AI and debate research

 It occurs to me that the people who should really be marching the streets in protest against the use of AI in debate are the people who run businesses selling debate support materials. The most elementary AI does it fast and free; I mostly use Google’s not necessarily sterling Gemini for quick and dirty results, and as often as not those results, while quick, aren't all that dirty. The fact that Gemini is simply There probably makes it the AI of choice for the teeming masses. I use Claude for more complicated stuff, but to be honest, I don’t use AI for much of anything except travel guidance. Why would I? I mean, I certainly don't use it for my writing and there’s not much call for it on the golf course…

Back in my coaching days, the first step whenever a new topic was released was a brainstorming session. We would write it on the blackboard and try to read the collective mind of the framers and figure out why this topic, especially if it wasn’t all that clear on face. (There were some real stinker LD topics back in the day; what you get now is prime grade A by comparison.) And then we would just bat around the subject itself. What did we know about it? What did we need to find out? We decidedly did not talk about arguments or cases. That was for later, after we knew all we possibly could about the topic itself. Good arguments come from deep understanding of the subject, not from the top of your head the minute a resolution is released. After our brainstorming we’d go off and research, and the next time we’d meet, we’d start examining potential arguments in the light of our research. Keep in mind that we did all of this as a team: whatever was discussed was discussed in an open arena. If not exactly the marketplace of ideas it was, at least, the corner QuikMart of ideas.

Ultimately, I feel, our approach was a good one. Everyone learned a lot, which was the whole point of the thing after all. Coincidentally, we had decent success at tournaments, which was not the whole point of the thing, at least for me, but not a bad side result nevertheless.

Goodbye to all that.

I gave my handy dandy Google Gemini this: Give me 10 tags for both aff and neg for contentions for the Sept-Oct 2026 NSDA LD topic. I could not even remember the topic when I made the query; that’s how prepared I was.

Ten seconds later I got back what I’ve copied and pasted verbatim below. I’ll just point out a couple of things before you read it. First of all, it gave me exactly what I asked for. Second, it eliminates any need on my part to think of reasons for either an aff or neg; that work is all done for me. (It’s now done for you, too, if you were looking for some Sept-Oct arguments.) Third, it’s not bad. It’s not that I particularly like or dislike any of the arguments, but as likely as not, these are the arguments that will be in play, short of really nutty off-case stuff. Fourth, there’s that tag at the end: If you want to build full cases out of these, let me know if you would like me to pair any of these tags with specific philosophical frameworks (like Kantianism, Utilitarianism, or Cap K) or help write the link and impact chains for a specific side. Whoa Nellie!!! Take 3 tags from column A, pick one framework from column B, choose six side dish impacts from column C. All the educational benefits of research and freeform public discussion in the classroom completely eliminated and then some. Hello, 2026. 

In another post I discussed how AI-written cases eliminate the competitive and educational benefits to be derived from writing them yourself. In yet another post I suggested that AI is the search method du jour, and educators needed to figure out what that means. What you see below is the thing that needs to be figured out, because I don’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing. What I do know is that it is THE thing. This is not your computer searching for articles/quotes/facts on a subject. This is your computer, first and foremost, telling you what the subject is. That is beyond what we used to think of as research. Remember, I got this without even remembering offhand what the topic actually was. 

There’s a lot to chew on in this. 

 

 

 

The September-October 2026 Lincoln-Douglas debate topic selected by the National Speech & Debate Association is: "Resolved: Outer space colonization is a moral imperative."

