In which we remain retired

My freelance job for the DJ has concluded. I took it on only because they asked, as they needed someone with a fresh style but nonetheless an RD mindset to have at something. As it turned out, I’m not that much of an RD stylist. They have a meatier, pack-it-all-in approach, no doubt as a result of the magazine mentality, whereas I have a slower, more dramatic, let-it-play-out approach, born of my book mentality. I think the work I did for them acted mostly as a structural starter set than anything else. But, hey, it was only a few days and it was sort of fun. And they didn’t threaten to sue me for dereliction of duty, so I guess I didn’t foul it up too badly.

The thing is, having been retired for over a year, I don’t miss the DJ at all (although I do miss a lot of the people). Having started working when I was thirteen, caddying at our local golf courses, I was ready to stop when I tumbled into my seventies. This is not to say that I sit in the rocker all day, as I’ve been doing all my usual tournament stuff (until the pandemic came along) as well as various other bits of business. It’s just that they’ve been my bits of business, writing stories for my granddaughter and archiving my photos in digital format and things like that. Spending more time cooking and getting pretty good at it. Nice long daily walks to keep the blood flowing. Reading what I want to read. It’s interesting, actually. For years I couldn’t imagine retiring, and then one day I was done, and now I can’t imagine working. I have friends my age in various stages of the same. One thing that unites us is keeping our hands into some sort of real labor. They tend to have just one or two workdays a week, or they take on the odd freelance job, while for me it’s tournaments. None of us are doing it for the money (if there’s money in running tournaments I have yet to find out about it), just for the connection. If I didn’t have tournaments I might not have so completely severed the DJ connection. But I do have tournaments, and if anything, they’ve unexpectedly gotten a hell of a lot more interesting lately. 2020-2021 is going to be one hell of a roller coaster ride. 

Anyhow, so much for my little freelance moment. Short, sweet, done. On to the MSDL championships. 

In which we tackle a few odds and ends

I’ve started watching Jessica Jones on Netflix and so far I’m enjoying it. There’s something about both the narrative style and content that strikes me as very comic-bookish in a good way. As I watch it I can envision it playing out on a comics page. Just out of curiosity I went to Wikipedia to check out the heroine’s backstory. Whoa! If all that comes into play it’s going to be hard to keep up. We’ll see. I’ve also been watching The Clone Wars. It has clunky animation and a narrative that plays fast and loose with continuity, but somehow it is mildly addictive. Come to think of it, The Magicians has that same problem with narrative flow. Way too many things happen offscreen, if they happen at all. I’ve put that one on hiatus for a while. Given the almost pointlessness of the drifting plot, I won’t easily lose my place in it. I’ve still got Doctor Who on hiatus as well, come to think of it. When it went off Amazon (or was it Netflix?) I was not happy. I know there’s ways of streaming it again, but I don’t want to sign up for too many services until I’ve run out of content on the ones I already have. Amazon, Netflix, Disney+ and PBS Explore seem to offer more good stuff than I’ll ever be able to watch. I don’t want to replace my old ridiculously high cable bill with a ridiculously high streaming bill.

I recently rearranged my office space, and right now I can see a very yellow butterfly working its way around a light purple spray of flowers outside the glass doors. Used to be all I could see were the spines of my fiction books from C to G. I bring this up because at this moment I’m communicating with Catholic Charlie and Kaz about working spaces as we gird our loins for Massachusetts this weekend. Among the three of us, we seem to have enough tech to launch a cyber attack on three or four rogue nations simultaneously. Whether or not Massachusetts is a rogue nation is debatable. 

Finally, some of the latest additions to the Tab room playlist: lots of Three Dog Night, some Eddie Money who was never on my radar, some of Magical Mystery Tour that I can’t believe wasn’t there in the first place given that the Beatles were added in early, the Walker Brothers, some Nilsson rarities, some Beachboys that I can’t believe [see Magical Mystery Tour], the odd Bill Wyman Rhythm Kings track, a couple of Doors tracks without Jim Morrison, Barenaked Ladies, Elvis P [yeah, I can’t believe etc., etc.], and some Band rarities. 

And that is that. 

In which we face the future

I watched some of the workshops from the NDCA over the weekend. Mostly, of course, I stuck to the ones about tournaments; I don’t have a team, so at least that’s one thing I don’t have to worry about. As the speakers went through their paces, I was struck by one thing most of all: We don’t know anything yet about our covid forensic future. 

What we are undergoing now is a paradigm shift in the classic sense of the phrase. We are finding out that everything we think we know is relatively worthless in the light of present phenomena. The past is no longer prologue. This applies to many, many things, from office work to grocery shopping and everything that underlies those things, be it supply chains or how we consume media. It applies as well to forensics tournaments, and everything that underlies those tournaments, like coaching and training and recruitment and team-building and judging. For decades we have built a paradigm of debate as, first, learning how to do it, and second, doing it competitively once we’ve learned how. All of that needs to be thrown out the window.

One thing remains true: debate ultimately makes smarter people. (Forgive me for isolating debate, because other forensic activities are also strongly, albeit differently, educational. Debate happens to be what I know best of all.) Debate training is a strong educational activity. The thinking skills that are learned through debate can be applied to innumerable other pursuits. The Newark Superintendent’s keynote address said exactly that, and explained why, budgets and pandemics notwithstanding, in the long run he will want more debate, for more age groups, in all his schools. It makes education better on all counts, in all branches of knowledge. That is core, and that is unshakably true.

What the pandemic has just begun to do, and will do more of for at least the coming school year, if not longer, is challenge how we will get to have debate in our schools. It may for some be an existential question. For others, I hope the majority, it is a survivable challenge. And, in a word, creating a digital analog to the pre-covid world is not the answer. You can’t simply take everything you were doing and now do it online. It is not that everything is going to change. It is more that EVERYTHING IS GOING TO CHANGE!!!! Every notion we already have about tournaments, which is my subject in particular, is probably wrong slash inapplicable. It just ain’t the same anymore.

All the processes need to change.

All of them.

This is where the expression “thinking out of the box” comes in. We’ve thrown away the box. Our thinking has to be new. You can’t run rounds the same way, in the same number, for the same people. Online has its own demands. Time and space are redefined. Given that Kant says that the only two a priori facts are, indeed, time and space, you’ve got some big issues here. 

Maybe one-day tournaments take two or three days. 

Maybe weekend tournaments start on Tuesday.

Maybe new divisions need to be created to satisfy possible increased demand once travel costs are eliminated.

Trophies?

Qualifications/bids?

Availability to economically challenged programs? (As Jonathan Alston stongly and correctly pointed out, online tournaments do not solve economic issues, it merely changes them.)

Socializing between teams, both students and coaches? I’ve always loved that tournaments bring different people together in a shared activity. How do virtual tournaments do that? Should they? Can they? 

