At least joining the listserver doesn't require the use of any Fleet products

I spent some time yesterday reorganizing the order of the material for the newbies. Having gotten off to a raging start on morality, a basic theoretical view of right and wrong, I will now go tomorrow night for the concept of rights and the social contract. There’s a certain logic to this, I think, starting with a core concept of ethics and moving to a social concept of ethics, culminating in justice (presumably next on the agenda). With a new topic coming after the holidays next week, we should be moving along swimmingly, breaking these particular meetings into novice sessions followed by tutti of the fruttis.

This will be a busy week. A chez tonight on the October Pfffft topic will kick things off. With luck, the Sailors involved have been beavering away doing research, but I have to admit that, having met said Sailors involved, little beavering is expected. Still, it is a chestnut of a topic, the kind I like because while research is important, there’s nothing all that far off the stock pile, which means that debating is key. I mean, after, on the one hand, we need the alternate resource, versus, on the other hand, the thing is going to blow up and take half of the Hudson Valley along with it including the very chez we’re sitting in, you’ve simply got to be sharp in the round.

Tuesday is, as mentioned, the newbies followed by the tuttis. Wednesday is, with any luck, new parents’ night. This requires novices to corral their Aged Ps, which is often an iffy proposition, especially considering how difficult it always seems to be for newbies to corral themselves so much as to even sign up for the team: a constant problem, year in and year out, is how hard it is to get their sluggards to sign up for the Yahoo group. I’ve seen people more happily sign up for colonoscopies. Oh well…

Thursday I’m going out on private business related neither to the Day nor the Night Job. Which means God knows when I’ll get Yale into the computer; Wednesday, probably. Plus I’ve started playing “The Force Unleashed,” which means somehow I’ve got to work in the slaying of the occasional rogue Jedi into my daily routine. (And I have to marvel that, as I type this, the word Jedi is not marked for spell-checking: we live in a wonderful world nowadays. If only the economy, global tensions and Sarah Palin were as straightforward!)