Tick, tock, tick, tock...

Things seem to be happening fast and furious all of a sudden. One minute I’m bemoaning the summer doldrums, and the next minute the Goy is handling half a dozen tournaments and Peanuts is demanding a chez meeting and I’ve signed up a bunch of tentative Sailors for Big Jake and I’m thinking it’s time to update the Bump invite. Whatever happened to summer?

I must say, I am going to miss these debate-free weekends. I get Friday afternoons off, and we’ve been making the most of them, going into Manhattan for this or that, traveling around the ‘burbs soaking up culture. In fact, I’ve soaked up more culture this year than most other years put together, while still playing fairly decent (for me) golf. I am negotiating perhaps getting out of town rather than participating in one of the upcoming Fall MHL events; I might have a chance to visit the Mouse, and that’s sort of hard to pass up, although when we get around to looking at costs we may think differently. Reading about everyone’s abridged summer vacation plans for this year in yesterday’s Times makes me rather thankful that we got our licks in early. Flights are now costing twice what they were in the spring. The NDCA is worrying about the cost of traveling with tubs (at $50 a pop) and thinking, quite appropriately, that the time has come for the total acceptance of polician PCs. Sure, one can cheat, but you don’t need a PC to cheat. They just enable PC cheating. I would rather live in a world where our expectation of high school debate teams is a general sense of honorableness rather than a general sense of malicious ambition at all costs, and I don’t think I’m far wrong in that expectation, or far different from most other people. For that matter, I don’t even think it would be terrible if, at some future date, accessing data beyond the immediate computer (short of asking your coach, now what?) would be all that terrible, given the world debaters live in. The legendary/mythical cloud does make one wonder where we are going with knowledge per se: the epistemology of the plugged-in universe, so to speak. In any case, put the higher costs of travel into the mix with the likelihood of budget cutbacks, and a lot of people are going to be a lot closer to home in the coming year. Fortunately for the northeast, we have plenty of debate already at all levels, so provided we don’t lose funding completely in a program, we’re okay. For other more isolated areas, it won’t be so easy to survive. Lowering fees sounds good on paper, but when most of your fees go to progressively higher priced custodians and food-service outlets and hired judges, there’s just so much you can do. But, I guess we will muddle through, one way or the other. We always have.