There is a great disturbance in the Force

I love consistency. As in, guess who won't be showing up for Monticello... Right the first time! Thank God we didn't nickname the guy ShowUp.

CLG is doing a fund-raising walk. If you're interested in sponsoring, go to walk.diabetes.org where you can find her name (Le Goues) in the Boston walk. I'm all in favor of curing just about everything. If there were no diabetes, we wouldn't have spent four years leaving needles behind in every restaurant we visited. That would have been nice.

I was pointed to a thread about BB somehow co-opting NFA's TOC bids on the lddebate.org site (if you think I don't look at DOA much, then I REALLY don't look at this one anymore). There seems to be some sense among debaters that the northeast should have some specific apportionment of biddage, and that the cosmic balance needs to be redressed before life on earth as we know it ends in catastrophe. I don't really think it works that way. First of all, while I would love to see Bronx regain its bids, the issue we are facing at the moment is that there is simply a gap in the schedule on the weekend of Nov 11. This is a gap of Policy/LD in two divisions, novice and varsity, plus PF. In other words, at least half the people usually attending NFA have absolutely no interest in the TOC. Every tournament in the world should not be evaluated as how well it gets you into some other tournament. NFA is a spectacular opportunity to introduce a large number of novices to two-day events. I miss that a lot more than I miss four TOC bids. The number of people in the northeast who are seriously in contention for TOC bids is rather small. The number of people who mistakenly think they are seriously in contention for TOC bids is about the same. The number of people in the northeast who are seriously interested in debate for other reasons is everyone else, and that's the big number that I'm interested in.

In my wish list for that weekend, first and foremost is a place for the greatest number of my entire team to get debate rounds. This includes novices and varsity. At the absolute bottom of my wish list that weekend, although it would still indeed be on my list, is that whatever opportunity presents itself include a TOC bid of some sort. Some of us are working to do something in that direction; there will be much talk among coaches over the next couple of weeks when we congregate at Monti and Bronx. I do hope to see some solution that does the best it can to serve the complex constituency of area debate teams.