More cats, less debate: New Directions at Coachean!

Well, that's what Kt wanted, anyhow. "There's too much debate stuff here," she complained. "You need more cute cat pictures." This is what comes of people graduating high school: they forget the important things. I like cute cat pictures as much as the next person, unless, I guess, Kt is the next person. I will put some new pix up when I get some good ones. Soon. We seem to have settled on the name Tik pronounced teek. This is either a result of too many trips to the Tiki Room, too many trips to Trader Vic's with the werewolves, the attempt to prounced TK as one work, or a total failure of creativity. Whichever. So until something better come's along, Tik pronounced teek it is (and yes, it is three words, like Hillary Rodham Clinton or Dick Deadeye Cheney).

Pursuing the community preferences idea, I'm pretty much settling in to the concept as outlined here, both in prelims (As to bubbles, Bs to undefeated, Cs to the rest), and elims (equality of panels across the board with blind tabbing). For the life of me I can't see women in debate as a tab issue, at least with community prefs. The women in the field all get rated, and placed according to rating. If for some bizarre reason the women are all Cs and the men are all As, aside from eating my hat, I don't know what I could do in tab. I don't think the tab room is the place to solve social ills. What if the African-Americans are rated lower than the Euro-Americans? Or, perhaps more germanely, the young folk are rated higher than the old? That's life, and working for meaningful change, if needed, would have to ensue elsewhere. In any case, we're presuming incredibly large pools and incredible freedom, whereas in reality, most pools are pretty tight. In the event, discounting your blocks, in a given tournament you could have one C judge in one random round (but all the Cs would be swimming around like sharks), an A or B on your other random, a B judge on two undefeated rounds, then two A judges on bubble rounds. That's the best of all possible worlds, assuming enough ABCs to cover the needs. And nothing limits the higher ranked judges from adjudicating less "important" rounds, if there's enough judges to go around. I've love to see As judging 0-4 rounds if they could do so with strong educational intent (the 0-4s need good judges too). But as I said, since we'd just take the majority ranking, God only knows how it will work out at a tournament. O'C asks if we'd do this at Big Bronx. It's his tournament, therefore his call, but I'd certainly love to try it. He'll have the size of field and the size of judge pool for it to be meaningful. (And if it's a total disaster, it would be his problem, and I'd avoid it at Bump!).

By the way, isn't it time to retire the concept of Big Bronx, since there aren't any Little Bronxes that I'm aware of?

I've begun recording Caveman. My goal is to ruin as many minds as possible, as efficiently as possible. Given the length of this puppy, it may take a while to finish. Speaking of puppies, I've also recorded Pip remonstrating over our aquisition of Tik pronounced teek. I've got to find the appropriate place for that. Pip is quite the chatty fellow, as many of you know. So is Tik pronounced teek, except he just sort of peeps, whereas Pip growls and grumbles and makes you think he's thinking thoughts of great evil.

Big question: what books to bring on the upcoming Europe trip. Too bad there's not more Harry Potters. Talk about perfect airplane reading! I'm open to suggestions. No Frenchies, please.