In which we watch things go down the tubes

I wish something wonderfully controversial would happen so that I could comment from my responsibility-free perch of coachean retirement. Not being hindered by the chains of representing a school, I could wax eloquent on all manner of things and put everyone straight once and for all. Alas, at the moment the debate world seems as dull as the proverbial ditchwater. Or dishwater, if you prefer. I don’t care. I’m retired from it now.

Feh!

One thing that is fairly certain is that I won’t be blowing against the wind with the MHL going forward. Honestly, I don’t think there’s anyone around to run it, unless I do, and one of the things I don’t want to do is run things like the MHL. It’s a losing battle. The thing is, the NYUDL has become extremely viable, and once upon a time, the MHL was where schools that eventually went into the UDL would go. Once NYC seems to have a half dozen well-attended events every weekend and starts going to the White House and what have you, the MHL loses at least part of its raison d’etre, the providing of local, inexpensive events. The other part of its raison d’etre, providing a league for learning, remains something of an issue, but at least for novices there’s plenty of opportunities at invitationals, and if we can continue to come up with a few less intense venues for sophomores to learn while not being skinned alive, that would be a good thing. That was the whole point of “Academy” debate, but only two schools ever picked up on it, Monticello and Byram Hills. Whether either will pursue the idea in the future remains to be seen. It’s up to them.

It’s a big issue, though, the retention of students, especially in a region where there’s so much high intensity competition. I’ve already gone on at length about LD’s self-destructive $ircuit tendencies, so ’nuff said there, but PF has its own problems. If you’re always up against teams from schools that always qualify for the TOC, and you’re a sophomore and they’re seniors, you may learn a bit, but you’ll inevitably lose. It’s like chess. Once the skill gap is great enough, the better player virtually always wins, and there’s little point in playing for the better side. At least if you’re playing tennis with someone dramatically below your level you get a little fresh air and exercise. There’s no fresh air in debate, though. Occasionally people do get exercised, but seldom in a good way. Oh, well. Sophomore slump has always been an issue, and it certainly dogs speech events as well, but if one could alleviate it a bit, that would not be a bad thing.

One thing that has to happen around her is that non-UDL schools need to go to the UDL events. If they want competition for their younger students, that is. It’s no big deal to schlep down to the city once in a while, but people aren’t in the habit. Everyone only wants to go to familiar places. Brooklyn Tech? The one you can’t get to from the Brooklyn Bridge, even if your family was born at Junior’s? Not to mention schools in—gasp!—Queens. Heaven forbid!

If you want your first-year students to become fourth-year students, this is the sort of thing you ought to be thinking about. Unless all you care about is students who can get into the TOC. Then you probably want to shake off as many of the noobs as you can before they get too attached to the program. They would, of course, benefit from debate education way more than the kids born to it, but in this day and age, who cares? You can’t put that on the shelf.

In which we pass another debate-free weekend

As I work my way through editing the Epistles of St. Jules to the Forensicians, I am reminded that some of my best material when out in those emails. Shrubb, the Nostrumite’s answer to Jeeves at Mite Manor in Chappaqua, commenting on the lack of available castrati, for instance, should not be lost to future generations. Or at least not yet. One way or the other I’ll be working these into my Wednesday Nostrum postings.

I picked up a new keyboard slash cover for my iPad over the weekend. I have one that’s quite heavy, but good for work, at meetings when a keyboard is a necessity and I don’t want to lug around my DJ 15-inch MacBook. I figured one for traveling would make sense as well, although quite often just the standard light Apple cover is what one wants. Mostly I’m doing this to keep technolust from the door as the new Airs come out. I continue to treat my computers like my cars: as long as they get me from one place to the other, I don’t upgrade them. I believe in getting full value out of things, and my old MacBook Pro at home is perfectly usable, nicely spiffed up with the latest operating system and still as vital as it needs to be. Then again, for the most part, all one ever does nowadays is work on the interwebs. I can do whole tournaments on my browser, except for printing. I have Word and Excel on the iPad, and all my files are in the cloud. Buying a new computer would serve no purpose other than to lighten my wallet, which I can do more intelligently in small bits by buying cheap keyboards and the like. Given that every time I use my credit card I get a message on my iPhone, I am more aware than ever of the money going out. On the positive side, there is still money coming in. (Thank you, DJ.) When I declare bankruptcy, I’d rather not do it surrounded by sexy laptops.

