How I spent my Christmas vacation

Whew!

We had all sorts of interesting plans for the Christmas holiday, many of which went awry on the morning of 12/20 when I got the message that my daughter had had a bike accident and perhaps broken her arm. She was brought to New York Presbyterian Hospital on 68th Street, about as far as you can get in Manhattan from Prince Street, site of the accident. But thanks to Sandy, the closer trauma centers are closed, and will be for the foreseeable future. Which means that Presbyterian’s ER is like Calcutta, only more crowded. After various tests and whatnot, it was determined that Kate had managed to break her scapula, which is really hard to do unless you’ve broken every other bone in your body by driving about a hundred miles an hour into a brick wall. She was going quite a bit slower than that, in traffic, when she hit a patch of ice; it being about 45 degress Fahrenheit, she wasn’t exactly expecting arctic conditions. It probably could have been a lot worse, all things considered.

She spent about a day and a half in the emergency room. First, she was lined up in the halls with everyone else lined up in the halls. You can just triage so many people, and there were only so many “rooms,” which in the ER are simply curtained off areas. Eventually she scored one of these areas, which she shared with another patient. Did I say it was crowded in there? My wife stayed with her overnight, and I heard stories of drunks and moaners and you-name-it. I came in the next day to take over, and I watched people spitting up blood and looking one minute away from death and generally being ER-worthy. Everyone had been there forever but no one was complaining much. It wasn’t as if it weren’t obvious what was going on and why it wasn’t going on all that quickly.

When Mike came by (Mike?) she asked him when the surgery would be and he said soon. Mike was her surgeon, or at least one of them, the one who talked to patients. With surgeons, talking to patients is low on the list of necessary skills, but this guy was young and good-looking and very presentable. You trusted him on sight, and would have given him a lead role if you were doing the casting. Anyhow, after an hour or two they did take her away, and I went from Calcutta to the Upper East Side, a special waiting room for families of patients in surgery. Very nice. A volunteer came and took all my information and promised to keep me posted, and when she went off duty another volunteer came and took all my information and promised to keep me posted, and after a few more hours I realized that the volunteers went home at 7:00 and there was a phone you could call to get information. “She’s still in surgery,” was the drift of it. Three and a half hours, and it was performed by the head of trauma, and it was rare enough that, I gather, it was rather a popular procedure for all and sundry. The general response when people would look at her and ask what the problem was, was a widening of the eyes and the response, “That’s really unusual.” What they ended up doing was framing her scapula with titanium, making a little metal triangle to hold it in place, and then screwing the frame to the bone.

She was in a lot of pain before, and after. She still can’t hold out her left arm much above her waist. Thank God she’s right-handed.

I was fidgeting in the waiting room when an old friend of Kate’s came by to visit. She said that she had been told that Kate was in Recovery. Oh. We talked for a while, and no one official came by, so we ventured out on our own. One truth always holds: if you look like you know where you’re going, you can go almost anywhere, no matter how many signs there are to the contrary. We found Recovery, and sure enough, there was Kate. I had expected her to be wrapped like a plaster-covered mummy, but she only had a large gauze patch over her left rear shoulder. Amazing. She was groggy and in a lot of pain, but she was with us. We talked to her, and the nurse, and eventually Mike, and they told us she’d be going to a room eventually (no more Calcutta) and I finally went home.

What a day. If you want to know how discombobulated I was, it was way late and I was starving and I stopped on the road to have a Burger King Whopper. You wouldn’t have recognized me.

The next couple of days were a slow climb back to normalcy so that she could leave the hospital, things like getting heart rate down and getting off the morphine and so forth. We brought her home on Christmas Eve Day.

The prognosis is for complete recovery. But there’s a lot of physical therapy involved, and we have no idea how long she’ll be staying with us. At some point we drove out to Brooklyn to collect vitals. For instance her cat, the Captain, is in our basement. Tik (pronounced tik) has demonstrated that this intrusion is one of those things up with which he will not put. When we tried to have them together, Tik cornered the Captain and hissed him into a paranoid fit. Now, when the spirit moves him, Tik sits outside the closed door of the basement making the sort of moaning sound we haven’t heard since we were in the ER last week. He’d make a good, albeit pathetic, patient. The Captain, on the other hand, sleeps like a cat. It's that Brooklyn background, I guess.