 

Affirmative (Pro) Contentions & Argument Tags

• Extinction Insurance: Colonization prevents permanent human annihilation from global catastrophes.
• Existential Hedge: Spreading human consciousness secures long-term survival against planetary risks.
• Scientific Renaissance: Off-world laboratories accelerate breakthrough technologies and medical cures.
• Resource Abundance: Asteroid mining solves terrestrial scarcity and climate exhaustion.
• Cosmic Duty: Humanity possesses a unique obligation to seed the universe with moral agency.
• Economic Expansion: New interplanetary markets drive infinite post-scarcity growth.
• Inspiration Driver: Space futures re-engage youth in science, unity, and grand ambition.
• Demographic Survival: Overpopulation relief eases structural strain on Earth's ecosystems.
• Post-National Harmony: Space governance fosters cooperative cosmopolitanism free from old borders.
• Value-to-Life Metric: Expanding sentient life infinitely maximizes total universal goodness.
•  

Negative (Con) Contentions & Argument Tags

• Earth Neglect: Space spending diverts vital capital away from immediate terrestrial suffering.
• Imperialist Spillover: Off-world expansion reproduces colonial violence, exploitation, and inequality.
• Ecological Imperialism: Extraterrestrial mining despoils pristine pristine celestial environments.
• Corporate Dominance: Unregulated space enterprise empowers unaccountable monopoly power.
• Safety Distraction: Colonization is a high-risk gamble that fails to protect vulnerable populations on Earth.
• Lock-in Risk: Spreading flawed human institutions locks systemic injustices into the cosmos.
• Resource Sink: Astronomical financial costs drain resources better used for climate crisis mitigation.
• Techno-Solutionism: The myth of escape de-chains society from fixing environmental collapse at home.
• Exploited Labor: Space industries rely on dangerous, highly stratified labor conditions for workers.
• Biosecurity Hazard: Interplanetary transport risks introducing catastrophic space pathogens to Earth.

 

If you want to build full cases out of these, let me know if you would like me to pair any of these tags with specific philosophical frameworks (like Kantianism, Utilitarianism, or Cap K) or help write the link and impact chains for a specific side.

 

AI and Case Writing

 I do seem to have AI on the brain lately. 

The more I think about it, if I were still coaching the less likely I would be to allow students to use AI for the writing of cases. It’s not that the AI of it is somehow ethically wrong; I mean, as far back as I can recall students have been buying pre-written cases from various purveyors. It’s the “not writing” of cases per se that bothers me, regardless of the source. Here’s why.

The act of writing something requires you to think about that something. If it’s a debate case, first you have to study the subject, then think about it, then come up with a main theme you wish to argue—that such-and-such is good/bad for this essential reason—and then you have to come up with contentions that expound on that main theme. This requires a lot of thinking on the part of the writer. Asking AI to write a case for you eliminates the need for most of that thinking. The problem here is that the lack of that thinking is the skipping of a lot of steps in your preparation for rounds. That original thinking on your part has massaged your brain with all sorts of information and thoughts and byways. When the round happens, that massaging makes you ready for just about anything, not just what you wrote but what you considered and what you didn’t write. You are as prepared as conceivably possible. Delivering a pre-written case eliminates that preparation. It also eliminates all the learning derived from that preparation. The educational value of case-writing no longer exists.

There is another advantage to writing your own case. One of the most important educational values of forensics is mastering public speaking. The speed of LD and CX undermines this to some extent but in PF, with its predominance of lay judges, effective speaking is very important. When you write something and then present it orally, it sounds like you because it is you. Your familiarity with the language used, the emphases, the general style, is implicit. Public speaking is a difficult and often frightening situation; comfort with the material being presented removes much of inherent difficulty. Being an effective speaker can definitely be a life skill learnt through our activity. Removing the prep from the speaking equation is another more indirect lessening of debate’s educational value.

Meanwhile, even if you do get an AI-written case, there is the question of its reliability. You got AI to write it for you presumably as a labor-saving action. Are you going to parse it all the way to hell in back—as you should—to ensure that its citations, if any, are accurate? Are you going to use it as an outline and write your own case based on it? Are you going to practice it to death until in fact it does sound like you wrote it? All of these would seem to eliminate the efficiencies you were seeking in the first place by not writing the case yourself, while at the same time still eliding the educational benefits that writing it yourself would have granted.