My point is, the sooner we stop thinking about how to do what we did, and start thinking about how we can do what we can, we’ll be better off. My standard advice to people in the past who wanted to create a new tournament was to ask themselves why, and then to go about creating a tournament that fulfills their goals. On top of that, given my history as a systems manager, I’ve always worked with the idea that we have to give people what they need, and not what they want. As Steve Jobs rightly pointed out, if Apple had dedicated itself to giving people what they wanted, they never would have created the iPhone. If, as tournament directors, we spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to do what we’ve always done, we will accomplish little, and run some pretty punk tournaments along the way. We have to think differently. Outside the box. In a word, we have to set our goals for the virtual tournament universe, and find the best way to achieve those goals. The main thing our goals should be is NOT to replicate what we’ve always done. That just won’t hack it. 

As I’ve said before, I’m hoping that when we come out of this pandemic crisis we will have created a new paradigm of virtual debating that will endure beyond its origins. I’m not saying that we eliminate in-person debate, but that we find a way to add virtual debate to our overall menu in addition to in-person when in-person finally comes back in force. If we can do that successfully, we will, in a word, create more debate. And, as I said earlier, more debate = more and better education. No further reason needs to be given to aim for that particular goal. But in any case, the time has come to realize that the paradigm shift is here. Throw out the old paradigms. They won’t do you any good anymore. They’re based on a reality that doesn’t exist. We are in a new reality.

Deal with it. 

In which we do some book reports

The latest upgrade to MacOS took about a month to load this morning. I’m not used to that. Made me feel like I was running Windows again. 

Two books worth talking about, in the order I read them. Lathe of Heaven is, by my definition, a perfect example of classic SF. Le Guin takes an idea, effective dreaming (where one’s dreams come true), and comes at it from every possible direction, sinking her teeth into it and then shaking it like an overexcited dog until there isn’t anything she hasn’t considered. (Was that as poorly a done metaphor as it feels? Oh, well. You’re not paying me for this.) I’ve only recently begun reading her, and I’m glad that I have. Very satisfying stuff, if you’re in the mood for it. I was discussing classic narrative styles with a friend earlier this week. Contemporary styles tend to play fast and loose with structure. This isn’t exactly new—it’s what the modernists were doing prior to WWI—but it’s no longer avant garde. It’s sort of expected. As a matter of fact, contemporary writing of all sorts (and virtually every other art form) seems to provide fast and loose handling of something. Again, it’s sort of expected. Certainly that’s the rule in SF. Read the Hugo winners of late. You’ll see what I mean. 

The other book is The Fire Next Time. So much prescribed reading on race nowadays is impenetrable academic stuff that I wouldn’t wish on anyone, the value of its content notwithstanding. This is a problem of contemporary academics, not in any way limited to racial theory. Most inhabitants of the halls of academe have lost the ability to write clearly. They are not interested in getting their message across to anyone other than those who have the same inability to write straight. In fact, they have theories about unstraight writing to justify their inherent obfuscated approach, much in the same way “progressive” debaters have theories to justify their inherent obfuscated approaches. But getting back to the point, Baldwin published TFNT in 1962, and I think it ought to be among the first books one reads on race in America if one really wants to understand things. 99% of it could have been written yesterday. Toss in The Autobiography of Malcolm X (ghosted by Alex Haley) while you’re at it. Then Mills’s The Racial Contract if you’re of a debatish bent. Three really good writers lay it all out. I would imagine that your average white student would benefit from these more than any others as a starting point. (I wouldn’t presume to suggest a starting point for students of color, aside from it not being hifalutin academia.) Educators do need starting points, n’est-ce pas? 

In which we start to see that virtual tournamentation is going to raise a few issues

I think this is an interesting question. In a world of virtual tournaments, distance is meaningless. I can attend a tournament down the street as easily as a tournament in Cooch Behar, or more to the point, vice versa. I can attend a tournament anywhere. So how, or should, tournaments limit entries? If a tournament has an octas bid, everyone in the hunt will want to attend. This includes the hunters who would be lucky to escape without shooting an arrow into their own feet, the Orions who should be going JV in Podunk (sorry, Podunk), not Varsity at Glenbrooks. As soon as the $ircuit can change that $ to a C, things get interesting.

There’s another interesting question, that of independent entries. In a world where independent entries are often high school students who, if they are not traveling alone, have at best a “chaperone” who is maybe a college freshman or sophomore. I have always been hard-assed about independents, if for no other reason than if one of them falls down the stairs at a tournament I’m running, I’m going to have to be the one to take them to the hospital. If it’s an independent with a parent, obviating my need to help push the gurney, that independent is taking a slot from a school that is one of my regular customers. What business caters to fly-by-nights over their regulars? That independent isn’t going to be back in a couple of years. Do I want my regulars do remain satisfied over the long term? (At a tournament once, a coach had some cockamamie complaint that was ludicrous on face. The TD college kid wanted to blow her off. I pointed out that she was an annual guest paying upwards of a couple of thousand dollars year after year. Cockamamie and ludicrous go out the window at that point, and you listen sympathetically and promise to do your best to solve her problem.)

Limits are going to have to be set for virtual tournaments, obviously, if for no other reason than at some point, divisions get too big to run meaningfully (cf Harvard). Of course there are other considerations, like room management (since virtual rooms apparently are not free, but I wonder if that will be the case forever; maybe we’re just not seeing the obvious work-around). 

The thing is, in the non-virtual world, we don’t think too much about who is attending, because we have space limits and preset rules about status and the like. Now we’ve got to start thinking about these former givens. We have to go back to the beginning and ask ourselves what is the point of our tournament, other than fund-raising (itself an issue that starts flapping in the wind in the virtual universe)? 

Things are starting to get interesting. 

In which we wish we could run them over with our carts

Yale has announced its new dates in October, and confirmed its status as an e-tournament. The date change is simply based on the calendar, as in, when the Elis finally took a look at it, they found Jewish holidays in September as far as the eye can see. Wondering why they couldn’t have looked at the calendar back in last September is a mug’s game; the Ivy mind doesn’t work that way. In any case, the e-dominoes will start tumbling for real now for next season. The lack of anybody knowing anything, be it about budgets or travel or classes, makes everything anyone says mere opinion. There are no facts, and there’s no point in pretending otherwise. Which isn’t stopping us from gnawing on those opinions. Thomas Gradgrind is turning in his imaginary grave. 

I sallied forth this morning for my weekly grocery adventure. If you’re old as the hills, they let you in before the hoi and the polloi, so Tuesday mornings I simply roll out of bed, into the car and down the aisles. The thing is, when I used to live in Manhattan in the 1970s, we used to shop at the original Fairway, which was pretty much vegetables-only in its infancy. For some reason, 110% of the customers were, A) old people who B) had never been in a market before that day and therefore had no idea that C) there were other people in the building. Sadly, 110% of those exact same people go shopping with me on senior mornings. Now that I am one of those old people, I am happy to report that obliviousness is not necessarily a factor of age, and I will admit that I have seen goobers of all ages in my day. Still, there are some golden agers who give the rest of us a bad name, and they all shop when I do. The good news is that one doesn’t inevitably evolve into one of those bad eggs, any more than you inevitably wake up one day liking Lawrence Welk and Matlock. Doesn’t happen. 

