Bits of tid

If we can manage to squeeze through a pair of snowstorms—there’s another one forecast for Saturday night—we’ll have an MHL tomorrow at Newburgh. We’ve got about a hundred souls signed up, which is pretty good for a non-existent weekend. Next year there are no weekends at all in December; I mean, not just no empty weekends, but simply no weekends. Every day is a weekday. Very strange. Meanwhile, the only question about this coming weekend’s event is PF. I have one school signed up and another school that says it wants to be signed up, but isn’t. I have a message out to them which will, I hope, clear it up. Need ‘em both, obviously. In the other divisions, we’re fine, with the biggest numbers among the chilluns, three of which are Sailors. Not a bad turnout, 75%. By comparison, I was going through data on tabroom.com and noting that Bronx Scientology has three thousand novices. The list just scrolls and scrolls. I’ve offered to pay O’C for a couple of dozen, but wants to keep them all, in case one of them ever wins something, in which case thirty years from now he can include them in his Debate Trivia Encyclopedia, Volume 11.

Speaking of trivia, as we are winding down and hitting various conflicts pre-holiday, most especially the band concert on debate meeting night, we’ll be doing Bean Trivia next Tuesday, plus maybe at least some semblance of debate discussion. Of course, I can goof around with the best of them. This week, after some Pffftery, we did a bunch of improvs, which are always entertaining. Everybody is a standup comic these days. And a note to coaches: this is a nice team-building exercise as well as a speaking/thinking exercise. Give it a try. Two minutes prep and a two-minute speech on a silly topic. What have you got to lose?

So far I’ve worked it out with O’C that I’ll do a lecture on geopolitics along the lines of what I was writing here for the “No Holiday is Safe from Debate” Institute. That leaves time for something else. I was thinking intermediate buck-and-wing, but O’C claims that getting LDers to tap dance always fails for some reason. Go figure. Oh, well, I’ll keep my dancing shoes at home and try something else.

And I may have hit the end of my run of Nostrums, at least for a while. Having had a cold for a while slowed me down, and then, well, I’ve got so many other things going. Maybe I’ll take a short hiatus, at least. Sigh.