There must be something in the water in Sailorville. I had another dream last night, after seeing the new Harry Potter movie. I dreamt I was driving a new Tesla. Cool, except I’ve never driven a high-performance car before and I was really worried about crashing into the car in front of me when I was parallel parking. Obviously, this dream wasn’t as interesting as dreaming that I was running Big Bronx from my basement. Blame Harry Potter.
For those of you who have been following the Feed (I haven’t checked the stats, so it could be two of you or a million and two) you’ve probably noticed that I’ve fallen into the swing of it pretty well, with a reasonable handful of articles a day. I’m doing something similar for the DJ, only book-oriented, with a Twitter account to announce each posting. It’s just something I like doing, I guess. Silly me, but I get the impression that the interwebs are huge and we could all use a little help finding the good stuff, and as much as I like crowd-sourcing I do not feel that it is enough. But that’s all right. I will start soliciting articles for the Feed, by the way, in the near future (although vacating may slow me down, because when I’m vacating, I like to be electronically vacant, otherwise I might as well stay in the chez basement running Big Jake). Excelsior, you fathead (as Shep—one of my personal heroes—would say).
I will try to wrap up the series on Pffft before I disappear. Obviously what I’m doing is putting down my thoughts in the broadest, unedited approach here first. Then my plan is to boil them down into one single (albeit long) how-to article, an outline for the Sailors for discussions/lectures, and maybe a podcast. I’m almost done with the phase one. All that’s really left is talking about sealing the deal, i.e., being a closer. Easier said than done, maybe, in the world as it is today, where LD 2ARs forgo crystallization in aid of arguing points that have already been argued to death…
I have been getting field reports from WTF Camp Debatamucka in addition to the endless
drivel updates on their site. The Panivore is out there hearing tales of my judging past, all of which have been improved for narrative purposes. Funny that I remember a lot of rounds going back for generations. For instance, Nadir talked about hitting Ben Schultz, and I remember that round where Ben first hit Nadir at NFA distinctly. Anyhow, at WTF, Dougo Malfoy is referencing the round where I picked him up at TOC when his opponent managed to rebuild Doug’s case in CX. It was rather paradigmatic. If your opponent has a case that is as mathematically elegant and complicated as a moon launch, it probably doesn’t behoove you in CX to request further information on the areas where the math is the most complicated so that the judge can fill in any links he might have missed during the constructive. Other TOC rounds I remember? The coin toss where the tosser I dropped wouldn’t shut up about it. The round where you-know-who brought his mother (all I remember, actually, is his mother). The round where the girl who later went on to greatness blithely and with no intended malice congratulated her opponent on being better than all the other opponents she had crushed. With mutual preferences, mostly I would be relegated to the boondocks, though, of people who didn’t know me well enough to realize that striking me would be better than giving me a C. Whatever. Golden memories, eh? Of course the thing that always comes to mind first with TOC is that it’s always manuring season down there when we arrive. The air is scented with—
Oh well, you get the idea.
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