Whew. 

In which we use proper English

I managed to turn on the flash on my iPhone camera. I have no idea how that happened, and it was the devil to remember A) that it was on, and B) how to turn it off. Most pix I take the flash never comes into play, so I’d unexpectedly get a flash shot in low light, curse the darkness, go to bed and forget about it, until the next time the light was low. Not that it’s hard to turn on and off, but as with all the camera features of the phone (presumably every phone) there’s a lot of options shoved into a tiny space. Anyhow, it’s off now. Until the next time to comes on for no reason whatsoever. 

Curse you, Steve Jobs.

I’ve moved things around in the dungeon chez so that I can have a little view when I’m working. Previously I stared into the corner if I wasn’t staring at the monitor. Now I can stare out the window. Feel free to walk by to give me something to look at. 

Catholic Charlie is trying to lasso the NYCFL leadership to talk about next season. It’s not as if anyone exactly knows anything, but it won’t hurt to begin brainstorming. We’re all operating under the assumption that we will have limited access to tournament travel, so this will be yet another shot at virtuality. The thing is, once schools see that they can go to tournaments without actually going to tournaments, thus saving all that travel money, won’t there be pressure to keep tournaments virtual beyond the pandemic? As I’ve said before, this might be a good thing, a barrier breaker for schools without the funds to travel. We’ll see. 

Just for the record, I happen to follow NSD Update. And they drive me effing crazy because apparently they have no regard for the English language. To wit: the verb champion means to advocate or fight for a cause. It does not mean to win a championship. NSD doesn’t know this. Or maybe they have the old Humpty Dumpty idea that words mean what they want them to mean; didn’t that go out with Derrida and the leisure suit? Anyhow, I figure no one from NSD reads this blog, which defiantly champions good usage, but this image is for them, just in case:

In which we continue being conservative

I’ve finished a workable first draft of the article for the DJ, so the burden of that has temporarily moved to others, although it will be back eventually for further editing. So that’s done, mostly. It was work. I’ve almost forgotten what that was like.

The NDCA conference is next week, and I will try to catch as many relevant workshops as I can, although they are promising that they will also eventually be online. No one will probably be interested in my warnings about Zoom, in any case. I do not claim that it will go away; I just claim that it isn’t exactly here, and while it might be the ad hoc program, there is no guarantee that it will (or won’t) become the default or the standard. This wouldn’t matter much if there wasn’t money involved, but I have a fear that people desperate for something to do debate wise will buy in too soon, and get stuck. I’ve seen that happen in my other world. For years people were coming to us at the DJ with great solutions to this, that or the other problem, and almost inevitably their proprietary solutions, which did in fact solve, couldn’t match the solutions found in more general software. If you have Word, for instance, you are running the de facto default program available to (and understood) by all. If you are dealing with writers in-house and freelance, they all not only know how to use Word but are probably using it all the time. So some other writing solution would somehow be better than the installed and understood base? I don’t think so. The benefits of already being installed and understood are hard to overcome. What we’re looking at in debate software is analogous but not quite the same. We now live in a universe where Google and Microsoft were beat out of the gate by Zoom, despite having their own solutions. Google and Microsoft (and who knows, Apple?) have been beat out of the gate before. But they’re still very much in the race, and it’s the final stretch that matters most. Bet your money on the proven runners, I say. Long shots win occasionally, but not as often as the favorites. Trust me on this.

Reading: Master of the Senate
Listening (book): Lathe of Heaven
Watching: The Magicians (season 3 and I still don’t know if I like it or not)
Listening (music): Elvis selections for the tab room playlist (found a couple)
Listening (podcast): David Tennant
Cooking: From James Morton’s Brilliant Breads (about the thousandth bread book I’ve tried and definitely the best; he was a Bake-off finalist)

In which we work

Out of the blue the old DJ asked if I was interested in a little writing project. My only criterion was that it be truly little, no more than a week, which turned out to be the case. Now I’m in the middle of that week. It’s strange writing under the eyes of an editor again (actually, two in this case). Normally I just plunk stuff down and devil take the hindmost. But now I’ve got to engage in give and take, which essentially means getting directions, throwing something down on paper (in a manner of speaking), passing it along, getting new directions, throwing something else down on paper, rinse, repeat, and with any luck, zeroing in a good end product. The funny thing is that I like being told what to do, and I have no compunctions about throwing out what seemed perfectly good at the time and trying something else. And I like writing to order. I wouldn’t want to make a living at it, but a little can be fun. A change of pace, in any case.

I Zoomed for the first time yesterday, a discussion of virtual tournaments, and I have to agree with the general consensus that the software is easy as pie. I loaded the app onto my iPad, also following the general consensus that the IOS app is safer than the PC app. Maybe. Of course, the issue with a virtual tournament is not the presentation software per se but the rooms. One-off meetings are simple enough, but when you have an army or two you’re trying to manage, that becomes problematic. Given the youth, shall we say, of present solutions to that issue, I am extremely reluctant to believe that we are anywhere close to a reasonable set of best practices. Given how much of our lives is run by Google or Microsoft, how long will it be before those folks come up with something that turns Zoom into Geocities? If, say, my mail and document storage and communications software are all connected at the root, and I never have to leave the Google garden, why would I? The same could be said of Microsoft, at least in the enterprise universe. So, expect change. That said, one has to live now. We’ll see what happens.

What I’ve seen among my friends, in and out of debate and the DJ and the poker table slash golf course, is a complete agreement about the future, to whit, everyone thinks something different. Literally. Opinions range from the marching in the streets tomorrow to I’ll see you in 2022. Personally, I am neither optimistic nor pessimistic but simply hopeful. My biggest horse in the race is the family in the UK, which I only visit via software these days (for which, thank God). Today was the day we were originally going to fly to London for a visit. Now all I have is a Delta voucher, and lots of emails from Cameron Macintosh (sp?) telling me that the Stoppard play for which I had purchased tickets will happen and to hold tight while he holds my money. Sigh.

Oh, well. Back to work. For the DJ.

In which, although we are not made of sugar, we probably would melt

I find it sort of glum when it’s a rainy day. One of the high points of my retirement is nice long walks listening to audiobooks, on which rain puts the kibosh, so to speak. Not taking that nice long walk means missing out. Fortunately I do have a nice place to take the long walk, quiet streets that for the most part are free of other humans. Hence no face mask, just me and my shadow and my iPhone and headphones. It’s about time to dump the over-the-ears, which act as ad hoc earmuffs. At least there’s that to look forward to. Anyhow, housebound today, again. Feh. 

