (Also Bluetooth, but that sucks, so after toothy salesman demonstrates it with my iPhone, feel thankful that this wasn’t why I bought the car.) This is sort of unrelated, but I do a lot of listening behind the wheel. I also introduce Sailors to music they wish they’d never heard, and conduct Disney sing-alongs with O’C, which is why I mentioned it.
Step eleven: start listening to 1Q84 audiobook. After five weeks, I’m about halfway through. Which means that February is accounted for on the audiobook listening front.
Step twelve: think about ripping some more disks or buying some new mp3s, now that I have the room for it.
Step thirteen: leave out discussion of Time Machine and that drive getting filled up, which you know how to solve if it’s happened to you and if you haven’t, it will.
None of which would have happened quite so swiftly if the DJ blog had been breathing down my neck. Still, I liked that concept. One way or another, it will rise again…
I think, but I’m not sure, that the DJ blog has been put on hold. It may have been cancelled. Beats me. In any case, that frees up all that time I’ve been talking about not having. First off, I’ve been updating my music. It started with my old classic iPod being just about filled up. Then—horrors!—the hard drive on my MacBook was just about filled up. Now the old classic iPod was connected to Little Elvis, which is the jukebox in the house. There’s an exterior drive connected to Little E so there’s plenty of room there for more music, and the computer is never turned off. So…
Step one: buy big new hard drive. Attach it to the MacBook.
Step two: copy all the music from Little Elvis to the new hard drive. Connect the MacBook iTunes to the library on the new hard drive.
Step three: upload all of the new hard drive music to Amazon cloud (since I get it for free).
Step four: clean up iTunes on the MacBook. I realize that this should have come before step three, but nobody’s perfect, and how clean does a cloud drive actually need to be?
Step five: purchase new 160 gig iPod.
Step six: synch cleaned up iTunes music, with some new playlists, to the new iPod.
Step seven: coincidentally get Potentially Life-Threatening Burning Nano replacement in the mail. It’s the size of a first class stamp. Decide to turn it into a talking machine, with podcasts and audiobooks. Buy watch base for it because it’s so *(#&%! small I keep misplacing it.
Step eight: figure out what to do with old classic iPod and a portable speaker set already replaced by Jambox. (Pending…)
Step nine: decide that Bluetooth sucks.
Step ten: buy new car with USB and in-dash music access. (Also Bluetooth, but that sucks, so after toothy salesman demonstrates it with my iPhone, feel thankful that this wasn’t why I bought the car.) This is sort of unrelated, but I do a lot of listening behind the wheel. I also introduce Sailors to music they wish they’d never heard, and conduct Disney sing-alongs with O’C, which is why I mentioned it.
Step eleven: start listening to 1Q84 audiobook. After five weeks, I’m about halfway through. Which means that February is accounted for on the audiobook listening front.
Step twelve: think about ripping some more disks or buying some new mp3s, now that I have the room for it.
Step thirteen: leave out discussion of Time Machine and that drive getting filled up, which you know how to solve if it’s happened to you and if you haven’t, it will.
None of which would have happened quite so swiftly if the DJ blog had been breathing down my neck. Still, I liked that concept. One way or another, it will rise again…
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Ready. Set. Register!
Once upon a time, kiddies, you registered for a tournament by fax. This was considered quite modern. (As a matter of fact, in some schools, fax is still considered quite modern; if your school is one of these concerns, you might want to consider starting up a pony express operation. I hear there’s good money in them thar horses.) In this Periclean age, you got your invitations to tournaments by mail, if you happened to be on the mailing list. In other words, invitationals actually had invitations attached, and I remember spending a lot of time getting onto the right mailing lists. Some schools were very prissy about this, with limitations and pre-ordainment and elite regulars, but no one is like that anymore. (Oh, wait a minute. They are. Can you use the word pompous and the word tournament in a sentence?)
Email replaced fax for most people. For one thing, in the Faxiclean Age, the machine was usually in the administration office; every Tom, Dick and Harry didn’t have the ability to fax from their printer as we can now, when we no longer need to. Email was more democratic. Anyone with an AOL account and a telephone could email to their heart’s content. (I can hear the crunching sound of the electronic handshake even as I type this.) This was a civilized era. Maybe you received your invitation by email, and then you responded by email. And as changes came along, you emailed them. And then you emailed the next changes. And the next. And the next. Such joy. Such rapture.
Then came electronic registration via Joy of Tournaments and tabroom.com. Now, you set up your tournament online, open for one and all to see. (Although, if you’ve still got a you-know-what up your you-know-where, elitism can still be perpetrated.) And on a given day, at a given time, usually well known to prospective entrants, registration opens. And at most major tournaments, within hours it fills up, and closes.
What’s wrong with this picture?
JV and I were hashing this out over the weekend at the MHL. This is not a good situation. First of all, not everyone is up at midnight to register. Some people might be on vacation, if it’s a summer registration or if it opens on a holiday of some sort. I opened Princeton, if I’m not mistaken, in the middle of Big Bronx, which was pretty dumb on my part, because everybody was busy working the tournament rather than remembering to sign up for another tournament in two months. Anyhow, plenty of people do sign up, getting in immediately—but not really. That is, they get slots, populated by any name on the roster, and then they hold on to those slots until it’s time to pay fees, at which points tournaments slim down like someone just let the air out of the forensic balloon.
How do you solve this? How do you not provide victory to the fleet, where fleetness is no great quality since it inevitably results in exiting before the end of the race? [Sometimes you just have to torture the analogy beyond what it can stand…] I tried waitlisting everyone at Columbia, which worked okay, but it meant that faraways got in and made their plane reservations first, then the locals came on board, but there’s only so much last-minute planning a local can do, even a big combine like Regis, the most dependable school in the universe when it comes to providing judges and debaters, especially when the tournament is in their backyard. And at high school tournaments where there’s housing, a whole ’nother level of waitlist kicks in.
Is a puzzlement… I wish I had a solution to it.
Email replaced fax for most people. For one thing, in the Faxiclean Age, the machine was usually in the administration office; every Tom, Dick and Harry didn’t have the ability to fax from their printer as we can now, when we no longer need to. Email was more democratic. Anyone with an AOL account and a telephone could email to their heart’s content. (I can hear the crunching sound of the electronic handshake even as I type this.) This was a civilized era. Maybe you received your invitation by email, and then you responded by email. And as changes came along, you emailed them. And then you emailed the next changes. And the next. And the next. Such joy. Such rapture.
Then came electronic registration via Joy of Tournaments and tabroom.com. Now, you set up your tournament online, open for one and all to see. (Although, if you’ve still got a you-know-what up your you-know-where, elitism can still be perpetrated.) And on a given day, at a given time, usually well known to prospective entrants, registration opens. And at most major tournaments, within hours it fills up, and closes.
What’s wrong with this picture?
JV and I were hashing this out over the weekend at the MHL. This is not a good situation. First of all, not everyone is up at midnight to register. Some people might be on vacation, if it’s a summer registration or if it opens on a holiday of some sort. I opened Princeton, if I’m not mistaken, in the middle of Big Bronx, which was pretty dumb on my part, because everybody was busy working the tournament rather than remembering to sign up for another tournament in two months. Anyhow, plenty of people do sign up, getting in immediately—but not really. That is, they get slots, populated by any name on the roster, and then they hold on to those slots until it’s time to pay fees, at which points tournaments slim down like someone just let the air out of the forensic balloon.
How do you solve this? How do you not provide victory to the fleet, where fleetness is no great quality since it inevitably results in exiting before the end of the race? [Sometimes you just have to torture the analogy beyond what it can stand…] I tried waitlisting everyone at Columbia, which worked okay, but it meant that faraways got in and made their plane reservations first, then the locals came on board, but there’s only so much last-minute planning a local can do, even a big combine like Regis, the most dependable school in the universe when it comes to providing judges and debaters, especially when the tournament is in their backyard. And at high school tournaments where there’s housing, a whole ’nother level of waitlist kicks in.
Is a puzzlement… I wish I had a solution to it.
Monday, January 30, 2012
Do-It-Yourself Registration
Things are a little odd at the DJ and I may get some time back for other things, i.e., the time I spend at home on DJing might go back to time spent NJing. We’ll see. If it turns out that way, it will probably only be for a short time, but I really want to take a look at some of my manuals, which are probably a bit out of date by now. As they’re intended for novices, the core is probably okay, but to say that LD has changed in the last few years is to say that the sun rose in the east this morning. I think I have some work to do.