In the middle of all this, there was of course the poor spouse, who was still in England. He won’t be moving here until March. He was scheduled to arrive on Christmas night, just for a visit. Needless to say, he’s been with us too. Newlywed life can be…interesting. He’ll be going back New Year’s night, but it’s been great that he’s been here to help and to be with her.

So Kate has been doing fine, all things considered. She can go out, go for a walk, go to restaurants, go to the movies. She just has to rebuild her left side. Physio starts Friday. It will be a long haul, but in the end, she’s okay. Which is a lot to be thankful for.

And maybe now we can get back to normal.

You too can Bean

I'll post the questions on Twitter @jimmenick #HHBeans. We'll see how smart you really are, you spalpeen!

Debate: Think you're so smart, eh?

We ended up Beaning at the chez, as I said, because of those gas leaks. No one ate any of the beans, so there were no similar gas problems chez moi. It was a good turnout, with people squeezed in everywhere. We created balanced teams rather than sorting by vintage, and it worked pretty well.

For those of you who wish to play our game at home, I offer a sample challenge. Are you smarter than the average Sailor? Let’s try a few samples. Keep in mind that for some of these, it was only the group on the hot seat, not the entire bunch.

They were able to answer these questions:

• Which first lady was a former actress?
  
• What is Wonderland Center (category Lindsay Lohan)?
  
• Fill in the Stones blank: Please allow me to introduce myself, I’m ___
  
• Name the three Pixar features with no people in them.
  
• Who is Mr. Dithers (comic strips)?
  

Presumably you can answer all of them too. On the other hand,

• They were unable to name a Sondheim show (unless you count Fiddler on the Roof, which I was not prone to do).
  
• The best they could come up with for the year 313 AD was that was the year Rome fell. Much like 2012 is the year the world ends, I guess.
  
• They could not identify the composer, the name of the song, or any other lyrics from the the song in the Great American Songbook with the line: “The Rockies may crumble, Gibraltar may tumble, They’re only made of clay.” They spent a lot of time analyzing the fact that a lot of rocks were mentioned, presumably on the assumption that this represented the geological vein of the Songbook.
  
• No one could figure out which one doesn’t belong and why in the group Cosmo, George, Archie and Jerry.
  
• Nor did anyone know which Muppet plays the piano. (Actually, there’s more than one answer to that one.)
  

As for the lifelines, O’C had Gwyneth Paltrow starring in a movie that was never made, my daughter flunked miserably at comic strips and claimed it was because the particular strip sucks, and Spons, while knowing that birds gotta swim and fish gotta fry, thought that Showboat was written by Lerner and Loewe. No one ever went broke betting against the lifelines.

Two of the little Dec girls made it all the way to the finals, so as CP suggests, in the future I’ll keep my opinion of Dec to myself. It took a Yale student to actually win, but as usual, Meh was in there up to the finish.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a goodnight.

Debate: Beans, Kinda and Dec

We were supposed to do Bean Trivia last night, but there was a gas leak at the school and the place was shut down. They opened it this morning, took a few whiffs and shut it down again. Given that there are no days left to have the event, we're chezzing it up.

A lot of little Dec girls may never recover.