I sallied forth Tuesday for the first time in ages, launching an attack on one of the local supermarkets. Liz told me that it was quite empty a couple of weeks ago when she went; grocery shopping is a chore that she hates and which I rather enjoy, but the rule in NY is that is if you’re over 70 you have to stay home, and until yesterday she was short of the mark. Now that we’re both in our dotage and hence equally potential quarantine felons, it was back on me. It was my first time masked (shades of “A Weekend in the Country” – we’ll go masked), and my first time traveling one-way aisles, but it was good to get my hands on some foodstuffs again. We’ve been well supplied from a local farm with once-a-week online ordering and curbside pickup, but they don’t grow pineapples or gelato locally… The market even had toilet paper, which we actually didn’t need, but I alerted Catholic Charlie, who lives nearby, and who apparently hasn’t relieved himself since early March. I can’t wait till the plumbing supply stores reopen: I’m going to stock up on bidets in preparation for the next apocalypse.

The Wyoming folks recently did a virtual tournament, and published a whole slew of help docs online. Curiously, they were able to do it without charging everyone an arm and a leg (I’m looking at you, Kentucky), since the software was, all of it, free. I know I’m the only person in the world who thinks there’s a future for long-distance forensics that can somehow eliminate most of the costs and enable less resource-heavy teams to participate, not from homes with dicey wifi and shabby equipment (if any), but from better set-up schools, but I can dream, can’t I? Maybe I’ll end up throwing my own damned tournaments, just for the hell of it. I mean, it won’t cost me anything. 

At the moment, it’s questionable if/how schools will reopen in September. If they do, whew. If they don’t, we all need to get our acts together at a much more rough-and-ready level than TOC. For one thing, PF will be 90% (or whatever) parent judges. Then again, the lack of travel costs will enable lots of college student judging; I would imagine that a tournament might set up an exchange for schools to purchase judges absent the tournament getting involved much in the process. I don’t know. It’s early days yet. I’ll learn more from the NDCA conference. 

In which we debrief on some pastimes

I resisted installing YouTube on my Roku until last night, when the Sondheim tribute gave me no choice. My feeling until then was that the last thing I needed on the widescreen was wall-to-wall PewDiePie, which overshadows much of my opinion of the service. But I have to admit that, in reality, I am not above watching a video or two, but I think of them as snacks during the day, breaks from the main business, a very occasional pleasure. When I watch TV, I watch TV. Big screen, comfy chair, no distractions—I’m in it for whatever it is I’m watching. Lots of people I know watch TV while they read, eat, fornicate, et cetera, which to me distracts from the enjoyment of the program. Then again, when I et cetera I inevitably have music playing, and I know people who never think of music as a background and wouldn’t consider for a moment doing anything when they’re listening to music other than listening to music. (Note: Mozart would be surprised at that, btw.) Anyhow, I’m now set up, and the challenge will be to resist things like endless plunges into Fred Astaire dances and amusement park videos. We’ll see.

By the way, the Sondheim was a joy. I can’t imagine that if you are the potential audience you weren’t watching it, but just in case, check it out. Too bad that now you won’t see the false start: it was really heartening that broadway.com could screw up so blandly. Poor Raul.

On the entertainment front, I caught My Name is Dolemite on Netflix over the weekend. It got great reviews when it was released, and I have to admit it had me regularly laughing out loud. Highly recommended. And rather than pursue the new Hillary Mantel, which I did buy in preparation for finishing off the trilogy, I switched over to Master of the Senate. Sort of the same thing, in a way, with different players. There’s nothing like high politics for great drama. Caro starts off with a critical history of the Senate before dropping LBJ into the mix. God, that Caro knows how to write! Meanwhile Cromwell will have to cool his heels for a while. 

Other commentary: season three of the The Crown was a letdown from the first two seasons, mostly because the history is less interesting, as is the soap element. Colman is great, as is Helena BC, but it’s just not the same as their characters age. Still, it’s not as if I won’t watch again when the next season arrives. I think in the meanwhile I’ll attack the second season of Broadchurch to get Colman’s ER2 cleared out of my mind. That show is, shall we say, different from this one. Say what you will about the royals, there’s no child molesting. Much. 

In which we wonder how the horse died in the first place

All of the reports I’ve seen are quite positive about e-TOC. Predictably the interp events were found a bit lacking, but everyone was glad to have them, and the debate events seemed to work fine. I seem to be the only one on the planet who questions the costs. Granted there are expenses, even for a virtual tournament, but not the same as a physical tournament. At the point where this isn’t factored into the running of a tournament, I’m more than a little suspicious. Still, for me this is probably beating a dead horse, something that is generally frowned on in Kentucky, and nobody else seems to care. It is a truth generally acknowledged that the cost of circuit debate is prohibitive, and everyone tsks-tsks about it once in a while, and whole styles of debate have evolved to criticize it (albeit while being a part of it), but I haven’t seen anyone yet stand up and say that because the system is unfair economically in general, I will simply not participate in it. I can understand that, I guess—if you’ve got it, baby, flaunt it—but virtual debating does leave open the opportunity for debate at a high level that isn’t prohibitively expensive. Something tells me no one will be very enthusiastic about the idea, though. 

Oh, well. I’ve signed up to audit NDCA’s coaches' conference in May, which promises to be mostly about remote debating. Given that there’s no guarantee that we will be returning to normal even in the 2020-21 school year, and given that I run tournaments practically every weekend, it behooves me to be up on things. 

We’ll see what happens. 

In which we spend a rainy afternoon

Speaking of Robbie Robertson… 

Having been retired for over a year now, I have my routines pretty down pat. I’ve been doing lots of writing, as well as retrieving and archiving old family materials and the like. Throw in a nice long walk to listen to my latest audiobook and a good night’s sleep without any alarm other than Tik (pronounced teek) to force me up early, and I’m really not looking to fill any empty hours. Before the quarantine, I did pop down to a movie theater in the afternoon every couple of weeks, because I love movies, but obviously that has stopped. My point is that I find myself feeling guilty if I settle down to watch a movie at home in the afternoon. I should be doing something productive, sez I to me. On the other hand, there was a really cold wet day last week that seemed absolutely perfect to watch The Irishman. I mean, the damned thing’s three and a half hours long, and in a remarkably uncharacteristic move on Martin Scorsese’s part, it’s all about gangsters, so when else was I going to watch it? So I popped some corn, settled myself in, and went for it. 3 ½ hours? Passed like a minute. Never bored for a second. Of course, if Scorsese doesn’t know how to tell a story by now, he’s never going to. The aging/unaging of the actors worked quite well. In fact, the only uncanny valley moments were centered around DeNiro’s not-blue-in-real-life eyes. Suddenly they’d be sticking out more brightly than anything else on the screen. Anyhow, a strong recommendation for your own rainy afternoon. Or sunny afternoon, if it comes to that. 

Robbie R, to answer your question, did the music for the film. I also happened to see this, 

which is fun for old Band fans. And I was listening to an odds-and-ends Band collection from the vaults this week, so I’ve had Robbie up the wazoo. 

