I am in the midst of a buying frenzy: the Michelin guide to Spain (which is the country to the left of Italy, a comment specifically aimed at one member of the VCA who needs a vacation but who isn’t quite sure which are the European countries): some Sennheiser headphones (lightweight, to replace one missing and one dying pair of standard-issue iPodians, which looks like it ought to have 2 Ds); a Canon ultra-compact digital camera, fairly upscale, to replace mine, which replaces Liz’s, which died (and this after a long lust for a digital SLR, which I finally realized would be a pain to lug around, and the whole reason I went to tiny cameras in the first place, even pre-digital, was lug pain); a basic albeit solar powered sports watch to replace the old classic Swatch because you can’t wear Mickey everywhere, unfortunately, especially when you’ve already got other Mouse gear on, because then you look like the geek you really are and the world doesn’t need that much additional evidence, although I do worry about leaving solar-powered gear out in the sun too long, and sucking up all the energy, and then where will we be; a DVD player with holes for the sound system wires, since my present DVD player (the main one with room for 5 disks) ate a Star Trek TNG disk unexpectedly and now merely makes gurgling sounds (yes, I am plodding my way through TNG, at the rate of about a show a month, which is enough Make It So for the average person wearing full Mouse regalia).
Amazon stays in business thanks to me.
On the debate front, last night I revised the cur, as I had intended. So now we give an overall description of the Life to the newbies, from which we segue directly into some background philosophy, as compared to formerly segueing into the nature of LD (e.g., what’s a 1AR). This works especially well this year, coming off an introductory discussion of Sept-Oct, which followed the description of the Life last Tuesday. For those who haven’t noticed, while the area of analysis in this rez is the death penalty, which comes complete with a whole subset of issues familiar to anyone who’s given it a moment’s thought (innocence, DNA, recidivism, deterrence, etc.), the subject of the topic is “a just society.” So right off the bat the Plebes (mine and yours) need to understand what that means, and frankly, I think that’s a lot more interesting than the meaning of a 1AR, at least the second week you’re in the room and you’re 14 years old. Correct me if I’m wrong. Of course, this means that next week I’ll need a couple of meetings, one for younger students with this stuff, and one for the ABs, who pretty much know this material by now, and with whom I’ll concentrate on cases, which they should be in the midst of, given that Yale is two weekends away.
Interesting side note: Termite keeps suggesting that people only do the right thing through fear of punishment, which I seem to have read an awful lot of empirical evidence against in Moral Minds. I can’t wait for this year’s morality unit! Or, Push Mama on the Tracks, as we will probably come to know it over the coming years.
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