We ran our first MHL under the new rules this weekend, to wit, having people take responsibility for their entries online right up to registration, which consisted of them saying they were all present and accounted for. No registration sheets to ignore. The first problem was that you can’t access your registration on tabroom.com on tournament day, so I had to tinker with the dates, but after that, people were able to get in fine. The usual complication of changing a name, requiring a switch to a non-participant, then a drop, then a switch to the real participant, is always a poser; I did a couple of those myself for people. I kept myself online with tabroom, meaning that at registration I could help people out a bit. But mostly people did what they were supposed to do. A few folks had some extra judges that showed up for later rounds, but there’s nothing wrong with that, as long as I knew it, which I did. One school had an extra judge they didn’t know about, but that judge was a hoverer, and we had to put up sandbags outside of tab to keep her from literally standing behind us as we paired. Jeesh. We finally figured out that the problem was not that we weren’t giving her rounds—if you breathe down our necks at any point in this millennium, we will put you in every round we can—but that she was never entered by her school. There are worse offenses when it comes to handling a registration. Anyhow, the new rules went quite well, and will become the way of the future.
What I couldn’t do anything about is the number of rooms we had. I had to set limits, and you’d think that I had sold the students into hard labor in the diamond mines or something. Rule number one: don’t complain that it’s the end of the world if you’ve never volunteered to host yourself. We need solutions, not conspiracy theorists. Jeesh.
One school didn’t get in because they registered for the tournament and a minute later dropped their entry; God knows why, but all this happened a couple of weeks ago. They thought I had done something to eliminate them, which is why I always activate the change log in tabroom, so that when somebody says you did something, you can point out the date and time and name of the person who actually did do it, which more often than not is them, and not at the time and date they claimed. (The usual offense on this is that someone claims shouldn’t be charged fees because they met the deadline. But they didn’t. Tabroom.com doesn’t lie. Much.) Honestly, though, the sad thing with this school was that it was a new program that was obviously tripping over its own feet; if I had had the room, I would have let them in. Alas, we had a lack. What can you do?
We ran our first MHL under the new rules this weekend, to wit, having people take responsibility for their entries online right up to registration, which consisted of them saying they were all present and accounted for. No registration sheets to ignore. The first problem was that you can’t access your registration on tabroom.com on tournament day, so I had to tinker with the dates, but after that, people were able to get in fine. The usual complication of changing a name, requiring a switch to a non-participant, then a drop, then a switch to the real participant, is always a poser; I did a couple of those myself for people. I kept myself online with tabroom, meaning that at registration I could help people out a bit. But mostly people did what they were supposed to do. A few folks had some extra judges that showed up for later rounds, but there’s nothing wrong with that, as long as I knew it, which I did. One school had an extra judge they didn’t know about, but that judge was a hoverer, and we had to put up sandbags outside of tab to keep her from literally standing behind us as we paired. Jeesh. We finally figured out that the problem was not that we weren’t giving her rounds—if you breathe down our necks at any point in this millennium, we will put you in every round we can—but that she was never entered by her school. There are worse offenses when it comes to handling a registration. Anyhow, the new rules went quite well, and will become the way of the future.
What I couldn’t do anything about is the number of rooms we had. I had to set limits, and you’d think that I had sold the students into hard labor in the diamond mines or something. Rule number one: don’t complain that it’s the end of the world if you’ve never volunteered to host yourself. We need solutions, not conspiracy theorists. Jeesh.
One school didn’t get in because they registered for the tournament and a minute later dropped their entry; God knows why, but all this happened a couple of weeks ago. They thought I had done something to eliminate them, which is why I always activate the change log in tabroom, so that when somebody says you did something, you can point out the date and time and name of the person who actually did do it, which more often than not is them, and not at the time and date they claimed. (The usual offense on this is that someone claims shouldn’t be charged fees because they met the deadline. But they didn’t. Tabroom.com doesn’t lie. Much.) Honestly, though, the sad thing with this school was that it was a new program that was obviously tripping over its own feet; if I had had the room, I would have let them in. Alas, we had a lack. What can you do?
Friday, January 27, 2012
Yip Harburg, if you were wondering...
I do like the rhyme of “exploring the Amazon” and “with her pajamas on.” Is there any day that watching Groucho won’t improve?
The Beacon MHL is proving problematic. The simple fact is that there is a limited amount of space, which hardly ever happens at MHLs, and people are reacting as if infinity is guaranteed. I set limits (equal in every division) and sent out a message that people needed to act fast. But there’s still more debaters than there is debating rooms. Some people act as if this is a change of policy, others just sort of moan and groan, but I have to say, I’ve gotten more reaction to this than I’ve ever gotten to my requests for people to volunteer to host an event. Just sayin’.
In any case, I’ve been trying to be fair when giving out the waitlisted slots (made available by not hitting the limit in other divisions). One to you, one to you, one to you, which is the only way that occurred to me as acceptable, because it spreads the lack of wealth. With any luck, someone else will drop a couple of entries tonight and we can accommodate more people, but I’m not counting on it.
On top of that, tomorrow is the first day where registration = get it right by 9:00, have an adult tell me it’s right, we start the tournament. This should be entertaining, but I’m adamant about it. If you’re too dumb to have read the emails about this, you’ll pay the price. I’m not your mother (as my mother used to say, which I have to admit caused a lot of confusion around the house). Clean up your own messes. What will really piss me off is if anyone drops people in the a.m., in slots that others could have picked up.
We’ll see.
The Beacon MHL is proving problematic. The simple fact is that there is a limited amount of space, which hardly ever happens at MHLs, and people are reacting as if infinity is guaranteed. I set limits (equal in every division) and sent out a message that people needed to act fast. But there’s still more debaters than there is debating rooms. Some people act as if this is a change of policy, others just sort of moan and groan, but I have to say, I’ve gotten more reaction to this than I’ve ever gotten to my requests for people to volunteer to host an event. Just sayin’.
In any case, I’ve been trying to be fair when giving out the waitlisted slots (made available by not hitting the limit in other divisions). One to you, one to you, one to you, which is the only way that occurred to me as acceptable, because it spreads the lack of wealth. With any luck, someone else will drop a couple of entries tonight and we can accommodate more people, but I’m not counting on it.
On top of that, tomorrow is the first day where registration = get it right by 9:00, have an adult tell me it’s right, we start the tournament. This should be entertaining, but I’m adamant about it. If you’re too dumb to have read the emails about this, you’ll pay the price. I’m not your mother (as my mother used to say, which I have to admit caused a lot of confusion around the house). Clean up your own messes. What will really piss me off is if anyone drops people in the a.m., in slots that others could have picked up.
We’ll see.
Thursday, January 26, 2012
They are out to get us. Unless we are they, in which case, we are out to get you.
I long for the golden age when people would fall off their seats because of this: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OpenCulture/~3/tlde5RNB3Q0/michel_foucault_free_lectures.html I think that was two years ago.
Anyhow, I've enjoyed thinking about the number of topics per year immensely, because the more I think about it, the less I know. I'm trying to organize a little discussion on TVFT about it; stay tuned (if, in fact, you were tuned in the first place). The TOC has announced that it will stick to Jan-Feb this year, but I don't know if there's any deep meaning to be read in that. My sense is that, if the $ircuit had its way, there really would be only a couple of topics a year, but I hesitate to suggest that it must be bad because the $ircuit wants it. That's why I want to extend this dicussion. It's a good one. So far most of it's been in the comments here, in case you missed it.
Speaking of TVFT, we did one last night, Bietzless (although he had said he'd be showing up). We discussed NDCA, and it was rather heated. One of the issues we touched upon was openness, and I think that was the most interesting thing we talked about. No matter how you slice it (said moi), people always seem to think there's something going on behind the scenes in the smoke-filled room of the old boys network. They say it about TOC, CFL, NDCA, and NFL, and they say it about such lowly operations as the MHL and our local traveling tabroom. Some folks have been rather upfront in their idea that our region is run behind closed doors and as an exclusive club of some sort, and we're all pulling the levers to have debate go the way we want, but those same people don't have any actual evidence of it. I neither deny it nor admit to it. (You either trust me or you don't.) Since I tend to blab everything that's going on in my mind in this venue about two minutes after it occurs to me, I will cop to not being exactly behind the door in expressing my opinions and my plans and whatever. But it is the nature of things that an organization comes along, it gets established, and sooner or later new people come along and look at the organization and decide that it needs to be shaken up a bit because the leadership is out of touch or whatever. This is not news. In the world of LD, where there are more people than you can shake the proverbial stick at claiming that some thing they've just discovered is "progressive," and where there is no doubt that the activity changes regularly (or at least it has been in a state of flux ever since I've been doing it), the idea that people look at an organization and want to give it a kick in the pantaloons is pretty predictable. Of course, we always want it to be somebody else's pantaloons. However, with the exception of a few debate coaches who are a little over-competitive, and a few people who resemble the nether portions of your average pony and don't have the wit they were born with, I've always found that this is a group of people who are happy to express their opinions and fairly willing to change them. I don't think I'd still be in it, otherwise.
