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?

'enery the eighth I am I am

Every now and then I upgrade my website, jimmenick.com. I don’t exactly change the design—life is short—but I do have at the content. Some of it is evergreen and stays as is, but some of it needs a kick in the pants because things ain’t what they used to be, e.g., handouts on how to judge PF, which regularly need to be reevaluated. Other things get weeded out altogether; I’m thinking that by now most of what I wrote during the Harding Administration about LD can go down the old drain. I’ve only just begun working on this, but it will hold me for a while, especially the Tournament Toolkit, which will need the most work. Anyhow, this morning I discovered that access to a few of the original Nostrum episodes was missing. Sacre effing bleu, as the Frenchies say. I fixed that, not only for the sake of the website but to get for myself a definitive set. After all, I do think of it as the Moby-Dick of forensics (by which I do not mean ponderously long and no one ever really reads it, but then again, I’m an M-D fan since college, when I hired out to write papers on it for hapless fraternity bros who had more money than brains, and I became even a bigger fan when I read it, about ten years after that). I couldn’t find the overall file for the first collection, the one that I used to upload it to Amazon. Sigh. It must be on one of the old computers that I scrapped last year. I do hold out some hope it’s on one of the numerous external drives on the table next to me that I have to do something with someday. We’ll see.

Meanwhile, I finished reading Wolf Hall yesterday. Literally reading, as compared to an audiobook (which I do consider reading, but I would imagine that Wolf, which is lots of little strings in all directions, wouldn’t work well by ear). I was inspired by, first, having watched the TV version (which I loved), and then seeing that the third volume had just hit the stands. The time seemed ripe. I probably confused the issue by starting to watch The Tudors at the same time. The show is enjoyable enough, but as The New Yorker put it, it is pretty much cast with underwear models. To wit, Holbein’s Henry:

Played, in The Tudors, by Jonathan Rhys Meyers:

Um, pumpkins and oranges, you might say. Anyhow, I really loved the book, which has inspired me to find out what the facts are, since they differ widely between Wolf and Tudors. For instance, the bastard Richmond melodramatically dies as a lad in the latter (not true), and is alive and kicking still at the end of the former (true). The real problem is that TV imprints things on the brain more sturdily than books, especially wispy books with circular narratives like Wolf. Also, one has to account for the fact that Wolf’s Anne Boleyn was The Crown’s first ER, while Queen Anne of The Favourite is The Crown’s second ER. Which is not to mention that Dr. Who was the first Crown’s Prince Consort, Dr. Who’s Clara is Victoria in that series (which I’m also watching), and Broadchurch, which I am also watching, fields not only two Whos but also Anne/Elizabeth, Rory and, for all I know, Strax and a couple of Daleks. Can’t these British actors find one job and stick to it?

The bottom line is, Wolf Hall, the book, highly recommended. Ditto WH the Masterpiece Theatre (or whatever it was). The Tudors? Think of it as the Shonda Rhimes version of the 16^th Century: entertaining, lots of lust, to be taken with a full cone of salt. 

Been There, Been Doin’ That

Given that I retired from the Day Job at the beginning of 2019, I’m not exactly new to being around the house all day. Of course, before Commander Cuomo forbade it for we 70+ folks, I did on occasion sally forth for one thing or another, most notably debate tournaments and the like, but I did have time on my hands that I had not had before, and the question was, how to fill it.

For me, this was easy. My granddaughter being born in 2017 helped me focus my mind on what, if anything, I had to bequeath to her. Family history was an obvious answer. First of all, I and I alone know my own story (I’m an only child), so there’s a touch of memoir to pass along, and additionally there’s all the family lore that I picked up over the years about my parents and their parents, real stuff, at least anecdotally, as compared to steamship passenger lists and birth certificate searches. Secondly, although related, there is a trove of photographs and the like that were collecting dust and discoloration in various albums, all of which needed modernization. With these things in mind, I settled down to the creation of a family history, now completed, and also committed to the seemingly endless task of digitizing old photographs, which I am now about halfway through. In other words, while I wasn’t working anymore at the DJ, I was still working. The big difference was that the alarm didn’t go off in the morning, and I didn’t have to spend endless hours reading a lot of crappy books to find a handful of good ones. (I did  take up some quality reading, though. All of my own choosing. We’ll get to that eventually.)

