Forensics: Halfway through the summer

One of the problems of putting CL into evolution mode is that when I say evolution, I meant it. I have no idea what I’m doing or where I’m going—intelligent design does not play into it. My only goal is to open it up to more things than debate. But at the same time, I don’t want to lose the debate parts, which are core. Or the audience that has developed over time because of the debate parts. I have a general idea who’s reading this, in other words. But I don’t think that all of them are only reading it for debate stuff. The VCA is interested in a lot of other things as well. My goal is to provide non-forensic material for those interests, to entertain the sort of person who would be in the VCA in the first place. Forensics remains core, though: make no mistake about that (as Richard Nixon would say, usually when he was lying). I have no intention of moving away from debate, letting the tail take over the dog, so to speak.

Still, we have problems, especially for those who really don’t want the non-debate stuff, or think of the debate stuff as apart from the rest of it. If I could do separate RSS feeds for the same blog, I would, but that is beyond me (or maybe it’s just beyond Blogger). That was one of the reasons Grinwout’s was created, but I’ve already discussed why I’ve given up on that.

Anyhow, to try to make things palatable, I’m adding a generic tag at the top of each post title. I’ll try to keep them to a manageable few, like Movies, Music, Coachean Feed (which I’ve revived as a weekly post), and of course, Forensics. This means that, at the very least, you can see off the top if you want to read that sort of post because you’re in that sort of mood. Or you can just pass over the ones you’re not interested in, if you’re merely reading this to keep up with registration dates at the next high school tournament. Your call. I’ll do this for a while, until I think of something else.

Meanwhile, if you missed it, we put up a new TVFT last week, talking about the second three in the set of 2012-13 resolutions. Mostly we agreed this time around, except maybe on the civil services one, which I went into hating. I came out of it hating it just as much, and I think some of my reservations (chiefly its broadness) started to click with the others. Listen for yourself. In any case, it was good to get all four of us back together again. We do come at things from such radically different points of view. I think of Bietz and CP as hot into the midst of today’s LD, whether they like it or not (L’Etoile did win TOC, after all), while Cruz has such a literally vast army that he has no choice but to take a broader view of forensics as a whole while I’m firmly rooted in the get-off-my-lawn land of about a decade ago. Our longevity is interesting, come to think of it. This was the 59th episode, going back at least a couple of years. We have yet to run out of things to say. How odd that a bunch of speech/debate people could be so chatty.

On the home front, I have sent out the call to the Sailors to get their acts together to sign up for the Pups and Jake, both of which open on August 1. The Pups opens at 1:00 pm and goes immediately to a waitlist, which is pretty sane if you ask me. Jake opens at 12:01 am and closes about a minute later because O’C prefers the style of the midnight opening of the latest Geaoge Lucas film, and models his tournament after The Phantom Menace.

Quick quiz for normal people. No peeking. Okay, quick: Name the last movie directed by George Lucas.

Aha! I knew you couldn’t do it. (O’C doesn’t count.)

Anyhow, at the moment, the Sailor signup sheets remain as pure as the driven snow. I’m sure this will change. (One parent has advised me that their kid is offline for a couple of weeks, which rather shocked me. I didn’t know people could go offline anymore.) I’ll fill in a few slots with dummy entries (that is, temporary space fillers, not wooden-headed students) until a reasonable time. I mean, I do hate going to tournaments alone. It sort of undermines the whole point of things.