Anyhow, as you’re reading this, I’m officially kicking off the Christmas version of Bean Trivia, and O’C and Kt are standing by as lifelines. The categories? First ladies, the Great American Songbook (or as Michael Feinstein calls it, the Rod Stewart Songbook), Comics in the local paper (because I know they’re not reading the news, but maybe Beetle Bailey will ring a bell), Transvestites, Lindsay Lohan (who would make a really good policy topic some year, because there’s new info every day), Famous Dogs, Universal (a no doubt welcome change from Disney), Famous Dates, Original Sources (e.g., the play from which Hello Dolly was derived) and maybe one or two others that I’m forgetting. Plus there’s Which One Doesn’t Belong and Why, and Name a Bunch Of, both of which allow for extra points. And on top of that, there’s side betting on the lifelines, who in addition to the above-mentioned includes our beloved speech coach. If you guess accurately whether or not they’ll guess accurately, you can win a few extra beans. And what is the prize for all of this? Well, there’s some serious crap, as usual, but at the very top, numero uno, king of the heap, A number one: the largest bag ever to be imprinted with Hello Kitty material. I mean, really large. You can fit two novice Speecho-Americans and a Fiat in there. I don’t know why I’m giving it away. There has to be some good use for it around the house.

Policy turnout for the Regis Kinda Kristmas Klassic this coming weekend is looking fairly bleak. Kaz will be on-hand, but if these numbers persist, we might suggest she be off-hand, which would make her life traveling to her Midwest family home that much easier. (Note that I don’t exactly specify where in the Midwest. I can’t keep that stuff straight. Wisconsin? Minneapolis? Newark? It’s all the same to me once you cross the Hudson.) As for myself, I wouldn’t mind a nice manageable tournament. I’ve got a full boat going down, though, so at least I have a reason for being there beyond wanting to run over to the fancy deli for last minute stocking stuffers. But an easy tournament is so much nicer than a hard one. Throwing a few cards would be fun though. Haven’t done that in a while. Anyhow, the other divisions look robust enough, considering the date.

The two months after the turn of the new year are, as always, packed to the gills. The odd Sailor has been signing up here and there, especially for UPenn, but there it’s mostly novice Speecho-Americans who don’t actually understand the concept of signing up for college tournaments. Then again, offering Dec? I guess it’s worth it at some level, even though I want to eliminate it going forward at the Gem to make more room for something else. UP is still building, and Dec probably brings in a lot of locals, so who can complain. It’s not going to bring in my yokels, though, unless they’re ready to double-enter and spend the hotel money premium. I posted a fish or get off the pot message to them; things should clear up by tomorrow, when I’m securing the hotel rooms.

And, going back to Bean Trivia, I leave you with this parting reminder of a Great Moment in Forensics.
Q. Name the Muppet beloved by Miss Piggy.
A. Hermit the Crab.

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Debate: Whoda thunkit

Tonight's bean trivia event was postponed because of a gas leak at the high school.

A gas leak? Bean trivia?

Do the math.

Debate: Catching up

Take off one weekend, and you feel like you’ve never been to a tournament in your life. I communicated with O’C at Blake a couple of times, although it was hard to get his attention because he thought that Walter Mondale might walk by at any moment. Curiously enough, he (O’C, not Mondale) forgot to secure the medals for the Newark MHL, which is something like [fill in your own metaphor here; the best I could come up with was either the Pope not bringing the holy water or Queen Elizabeth II forgetting her underwear, neither of which makes a lot of sense]. But apparently the Jerseyites managed to soldier through. Since one of the Sailors earned his first piece of tin on Saturday, I’m rather disappointed that he couldn’t immediately don it and look like he just won the Croix de Guerre, but you can’t have everything. Curse you, O’C!

I’m going to TVFT on Wednesday if it kills me. Palmer claims last week he thought it was on a different day, and meanwhile he’s kicking and moaning because I didn’t save the data from Wee Sma’ Lex for the ages. Who knew it was of archival quality?

Just to keep my hand in, I set up the January MHL on tabroom today, which is the same weekend as Columbia. Still waiting to hear from the Gems to confirm room numbers. I’ll bug them shortly. This coming weekend is the Regis Kinda Christmas Klassic (or Regis Chinda Christmas Chlassic), which will probably be pretty small, given that there was the MHL last weekend plus it is after the break officially starts. More judge food for the rest of us, in that case.

Otherwise, not much going on. Nice restful weekend, with poker on Friday, NYC trip and show and nice dinner on Saturday, then tree decorating on Sunday. Gearing up for the holidays, which should be pretty busy, apparently kicking off with a bout of slot machines with O'C and Matt Dunay’s mother. One never knows where one is going to end up next.