Anyhow, check out the TVFT podcast. It's a good one. (And I don't say that about all of them...)
Anyhow, I've enjoyed thinking about the number of topics per year immensely, because the more I think about it, the less I know. I'm trying to organize a little discussion on TVFT about it; stay tuned (if, in fact, you were tuned in the first place). The TOC has announced that it will stick to Jan-Feb this year, but I don't know if there's any deep meaning to be read in that. My sense is that, if the $ircuit had its way, there really would be only a couple of topics a year, but I hesitate to suggest that it must be bad because the $ircuit wants it. That's why I want to extend this dicussion. It's a good one. So far most of it's been in the comments here, in case you missed it.
Speaking of TVFT, we did one last night, Bietzless (although he had said he'd be showing up). We discussed NDCA, and it was rather heated. One of the issues we touched upon was openness, and I think that was the most interesting thing we talked about. No matter how you slice it (said moi), people always seem to think there's something going on behind the scenes in the smoke-filled room of the old boys network. They say it about TOC, CFL, NDCA, and NFL, and they say it about such lowly operations as the MHL and our local traveling tabroom. Some folks have been rather upfront in their idea that our region is run behind closed doors and as an exclusive club of some sort, and we're all pulling the levers to have debate go the way we want, but those same people don't have any actual evidence of it. I neither deny it nor admit to it. (You either trust me or you don't.) Since I tend to blab everything that's going on in my mind in this venue about two minutes after it occurs to me, I will cop to not being exactly behind the door in expressing my opinions and my plans and whatever. But it is the nature of things that an organization comes along, it gets established, and sooner or later new people come along and look at the organization and decide that it needs to be shaken up a bit because the leadership is out of touch or whatever. This is not news. In the world of LD, where there are more people than you can shake the proverbial stick at claiming that some thing they've just discovered is "progressive," and where there is no doubt that the activity changes regularly (or at least it has been in a state of flux ever since I've been doing it), the idea that people look at an organization and want to give it a kick in the pantaloons is pretty predictable. Of course, we always want it to be somebody else's pantaloons. However, with the exception of a few debate coaches who are a little over-competitive, and a few people who resemble the nether portions of your average pony and don't have the wit they were born with, I've always found that this is a group of people who are happy to express their opinions and fairly willing to change them. I don't think I'd still be in it, otherwise.
Anyhow, check out the TVFT podcast. It's a good one. (And I don't say that about all of them...)
Monday, January 23, 2012
The Topic Cycle Refuted: In Which Menick Caves?
The problem with people like us (and if you’re reading this for any other reason than to remind yourself why you like to be pissed off at me, then you are one of us) is that we like to argue about everything, and as often as not don’t have terrifically grounded opinions, so we’re willing not only to listen to the opposition but to change our minds. I love throwing a few shots across the bow to see who salutes. Sometimes I wish to take no prisoners and go down in flames if necessary. At other times, well, we’ll see where the chips may fall. This is one of those times.
The thing is, I’m in a position of some authority when it comes to choice of resolutions. I’m the person who pushed for the Modest Novice, which has now been institutionalized in our circuit, where we start off novices with the same topic every year from Sept through Nov. The argument for this was primarily to guarantee an inherently good starter topic; additionally, over time, since upperclassmen would themselves have been trained on this topic, we would create a built-in legacy system. The chief objection at the time was that this meant multiple topics at tournaments, and somehow this would be unmanageable, but after the years we’ve been doing it, that has never been a problem. Keep in mind that the flow of LD judges to cover occasional PF rounds has become pretty regular, and on the judging end, complaints that there’s too many topics to follow just don’t come up. That would be like watching the news and complaining that it wasn’t all about Newt Gingrich. This world view has Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum and even Ron Paul. That way, you can complain about all of them.
So when I wrote about the resolutions going every two months, I won’t say that it’s a do or die for me. Honestly, I think my logic (which was not really expressed in the article) was that we have a resolution every two months, so let’s just use it, unless somebody can explain why there’s a better way. Ryan Miller has decided that I’m talking through my hat, and posted his own ideas on the subject.
Here’s the link to Ryan’s article: http://buckinghaminquirer.blogspot.com/2012/01/in-praise-of-fewer-resolutions.html
So, let’s see…
---
In Praise of Fewer Resolutions
Because Jim Menick is wrong on the internet, I feel compelled to respond. Jim seems to think that we should go back to prepping 5-7 resolutions a year in LD, because prepping resolutions has value and it makes bad resolutions go by more quickly. I'll answer on the line by line and then offer a counterplan with net benefits.
Well, really it’s 4 resolutions plus Nats, which is a little less than 7 but could be construed as 5, if you go to NatNats. Anyhow, I'm always right and I never lie, so let's get over this Jim Menick is wrong idea. Jeesh!
1a: If practicing resolutional prep is a good thing, then it can better be achieved by a single tournament of parliamentary/legislative debate or extemp than a whole season of old-school LD or even modern PF, so the status quo solves.
Only true if you somehow think all debate is the same. It shouldn't be. If LD and extemp and PF and parli are interchangeable in form, then we're misconstruing LD and extemp and PF and parli.
1b: There's less of a discontinuity between prepping new arguments on a resolution and prepping a new resolution than Jim thinks. Killing one to save many/vigilantes/civil disobedience/response to domestic abuse all have deeply overlapping ground--often moreso than various cases on the same topic, which are written precisely to avoid common objections and thus need to trace out new approaches. This might even be a turn since there's a time tradeoff between adapting old arguments to new resolutions (with observations and link evidence) and understanding new philosophical approaches (e.g. virtue ethics).
Well, what's your rush? More to the point, I think the great ethical questions facing humanity may be better understood by applying them to a lot of different things. Much of a muchness in our thinking here, though, I think.
1c: Frequently changing resolutions advantage those who can perfect truly generic ground like kritiks or micropolitics. They don't experience the disadvantage of new resolutions, and those who actually prepare for the new resolutions don't have enough time to write good answers to the generics.
You might have a point here. But there's always been a substratum of debaters who will do anything they can not to debate a topic. This is probably non-unique.
1d: Frequently changing resolutions was an adaptation to a world where absent a summer camp in a university library, finding new angles on an existing resolution was very difficult (note how evidence poor LD cases were in the nineties). The internet solves this.
I'd need to see your evidence on this. My guess is that it was a direct response to the annual nature of the policy rez, and an attempt to keep LD different. And anyhow, if this were true, why did the policy people all have 5 tubs? Merely because the resolution didn't change? Wedro used to bring evidence on everything from Kant to Shinola, for that matter.
2a: Bad resolutions might go by more quickly, but if those resolutions are the chosen ones for States/TOC/NFL/CFL, they have just as much impact.
The impact of these 4 examples are radically different. A state topic is local and affects only some in that state. The impact of TOC is fairly toxic in a variety of ways, and is overwhelming in convincing people that they have to do certain things to debate at the "top" level. This presumes TOC style debate is the top. Whatever, but the influence of the event is overwhelming. The NFL influence is passive aggressive at best in that they create all the topics but not everyone believes in the organization as a standard setter. And the effect of the CFL topic is usually limited to Catholics, who on hearing the resolution for a given year, start to consider once again if they wouldn't be better off if they converted to Lutheranism. Anyhow, if all these groups just went with the NFL topics in the first place, the point is moot.
2b: Resolutional quality isn't endogenous to resolutional quantity. The wording committee only has so much time to work, and proposal quality would also go up if there were fewer proposals needed (see: policy). This turns the argument.
No. The quality of the resolutions is not in question. This is a separate issue altogether. That's why I don't want to conflate the particular Jan-Feb with this discussion. Whether NFL can do a better job of creating resolutions stands whether there's one of a hundred.
2c: More resolutions advantage large squads and those with large budgets. Small squads with poor connections to the alumni coaching network need to attend a circuit tournament before they even know what is going to be run on a resolution, and with the resolution changing every two months that means they need to attend one every month. For resolutions that are basically only run once, such squads get completely blindsided by those who can do a lot of brainstorming and scrimmages.