Speaking of Martin Scorsese, The Last Waltz happens to be one of the few concert movies I’ve ever gotten into. Kaz and I watched it together not that long ago. 

And one other strong recommendation: the Marco Polo app. If you've got distant family, this is a joy to capture not conversations but simply the fun active moments of the day. With an almost-three-year-old in London, daily Marco Polos are a lifesaver. For the record, we use Google Duo for video chats. 

What would we have done if this virus had hit 20 years ago? Or 40 years ago? The bind moggles.

In which we wonder about the audience

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer poses an interesting question. The author clearly states in the text that he intends it to be a book for children, but Twain’s style makes it seem anything but, not to mention that it is filled with pretty grim stuff, including graverobbing and murder and attempted mutilation and homelessness and the like. As for the style part of it, Twain’s use of understatement and overstatement and his coy omniscience would have to go over the head of almost any reader the same age or so of his hero, that is, his stated audience, while inevitably tickling the amusement of the adult reader. As for the plot, maybe in 1876 all manner of vile criminality was one’s daily bread, and no one would blink twice at the things the Injun Joe is up to, but I have to say that the proceedings made me wonder once or twice. A little dab of research on my part did not uncover whether Twain was serious about aiming it at a young audience, but I will say this: I can’t tell you how many times I laughed out loud listening to it. (I mentioned before that it was Nick Offerman narrating very, very well.) Obviously I have set myself up for a visit with Huck in the near future, a book that I will not listen to but instead handle the old-fashioned way. It will be about the umpteenth time I’ve read it. If I happen to find myself on a desert island some day, it will be there along with me. 

I’m falling away from watching The Tudors. The more I see, the less real it becomes. Reading Hillary Mantel at the same time is the key kibosher, given that the facts outweigh the fancy, but the melodrama I watched yesterday of the death of Thomas More was tedious enough to do the work all by itself. And I don’t know if I can watch Natalie Dormer sneer even one more time. No wonder Crumb/Cremuel was so efficient at getting AB’s upper regions removed. I’d volunteer to do it myself at this point. 

For the record (no pun intended), recent additions to the Spotify playlist include songs by KT Tunstall (for which I probably ought to apologize for the poppishness, but an ear worm is an ear worm is an ear worm), Levon Helm (yet again, so take that Robbie), Gram Parsons (sigh), and Graham Parker and the Rumour (new to me). 

And there you are.

In which we point out some changes in the 2020-21 schedule

[Video of the day, entirely for keeping one's spirits up:  https://youtu.be/0-b4M8jssX8]

Assuming that we’re all back on track come September, there will be a couple of changes to the regional calendar. 

First of all, Byram Hills is probably moving to Columbus Day weekend. This weekend has opened up because Monticello is passing on their invitational and hosting a grand prix of debate and speech under the auspices of the NYCFL on November 7, which, coincidentally, used to be the old MHL Monticello weekend. Plus ca change, eh? 

The biggest craziness is in the New Year. The way it looks now is this:

1/8-9 Newark

1/9 Chaminade

1/16-18 Bigle X

1/23 Baby Bump at Hen Hud

Weekend of 1/29: Columbia, Emory, Ridge

Essentially this jamboree is happening this weekend rather than as usual because the Emory folk, who historically pay no attention to anything other than themselves, have been hitting the wacky weed again, and wreaking whatever havoc they can as a result. 

2/5-6 Pennsbury

2/6 Bronx Winter Local, AKA the Re Ducks

2/13 Harvard

Presumably Penn will revert back to Harvard weekend, or at least that was our recommendation to them, since their attendance was equal on that weekend to what it was the earlier weekend, which would now conflict with Pennsbury. Given that the Pennsbury tab room = the Penn tab room, and high schools always take precedence, I would expect this to be a no-brainer on the parts of the Ben Franklinites. 

I could easily see Ridge moving off 1/29 to 1/23, which would mean we’d have to bump Bump, probably to 2/13. 

The rest of the season is where you would expect it to be. 

Let's just hope we do have a season. 

In which we partake in our annual feast of Kentucky vitriol

The TOC was designed to break all 5-2s to a “sweet sixteen” round. If you do the math, this means a field of 72. Of course, the pyramid doesn’t always break perfectly, but the point is clear. To get these 72 champion teams, from Policy or LD, a system for the accumulation of bids was required. I gather that originally the bids were established by looking at any tournament and measuring the number of states represented and the number of teams participating against a preset formula, and then pulling off the top until you reached 72 entrants. Later, this evolved into determining in advance a set of bid tournaments that would provide the field of 72 on a regular basis. Becoming, and remaining, a bid tournament was hotly contested, and argued annually by a group of TOC advisers, with J. W. Patterson, the TOC tournament director, as the final arbiter. 

Things have changed. Obviously this week’s tournament is nothing like any previous TOC, given that where once there was only Policy, there is now everything from Congress to POI and, of course, PF and LD. And there won’t be much scrambling for hotel rooms and dinner reservations. More to the point, the magic number of 72 no longer applies, at least as far as PF is concerned. Even in the pandemic, there are 99 teams "attending" that are fully qualified, not to mention 114 “silver” teams who are not fully qualified. Breaking to a so-called sweet sixteen isn’t happening. 

I balked originally at the whole silver PF thing, and I still eye it as little more than a money grab. Should we have changed the name of the event to the TONC, the Tournament of Non-Champions? Of course, much of my vitriol against it evaporated in the light of the birth of the Middle School TOC (cancelled this year, thank God), where the qualification for entry was not previous success, or even being on a school debate team, but simply sending a check. I love the idea of middle schoolers learning to debate, of learning to acquire the debate thinking skills at that ripe early age. I detest the idea of ten-year-olds developing the idea of competition over all, or participating at a national “event” that has literally no entrance requirements aside from a fat wallet. 

The high school TOC is what it is, and enough schools have bought into it over time that we’re stuck with it. All of its ill consequences, which stem primarily from a bids-over-all slash competition-over-education mentality, are now a fixed part of our universe. What I find curious is that, even when TOC trips over its own feet creating events for non-champions, nobody blinks an eye. I mean, if next year they announce a Bronze PF Division for teams who have never earned a bid, or maybe a Brass PF Division for teams who have never debated anyone but their parents, I’m sure all the potential attendees will be sending in their checks at the first opportunity. Personally, I’m holding out for a pre-school division. My two-year-old granddaughter looks ripe to me for PSTOC, and by cracky, I’ve got the checkbook to prove it!

In which we, among other things, push the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museo Nacional

I’ve given myself the task of updating the Tournament Director’s Toolkit on my website. I find it interesting how small things change relatively quickly over relatively short bits of time, while the big things hardly budge at all. This is going to absorb me for a while, but hey, it’s not like I’m going anywhere anytime soon.