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Debate: Who doesn't remember the Oogs, eh?

Pajamas Wexler has reported to me that some poor misguided student from Lacking Pork, following a poorly aimed bolt of forensics inspiration to its logical conclusion, recently used an episode of Nostrum for a prose piece. Something to do with the Oog family. It rang no bells at all, so I went and read it, and it still rang no bells. It’s about the history of advertising, going back to prehistoric times, where apparently there was less advertising than there is now, although there were already plenty of people around who just watched the Superbowl for the commercials. Apparently the piece did pretty well. One never knows, does one…

There was no TVFT last night. I’m not quite sure why, but when I got to Skype, all was quiet. The only person I talked to was the British lady who tests to see if your connection is working. I need to get me a new batch of TVFTers.

On the plus (?) side, none of Tuesday's Sailor newbies responded with the mandatory signup email, not even the one who looked just like a debater, so maybe I won’t have to worry about that after all. Of course, it might just be the overwhelming burden of having to send an email. Kids these days… When I was their age, we sent emails all the time, and—by the way and Oh my God—spelled out every single word, and because there were no computers we carried them by hand five miles in the snow uphill in both directions. How did we get so quickly to a spot where sending an email is an archaic vestige of the stone age and an impossible burden beyond what a coach can reasonably expect of a student? It’s not like I’m asking them to click on the flashing gif on my Geocities account. Jeesh. What would these people do in a world of C. Colin Backslash, the original computist?

It seems strange not having to do a tournament this weekend. I look at the MHL registration longingly and my fingers get itchy wanting to scissor up some contestant cards. It’s a pretty good turnout, overall, although the JV divisions always shrink a bit as the year progresses. As ought to be obvious to anyone with the ability to read between the lines, I would like to apply some of the thinking of Academy to the MHL, to wit, tossing in some tutorials and the like. Maybe that’s where the idea will end up. Who knows? Byram, for all the hoo-ha, doesn’t look much different from last year in terms of numbers, which means that for all my bloviating I haven’t made much of a dent. My feeling is, if we can make just one noticeable difference in one venue, it’s a step in the right direction. I really do worry about small tournaments disappearing. The idea that someone will come and take over those weekends simply transfers the problem to a different venue, so unless that new venue has some intrinsic benefit over the former one, it’s all much of a muchness.

I'll probably slow down over the next couple of weeks as the holidays settle in, but I will continue to post the odd this and that. It's the least I can do, and I mean that with all my heart.

Video: Someone watched all of Atlas Shrugged so that you wouldn't have to

The funny thing is, even at 3 minutes and a few seconds, it's one of the most boring things you'll ever see.

Video: One good reason not to invite Yoko Ono to karaoke night

Debate: Newbies, disease-ridden adolescents and the tragically inept

So that was weird. Last week there was an assembly on extracurricular activities at Sailorville, at which Zip apparently wowed the crowd, leading to three new plebes at the meeting last night. Who expects new faces at this stage of the game? Assuming that at least one of them was appalled enough at the night’s proceedings to disappear for all eternity, that still means that one or two will return. What in tarnation am I supposed to do with them starting in January? At the moment, the ad hoc plan is give them a special session or two on the basics, have them watch at Bryam, and point them to compete at Newark and Scarsdale. That, of course, assumes that they have some live coal in their intestinal boiler rooms. If they are more like the traditional Sailor, there will be much hemming and hawing on their part and much gnashing of teeth on my part, and they’ll sit out the year wondering if there wasn’t something on TV Tuesday night that would get them out of this. We’ll see.