That seems true to me, but at the same time, what doesn't advantage the large squad over the small? Your point above about generic kritik responses sound to me like the small squad circuit debater's response to this. Anyhow, I'm not advocating running anything once; that was mere reminiscing. Two months is pretty long in debate years.
Counterplan: LD should have two resolutions a year, one released August fifteenth and the other December first. Resolutions should be drawn from a very long list which has five added to it every June by the topic committee. Advantages:
1. The list can grow very long (a hundred?), thus making current prep on the entire list infeasible for even very large teams, and lowering the edge provided by going to a summer camp which luckily picked an important topic (and the resentment from paying a lot of money to a camp which failed to do so). This also means that resolutions will tend to spend a long time on the list before being picked, allowing campaigns against those with poor or offensive wording.
I like the idea of giving people an opportunity to think about things over a long term. We essentially agreed to that on TVFT. We move too fast, and over the summer, no less. Not good.
1b. This basically sets LD up as a logistically constrained version of policy, which has all the advantages of policy debate theory, but without the semi-mandatory camp and evidence burden and requirement for a partner. As I've argued previously, affirmative parametrics will solve for negative win skew. This is analogous to off-season-practice rules for sports, but without the enforcement hassles.
Could be...
2. Gets rid of the most important driver for modest novice (that novices can't be expected to debate a new resolution on their second or third tournament) without triggering the harms of modest novice (small squads and those on the edge of the service area are burdened with prepping yet another resolution).
True enough, but actually the biggest MN driver was avoiding giving novices a random (and crappy) resolution that was not beneficial for novitiate training.
3. Debate quality improves for the Glenbrooks, Blake, Apple Valley, and Princeton just as it has for TOC vs NFL and CFL. The quality of debate has gone up tremendously since the nineties, except for those tournaments which insist on vanity resolutions and random judging. This is not random.
I see no proof of this in-case. Pure assertion. (I love saying that.)
All of that said, I am nonetheless rather intrigued by the idea of two topics, especially given the long brooding process. One of my chief objections to certain topics over the years has been that one or two words in the rez make it unacceptable or hard to debate, and time would heal that wound. In the modern world, we essentially only have 3 topics a year anyhow—Sept-Oct, Nov-Dec, and Jan-TOC. And there is privileging via camps that could be addressed. Of course, how do you do anything about this? Well, perhaps some November tournaments simply run Sept-Oct and do it de facto if not de NFLo. I don't know.
We'll probably end up discussing this on TVFT.
The thing is, I’m in a position of some authority when it comes to choice of resolutions. I’m the person who pushed for the Modest Novice, which has now been institutionalized in our circuit, where we start off novices with the same topic every year from Sept through Nov. The argument for this was primarily to guarantee an inherently good starter topic; additionally, over time, since upperclassmen would themselves have been trained on this topic, we would create a built-in legacy system. The chief objection at the time was that this meant multiple topics at tournaments, and somehow this would be unmanageable, but after the years we’ve been doing it, that has never been a problem. Keep in mind that the flow of LD judges to cover occasional PF rounds has become pretty regular, and on the judging end, complaints that there’s too many topics to follow just don’t come up. That would be like watching the news and complaining that it wasn’t all about Newt Gingrich. This world view has Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum and even Ron Paul. That way, you can complain about all of them.
So when I wrote about the resolutions going every two months, I won’t say that it’s a do or die for me. Honestly, I think my logic (which was not really expressed in the article) was that we have a resolution every two months, so let’s just use it, unless somebody can explain why there’s a better way. Ryan Miller has decided that I’m talking through my hat, and posted his own ideas on the subject.
Here’s the link to Ryan’s article: http://buckinghaminquirer.blogspot.com/2012/01/in-praise-of-fewer-resolutions.html
So, let’s see…
---
In Praise of Fewer Resolutions
Because Jim Menick is wrong on the internet, I feel compelled to respond. Jim seems to think that we should go back to prepping 5-7 resolutions a year in LD, because prepping resolutions has value and it makes bad resolutions go by more quickly. I'll answer on the line by line and then offer a counterplan with net benefits.
Well, really it’s 4 resolutions plus Nats, which is a little less than 7 but could be construed as 5, if you go to NatNats. Anyhow, I'm always right and I never lie, so let's get over this Jim Menick is wrong idea. Jeesh!
1a: If practicing resolutional prep is a good thing, then it can better be achieved by a single tournament of parliamentary/legislative debate or extemp than a whole season of old-school LD or even modern PF, so the status quo solves.
Only true if you somehow think all debate is the same. It shouldn't be. If LD and extemp and PF and parli are interchangeable in form, then we're misconstruing LD and extemp and PF and parli.
1b: There's less of a discontinuity between prepping new arguments on a resolution and prepping a new resolution than Jim thinks. Killing one to save many/vigilantes/civil disobedience/response to domestic abuse all have deeply overlapping ground--often moreso than various cases on the same topic, which are written precisely to avoid common objections and thus need to trace out new approaches. This might even be a turn since there's a time tradeoff between adapting old arguments to new resolutions (with observations and link evidence) and understanding new philosophical approaches (e.g. virtue ethics).
Well, what's your rush? More to the point, I think the great ethical questions facing humanity may be better understood by applying them to a lot of different things. Much of a muchness in our thinking here, though, I think.
1c: Frequently changing resolutions advantage those who can perfect truly generic ground like kritiks or micropolitics. They don't experience the disadvantage of new resolutions, and those who actually prepare for the new resolutions don't have enough time to write good answers to the generics.
You might have a point here. But there's always been a substratum of debaters who will do anything they can not to debate a topic. This is probably non-unique.
1d: Frequently changing resolutions was an adaptation to a world where absent a summer camp in a university library, finding new angles on an existing resolution was very difficult (note how evidence poor LD cases were in the nineties). The internet solves this.
I'd need to see your evidence on this. My guess is that it was a direct response to the annual nature of the policy rez, and an attempt to keep LD different. And anyhow, if this were true, why did the policy people all have 5 tubs? Merely because the resolution didn't change? Wedro used to bring evidence on everything from Kant to Shinola, for that matter.
2a: Bad resolutions might go by more quickly, but if those resolutions are the chosen ones for States/TOC/NFL/CFL, they have just as much impact.
The impact of these 4 examples are radically different. A state topic is local and affects only some in that state. The impact of TOC is fairly toxic in a variety of ways, and is overwhelming in convincing people that they have to do certain things to debate at the "top" level. This presumes TOC style debate is the top. Whatever, but the influence of the event is overwhelming. The NFL influence is passive aggressive at best in that they create all the topics but not everyone believes in the organization as a standard setter. And the effect of the CFL topic is usually limited to Catholics, who on hearing the resolution for a given year, start to consider once again if they wouldn't be better off if they converted to Lutheranism. Anyhow, if all these groups just went with the NFL topics in the first place, the point is moot.
2b: Resolutional quality isn't endogenous to resolutional quantity. The wording committee only has so much time to work, and proposal quality would also go up if there were fewer proposals needed (see: policy). This turns the argument.
No. The quality of the resolutions is not in question. This is a separate issue altogether. That's why I don't want to conflate the particular Jan-Feb with this discussion. Whether NFL can do a better job of creating resolutions stands whether there's one of a hundred.
2c: More resolutions advantage large squads and those with large budgets. Small squads with poor connections to the alumni coaching network need to attend a circuit tournament before they even know what is going to be run on a resolution, and with the resolution changing every two months that means they need to attend one every month. For resolutions that are basically only run once, such squads get completely blindsided by those who can do a lot of brainstorming and scrimmages.
That seems true to me, but at the same time, what doesn't advantage the large squad over the small? Your point above about generic kritik responses sound to me like the small squad circuit debater's response to this. Anyhow, I'm not advocating running anything once; that was mere reminiscing. Two months is pretty long in debate years.
Counterplan: LD should have two resolutions a year, one released August fifteenth and the other December first. Resolutions should be drawn from a very long list which has five added to it every June by the topic committee. Advantages:
1. The list can grow very long (a hundred?), thus making current prep on the entire list infeasible for even very large teams, and lowering the edge provided by going to a summer camp which luckily picked an important topic (and the resentment from paying a lot of money to a camp which failed to do so). This also means that resolutions will tend to spend a long time on the list before being picked, allowing campaigns against those with poor or offensive wording.
I like the idea of giving people an opportunity to think about things over a long term. We essentially agreed to that on TVFT. We move too fast, and over the summer, no less. Not good.