One of the big things I’ve been missing lately is art. Since my retirement I’ve been heading to one museum or another quite regularly. To sate this appetite for the duration, I’m now following museums from around the world on Instagram. I highly recommend the Musee d’Orsay, which does include English translations, and of course the Met, the National Gallery in DC, and the V&A in London if you’re looking for a good starter set. I was sort of disappointed in the Prado site, but the Thyssen down the camino has some great stuff. Maybe I’ll learn something from all of this before the doors to life swing open again.

Doctor Who fans might be interested in this: https://io9.gizmodo.com/this-steven-moffat-penned-doctor-who-short-story-is-a-s-1842678936  It’s young Amy Pond writing about the raggedy doctor. For the record, I was on a regular diet of the Doctor until Amazon dropped them from Prime a couple of months ago. Oh, the humanity! I had gotten to the end of Clara when the calamity struck. It was probably a good thing, though. It gives me something to look forward to. (Speaking of which, I for one would have loved to have seen this guy take the role: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/doctor-who-bill-nighy-turned-607440)

In which we dispense with some entertainments

Nick Offerman, about whom I know virtually nothing, definitely has a Mark Twain thing going. I listened to him read Connecticut Yankee a while ago, and this week I started listening to him do Tom Sawyer. Of course, I am a Twain fan beyond the norm myself, and I can understand Offerman’s commitment. He has almost perfect pitch in his readings; he’s a good fit for Twain’s voice. I highly recommend him and these books. To be honest, I haven’t read Tom in ages, so in many ways it’s coming across as new. And fun. Just out of curiosity I moseyed over to IMDB and found that a search for Tom Sawyer yields 126 results. Hmmm. I have my doubts. I’ll stick to the book. 

And for the record, on the reading reading front, I went in for Bring Up the Bodies. Once you start a series, sometimes it’s best to keep going, especially when there’s not a lot of demarcation from volume to volume. Sometimes you don’t have to keep going, as with the Caro LBJ bios (which read better and more easily than most fiction), because the breaks are discrete periods (which I happened to live through). Sometimes you don’t want to, as with GoT. I ploughed through a couple of them and the monotony of people I couldn’t really track killing/maiming/ousting/whatevering one another finally just wore me out. I liked the main characters, but the supporting cast made my eyes glaze over. Come to think of it, I didn’t like the TV show for the same reason. I thought the books would clear all that up. Na’ah. 

Another one rides the bus; Can some explain the ending to me?

The NY State finals have been kiboshed. This may be common knowledge to others, but I just happened to go to the website on the assumption that it was going down the tubes, and sure enough, glug glug glug. I think that originally we all underestimated the potential for covid-19 to turn the world upside down. We were optimistic that in a few weeks we’d be on the road to recovery. We were wrong. We’re not yet even at the turning point. The States tournament that we thought might sprout up at a temporary site never happened.

Putting aside forensics, I can’t imagine the disruption this is having on students in general. I watched the latest Spider-Man movie last night (Word just put that hyphen in there), and they had a little vignette about students taken away during the blip having to repeat a grade. Cute. We may not be repeating grades next year, but whatever year this is will, overall, be an incomplete, even if we don’t mark it officially as such. The Times today reported that the absentee rate on e-classes is quite high. Equipment accounts for a lot of it, of course, or more to the point the lack thereof, but also I would imagine that a certain fire in the belly has been tamped down. No doubt forensicians have a better heat-containment system in their bellies, but even they are being sorely tried. 

By the way, the Spider-Man movie (again with the hyphen!) was pretty good, although I was a little behind the curve in what the villain was actually doing, or more to the point, how he was doing it. And the ending (the very last one, not the first one or the second one), eluded me completely. One thing about watching MCO movies on disk is that you can speed forward through the credits to the codas, unlike seeing them in person and having to sit there for another couple of hours just so you can walk out scratching your head. This way you get to scratch your head right away. 

Reviews of this and that

Old Man’s War by John Scalzi: My entire connection to Scalzi, who has become one of my favorite and most fun authors, is through audiobooks. Many of them are read by Wil Wheaton, who in my opinion went from being the world’s worst actor (beats there a heart so cold as not to want to crush Wesley on sight?) to the world’s best reader thanks to Scalzi’s work. Old Man’s War is Scalzi’s first novel, and also the first of a series, and in fact was not read by Wheaton, but I loved it. It made me want my afternoon audiobook walks to go on forever. Given my history with Scalzi, I’ve decided to jump over and try to actually read him on (e-)paper, having just purchased book 2 in the series. We’ll see how that works out.

My actual reading reading, so to speak, has been of the air-out-the-brain variety since finishing Wolf Hall, which is major stuff. There was some Rumpole first, and then I’ve been coasting through some early Raymond Chandler in volume one of the Library of America collection, finding the plots hard to grok but enjoying them anyhow just for the pleasure of the words. Chandler can be like that. The big question is whether to go on with Mantel or go back to Caro’s LBJ, or to try something else altogether. I could finish off my Nance Mitford crush… We’ll see, but whatever it is, it’s coming up next.

One thing I do miss during the quarantine is my semi-weekly trip to the local artsy movie theater. I was just beginning to get up a nice cinematic head of steam, reinvigorating my longtime love of movies. I don’t watch that many at home, for some reason, because I’m pretty much too busy during the day and at night there’s too much good TV, not to mention reading reading. Going to the movies in the middle of the afternoon was an event, unlike sitting plopped in front of the TV in the middle of the afternoon. I am beginning to look at late evening as a possible movie time, since I do tend to stay up way later than the missus. Yet another “we’ll see.”

I’ve downloaded some games which I’ve begun playing online with likeminded folks, namely Carcassone, Ticket to Ride and Settlers of Catan. Well, I think I’ve mentioned before that I don’t really like Catan, but the others are quite entertaining, even though I suck bigtime at them. We spent Christmas in NOLA with a whole bunch o’ folks, and gaming was a big part of it. (So was eating, drinking, and, it being NOLA, sightseeing while eating and drinking.)

Finally, on the music front, I continue to work on my magnum rock playlist on Spotify, AKA Menick’s Tab Room (spotify:playlist:1CzrLTz52lXBVAGs4GNG1p). Additions over the last 7 days include 6 songs by the Blasters and 5 songs by Mojo Nixon and Skid Roper, all of which is rockabilly-based, 2 songs from Steve Miller’s Children of the Future, and 1 Ry Cooder from Boomer’s Story. If you have Spotify you should follow the playlist. It's enormous, and I guarantee that you will like most of it. It's especially helpful in keeping you dancing while being creative in the kitchen. At least, it's helpful to me. 

Good old Rippin' and a bottle of plonk

And then the NSDA went virtual…

No surprise there, of course. And I wish them all success with it since, as indicated earlier in the week, I am starting to believe that there is a possibility of real tournaments being conducted online as a matter of course in some not so distant future, but using resources provided by a team’s school and not individuals. Eliminating travel costs would open forensics to almost everyone. The possibility is fascinating. Whether as a community we will ever do this depends on us, but I do think people might start looking in that direction after the dust clears on covid-19.