Nevertheless, the NSDA and NCFL are perfectly happy with you using AI to write your cases. It is, in a word, no skin off their noses if you skip the educational basics. After all, most of the activities they support are IEs and Congress, and the numbers behind those activities are far greater than the number of debaters. And AI is a messy subject at best, so why not avoid it if you can, despite the fact that the Sept-Oct PF topic goes at it at the roots? I wonder how many educators across the country are really well-informed on the subject. 

There is one legitimate albeit depressing argument in favor of using AI to write cases. The world students will be venturing into in the coming years will indeed be a world of AI. AI will do most of the writing of a non-creative (and, God forbid, even creative) nature. Reports, memos, brochures, proposals, etc.: most people are already not particularly good at writing but presumably good at their jobs, so when their jobs require writing, why wouldn’t they use a shortcut? It could be said that learning mastery of AI in secondary education will be of value in the long run. But this is not mastery of AI, it is simply learning one application of AI, and not a particularly desirable one at that, for all the reasons stated above. I would like to live in a world where everyone is capable of writing workable prose for memos and reports and the like. I would like to live in a world that educates everyone to do that writing. This is not me being a luddite, any more than if I wanted all art to be created by humans as expressions of humanity. Casual writing is, to some extent, an expression of personality. Do we want to lose that by making all casual writing machine-generated? 

I would hope that the NSDA and NCFL, and educators in general, are hotly debating the use of AI. Actually, I know that a lot of folks are. But if the forces against AI in education lose the battle, it is education’s loss, and ultimately humanity’s loss. There really isn’t much to debate about that. 

Sept-Oct in Debateland

• These are the September-October resolutions. You probably know them already if you’re in the game.

  
  

  • Public Forum: Resolved: The United States federal government should enact a moratorium on hyperscale data center construction.
  • Lincoln-Douglas: Resolved: Outer space colonization is a moral imperative.

  
  

  The contrast is interesting. I can’t check out the news these days without seeing articles about the building of data centers. These things are enormous and extremely controversial. As our tech gods dive ever deeper into AI, well- or ill-advisedly, more processing power is needed. We may think we’re in a world of ever increasing miniaturization, given the power of our personal devices, but the data those devices need, and will most likely grow to need more of, require monster, or as NSDA would have it, hyperscale, data centers. 

  
  

  This is a wonderfully hot topic. On one side, our executive branch wants to go so far as to give over federal park land to the operation. And of course on that same side is (so-called) tech progress, US competitiveness, etc., etc. On the other side, my use of the word monster to describe these things is only mildly hyperbolic. And on that side is the demonization of AI and its apostles, the protection of the environment, etc., etc. So many irons in the fire... I would imagine that, during the months of debate, nary a day will go by without a new item in the news, and new discussion thereby from all sorts of people on every side of the issue. A PF team will have plenty to work with, and the strongest PF teams will work with all of it. In other words, a strong topic, with enormous relevancy in our present-day life, with an almost daily impact. Kudos to those who came up with it, and those who voted for it.

  
  

  Meanwhile, I can’t check out the news these days and ever see articles about the colonization of outer space. As we’re driving along in our golf cart between holes the subject has yet to arise in the forty years we’ve been banging away at those little white balls. My poker game has yet to wonder about the morality of space colonization in between hands. In dinner conversations, with friends or family, nary a peep. 

  
  

  My guess is that someone was deep-thinking about Elon Musk and Mars and decided that this was the underlying question that needed to be pondered. Or maybe that particular someone has spent just a little too much time with their Paramount subscription following all the various Star Trek series. I'm wildly guessing what they really want to do is discuss spending money on space versus spending money for some sort of social change on earth. I mean, that’s what it boils down to, if you argue it on a straightforward level,  keeping in mind that what we're talking about here is morality. Clash? Good luck with that. I mean, the Rez doesn’t suggest that it’s space for the sake of knowledge; it’s talking specifically about the morality of colonization. So, fasten your seatbelts, judges, because sooner or later you’re going to be hearing about the negative aspects of colonialism. Man versus the Martians? Whatever. It won’t be any fun, whatever it is.