1b. This basically sets LD up as a logistically constrained version of policy, which has all the advantages of policy debate theory, but without the semi-mandatory camp and evidence burden and requirement for a partner. As I've argued previously, affirmative parametrics will solve for negative win skew. This is analogous to off-season-practice rules for sports, but without the enforcement hassles.
Could be...
2. Gets rid of the most important driver for modest novice (that novices can't be expected to debate a new resolution on their second or third tournament) without triggering the harms of modest novice (small squads and those on the edge of the service area are burdened with prepping yet another resolution).
True enough, but actually the biggest MN driver was avoiding giving novices a random (and crappy) resolution that was not beneficial for novitiate training.
3. Debate quality improves for the Glenbrooks, Blake, Apple Valley, and Princeton just as it has for TOC vs NFL and CFL. The quality of debate has gone up tremendously since the nineties, except for those tournaments which insist on vanity resolutions and random judging. This is not random.
I see no proof of this in-case. Pure assertion. (I love saying that.)
All of that said, I am nonetheless rather intrigued by the idea of two topics, especially given the long brooding process. One of my chief objections to certain topics over the years has been that one or two words in the rez make it unacceptable or hard to debate, and time would heal that wound. In the modern world, we essentially only have 3 topics a year anyhow—Sept-Oct, Nov-Dec, and Jan-TOC. And there is privileging via camps that could be addressed. Of course, how do you do anything about this? Well, perhaps some November tournaments simply run Sept-Oct and do it de facto if not de NFLo. I don't know.
We'll probably end up discussing this on TVFT.
Friday, January 20, 2012
The Topic Cycle
I’ve made my feelings known about Jan-Feb on TVFT, and to some extent here. I’m agin’ it. I measure the possibility of harm against the magnitude of the harm, and I find the math unacceptable. My job is to educate students about various ethical subjects against the backdrop of competitive debate; I am ill equipped to engage myself in handling the problems they may be encountering in their personal lives, and I certainly do not want, inadvertently or otherwise, to make any of those problems worse.
I’m less certain about how to handle it, though. We had this topic in the past and it flew right over my head, and the heads of most other forensicians. What has changed? Probably nothing, except that this time we saw the light (or dark) and that time we didn’t. So it goes. Because it got by us the first time doesn’t warrant using it the second time. As we agreed on TVFT, there is no blame for anyone here, from the committee to the community. (We distinguished this one from the hideous ill-informed Muslim center PF topic, which as a political wedge issue was beneath contempt as a subject for intelligent discussion, and worse, a direct harm to the Muslims in our community, who would have no choice but to defend a position claiming that their right of free speech ought to be abridged for no other reason than their religion. That one was dead on arrival. And the NFL should have known better.)
The solutions to handling the resolution have ranged, but one thing that has come up is the idea of not continuing to debate it past the theoretical normal end of its cycle. In other words, at the very least, let it go away on its expiration date. That is a proposal before the NDCA now for their national tournament, and one that I will put before the NYSDCA for our state event. But that raises another question, and while I have been separating that other question from the content discussion of this particular topic, I still think it’s worth thinking about. To wit, why the hell do we stop changing topics after the turn of the new year? I mean, I know the answer, but it’s a dumb one, and we should rethink this question, regardless of the content of any given topic, at the macro level.
Back when I started in this activity (during the Buchanan administration, if I remember correctly), we had a Sept-Oct topic, a Big Bronx topic, a Nov-Dec, a Jan-Feb, a Mar-Apr, a NY State Finals, a CFL Finals and an NFL Finals topic. I would regularly be prepping 6 topics, in other words, and occasionally 7 or 8. If there was something wrong with a topic, you waited a minute and there was the next one, and you moved along. All of which raises the question, was it a good thing to have this many topics? I think yes. Or at least I think it was mostly yes. The more parochial a topic would get, i.e., the smaller the group selecting it, the less likely it was really all that good, but by that standard the NFL topics, at least, were usually quite acceptable, and we had all voted on them straight up, and there you were.
If you followed the NFL exclusively, you debated probably 4 different topics over the space of a year, about two months per. You got as far as you could go in two months, and then you moved along. In policy, on the other hand, one topic lasts all year. One can qualitatively compare the nature of the two beasts by comparing the quantitative depth achievable over the different life spans. A policy topic has to be deep, and it has to have a year’s worth of analysis in it. Every day new research will bring up new stuff, and over the space of a year cases will come and go as the world changes and cases hit the public awareness and new blocks are developed, et cetera, et cetera. The same holds true in LD, but only for a couple of months. Then it starts all over again. (And keep in mind that some of the logic informing PF’s one-month span is precisely to restart the process every few weeks, to prevent the deep sea research diving and twisty-turny-theory arcs of a longer span.)
I like the change of topics. I like that students will get a new subject to dig into every couple of months. I can see the value of one topic dug into all year, but if that’s what you want to do, take up policy. The problem is, for reasons I do not know, but which I expect were predicated on the policy bias of the TOC folks at the time—which meant that here was a group of people raised on a year of a given topic who looked at LD and said, wouldn’t it be great if we just used the Jan-Feb topic, to get all the benefits of depth we know will ensue?—TOC instituted using Jan-Feb in May. Which is fine and dandy, but now, everybody does it. You can’t run a tournament in March or April and use anything but the Jan-Feb topic (aside, of course, from District tournaments and the odd CFL qualifier).
Does this make sense? Well, if we’re looking at every tournament in the universe after Jan 1 as prep for the TOC, it would, except I have a sneaking suspicion that the majority of people who do LD after Jan 1 of a given year aren’t going to TOC. Another issue is that people believe that students don’t want to write cases on a new topic after March 1, so we say okay, and let them keep going with what they have, even in novice divisions. Of course novices don’t need experience writing cases on new resolutions; however could anyone have ever believed that? (This paragraph, by the way, is dripping with sarcasm. If you didn't realize that, you need to readjust your sarcasometer.)
What I think we need to do is look at the question on its own merits. Should we switch topics ever two months? If it makes sense in November and January, why doesn’t it make sense in March? Because TOC does it? If, as my mother used to say, TOC jumps off a bridge, are you going to do it too? Because it’s work? Are we saying that our poor little students shouldn’t have to write cases? That sort of presumes that all those TOC people write a case on Jan 1 and then stop, and, uh, that’s not true.
Changing topics regularly is good educationally. Not changing topics offers no educational benefit over changing topics (aside, perhaps, of allowing students to concentrate on class work rather than debate). We should seriously reevaluate what we’re doing with late season tournaments.
I’m less certain about how to handle it, though. We had this topic in the past and it flew right over my head, and the heads of most other forensicians. What has changed? Probably nothing, except that this time we saw the light (or dark) and that time we didn’t. So it goes. Because it got by us the first time doesn’t warrant using it the second time. As we agreed on TVFT, there is no blame for anyone here, from the committee to the community. (We distinguished this one from the hideous ill-informed Muslim center PF topic, which as a political wedge issue was beneath contempt as a subject for intelligent discussion, and worse, a direct harm to the Muslims in our community, who would have no choice but to defend a position claiming that their right of free speech ought to be abridged for no other reason than their religion. That one was dead on arrival. And the NFL should have known better.)
The solutions to handling the resolution have ranged, but one thing that has come up is the idea of not continuing to debate it past the theoretical normal end of its cycle. In other words, at the very least, let it go away on its expiration date. That is a proposal before the NDCA now for their national tournament, and one that I will put before the NYSDCA for our state event. But that raises another question, and while I have been separating that other question from the content discussion of this particular topic, I still think it’s worth thinking about. To wit, why the hell do we stop changing topics after the turn of the new year? I mean, I know the answer, but it’s a dumb one, and we should rethink this question, regardless of the content of any given topic, at the macro level.
Back when I started in this activity (during the Buchanan administration, if I remember correctly), we had a Sept-Oct topic, a Big Bronx topic, a Nov-Dec, a Jan-Feb, a Mar-Apr, a NY State Finals, a CFL Finals and an NFL Finals topic. I would regularly be prepping 6 topics, in other words, and occasionally 7 or 8. If there was something wrong with a topic, you waited a minute and there was the next one, and you moved along. All of which raises the question, was it a good thing to have this many topics? I think yes. Or at least I think it was mostly yes. The more parochial a topic would get, i.e., the smaller the group selecting it, the less likely it was really all that good, but by that standard the NFL topics, at least, were usually quite acceptable, and we had all voted on them straight up, and there you were.