The point of all this is that, despite being under lockdown, it doesn’t really have that much effect on me personally, because I already have a fairly set routine for the day (and, thank goodness, my wife and I are healthy). My sympathies go out to those whose lives are obviously torn asunder by current events, or maybe even suffering from the virus. I mean, this is the real magilla.

For the moment all I can say is stay safe. And be good. This too shall pass. 

Oh, what the hell...

I originally created this blog as a sort of journal of my career as a debate coach. Although it often roved far afield of that intention, it always ultimately returned to its main business. I've been going through the old entries lately, and I find it interesting that a lot of what I was thinking about forensics over a decade ago was, A) incredibly prescient, and B) on occasion, ridiculously wrong. I changed my mind about many things over the years, but mostly I did stick to my guns. There is a plus ça change aspect to the whole thing, to tell you the truth. 

In any case, when I retired from coaching, the motivation of providing a coaching journal was obviously rendered moot. While I was still tabbing my little heart out, I was pulling away from the nitty-gritty of debate. I didn’t watch rounds, and I no longer studied the trends. I kept up with the rules insofar as issues might come to the tab room, but that was the extent of it. So, with little ado, I put blogging behind me.

When I retired from my Day Job in 2019, I started doing a whole bunch of writing of a personal nature, beginning with a family history. Having a grandchild will prod one in that direction. I also began creating stories for said grandchild. The thing is, writing—my own and that of others—has always been important to me. And while I’ve been beavering away at it with decent discipline for over a year now as my main retirement activity, one thing that has been missing from my work was this particular outlet, where I could play around with the odds and ends that fit nowhere else. So I've decided to come back.

I don’t know if anyone will care one way or the other, but then again, I never did. One exercises to keep one’s muscles working: this applies as much to mental as physical exercise. My writing here will be just that, i.e., mental exercise. It will entertain me, and maybe it just might entertain some others. Who knows? 

And so we begin.

The Proposed 2019-20 LD Resolutions

I can never resist commenting on the upcoming LD rezzes. 

Resolved: Predictive policing is unjust.

I have mixed feelings on this one. It’s about data analysis, making it wonky at best and not uninteresting, but I fear that in rounds it can be easily defined as a version of hi-tech racial profiling, veering away completely from an arguable issue. Flip neg at your own peril.

Resolved: The United States ought to grant legal personhood to natural ecosystems.

Sort of interesting, the more I think about it. Should require a lot of good educational research. But in the end, flip neg at your own peril.

Resolved: Japan ought to amend Article 9 of its constitution to allow for offensive military capabilities.

Here’s where the PF committee came into the room by mistake and someone forgot to erase their resolution from the board. I’m betting that for someone on the wording committee this was a pet idea that the rest could not shake. 

Resolved: The United States ought to legalize adult sex work.

Can I come on parents’ night when you explain to them why you’re doing this? This will be voted on only by the coaches who really want to discuss and direct research about adult sex work with non-adult high school students. Probably not the largest number of teachers out there… 

Resolved: The intergenerational accumulation of wealth is antithetical to democracy.

If you’re judging this, your head will spin, but you will never actually get to hear whether or not the intergenerational accumulation of wealth is antithetical to democracy, two ideas that are mental ships passing in the argumentation night.

Resolved: In the United States, colleges and universities ought not consider standardized tests in undergraduate admissions decisions.

Not only relevant and timely, but meaty and interesting. Solid!

Resolved: States ought to eliminate their nuclear arsenals.

A classic, of course. With lots of modern issues to chew on. 

Resolved: The United States ought to act as the employer of last resort.

I like this. I always like questioning what the purpose of government is beyond the theoreticals of the social contract. What are the responsibilities of big government in the 21^stCentury?