  
  

  I guess that the LDers will quickly enough find a way to debate the topic; they always do. And with any luck, it will be somewhat reasonable. But meaningful? There is no world in which if we don't invest in space exploration we will instead invest in feeding the needy. Any novice policy debater worth their salt can explain that one to you. If colonialism discussion was the goal, has anyone noticed, for example, our President’s actions in Venezuela or Greenland? Plus colonial abuse of indigents does require indigents, and so far the Alpha Centaurions have been keeping a fairly low profile. So they probably really do want to argue resource allocation. Or maybe I’m missing the point entirely. It wouldn’t be the first time. By the way, the alternative to this in the voting was a resolution that "keeping wild animals in zoos is immoral." I can't say that I like it—that word "immoral" applied to animals is a philosophical landmine, not to mention the great work that major zoos around the world to to protect and revitalize endangered species, among other good works—but at least it is fairly relevant: Free the elephants and all that. Versus a rather unlikely "moral imperative." Immanuel Kant is rolling in his grave.

  
  

  Sigh.

  
  

  Of course, I won’t have anything to do with any of it, thank God. I’ll be in the tab room. Or on the golf course. Or at the poker table. Or enjoying a nice dinner. Discussing everything but the morality of colonizing Tatooine. 

A modest proposal for AI in speech and debate

I used to believe when I was coaching that debate helped students in a number of areas that would be of lifelong value to them. There is public speaking, of course, something with which I had my own difficulties when I was younger. Sooner or later, in countless professions, one is called upon to make a presentation, and some professions are virtually endless presentations. Skill at this is definitely a skill for life, and debate is a great realm for learning it. And it is unlikely that anything about AI will replace that learning or that value. 

Which leaves us everything else I thought students would be learning.

There's research, of course. The art of research has changed dramatically in my lifetime. When I was a debater back during the Van Buren administration, research was a process of manipulating physical media. We went to the library and used The Reader's Guide to Periodic Literature to find articles in magazines that we then dug out of the stacks. The information we gleaned from those articles we wrote onto 3*5 index cards, and those cards, in shoeboxes, comprised our research. In the first phase of the personal computer, which was a machine that was not connected to a Web that didn't exist yet, I acquired an encyclopedia on a CD, Microsoft Encarta, for my personal research. Then the internet and search engines came along, and the magic of Google's algorithm. And then there was Wikipedia, which got off to a bumpy and rather unreliable start, to put it mildly, before becoming quite useful. The unifying factor of all of these is that their manipulation required skill. That is, it could be said that, using the tools at hand, one was, or wasn't, a good researcher. And learning to be a good researcher was another area of lifelong value added to a debater's education. 

Next up on the list of skills to be learnt was writing. To debate you needed cases, and if you wanted cases, you had to sit down and write them. In my experience, contemporary elementary school education does not come close to teaching students how to write. At best it teaches an approximation of what writing might be if one removed spelling, punctuation, grammar, and anything resembling lucidity. The writing of grammar school students is the equivalent of what we assume were the grunts and groans of the pre-Neanderthals: something was being communicated, but only at the most basic level. You can't communicate complex thoughts if you can't articulate them in the first place, and if you can't write them down, they remain unarticulated. Debating forced students, one way or another, to become decent writers, even if only of something that was going to be entirely spoken. (The exchange of written cases is relatively modern.) 

