NOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!

We recorded a TVFT last night. Started with me and CP and Ryan Miller, and shortly thereafter Pajamas Wexler showed up. It was very interesting. You would have loved it. I would have too, if I had actually recorded it. Alas, I screwed up. How doesn't matter; in the future CP will back me up. Can't hurt.

Anyhow, we talked about the topic cycle, and didn't necessarily come to any conclusions, aside from the fact that better resolutions is a good idea.

Here's something Ryan posted when we had our original discussion:

LD should have two resolutions a year, one released August fifteenth and the other December first. Resolutions should be drawn from a very long list which has five added to it every June by the topic committee. Advantages:

1. The list can grow very long (a hundred?), thus making current prep on the entire list infeasible for even very large teams, and lowering the edge provided by going to a summer camp which luckily picked an important topic (and the resentment from paying a lot of money to a camp which failed to do so). This also means that resolutions will tend to spend a long time on the list before being picked, allowing campaigns against those with poor or offensive wording.

I just love this idea, or something like it. As it stands now, the topic people (who, we all agreed, do a great job under the circumstances) come up with some topics in a couple of days, and then a list is posted, and then when most people aren't even really at school we vote, with no chance for input or real analysis, and there you are. This may make sense in the age of the buggy whip, but we have the interwebs nowadays. Why can't NFL come up with a system like Ryan's suggestion that allows the community an opportunity to really study and polish the resolutions? There is no rush to run LD topics, as they are inherently timeless, as compared to PF topics, so giving them a chance to get good, so to speak, far outweighs any needs of immediacy. I wouldn't suggest eliminating a dedicated committee, because someone digging in on this is a good idea. But why do they have to get it done at NatNats? Don't any of them have email?

Lots of things are done a certain way because that's the way they are done. LD topic selection need not be one of them.

And, lucky you, I've saved you over an hour of your life listening to CP curse like a sailor (and not a Henhuddian one, btw) and me try to find PJ on Skype; you can use your iPod for more satisfying pursuits, like finding all the Madonna songs you've acquired and feeding them to the crocodiles.