Nothing in life is forever. Except Twinkies.

As a special thank-you to Mike Bietz (he knows why), a bracketology especially for debate coaches. Anyone heading to Kentucky this week ought to appreciate it.

In these last few dwindling days of debateness, we seem to be up to the old eyeballs in topics. Last night we chezzed it up on judicial activism, and I was finally reminded what the problem was back last time we debated this, which had been eluding me, which was that a sizeable portion of the community was arguing for or against judicial review, and not judicial activism. I mean, at least they got the adjective right, but buying tickets for the policeman’s ball is not the same as buying tickets for the policeman’s wife. I’m not sure how things like this happen. Certainly there aren’t coaches out there who don’t know the difference between JA and JR. It’s hard enough to come up with a neutral definition of JA as it is, much less finding a neutral definition of JA for people don’t know what JR is. What is a debate judge to do in that situation, when both sides are so off the mark that you want to throw a couple of desks at them, their coach, their principal and their school board en masse? For that matter, all it takes is an affirmative to totally misdefine a concept for a round to go off the tracks. Ah, the joys of debate. Anyhow, we kicked old JA around for a while last night, and if nothing else established some ground of what law is all about, and majority will and minority rights and the like, but the lack of an objective standard for JA in the real world, as well as in the debate world, is a problem. Given that JA, as we’ve said before, is a pejorative term, dissociated from any particular left or right leaning of its practitioners, it’s hard to defend. In a way, you have to offer another, neutral term as your definition, and then run with the neutral term, sort of the opposite of calling estate taxes a death tax or late-termination procedures partial-birth abortions. If you make something sound undesirable, it will be hard to defend, and if you make something sound neutral, it will be easier to defend, and if you make something sound good, it will be easiest to defend. Needless to say, on the anniversary of Mission Accomplished, the power of words is moot, which is why the subject is so much fun. Still, for debate purposes, clear language that is fair to both sides ought to be the norm, but that would only be true if it weren’t competitive, which means that many debaters will grab any advantage they can, including something as simple as linguistic distaste. If JA has a bad odor, make your opponent defend it. Since the opponent can’t overcome that bad odor, the opponent needs to defuse it immediately and make the round not about something else, but about the underlying—odorless—concept. Good luck with that one.

Termite was among the confabbers last night, and got to formally express his dismay that he won’t be debating the NatNats topic. Or at least I think he formally expressed his dismay: last night he was speaking entirely in Polish, so for all I know he was listing the ingredients on a Twinkie package. Still, I agree with him. As we know, the best topics are always the NatNats topics, exclusive to the annual finalists. In my old Modest Novice days, it would not be inconceivable to simply take any NatNat topic and carry it over for next season’s novices, since it will be, almost by definition, paradigmatic. It will be interesting to see how the new resolution-choosing rules affect the outcomes next year. I remember them as being fairly confusing. Time will tell.

And I’m off to WDW in little over a week. Today’s trivia: Epcot’s Japan attraction was going to have a roller coaster, and Fuji film offered to finance it, but since Kodak was a major Disney sponsor, that was not going to happen. Which is why Figment, the character from the Kodak pavilion, is purple. If he were green, like a normal dragon, he’d be the corporate Fuji color. And I always thought he was purple because he was imaginary… Welcome to the real world. Or the real Disney World (if such a concept is possible).