And finally, there is the logic of argumentation. (There are other valuable skills in Speech and Debate, of course, but we're concentrating here on the ones most in present-day jeopardy.) There is the structure of claim/warrant/impact. There is the ability to listen to what someone is saying and to respond cogently. There is the process of weighing in one's own mind the importance of what is being said, and prioritizing accordingly. In other words, there is the art of debate itself. What makes a good debater is the ability to present their own position clearly, and to clearly refute the position of the opponent. You take what is said and turn it around or disprove it or show that it misses the point and that what you are saying outweighs it. Refutation is a combination of quick thinking and logic and very much knowing what you're talking about (which you learned from your research). And successful refutation is the key to debate success.

And here's the problem. When it comes to research, writing, and argumentation, AI at its simplest, most easily accessible form, is incomparably better at the first two than any high school debater, and a fair contender with the third one. (I'm not going to demonstrate any of this. Either you know it already, or if you don't believe it, you can try it for yourself.) 

As for research, any AI agent can feed you a list of sources on literally any topic, saving you the need to poke around on Google or Wikipedia using only your wits and a galaxy-hitchhiking towel. If it is the first of the month and the topic has just been released, AI is probably not a bad starting point. It's the next progressive step in that research process I described earlier that used to begin with a physical trip to the public library. If this initial step in research is followed by careful analysis and evaluation of the results, I'm all for it. We would be using the presumably best possible research tool, combined with our own skill at evaluating research. Debate coaches can still envision educating a good researcher.

As for writing, I have fed an NSDA PF topic into an AI agent, and gotten back, in seconds, a perfectly acceptable set of both Pro and Con cases, complete with citations and timings to keep it within the speaking limits. Any novice could walk into a round with those cases and feel completely confident. Needless to say, with some juicing of one's queries, AI could produce some really excellent cases. Which means that, instead of learning to write cases, one would learn to use AI to write cases. This may or may not be a valuable skill—will anyone other than fiction authors actually write anything in the future?—but it certainly doesn't provide much education to a student in literal writing. It is, to writing, what asking AI to draw a picture is to art. It is not even close. 

Finally, there's going into the round and debating. Here let us imagine the completely usual process of teams entering a round and immediately sharing their cases. (The art of flowing, I am told, is akin today to the art of etching Egyptian hieroglyphics.) What a team can do, as soon as they have the opposition case in hand, is feed that to their AI agent and have the AI agent provide logical rebuttals, complete with citations. This means that debaters don't have to consider what their opponent is saying and figure out responses: AI has done it for them. For that matter, they can ask their AI agent for some leading questions for Crossfire or CX. They can ask their agent to weigh the opposition arguments and tell them which are the strongest and which are the weakest and where is it that they should attack with the best chance of a favorable outcome. None of this communication with their agent will take them more than a few seconds. 

And that is the state of AI today. (It will be getting better and better very quickly.) As for the research part, this is where the educator's skill comes into play. A debate coach in the 1960s had to teach a novice how to research. In 2026, a debate coach still needs to teach a novice how to research. The only thing that has changed is the actual "how." As for the writing of cases, again we rely on the educators. The debate coach can help students learn to write well, or the debate coach can skip that altogether and simply help students get their AI to write well. Those latter coaches will not be doing their students any favor...perhaps. But if the art of writing does go away, assigned to AI drones the way so many other things are being done by machines nowadays, well, I don't know. E. B. White's words may be prophetic: "It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer." (That line still brings a tear to my eye.)

It is the use of AI in actual rounds, as an agent assisting debaters in their arguments, with which I take issue. Allowing use of AI in rounds means that it is not inconceivable that two teams will be facing off arguing not their own ideas and responses but the ideas and responses fed to them by their AI. This is not fantasy: it is absolutely possible. Worse still, one side could be relying on their own wits while the other side is arguing with an unseen assistant at their side, an assistant with the full access to the might and main of the internet, accessible in microseconds. If both teams use AI, what's the point of having the humans? If one team uses AI, how is that even remotely fair?