If you followed the NFL exclusively, you debated probably 4 different topics over the space of a year, about two months per. You got as far as you could go in two months, and then you moved along. In policy, on the other hand, one topic lasts all year. One can qualitatively compare the nature of the two beasts by comparing the quantitative depth achievable over the different life spans. A policy topic has to be deep, and it has to have a year’s worth of analysis in it. Every day new research will bring up new stuff, and over the space of a year cases will come and go as the world changes and cases hit the public awareness and new blocks are developed, et cetera, et cetera. The same holds true in LD, but only for a couple of months. Then it starts all over again. (And keep in mind that some of the logic informing PF’s one-month span is precisely to restart the process every few weeks, to prevent the deep sea research diving and twisty-turny-theory arcs of a longer span.)
I like the change of topics. I like that students will get a new subject to dig into every couple of months. I can see the value of one topic dug into all year, but if that’s what you want to do, take up policy. The problem is, for reasons I do not know, but which I expect were predicated on the policy bias of the TOC folks at the time—which meant that here was a group of people raised on a year of a given topic who looked at LD and said, wouldn’t it be great if we just used the Jan-Feb topic, to get all the benefits of depth we know will ensue?—TOC instituted using Jan-Feb in May. Which is fine and dandy, but now, everybody does it. You can’t run a tournament in March or April and use anything but the Jan-Feb topic (aside, of course, from District tournaments and the odd CFL qualifier).
Does this make sense? Well, if we’re looking at every tournament in the universe after Jan 1 as prep for the TOC, it would, except I have a sneaking suspicion that the majority of people who do LD after Jan 1 of a given year aren’t going to TOC. Another issue is that people believe that students don’t want to write cases on a new topic after March 1, so we say okay, and let them keep going with what they have, even in novice divisions. Of course novices don’t need experience writing cases on new resolutions; however could anyone have ever believed that? (This paragraph, by the way, is dripping with sarcasm. If you didn't realize that, you need to readjust your sarcasometer.)
What I think we need to do is look at the question on its own merits. Should we switch topics ever two months? If it makes sense in November and January, why doesn’t it make sense in March? Because TOC does it? If, as my mother used to say, TOC jumps off a bridge, are you going to do it too? Because it’s work? Are we saying that our poor little students shouldn’t have to write cases? That sort of presumes that all those TOC people write a case on Jan 1 and then stop, and, uh, that’s not true.
Changing topics regularly is good educationally. Not changing topics offers no educational benefit over changing topics (aside, perhaps, of allowing students to concentrate on class work rather than debate). We should seriously reevaluate what we’re doing with late season tournaments.
Thursday, January 19, 2012
A Note to the Connoisseurs of Exquisite Differentiation
Ah, you aesthete, you. Your palate is so refined, I can only envy you. Whereas the average schlub on the street is lucky to know the difference between a link turn and a link sausage, you on the other hand can differentiate between a 26.2 and a 26.3 on the speaker scale using tenths of a point.
Do you extend your pinky when you are writing your ballot?
Okay, I may be wrong about this, but members of the VCA, knowing my track record of (admitted) wrongness, realize that I’m only saying that in case the Mayans were right and 2012 is the end of the world and I’m going to want to sing “Kumbaya” with people on the other side of the question as the earth falls into the sea and I won’t want this hanging over our heads in those last few moments. The thing is, I’ve seen too many studies that absolutely disprove that people could possibly rank speeches on a scale of 1 to 100. Or 1 to 50. 1 to 20 is out of reach. 1 to 10? Good luck.
Here’s the deal. The average person, given choices, is able to discriminate about 7 of them. There’s variation of course, but not much. If you give people too many choices, they balk. In marketing, either they don’t buy your product, or they default to the simplest option. Any wonder why vanilla is the top selling flavor at Baskin Robbins? Even been in a restaurant and someone looks at the menu and says, “There’s too many choices”? Ever felt that way yourself? Marketers use choice to set up a paradigm that their product offerings are diverse and full and rich, not because they expect to sell all those products. It’s the cost of doing business. But you don’t want to be overwhelming, so you provide defaults. Whole Foods has 17 kinds of tomatillos; most people just buy the basic cherry tomatoes.
Even if you don’t buy that (a phrase that, when uttered in debate, makes me want to throw a desk at the speaker), in LD we have a solid, time-honored history of inability to create a decent speaker point scale. Because we have no objective criteria on which to make the measurement, it becomes entirely subjective. This is why I like the breakdown of win the tournament / definitely break / might break / shouldn’t break / needs work. Those are fairly definitive gestalts of a performance that can be roughly agreed to. When I’m talking to PF parent judges before a tournament, I tell them to use a grading scale like they learned in school, A, B, C, D, F. Add maybe a tiny gradation, and there’s your 7. People can handle that.
But a hundred point scale? It’s hard enough to separate a 29 from a 28, but you want to tell me you can differentiate a 28.1, a 28.2, a 28.3, a 28.4, a 28.5, a 28.6, a 28.7, a 28.8 and a 29.9 as well? Not to mention 29.1, 27.9, 29.2, 27.8, etc., etc., etc.
On top of this, the norm is not to assign the same amount of points. No ties. But there can still be low point wins? My mind doesn’t boggle, it literally falls out of its resting spot and onto the floor, where the cat chases it around until it gets lost under the closet door.
Get real, people. You may like to stick out your pinky and explain in excruciating detail why you can tell the difference between a male and a female fly at 200 yards in the dark while blindfolded (you, not the fly), but I know better. Tenths of a point? You can barely handle showing up within half an hour of the posted round start time, and as often as not you have so little idea what happened in the round that you have to read the cases. And that, indeed, is a 28.8?
Jeesh.
Do you extend your pinky when you are writing your ballot?
Okay, I may be wrong about this, but members of the VCA, knowing my track record of (admitted) wrongness, realize that I’m only saying that in case the Mayans were right and 2012 is the end of the world and I’m going to want to sing “Kumbaya” with people on the other side of the question as the earth falls into the sea and I won’t want this hanging over our heads in those last few moments. The thing is, I’ve seen too many studies that absolutely disprove that people could possibly rank speeches on a scale of 1 to 100. Or 1 to 50. 1 to 20 is out of reach. 1 to 10? Good luck.
Here’s the deal. The average person, given choices, is able to discriminate about 7 of them. There’s variation of course, but not much. If you give people too many choices, they balk. In marketing, either they don’t buy your product, or they default to the simplest option. Any wonder why vanilla is the top selling flavor at Baskin Robbins? Even been in a restaurant and someone looks at the menu and says, “There’s too many choices”? Ever felt that way yourself? Marketers use choice to set up a paradigm that their product offerings are diverse and full and rich, not because they expect to sell all those products. It’s the cost of doing business. But you don’t want to be overwhelming, so you provide defaults. Whole Foods has 17 kinds of tomatillos; most people just buy the basic cherry tomatoes.
Even if you don’t buy that (a phrase that, when uttered in debate, makes me want to throw a desk at the speaker), in LD we have a solid, time-honored history of inability to create a decent speaker point scale. Because we have no objective criteria on which to make the measurement, it becomes entirely subjective. This is why I like the breakdown of win the tournament / definitely break / might break / shouldn’t break / needs work. Those are fairly definitive gestalts of a performance that can be roughly agreed to. When I’m talking to PF parent judges before a tournament, I tell them to use a grading scale like they learned in school, A, B, C, D, F. Add maybe a tiny gradation, and there’s your 7. People can handle that.
But a hundred point scale? It’s hard enough to separate a 29 from a 28, but you want to tell me you can differentiate a 28.1, a 28.2, a 28.3, a 28.4, a 28.5, a 28.6, a 28.7, a 28.8 and a 29.9 as well? Not to mention 29.1, 27.9, 29.2, 27.8, etc., etc., etc.
On top of this, the norm is not to assign the same amount of points. No ties. But there can still be low point wins? My mind doesn’t boggle, it literally falls out of its resting spot and onto the floor, where the cat chases it around until it gets lost under the closet door.
Get real, people. You may like to stick out your pinky and explain in excruciating detail why you can tell the difference between a male and a female fly at 200 yards in the dark while blindfolded (you, not the fly), but I know better. Tenths of a point? You can barely handle showing up within half an hour of the posted round start time, and as often as not you have so little idea what happened in the round that you have to read the cases. And that, indeed, is a 28.8?
Jeesh.
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Lexwegian Adventure
Just when you think you’ve seen it all, good old TRPC throws you screwball.