Resolved: A just nation ought not use offensive cyber operations to target civilian infrastructure.

This is no different from a rez saying the military should not attack civilians. Plus, as far as I understand things, it’s a completely wrongheaded approach to the very important subject of cyber warfare. A great subject, but this isn’t the resolution for it. 

Resolved: The United States ought to eliminate subsidies for fossil fuels.

Sort of a bread-and-butter topic, if perhaps way better for policy than LD. People will probably vote for it, and then complain that they couldn’t keep their eyes open during the rounds. 

Order of preference:

Resolved: In the United States, colleges and universities ought not consider standardized tests in undergraduate admissions decisions.

Resolved: The United States ought to act as the employer of last resort.

Resolved: States ought to eliminate their nuclear arsenals. (I'm thinking of this as a Nationals topic.)

Resolved: The United States ought to eliminate subsidies for fossil fuels.

Resolved: The United States ought to grant legal personhood to natural ecosystems.

Resolved: Predictive policing is unjust.

Resolved: The intergenerational accumulation of wealth is antithetical to democracy.

Resolved: Japan ought to amend Article 9 of its constitution to allow for offensive military capabilities.

Resolved: A just nation ought not use offensive cyber operations to target civilian infrastructure.

Resolved: The United States ought to legalize adult sex work.

Student judging

I’ve always been a big proponent of student judging. I believe that, for debaters, seeing a round from the perspective of the back of the room is a good experience that will improve their own debating skills. I also always felt it important to train my student judges to be good at what they do. They needed to perform as educators pro tem, and they needed to make judgments on a round that transcended their own feelings on a resolution or an argument. They needed to be as objective in their judgments as we expect any judge to be objective, to decide a round based not on their personal preferences but on the actual debating that has taken place. 

For the most part, student judges are placed into novice or middle school pools. In my region, we also have JV divisions, where student judges are also acceptable, although I question their validity in college JV divisions, where you might have juniors judging sophomores in a fairly serious venue. I accept it more at our local one-dayers, where it is the norm, but only because it is the norm, and allows those divisions to exist in the first place. For that matter, the use of student judges often has to be seen in the light of making novice (and some JV) divisions happen in the first place. If we disallowed student judging, we’d lose an awful lot of debating opportunities for younger students.

I have seen serious abuses at all levels of judging. Novice judging is not unique in that. But lately I saw a team go so far in abuses that I was tempted to disqualify them as a group. A student who had never debated, but who had a younger sibling on the team, was entered as a judge in the novice division. The couple of (relatively illiterate) ballots this person wrote clearly demonstrated a total lack of understanding of the event, and probably a total lack of training on the part of that team. Worse, because this person was so at sea, one of the novices on the team who was competing at the tournament started not only shadowing this judge and providing advice when not debating themselves, but eventually writing that judge’s ballots. In other words, a competitor was judging their competition. Needless to say, once we found out about this, we put a stop to it and kicked out the judge (and brought in the team’s chaperone that day and explained in no uncertain terms our feelings on the subject), but because this person had now judged 4 double-flights, we had no choice but to double-bye all their decisions. For all practical purposes, this one person had made the division of the tournament almost a complete blowout.

I can’t do much about what happened, but I can offer a preventative for it happening again, to wit, a standard wording of what is required of a student judge. I offer this: Student judges in the novice division must be at least in their junior year with two years of debating experience. 

I could go on with all sorts of other requirements for judging in any and all divisions, but the further you get from the simplest measurement—either you’re a junior debater with two year’s experience or you’re not—the harder it is to enforce. This basic requirement can be easily adjusted for JV divisions and the like, if necessary. I will be proposing something like it as a rule clarification for our local CFL, where we regularly have novice and JV debate divisions. And I will be adding it as a rider to invitationals where we have novice and JV divisions. 

It is a shame that we have to belabor the obvious like this. But as long as there are teams that fail at the most basic level to provide judging for a tournament commensurate with the judging they expect for themselves, we have no choice.