We didn’t have our practice round because of illness. Why do teenagers always seem to be at death’s door? As a species they are shockingly unhealthy. On the way to Ridge, for example, Pickles complained that he almost didn’t come because he was sick, and I told him to give me ample warning if he was going to vomit, since I find vomiting in my car less than congenial. On the way back, George Whose Name is Robert told me he was so sick that he almost stopped competing, and I gave him my same vomit speech. Neither GWNIR nor Jiminy Cricket were at the meeting last night, but at least I didn’t have to give her the vomit speech. [Cue the off-my-lawn music.] Now when I was a kid, they hadn’t invented sickness yet. Not only did we have to walk the proverbial snow five miles both ways, but we did it with a raging fever, backwards and in heels. (I thought I’d throw a Ginger Rogers reference in there for the dance fans among the VCA.) We were made of sterner stuff back in my day.

I seem to have been bombarded lately with questions from people incapable of reading. I’ve mentioned this recently, but it just won’t stop. RTFM, or in this case, substitute website for manual. What is most irritating is stupid questions from people who have done it before about doing it again. It’s the same. It will ever be the same. Please, don’t email me about it. That’s why they invented O’C (who, by the way, has entered into a special twilight zone of wandering away that is profound even for him; whatever he’s up to, he’s really up to it). I do have a little more patience with newcomers, but even they ought to read the invitation sooner or later.

Aaaargh!

Coachean Feed: the 6th Amendment, indirect limits to freedom, what exactly is a person, economics and prison, anti-gay movements

More links of interest to the debate community.

• The sixth amendment? The one about how everyone is entitled to a fair trial? How quaint, in a world where there are no trials anymore. The Sixth Amendment Rights to Fairness: The Touchstones of Effectiveness and Pragmatism
  
• Indirect limits to freedom are still limits to freedom: What is Freedom? (10): The Ability to Do Things
  
• When does an animal count as a person? Not just a protected species, but a person due the rights protections of any other person.
  
• Another article that dances around Jan-Feb: Foreword: Criminal Justice Responses to the Economic Crisis My bet is that you won't regret having too much data in rounds.
  
• Meanwhile, back at the ranch... There are those of us who worry that SCOTUS will make gay marriage unconstitutional, or immoral, or some damned thing fueled by Scalia-esque homosexual agenda arguments. Will someone please tell him that he's safe, and that there isn't a homosexual in the universe that wants to have sex with him? In other countries, they are not quite as blessed as we are, able to joke about things: Nigeria pushes “Jail the Gays” bill.
  

The last Steve Buscemi video you'll ever want to see

Assuming, that is, that you wanted to see this one. Remind me not to look up Diana Krall videos again any time soon.

A nice little treat: great animation

12 Essential American Cartoons

Absolutely—a fine selection. If you haven't seen some of these, stop everything now.

Sinatra

Born on this date in 1915, as a young lad Frank had the guts to partner up on the dance floor with Gene Kelly. He pulls it off too. (Then again, Kelly had the guts to sing along with Sinatra. He doesn't do too badly either.)

Debate: Planning this and that

I’m getting eager for the Academy Debate intro at Byram Hills. We put together an agenda at Ridge from earlier discussions, and sent it out into the world. We still need the seniors to fill the training slots, and I’m looking for volunteers, but there will be a Bronxwegian pool to draw from if all else fails. I want to lead some of this stuff myself. It might be a problem being in three places at once though. Still, I wouldn’t mind giving it a shot. The thing is, our competition on this weekend is the Sunvitational, which is good insofar as it won’t draw the primary field from a local event, but bad insofar as a few key people like O’C, for reasons I can’t understand, think a well-run tournament in Florida in January is somehow attractive. What are these people thinking? Curse you and your climate, Schappaugh!

We’ve also been murmuring among ourselves about the Modest Novice and possibly expanding it through December. There are plusses and minuses to this. This conversation will no doubt extend shortly. And speaking of extending conversations, we’re definitely recording a new TVFT Wednesday. The vast TVFTean Army rejoices!