I will be petitioning my local league to ban AI in rounds. This includes, by the way, speech. I have tested this: a basic AI agent can create an absolutely perfect extemp speech in a handful of seconds, complete with timings and citations and speaking hints. Which means that an extemper who once spent precious minutes researching followed by precious minutes preparing a speech followed by precious minutes memorizing it, can now simply spend all those precious minutes on the memorization of something they had virtually no hand in creating. Where's the value in that? Where is the competitive fairness? Are we ranking speakers or are we ranking AI programs?

To be honest, I think that AI is the greatest challenge that coaches face today. AI needs to be understood and used wisely by coaches. And it does need to be used: It is real, it is not going away, and there are ways of using it that will provide good education to students. But there are also ways of using it that are, in a competitive environment, cheating. Let me emphasize that. Use of AI in rounds, which is the accessing of outside agents, is as much cheating as having your teammates in the back of the room provide you responses during the round in your Google doc. The only difference is the inherent humanity. Cheating is cheating no matter how you slice it. 

If I successfully pass a rule prohibiting AI in rounds, can it be enforceable? Probably not. I can only offer the honor system as enforcement. Given that I'm proposing this rule in our local Catholic Forensic League, I don't think it is too much to ask that we rely on that honor system. The students who are going to cheat are always going to find a way to do so—it's not as if cheating is unknown in our activity—but the vast majority of students, teams and coaches and judges, will be good citizens, adhering to the rule, and will gain the reward of achieving our speech and debate educational goal. And if we don't provide some guardrails against misuse of AI in our activity? First off, we can just dump extemp as totally worthless as an event, and before long, as students learn to train their AI (I imagine some eager entrepreneur coming up with Chat1AR before too long, available for just $9.99 a month plus, well, your immortal soul), we can dump PF, LD, CX and BQ. (I know little of how student congress works, but I would imagine it too is in jeopardy.)

Do any of us want to be around when Claude wins the TOC? In all events? 

Addendum: NSDA does ban AI in competition. NCFL does not. So this does, obviously, apply to CFL tournaments specifically. Which is why it's a rule I'm presenting to my local CFL league. I was rather shocked to find that use of AI in competition was acceptable when I worked at their MS virtual tournament. I wrote this rather long piece, which would all be relatively obvious to probably the vast majority in the activity, in the hopes of getting their national organization on board with this. 

In which we confront (the original) Rod Stewart

 I know in the past I’ve briefly mentioned Crooner Rod Stewart, so therefore I feel, well, ‘Nuff said. If you like it, fine. It’s good to have someone selling Great American Songbook albums, whatever I might personally think of them. (As a reminder, I neither hate nor love them: I listened once, and that was enough.)

But the other Rod Stewart? That’s something else. 

At the time, the late 60s, Stewart suddenly seemed to be everywhere. When I look at the release days of the music now, he was only sort of everywhere, but it was close enough. It started with the Jeff Beck Group and the album “Truth.” Everyone accepted this as a great album immediately, and it introduced Stewart’s voice to the world at large. (Even in those pre-interwebs days we already had an inkling of who Jeff Beck was.) Next thing you knew, Stewart was singing with the Faces, a group that immediately rose to the forefront as a result of its preexistence as Small Faces, creators of the all-time great “Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake” album. In reality, its preexistence was both Small Faces and Stewart and Rod Wood breaking off from the Jeff Beck Group; I would have known all this back in 1969 if my copy of Wikipedia hadn’t gotten lost in the mail. Faces immediately hit the stratosphere; “First Step,” “Long Player,” and “A Nod is as Good as a Wink” are bursting at the seams with great cuts, all released in the space of about a year in the wake of “Truth” and “Beck-Ola.”

