Friar Pajamas

The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ debate coaches gang aft aglay.

The unfolding of TVFT in the annals of narrowcasting has been a perilous adventure for all concerned. It started with me just talking to my microphone about various subjects, mostly because I liked (and still do like) the idea of podcasting. Actually, I think I started with the recordings of Nostrum, and then after I bought a decent microphone, I branched out. In any case, the idea of getting a bunch of us together to talk about debate issues was a pretty obvious one, and it started with me and O’C and Bietz, which gives a nice cross-section of opinion and a pretty broad base of experience. Somewhere along the way we added CP, which means that if one of us is out painting the town that night, the other three can put together a quorum (unless I’m the one out painting the town, since I do all the dogsbody work of recording and posting and XMLing).

Every now and then we have had a guest star, but not very often. I like the idea, though. Often somebody has a unique perspective on something or other, and it’s good to hear that perspective firsthand. I recently repeated my offer to add anyone who wanted to spew about something onto the show, and got a positive response from Pajamas Wexler, who is always eloquent about debate issues (and who has strong opinions on some of what he thinks are negative trends in LD lately). He also has the world’s worst handwriting, and I have students from 1995 who are still trying to figure out what he wrote on their ballots, but that’s another issue altogether. At the same time, I posted a couple of articles that resonated with Ryan Miller. One of them, on tenths of a point, he posted to Facebook, and never have so many people who haven’t been in a debate round in over a decade had so much to say about the present state of the activity. Since I haven’t been FBing much lately, I just followed it from the comfort of my email account. Then, I wrote about the changing of topics, and he posted a very interesting response, and as far as I’m concerned, this is a great topic (although I’m tempted to change it now that it’s February) and since PJ had also chimed in, that seemed like a good one for TVFT.

Right.

The good news is that I got Ryan on okay, although he wasn’t exactly state of the art in his equipment. As long as he didn’t move his head, he was fine. (He should save up those nickels and dimes and get a headset. Then he could call just about anyone and sound like James Earl Jones, more or less.) PJ, on the other hand, had problems. I had forgotten that he has taken a vow of technological asceticism. He’s like a monk when it comes to computers: he could have the internet, but he chooses not to. Actually, he does have the internet, but only via dial-up. Dial-up? The last time anyone seriously dialed up on the internet, aside from PJ, was when Madison was in the White House. PJ says that if he had a regular connection it would somehow suck all the life out of his brain. Whatever. So, knowing that Skype wasn’t going to work at 16 bits an hour, he went to his school, Lackpig, and tried to access Skype there, and got about as far as anyone ever gets trying to do something remotely outré on a school internet connection. After various failures, he tried to download Skype to his iPhone (where his technological asceticism breaks down, apparently), and as far as I know, he’s still waiting for it to load. (I hope he’s paid up on his data plan.)

So, we gave up. I had a nice talk with Ryan though, about this and that. And then I went on to creating more new iTune playlists, until I was interrupted by the need to work up pairings and panels for the Newark Round Robin.

Which is another story entirely.