I do have doubts about some of the interp activities, though, at least at the moment. I have seen enough performances to know that the physical aspects of them, not to mention the intimacy of performance in person, are pretty much beyond the average person’s computer camera and earpod mic. It’s hard enough for professionals to capture live performance; for the rest of us, it may just not be possible. At worst, a set of performances could be skewed competitively by the quality of one’s hardware, which of course brings us back to the money talks side of the business. Again, solutions can probably be created, but they are more likely to come from within a high school rather than at home. 

But, as I say, I wish NSDA well. They are the glue of our activity, the thing that unifies us however much we may disagree with this or that particular aspect of it. (I’m looking at you, coinflip.) 

*** 

I spent an endless amount of time today getting Delta to provide a credit for my May trip to the UK, but it finally happened. What I would like to do is go in September, but I’ll go whenever as soon as I can. I have a granddaughter to corrupt!

On the entertainment front, since I’ve been home for over a year and developed a pretty set daily routine, I haven’t been put out as much as some others by the quarantine. So I haven’t been digging deep into the archives to find things to pass the time any more than usual. Having just finished reading Wolf Hall, I thought I’d take a break to snack on some Rumpole of the Bailey stories by Emily Mortimer’s father. The only problem with these stories is that there is not enough of them. Each one is a perfect little gem. And anyone who ever saw the TV series with Leo McKern has him way in the front of one’s mind as one reads, although I don’t think that’s an essential requirement. If you haven’t tried them, they get my highest recommendation. 

WAIT A MINUTE! WHAT??? BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH IN A RADIO VERSION??? The bind moggles. You never know what you'll find looking something up on Amazon. I also just found a late novel about the legendary Penge Bungalow murders. My fingers have never jumped on a Kindle download so quickly. 

Birthday boys

Two interesting artist birthdays have been splashed all over the art universe this week: John Constable and Vincent Van Gogh. The latter seems easy to love: people who don’t know a paintbrush from a milking machine all know and love Vincent. People gurgling in front of The Starry Night used to block traffic at MOMA for miles (and may still do for all I know, since I haven’t been since the reopening). He’s like Monet; you don’t have to know what he was doing to enjoy looking at it, and don’t forget to stop in the gift shop on the way out to pick up the t-shirt, the mug and a couple of postcards. If you, by some bizarre happenstance, do not recall Vincent, maybe it will jog your memory when I point out that he was inspired by Amy Pond to do some of his best work. If you, by some bizarre happenstance, do not recall Amelia Pond, why are you reading this blog?

Constable is another matter altogether. His dates are 1776-1837, and what he did as an artist was legitimize the painting of landscapes from nature, or maybe better, he legitimized the value of nature as such in painting. He did not invent the landscape painting, but his work transformed the idea of landscape painting. 

The Hay Wain is one of Constable’s most famous and highly regarded works, and it does two of the things he is noted for. First, the setting is real life, and second, the depiction of a farm wagon is also drawn from reality. No gods and goddesses, no idealized classical gardens dotted with little Greek fandangos, mixing of the mythical and real a la Canaletto. This painting, according to the BBC, is the second most popular in any British gallery, right after one of Turner’s gorgeous seascapes. (Turner was born a year before Constable, and there was apparently something of a direct rivalry between the two, although their bodies of work are quite dissimilar.)

When you look at Constables, sometimes you might fail to really appreciate them on their own. To us today, landscape includes Cole and Church and Van Gogh and, well, you name it. Constable’s rather staid works by comparison might not get the juices flowing like some of these others. But when you learn a little bit about his history, you might start to feel otherwise. He brought painting out into the real world for its own sake. And that, in its day was a big deal. And it still is today. If you're looking for an entry point into his work, check out the clouds. They are, in a word, amazing. 

The Class of 2020

This should have been one of the great periods of life for high school seniors. My friends have been talking about all the missed milestones, a conversation prompted by the continuing domino collapse of season-ending tournaments. Graduation ceremonies, proms, the various culminations of four years of sports efforts—you name it, they''re not going to happen, or at best they will happen as mere simulacra. All of this is exaggerated by senioritis, that sense of being done with high school and being ready to move on and having to suffer through the dragging of time that is keeping you from the next step. None of this is fanciful. All of this is true and real.

There is something else beyond rituals that comes with being a senior in the last few months of school. For all practical purposes, aside from a few classes that might still need your efforts, the game is over. And more to the point: you have won. You have made it. You have changed from that raw, unformed ninth grader into, nearly four years later, a Master of the Universe, that universe being high school. You have gone through most of the most difficult business of adolescence, and survived. You have faced every hurdle secondary school can throw at you academically, be it courses you know you’ll never use in your future life or teachers sent directly from Dante’s Inferno to torture you. You have gone through a life-changing period with a handful of others who will not only live in your memory forever, but who may indeed become part of your life for all time. And now it is April, and you still have a couple of months more of school, and you are filled with this sense of universe mastery. It is the air that you breathe, it is the aura that surrounds you as you walk down the hallways. You know every nook and cranny of that school, you know how to get everything done that has to be done, you know where every body is buried and which skeletons are in every closet. It is a heady feeling, and it is one of the few times in your life that you will get to enjoy it.

Except not this year. Not for the class of 2020. Just when they should be enjoying the glow of accomplishment and the pride of position, just as they should be enjoying that magic island of contentment located between one finished phase of life and the next wide-open and even more vast phase of promise and opportunity, all of that has been taken from them. Oh, sure, they still get to feel a little sense of it, but they don’t get to live it day in and day out, striding the hallways in their full Master of the Universe personae. They’ll never really know what that is like. And that’s a shame.

Is this the worst thing happening during the pandemic? Hardly. Lives are literally being lost, more lives than we can comprehend. But that doesn’t lessen its reality. My heart goes out to the class of 2020. You only get to be certain things once in your life. Missing any of those things is a big hit. Missing this one may be the worst. You have my sympathy.

The Sun Shines Bright on my E-Kentucky Home

First of all, the Article of the Day: “And what’s on your desk?”

And now, on to business:

E-TOC

It doesn’t take a research genius to determine that historically the TOC has been populated by roughly the same schools over and over again. The key reason for this is money. The first essential bottom-line necessity of playing on the TOC circuit is a steady participation at a handful of tournaments scattered around the country. The programs that can afford this participation (transportation, lodging, meals, high registration fees) tend to be in the game for the duration. These programs additionally have the resources to afford the education (coaches, assistant coaches, camps) that results in winning teams. On top of that, these programs are supported by schools that accept that an aggressive forensics program can turn students into virtual part-timers as far as the rest of their curriculum, and that for the right students, this is not a bad thing.