This last weekend was Bigle X. Normally I do novice LD, but to tell you the truth, that’s sort of a snoozer, and I managed to get myself seconded to PF instead. I was working with Sarah Donnelly, who is not terribly familiar with TRPC. In the beginning she read and I input, and then we switched things around so that she’d get a feel for things, especially setting up break rounds.
Life was going swimmingly until round 5. We entered the results, printed up the check sheet and paired round 6, and prepared to goof off during the subsequent double flight. But then our checker handed us a mistake. And then another. And another. For all practical purposes, while the winners and losers were all correct, and the points for each side we totaled correctly, each individual’s points had been switched. For every single team. (Fortunately, since the totals and wins were accurate, the 6th round pairing was unaffected.)
Well, sez I, I guess that can happen, although I’ve never seen it before. We had printed the “other” PF ballots, not the Harvard ballot, so the names were often switched, so maybe that was it. (And I'm pretty sure I was the culprit here, not my poor apprentice.) We entered them again, carefully, correctly. We printed up another check sheet. It was no different from the first sheet. Then we just started entering and checking ourselves. If you entered results, no matter what, they didn't take.
Could the choice of ballots have affected the results? I can’t imagine how, because ballots are an output function that shouldn’t have bearing on input, but maybe that’s it. At this point CP joined the fray and we looked for the data file with round 5 results, and lo and behold, it didn’t exist. Oh joy. Oh rapture. The good news was, we could go into the contestant cards—each and every one of them—and make the corrections, and this time, they took.
I would suggest that Sarah got her baptism by fire. So did I, for that matter. Needless to say, we doublechecked the round 6 ballots thoroughly, but these were fine, and everything went back to normal in the elims.
As I say, every now and then TRPC has a surprise for you, even in a version you’ve used many times. Tim Averill, who was chivvying up the parents in the judges' lounge for us, likes to update to new versions like an Apple fanboy chasing iPhones, but I prefer to stick with one that works unless there’s some wonderful feature we’re missing and have to have. I don’t believe that tenths of a point is that feature, but that’s a subject for another day.
In other Lexington news, there were no exciting events worth reporting. One judge fell asleep in a round and was reported to us, but we knew this judge well and explained to the teams involved that they were no more likely to get a good decision if the judge were awake, and that they shouldn’t worry about it. Otherwise, everyone showed up, we made nice panels in elims especially in the bid round, and there wasn’t a blizzard, an ice storm or a plague of locusts. What more could you ask of a tournament?
This last weekend was Bigle X. Normally I do novice LD, but to tell you the truth, that’s sort of a snoozer, and I managed to get myself seconded to PF instead. I was working with Sarah Donnelly, who is not terribly familiar with TRPC. In the beginning she read and I input, and then we switched things around so that she’d get a feel for things, especially setting up break rounds.
Life was going swimmingly until round 5. We entered the results, printed up the check sheet and paired round 6, and prepared to goof off during the subsequent double flight. But then our checker handed us a mistake. And then another. And another. For all practical purposes, while the winners and losers were all correct, and the points for each side we totaled correctly, each individual’s points had been switched. For every single team. (Fortunately, since the totals and wins were accurate, the 6th round pairing was unaffected.)
Well, sez I, I guess that can happen, although I’ve never seen it before. We had printed the “other” PF ballots, not the Harvard ballot, so the names were often switched, so maybe that was it. (And I'm pretty sure I was the culprit here, not my poor apprentice.) We entered them again, carefully, correctly. We printed up another check sheet. It was no different from the first sheet. Then we just started entering and checking ourselves. If you entered results, no matter what, they didn't take.
Could the choice of ballots have affected the results? I can’t imagine how, because ballots are an output function that shouldn’t have bearing on input, but maybe that’s it. At this point CP joined the fray and we looked for the data file with round 5 results, and lo and behold, it didn’t exist. Oh joy. Oh rapture. The good news was, we could go into the contestant cards—each and every one of them—and make the corrections, and this time, they took.
I would suggest that Sarah got her baptism by fire. So did I, for that matter. Needless to say, we doublechecked the round 6 ballots thoroughly, but these were fine, and everything went back to normal in the elims.
As I say, every now and then TRPC has a surprise for you, even in a version you’ve used many times. Tim Averill, who was chivvying up the parents in the judges' lounge for us, likes to update to new versions like an Apple fanboy chasing iPhones, but I prefer to stick with one that works unless there’s some wonderful feature we’re missing and have to have. I don’t believe that tenths of a point is that feature, but that’s a subject for another day.
In other Lexington news, there were no exciting events worth reporting. One judge fell asleep in a round and was reported to us, but we knew this judge well and explained to the teams involved that they were no more likely to get a good decision if the judge were awake, and that they shouldn’t worry about it. Otherwise, everyone showed up, we made nice panels in elims especially in the bid round, and there wasn’t a blizzard, an ice storm or a plague of locusts. What more could you ask of a tournament?
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
By the way, translation: "I'll be right back" = He wanders off for at least 10 minutes
I think I’m turning into an ogre. It used to be that when people annoyed me with idiotic nonsense, I simply ignored them. Now my instinctive reaction is to engage them. This serves no purpose. People whose ignorance expresses itself in hostility are hardly going to become enlightened and gentle upon encountering the brilliance and clarity of my ripostes. In fact, it just encourages them to develop their ignorance in that forge of their hostility, while I just get progressively more hostile myself. Not good. The solution is for me to remember to ignore things that need to be ignored, and let it go at that. I can’t fix them, so why bother? Sometimes it’s hard, though.
Yes, I am working behind the scenes on a tournament, the Gem of Harlem, and people are driving me crazy. I remain amazed at how self-insufficient people can be, and how coaches who have been attending tournaments since the Garfield administration (the President, not the cat) can be so obtuse on the subject of tournament attendance. Oh well. This is the last one of the year like that. College tournaments do tend to attract way too many people, a lot of whom seem to confuse it with a cruise on the Norwegian Princess Line. No, we don’t serve herring in bed. We get them out of bed and then we serve them.
Jeesh.
Last weekend was a small local event that went swimmingly enough. The most interesting thing was putting together a 12-team PF event. After 3 rounds 2 teams from the same school were undefeated, so we byed them in round 4, the first time in a while we’ve byed a team at the top, much less two. But they had already beaten everyone in the 2-1s, or were also from the same school. A double pull-up hardly seemed fair, as it was more than likely to result in a predictable defeat. Fairer rounds were to be found elsewhere, and that’s what we did. But then came the interesting part for tab geeks. After round 4 we had the 2 undefeateds, then 2 3-1s who had already met. One of the 3-1s could have debated an undefeated, but the same school situation literally guaranteed the other 3-1 an elim slot because there was nothing for it but double pull-ups. This didn't seem right. Plus we had a bunch of 2-2s. At first blush we wanted to shut it out and declare it over and go straight to elims because it was so neat, and since every possible fifth round contest was a pull-up. At this point we had to push O’C aside as he had a horse in the race, and Kaz and I sorted it out. With a little snip here and a little tuck there, we managed to get everyone to debate a new singly pulled-up opponent, with the exception of the top 2, who remained byed, and the bottom two, who had debated before and were hence locked on the other side (which makes some sense in the flip-crazy world of PF). I mean, people did come to debate, not to sit around (except for the poor saps who were too good for the room). Interestingly enough, in the fifth round, a 2-2 did rise up to supplant one of the 3-1s, and as a result we had two natural semi rounds that worked beautifully. This is the kind of thing that makes tabbing fun. Most of the time you just click the button and it happens. Here, we shuffled the cards a dozen times. And the result was most pleasing (except, presumably, for the 3-1 team that was pushed out of the running, but that’s hardly a new story in any contest).
On this week to Bigle X with a marvelously full contingent: 1 PF team and 1 novice LDer. We’re going to need a bigger bus!
Yes, I am working behind the scenes on a tournament, the Gem of Harlem, and people are driving me crazy. I remain amazed at how self-insufficient people can be, and how coaches who have been attending tournaments since the Garfield administration (the President, not the cat) can be so obtuse on the subject of tournament attendance. Oh well. This is the last one of the year like that. College tournaments do tend to attract way too many people, a lot of whom seem to confuse it with a cruise on the Norwegian Princess Line. No, we don’t serve herring in bed. We get them out of bed and then we serve them.
Jeesh.
