'Nuff said

We're done. Bump Registration 2005 is now concluded. It's all over now but the gory details. We're so booked I'm not even taking any more waitlisters.

Whew!

Taking my mind off of all of this last night, I heard from the Nostrumite, right in the middle of enough email to sink the Potemkin. I needed the break. Of course, he has signed some TWHS kids up for the tournament (otherwise I'd have his head), but mostly he was complaining about Blogger AKA Blogspot, to wit, the site for this, and his, blog. I had told him way back when that it was a piece of cake, easy as pie, plus a few other assorted dessert metaphors, and he took me up on it, and began typing away. If you've followed the TWHS exploits, you know that first he was trying to write things up, but got bogged down in doing his real jobs (coaching and learning Lamaze) and passed the thing along to his team, and then they seemed to give up on it, and then finally 2argrl took over right before Thanksgiving. Along the way I've been providing them some storage space on jimmenick.com. Anyhow, apparently 2argrl simply could not log on to Blogger after the first couple of times, no matter what she did. She went to the Mite for help, which is like going to the Sahara desert to see the rain forest, and he couldn't log in either. Between the two of them, they did everything they could, which according to the Mite meant mostly stomping their feet in frustration and cussing like bandits, until finally they just gave up. So, 2argrl is now on her own at a brand new site and will be carrying on with the blessing of the Nostrumite, but no longer under his broad bumpershoot. Which is probably not a terrible thing. The fewer minds we allow the Mite to corrupt, even indirectly, the better a place the world will be.

People do occasionally ask me how I even know the Nostrumite. Truth to tell, he and Jules were in my very first HH batch of alums when I took over back during the Middle Ages. My first graduates. LD was so different then. People argued not merely resolutions, but the resolutions that they were supposed to be arguing. Heady times! I was reading an article in Rostrum about the (semiannual) downfall of policy, and the writer was complaining about gamesmanship vs resolutional argumentation. Cross-apply to LD, my friend. Said writer also called for an end to judge strikes, which simply enable the gamesmanship; this is interesting to me in light of my allowing strikes at Bump. The argument against strikes is that you ought to be able to pick up any judge, especially in LD which is intended to be for an enlightened but nonetheless general audience. There's a thread now on OMFG where people complain about the caliber of their regional judges. As Mr. Rogers might put it, Can you say "Get Real"? If the judges of an entire area are roughly of a certain cast, that means you have to debate to that cast, not that they're all screwed up and you have to go somewhere else. Can you say "Judge adaptation"? Jeesh. The point of public speaking (are we in any way advocating the learning of public speaking skills in forensics these days?) is to address any audience, not just the audience primed and prepped to love you, just you and always you. Any fool can do that, you bozo! Convince a hostile audience of your point of view, on the other hand, and you've actually done something. I wonder if we've created a TOC that is not a tournament of champions but a tournament of people who are only capable of convincing a very small body of hand-picked judges that their arguments, regardless of how uunresolutional, are good ones. Mebbe.