I'll be damned. So will the rest of fraternity.

For reasons that are wildly elusive, I cannot get the new episode of TVFT to register with iTunes. It’s there on the podcast page, I can see and hear it, and the xml is getting it into my RSS reader, but iTunes is simply giving it a pass. Not fun. The fact that an even newer Nostrum published without a hitch just adds to the mystery. So I’ve tried it again, revising the XML and crossing my fingers and spitting into the wind and kissing a frog, all the usual solutions to software problems. Or at least those are my usual solutions. We’ll see what happens over the next 24 hours. With luck, the problem will be solved, or at least I’ll have turned yet another frog into a prince. You never know nowadays.

In talking to O’C about the usual, he mentioned the vitriolic posts following his note on WTF about the success of the Scarswegians. Now I can’t say I read too much of this, because I’m also trying to read the Times, The New Yorker, my shopping list and the twenty books I’m somewhere in the middle of and rotate exactly the way I rotate the trousers I wear to the office. If today is Wednesday, it must be the brown flannels and the Kant. In terms of time sucked away I also talked to Noah yesterday for half an hour, and that was just between the Hello and the How Are You. Still, it is marginally entertaining to watch people I don’t know rant about stuff I do know. I mean, I wouldn’t know this MM person from a hole in the floor, but I do know whence he speaks. And I can address it categorically (this being Wednesday, AKA Kant and brown flannels day).

1. Coaches and debaters exist symbiotically. (Actually, both groups are parasites on the other group, but mutual parasitism is, in fact, merely a cynical definition of symbiosis.)
2. Coaches are inherently rotten human beings. While I can provide no analytic rule for this, my own experience has found no exceptions, including myself. If there is a good person coaching debate, I have not met that person. Given the nature of the activity, I find the likelihood of that person existing to be intuitively unlikely.
3. All the coaches in the northeast, with the exception of La Coin, are devout Satanists. (La Coin is only a moderate Satanist, which comes from being allergic to cheese.)
4. The northeast maintains an outrageous number of TOC bids because of specific deals made directly by the Satanist coaches with Old Hob himself.
5. The annual LD Advisory Committee meeting is actually a Black Mass.
6. Northeast coaches benefit directly from payments made by the year’s designated “winningest” coach to the “losing” coaches. The transferred money that does not line “losing” coaches’ wallets is paid to WTF rejects to write impenetrably bad cases for the “losing” teams so that the “winning” team will collect all the bids.
7. JV is demonstrably the richest Satanist coach in the northeast, evidenced by his driving the nicest car. However, as the money pours out of his wallet into the wallets of others, pretty soon he’ll be cranking up a third-hand Yugo an hour early just to get the carburetors warmed up while the rest of us are humming by in the odd Mercedes Benz or BMW. In fact, I can attest that O’C has been haunting the local Lotus dealership, and the only thing that keeps him from committing is that he keeps having more and more money to spend and he doesn’t want to get locked into a clinker.

Vrrrooommmm, vrrrooommmm!!!!!