I’m just about through clearing off the first wave of Columbia. I was actually asked what my waitlist strategy was, and it turns out I do sort of have one. No more than 5, outliers first, then locals. I would imagine that, aside from the heavily subscribed debate categories, just about everybody will get in, but it’s no big deal for a school from down the street to fill slots a few weeks out, as compared to someone who needs hotel rooms in Manhattan. I’m rather surprised, by the way, that they offer Declamation. That seems so… naïve. I mean, it’s a college tournament. There are better things they could be doing other than wrangling in freshmen and sophomores. We’ll have to talk about that for next time.

As always, there are the few schools who are starting out in forensics that are attracted to a big college tournament when they really should be practicing their chops more locally. I can’t talk them out of coming, but I’ve got to wonder why anyone would plop their entire year’s budget on a college trip where they’ll get whipped as compared to half a dozen shorter, closer trips. It has been ever thus, though. People didn’t turn the Harvard tournament into what it is today (which I can’t really speak to, having not attended in ages) for any other reason than that it was held at Harvard and not at the Hendrick Hudson Mail Order University for the Criminally Insane and the Women Who Love Them. High school administrations, from the loftiest to the looniest, are impressed by big names. Come to think of it, so is my mother. I tell her I’m going to the Bronx and she looks at me like I really need a new night job. I tell her I’m going to Yale and she thinks that’s exactly where I belong and why has it taken me so long to realize it? As I say, it has been ever thus.

Otherwise, these are peaceful times, with me not doing anything forensical this upcoming weekend. Tonight we’ll have a practice round at Sailorville, our last business meeting of the year, unless maybe we get together to make up some lost time over the break. I’ll get to watch my debating novices (as compared to my show up and stare at Menick novices) in action. Should be interesting. I hope.

A little fun video

Debate: Ridge-a-Roni

I find it interesting that Ridge has moved about a half hour closer to my school than it used to be. Much closer than I remembered. That’s a good thing. I’d much rather have a short drive to Ridge than a long one.

It was nice to do a high school again. 5 prelims, endless elims. At first we were in a room with good comfy chairs, but it was way too many of us and we quickly drifted over to our normal venue in the Media Center. (You would call this the library, but that’s not a tony enough name for the folks in Basking Ridge.) You can fit kazoodles of tabbers in this place and not even notice them very often, except when the policy folk get overexcited, which does happen occasionally. LD and PF tab never get overexcited. We don’t know the meaning of the word.

Things went fine for the most part, except for confusion over who owned which judges. PF liked to think that they were theirs, while we liked to think that they were ours. PF was being run by people who had taken vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. LD was being run by me and O’C. It was a bloodbath.

On the plus side, we had a “Jack.” Every tab room needs one, a major domo who is always there and who can solve every problem. Jack is a good name for such a person, and in this case, happened to actually be his name. We would just shout out “Jack!” when something was askew, and there was Jack, skewing it back up. Ridge happens to be slightly larger than the Pentagon, without the internal order of roomage, so it’s a major miracle to get from one area to another. I’ve been there enough now to have only gotten lost once, but it was for eleven hours, it being that kind of place. As I say, big and confusing.

I tried to keep CP around for various purposes, since I was using the notification system again (despite Ridge’s crappy wireless; I ended up plugging in my MiFi and paying the $5 for a day, which meant that when it ran out on the second day, it was either pay another $5 or let it go: I let it go). Unfortunately, he was the quality in the pool, probably ranked by everyone there as a 1, including the people who didn’t rank. So we didn’t see him much except at the short gathering Friday night at the motel, attended by everyone in the universe. I had brought nuts and cheese, which were quickly devoured. The other people were just nuts and cheesy. What can I say?

O’C didn’t wander off too often, although at those times when he insisted on blasting out “I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas” we were all wishing that he would wander off. JV was on burger patrol. There was one team that refused to use the other team’s coin for the PF flip because they had cursed it with negative energy. (Shouldn’t that be con energy?) The guys who had looked all professional last week running the Tiggers looked like normal human beings again judging PF this week.

And so it goes. This weekend I’m off. Yes, off. There had originally been no tournament on the schedule, so I made other plans. When a tournament came back on to the schedule, it was (thankfully) too late to change those plans. Whoopty damn do, as Clarence Thomas might put it.

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