So while all this is going on a friend of mine turns up in my college apartment with “The Rod Stewart Album.” It was amazing how much studio time these guys got back in the day. I remember reading at the time that the desire for Stewart to have his own material was that as a singer he liked slower, more deliberate songs than what the instrumentalists in the bands preferred. There’s no question that his first three solo albums are much softer than the Faces material. Of course, it was his third solo album, “Every Picture Tells a Story,” that finally made Stewart the relatively indestructible pop chameleon he is now well known as. If you Google him today, your first hit is a list of his upcoming concert dates. The man was born in 1945. No doubt he and Mick Jagger and a handful of others know something the rest of us don’t. (Maybe it’s that whole wives-younger-than-your-daughters thing…)

I bring all of this up because when I was originally working on my GOATs playlist, I had naturally simply dropped in Every P sight unseen sound unheard, a pure memory play. The title song and “Maggie May,” after all, are certainly all-time greats. But now I happened to be listening to “The Rod Stewart Album,” and the thought arose, “Wait a minute, this stuff is really great.” I mean, you simply cannot beat “Street-Fighting Man.”* At the break, when the temp changes… Well, this got me listening to those first three albums one after the other, bam, bam, bam. And when it was over, it was the first one that came out the clear winner. I went through the plodding process of removing Every P from the GOATs playlist and replacing it with The RSA. I will always love Every Picture and Maggie, but once you’re heard “Handbags & Gladrags,” there is no turning back. As for “Gasoline Alley?” Too many of those soft, singlerly takes. 

If you have nothing better to do, and you’re feeling in the mood for some rock history, treat yourself to these three albums, and make your own decisions. You won’t regret spending the time. 

• I asked the Boomer Manque for his opinion, and after giving the first album a listen, he claimed he enjoyed it accept for Stewart’s “anemic” version of “Street-Fighting Man.” That was the word he used. Anemic. The poor fellow. It isn’t easy missing a whole generation…

In which we finish a book or two

Reading—and more to the point, being somewhere in a book—is a presumed given. One is always somewhere inside a book. It is a constant. But there is a special situation where the constant is replaced by a variable, to wit, the ending of a book one is reading. (This does not really apply to a book to which one is listening.) You pick up your book and you see, if you are on your Kindle, that you are almost at the 90% mark. If it’s a physical book, you see just the slightest sliver of pages remaining. And this book, at which you have been chugging away for the same amount of time every day at the same rate of speed since forever, suddenly becomes a challenge. You are now going to finish this thing, regardless of how long it takes, no matter how tired you may be if you’re reading at night, no matter what distractions the universe might throw at you. You are going to move out of being somewhere inside this book. It will pass on. It will rest in peace. It will be an ex-book. 

There is something especially delectable about this final blast at a book. I just went through it with Robert Crais’s The Last Detective. This was not my favorite Cole/Pike novel, but it was a perfectly acceptable entry in the series. But when I saw that 87% read mark, I knew I could dispense with it and never pick it up again. This was especially important to me as I had begun The Forsyte Saga and finished the first volume, interrupting that one for a mystery break with the Crais. This was probably a bad idea. While the Forsyte books have way fewer shootouts than an Elvis Cole story, there is something about them that is sort of mesmerizing. There are more Forsytes than you can shake the proverbial stick at, all of them getting on with their lives one way or another, and once you jump on the wagon, it just keeps rolling along and rolling along. Galsworthy did not win the Nobel Prize for being a piker. And if it is lacking in shootouts, there is nevertheless action enough for a family saga. I’ve already complained about the most recent dramatization, "The Forsytes," which is more like a riff on the novels, or a Bizarro version, where characters bear no relation to their originals. That was what got me started reading in the first place. And now I’m lost. It will be ages before I’m finished with this, or at the point where the percentage on my Kindle tells me I can stay awake and finish it before the sun rises on a new day. 

Meanwhile, maybe there are shootouts in it and I just haven’t gotten to them yet. We’ll see. Anyhow, thank you, Mr. Crais, for the diversion.

Speaking of endlessness, I just finished the gazillion-hour-long audiobook of Frank, the Voice by James Kaplan. I enjoyed it and learned a lot I didn’t know about one of my favorite performers, and got him all the way up to winning the Oscar but still married to Ava, and when I removed it from my phone I immediately replaced it with the 40+ hours of the sequel, Frank, the Chairman. But I won’t listen to that one for a while. There is more to life than Frank Sinatra. Or so I am told. 