I do not dispute that these circuit programs are good at what they do. Given those educational resources, one would expect nothing else. I also don’t maintain that these programs are all from fabled moneyed districts or elitist private schools, although the minute you get on an airplane you probably are talking maybe a thousand dollars a weekend per person per tournament. That money has to come from somewhere. So let’s face it. The TOC circuit is what it is. It’s an elite establishment of schools that can afford to do it. Occasionally a lone wolf can break into it, but that lone wolf—individual or team—comes privately funded both as far as attending the tournaments and personal coaching. 

I have nothing against any of this, as long as we recognize it for what it is. After all, I was a coach for 20 years with plenty of TOC success for my team and I’ve run endless numbers of tournaments in aid of this circuit. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with having money, and spending it on debate. I wish every school had the resources to take on a serious commitment to debate. And I don’t want to undervalue the educators who have built their careers on it. If we took some of the storied TOC coaches and put them into a school district without a penny to its name, they would still develop outstanding teams—I have no doubt about that—although those teams wouldn’t be able to do much more than local competing.

I’m not going to go into the impact of TOC, which I have done over the years ad nauseum. Over and over I have said that if TOC didn’t exist, I wouldn’t invent it. But it’s there, and it’s not going away any time soon, so there’s not much point in pretending otherwise. I have to admit though that I find the upcoming e-TOC…shall we say…interesting?

The idea of debate-by-internet has been with us for a while. The first minute there was connectivity there was the thought of e-rounds. I think there was some sort of dream that e-debating would tear down barriers, ushering in a new utopia of access for all. No longer would “high level” debate be limited to those with the funds to travel the country weekend after weekend. Every student everywhere would simply log on and start mouthing off. I don’t think we ever thought about it much (although I would imagine there are some people who have tried it and, for all I know, it might be quite popular on parts of the web I don’t visit). It would happen some day, but meanwhile, the bus is leaving at 8:00 a.m. so get moving. 

The first thing that struck me about e-TOC was that it costs as much as IRL-TOC, aside from not having to pay a surcharge per judge to eat the bagels in the judges’ lounge. (I don’t remember them ever having a judges’ lounge back in my day, not that anyone in their right mind would want a Kentucky bagel.) Aren’t they at least saving money on the Monday morning breakfast? It was suggested to me that, instead of room fees and custodial costs they now have software fees. To be honest, I really don’t believe this, but I have no evidence to dispute it, so I’ll let it go. 

When I read the instructions for the tournament, which are wildly elaborate, for a while I completely disbelieved that the enterprise was even possible. I’ve communicated with others remotely for decades: back in the DJ, not all that long ago, we had state of the art videoconferencing, and I’m on the horn one way or another with my daughter in London on a regular basis. Based on my own not always ideal experience, my mind was having trouble grokking how teammates and judges would all somehow sort this out. But looking at how Zoom works, I’ve come to see that it is, in fact, quite possible to conduct a fairly decent simulation of a round electronically. I’m willing to ignore the hoo-ha of the real world when in a lot of rounds teams spend more time ineptly flashing cases and evidence and looking for outlets and cursing the wifi than they do debating, and where flooding a tidal wave of evidence on all and sundry is taught as a winning strategy (as compared to, I don’t know, debating good cases well). Let’s, for argument’s sake, assume a perfect world where everyone is the Master of the Tech Universe. Even if that’s not true today, it’s not an unreasonable expectation in the not-so-distant future.

I begin to see that, given today’s tech, e-rounds may not be so farfetched after all, manageable on a fairly large tournament-sized basis. And this does begin to fulfill that utopian dream of ultimate resource parity. Unfortunately, the dream has a few holes in it, at least as far as e-TOC is concerned. First, it assumes equal bandwidth for all, which certainly isn’t true in every household in the US. Secondly, if I’m using a device for my communicating, complete with mic and headphones and cam, I probably need a second device for my materials like cases and research, and maybe even a third device for private communication with my partner. In the world of social distancing, that means all that hardware for each and every participant. And you thought flying to Lexington for the weekend was going to be expensive?

If you think about all of that, you quickly come to realize that, at the moment, the e-round idea does anything but democratize debate. But to be honest, I’m actually thinking that, in the long run, our preliminary steps on the road to e-debate might pay off. Covid-19 won’t be keeping us all locked up forever. And most if not all of the drawbacks to e-debating alone in our individual closets will be removed if we were back in school. Yes, I know that all schools do not have all the tech they need, but that’s more likely than all individual students having that tech. If my teams at Imaginary High School wanted to debate at a virtual tournament, even today, there’s probably enough tech for them to do it.  And the thing is, the present situation, however inadvertently, is showing that it might indeed be possible. We will all, before long, be competent Zoomers. We will all, eventually, be back in school (well, not me, but you know what I mean) where the resources for e-debating are probably even now readily available. Will we begin to take advantage of this? Will we learn the lessons of the pandemic to take a giant leap in communication in the one high school activity that is entirely about communication? Will the e-TOC actually be an unwitting catalyst in democratizing the activity in which it is the very paradigm of elitism?

It could happen. 

The rut of coachean existence (which Blogger always wants to change to coachman)

Over the weekend some of us got all het up about playing some online games. So far I will say that I sort of enjoy Carcassonne, but its recent change of ownership, literally as we were downloading it, meant a bit of confusion among the usual suspects, not to mention that its German origins kept resulting in error messages like Du bist gescreweden. But at least I now have a game going with a couple of people, including Kate, whose time zone delay makes it fairly slow going. But no matter how slow it gets, one still manages to make dumb mistakes. Meanwhile we also went through some contortions on Catan, but I think they’ve been ironed out. I played a practice game today that was both endless and, seemingly, pointless. I’ve tried this game before, and its charms continue to elude me. Anyhow, everyone else thinks it’s the cat’s pajamas, so I’ll give it another go.

Unlike most people, my retirement last year makes the lockdown not much different than non-lockdown. I work on writing off and on all day, with occasional drifting into photo editing and long walks to listen to audiobooks. I’ve been digitizing my old photos going back to the 70s, and am now up to 1994. I look forward to the purchase of my first digital camera in the Spring of 2003 (I think). The tedium of scanning a handful of pictures at a time on one computer, the one with the big hard drive that is slower than [your metaphor here for some really slow thing], then exporting and editing on the Macbook (docked into a decent monitor and keyboard), then uploading and sharing on the cloud—jeesh! Talk about busy work. Sometimes it’s entertaining to revisit some of the old vacations and whatnot, but other times I have to wonder what the hell I was taking a picture of, and worse, where the hell. Oh, well. It keeps one busy indoors, and it is all part of my family history project.

As for the writing, there’s fiction (there’s always fiction, nowadays all for the granddaughter), and there’s work on the good old jimmenick.com website, which I do like keeping up-to-date. (Needless to say, I’m not prepping for any tournaments at the moment, and probably won’t again until October.) I’m also going through this blog’s archives looking for stuff worth preserving. I’ll post some here when I come up with it. 

Anyone want to trade sheep for wheat?