Last weekend was a small local event that went swimmingly enough. The most interesting thing was putting together a 12-team PF event. After 3 rounds 2 teams from the same school were undefeated, so we byed them in round 4, the first time in a while we’ve byed a team at the top, much less two. But they had already beaten everyone in the 2-1s, or were also from the same school. A double pull-up hardly seemed fair, as it was more than likely to result in a predictable defeat. Fairer rounds were to be found elsewhere, and that’s what we did. But then came the interesting part for tab geeks. After round 4 we had the 2 undefeateds, then 2 3-1s who had already met. One of the 3-1s could have debated an undefeated, but the same school situation literally guaranteed the other 3-1 an elim slot because there was nothing for it but double pull-ups. This didn't seem right. Plus we had a bunch of 2-2s. At first blush we wanted to shut it out and declare it over and go straight to elims because it was so neat, and since every possible fifth round contest was a pull-up. At this point we had to push O’C aside as he had a horse in the race, and Kaz and I sorted it out. With a little snip here and a little tuck there, we managed to get everyone to debate a new singly pulled-up opponent, with the exception of the top 2, who remained byed, and the bottom two, who had debated before and were hence locked on the other side (which makes some sense in the flip-crazy world of PF). I mean, people did come to debate, not to sit around (except for the poor saps who were too good for the room). Interestingly enough, in the fifth round, a 2-2 did rise up to supplant one of the 3-1s, and as a result we had two natural semi rounds that worked beautifully. This is the kind of thing that makes tabbing fun. Most of the time you just click the button and it happens. Here, we shuffled the cards a dozen times. And the result was most pleasing (except, presumably, for the 3-1 team that was pushed out of the running, but that’s hardly a new story in any contest).
On this week to Bigle X with a marvelously full contingent: 1 PF team and 1 novice LDer. We’re going to need a bigger bus!
Thursday, January 05, 2012
Your chance to be a Guest Star!!!
We recorded a TVFT last night (sans Palmer), and it's been a long time. One thing we agreed on (we do occasionally agree on things) is that we'd like more people to join us in dialogue about...whatever. In this episode we talk about the warring civilizations of LD, the conservative folks versus the circuit folks. The problem is that rather than work together to create an LD environment that works for all, we tend to entrench at the coachean level, which doesn't really help anybody. A solid discussion leads to a dialect movement towards truth: we can create a synthesis based, first, on commonality. But only if we talk.
If you're interested in being on the podcast, let one of us know via email. All you need is a Skype account and the little microphone headset that came with your smartphone (unless you want to get all Larry King about it and rent a radio studio for the occasion). It's so simple even a child can do it. For that matter, it's so simple even me and Bietz and Cruz and Palmer can do it!
Go for it.
If you're interested in being on the podcast, let one of us know via email. All you need is a Skype account and the little microphone headset that came with your smartphone (unless you want to get all Larry King about it and rent a radio studio for the occasion). It's so simple even a child can do it. For that matter, it's so simple even me and Bietz and Cruz and Palmer can do it!
Go for it.
Wednesday, January 04, 2012
Bad juju
I just got off the phone with the Crowne Plaza people. In addition to having extra Es lying around, which they dispose of willy-nilly, we discovered that I was totally unknown to them. This despite the fact that I had reserved 6 rooms in December for UPenn.
Well, stranger things have happened. I recalled distinctly that the woman I made the reservations with seemed a little… lo-res. And I had never received my email confirmations. What? Me worry? I figured it would sort out.
After we established that I had no reservations for the weekend of the tournament, I made new ones. 5 of them, instead of 6, which is why I was calling in the first place. This was doing fine until I tried to put one in for Panivore Junior. He, as it turned out, in his spalpeen way, already had a reservation. Except he had changed his first name to Nola (“like the city,” as the guy on the phone with the southern accent put it—very Dr. John of him). And lived on Fernwood Street. And his reservation had been made by someone named Jim Manic.
I remember making the reservation, but I hardly seemed manic at the time. In fact, I recall me being my usual mellow self, if you want to know the truth.
Anyhow, when all is sand and dunes, Dr. John and I spent about a half hour sorting this out as his creaky computer (he apparently was using a Commodore 64) kept stumbling around one piece of misinformation after another. But sort it out we did. I now have either 11 or 6 rooms for the Liberty Bell Classic. Sometime in February. Under the name of Sanders.
It’s things like this that keep it real.
Well, stranger things have happened. I recalled distinctly that the woman I made the reservations with seemed a little… lo-res. And I had never received my email confirmations. What? Me worry? I figured it would sort out.
After we established that I had no reservations for the weekend of the tournament, I made new ones. 5 of them, instead of 6, which is why I was calling in the first place. This was doing fine until I tried to put one in for Panivore Junior. He, as it turned out, in his spalpeen way, already had a reservation. Except he had changed his first name to Nola (“like the city,” as the guy on the phone with the southern accent put it—very Dr. John of him). And lived on Fernwood Street. And his reservation had been made by someone named Jim Manic.
I remember making the reservation, but I hardly seemed manic at the time. In fact, I recall me being my usual mellow self, if you want to know the truth.
Anyhow, when all is sand and dunes, Dr. John and I spent about a half hour sorting this out as his creaky computer (he apparently was using a Commodore 64) kept stumbling around one piece of misinformation after another. But sort it out we did. I now have either 11 or 6 rooms for the Liberty Bell Classic. Sometime in February. Under the name of Sanders.
It’s things like this that keep it real.
Tuesday, January 03, 2012
Happy End of the Universe!
It was a peaceful, quiet holiday, vis-Ã -vis forensics. Vis-Ã -vis everything else, for that matter. That’s not a bad thing, once in a while.
We did try to get a TVFT going, but we are becoming progressively more incapable of turning up at the same time as the eons progress. We’re going to try to get back to the Wednesday routine, and I think we’ll put something out even if it’s just me and O’C making Disneyland plans. Of course, we have more important stuff to talk about, to wit, the Jan-Feb resolution. Plenty of people have been talking about this elsewhere, but I have not been one of them. In a way, with such a limited commitment to LD at this point, I feel a little less than involved in the situation. But I have my opinions, and I would like to exercise them a bit with others. CP is strongly planted agin’ it, and I think Bietz was likewise. I want that conversation.
In the world of upcoming, this week is Byram Hills. It’s small and local, so should be simple enough. Then there’s Bigle X, which is always fun, although this time I’m only staying for the main event: no RR for me this year. They’ll have to provide their own beans for the trivia event (if any). On the other hand, it’ll be the first time in decades I’ve had that Sunday and Monday to myself. That will be a treat.
And then there’s the Gem of Harlem. The real problem there has been securing rooms. Without rooms you can’t accept entries, and there’s a lot of people hanging on, waiting to hear. I cleared off all the far-aways who needed plane tix, and have started on the locals mostly by when they entered. I should have a better idea of rooms by the end of this week. Then we can get serious, and even, just maybe, create a schedule.
Then again, this being the year the Mayans are proven right, we could go off into oblivion at any moment. I probably shouldn’t plan too far ahead. Aside from the Disneyland trip, that is. Me and O’C, together again. Set your Twitter feed on stun.
We did try to get a TVFT going, but we are becoming progressively more incapable of turning up at the same time as the eons progress. We’re going to try to get back to the Wednesday routine, and I think we’ll put something out even if it’s just me and O’C making Disneyland plans. Of course, we have more important stuff to talk about, to wit, the Jan-Feb resolution. Plenty of people have been talking about this elsewhere, but I have not been one of them. In a way, with such a limited commitment to LD at this point, I feel a little less than involved in the situation. But I have my opinions, and I would like to exercise them a bit with others. CP is strongly planted agin’ it, and I think Bietz was likewise. I want that conversation.
In the world of upcoming, this week is Byram Hills. It’s small and local, so should be simple enough. Then there’s Bigle X, which is always fun, although this time I’m only staying for the main event: no RR for me this year. They’ll have to provide their own beans for the trivia event (if any). On the other hand, it’ll be the first time in decades I’ve had that Sunday and Monday to myself. That will be a treat.
And then there’s the Gem of Harlem. The real problem there has been securing rooms. Without rooms you can’t accept entries, and there’s a lot of people hanging on, waiting to hear. I cleared off all the far-aways who needed plane tix, and have started on the locals mostly by when they entered. I should have a better idea of rooms by the end of this week. Then we can get serious, and even, just maybe, create a schedule.
Then again, this being the year the Mayans are proven right, we could go off into oblivion at any moment. I probably shouldn’t plan too far ahead. Aside from the Disneyland trip, that is. Me and O’C, together again. Set your Twitter feed on stun.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)