Meanwhile, and just as an aside, we saw Big Bad Voodoo Daddy perform live last night at our local concert hall. Quite the show, especially the second set when they were really in it. That aspect was interesting. They’re a tight band, and their first set was good, but they really didn’t take off until after the break, when they were great, while still being a very tight band. Go figure. Sometimes music-making comes out exactly right. Which is why you need to hear people live when you can. It can be transcendent. 

In which we dip back into the audit music queue

When most people think of Jesse Colin Young and the Youngbloods, they think of “Come Together.” It’s not that I hate the song—that would be impossible, like hating Mom and Apple Pie—but it was one of the most overplayed tunes of its day, back when we were all chained to our radios, and one had heard enough of it long before one stopped hearing it. I prefer to think of JCY&TY as album makers. (Disclaimer: They’re one of the first rock groups I saw live, in 1966. I was slightly younger then.) And when I think of their albums, there’s “Elephant Mountain,” probably one of the most underrated and forgotten albums of the 60s, and also the song “Grizzly Bear.” If GB isn’t on your radar as one of the greatest songs of all time, you need to fix your radar, bo bo dee yo… The guitarist for the group, nicknamed Banana, was Lowell Levinger. (It is possible that the guitarist for the group, Banana, was nicknamed Lowell Levinger.) What brings all this back is Levinger’s/Banana’s album “Married to the Blues.” Very nice acoustic stuff that obviously got me waxing nostalgic. If you’re an old JCY&TY-head yourself, it will do likewise for you. 

I have no idea how “Georgia Bound” by Blind Blake made the queue, but “500 Songs” is the likeliest suspect. As you can guess, it’s old blues and rag guitar, and very strong. And he is apparently the composer of “Diddy Wah Diddy,” which is warrant enough to give him a listen.

“Surf’s Up” by The Beach Boys, followed by “Going Public” by Bruce Johnston — There are those who place “Surf’s Up” high in the BB album pantheon. I wouldn’t go that far, but it did rescue the Wilson/Parks title tune from “Smile” oblivion, sung here by BB Johnston. It also has “Disney Girls,” an actual Johnston number, with the great inane rhyme of Fantasy Worlds and Dis-a-ney Girls. It’s a good BB album, always worth a listen. Following this is in the lineup with Johnston’s own solo album was a no-brainer. It’s a good album, kicking off with his most famous number, “I Write the Songs,” which famously is mostly identified with song-writer Barry Manilow who didn’t write the song. Apparently there are more covers of IWTS than there are people to cover it. More power to you, Bruce. BJ has the longest tenure in the BBs after Mike Love, which I wasn’t expecting. Anyhow, scratch a BB and you get a solo album or two in those 60 years or so. Brian’s are the best, unsurprisingly, but the others all get a good one off now and then. As does Johnston here.

Ron Dante, “Saturday Night Blast.” — So we’re sitting around the poker table and an unfamiliar song comes on my oldie playlist, and the Boomer Manque asks “Who is this?” I look on my phone and reply, Ron Dante. “Who’s Ran Dante?” he asks, so I look it up and reply, “The lead singer of the Archies,” to which the Boomer Manque slaps his head and replies, “I should have known that,” to which the only possible response on my end was, “No, you shouldn’t.” No self-respecting Boomer music fan would have listened to The Archies for any longer than it would take to hav changed the AM radio station, much less harbor such a fondness for their lead singer as to know his voice 60 years later after hearing two notes. As for this album, it takes a lot of mediocre pop hits and further mediocretizes them. I guess being the lead singer of the Archies got you plenty of studio time back in the day. Never underestimate the power of bubblegum. 

Oregon, "Music of Another Pleasant Era" - Nice jazz, if you’re interested. 'Nuff said.