And I’ve managed to pack up a whole boatload of medals for the little people (i.e., middle school parliamenters) to mail out, as they didn’t get them at the state championships. I knew I had a bunch of MHL medals somewhere, but it took me a while to find them, and not before the natives started getting restless, wondering where they were. Hey, natives, why don’t you dig around my basement for a while, and then find padded envelopes to pack them up and then carry them over to the post office in the pouring rain and sleet and hail and dark of night? Jeesh!

In which we start the next season

It seems awfully early, but I’ve already begun working on the Pups. This year out we’ll handle the waitlist better, for one thing. We learned to hold off a couple of weeks and not go first come, first served, but instead to divvy up the slots evenly. I’ve never taken to the idea that the reason you get into a tournament is that you have your finger on the button at the right time. In the end, just about every legitimate entry gets in most places. The point of a waitlist is to strain out the illegitimate entries and to limit the legitimate ones. That is, if you have a big team, you can’t register them all no matter how much you want to. A tournament needs to manage itself, and one of the ways it does this is to keep entries fairly distributed. Tabbing small events with unbalanced fields is something I do a lot, and you see lots of pullups and the like, the sort of thing you want to avoid at a major tournament. It’s okay at MHLs or local invitationals, but when you’re talking circuit events, it’s not so all right. People may want to get 10 slots, but that probably isn’t going to happen. Anyhow, waitlist management at the big events is crucial.

Of course there remains the illegitimate entries, and waitlist does allow you to detect who is an official entry and who isn’t. When in doubt, I email them. As often as not, they are legitimate. There’s nothing wrong with a lone wolf traveling with a parent or some other reasonable guardian, provided that it’s done with the knowledge of the school the LW is supposedly representing. No one has any serious brief against that. But at the point where you’re only saying you’re representing your school, which thinks that you took the day off because you have the ague, that’s something else. I’ve gone into that plenty of times here, and the VCA knows my feelings about it. No, you are not born with an inherent right to debate, and tournaments are perfectly within their rights to limit invitations to actual school entries. As for the camps, they’re perfectly within their rights to set up their own tournaments open to anyone under the sun, and anyone under the sun can then go and whoop it up to their heart’s content. Given that my experience with the camps has been steadily negative, I probably won’t be tabbing those tournaments.

And then there’s the new business about conflicts being used as strikes. This is a relatively new one, but we should have it beaten down by the end of next season. It began with honest misreadings of the concept of conflict, but since I now send out a detailed explanation of confliction before each tournament, that won’t hold anymore.

Meanwhile, I’m sure that the community of people looking to pull a fast one will, while we’re looking elsewhere, come up with some new fast ones. They always do. That community is probably seriously pissed that I didn’t go away completely, as I am no doubt high on their enemies list. So it goes. With enemies like that, who needs friends?

If this is Wednesday, it must be Nostrum

It turns out that I can’t offer Nostrum for free as a Kindle edition.

Sigh.

Then again, it is already free online, so stop your bellyaching, you spalpeen! I have to charge all of $.99 for it. That’s less than a dollar, for those of you who are mathematically challenged. It won’t kill you. And after all, this edition is not only filled with brand new annotations that make some of it marginally more understandable, but it can be carried with you anywhere on your device of choice: to the beach, to class, to work, to the Finland station, to the barricades, to hell and back, to kill a mockingbird, to a Grecian urn, to a fault, to Esme with love and squalor, to infinity and beyond, to lose one parent, toujours l’amour, toot toot tootsie goodbye, and all manner of things beginning with M. Et cetera.

Anyhow, it’s up and available, and I’ve begun working on the Epistles. I also realize that I have a boatload of work to do web-wise as a result of this publication, but I’ll be on it shortly. Meanwhile, we continue with our dramatis personae.

***

Nighten Day

The central team in Nostrum, but the budget is tight, and they may be dropping forensics at whatever point this year that the money runs out. The Snow Ball is Nighten Day's own annual tournament, run every January, usually in the middle of a snowstorm.

Coach: Tarnish Jutmoll

The Team: LD Varsity: Griot Goldbaum, Jasmine Maru, Trat Warner, Ellie DiBella

LD Novices: Camelia Maru, the Tarleton Twins, Hamlet P. Buglaroni

Speechies: Mark & Noah (extemp); David (Twas) Brillig and William Hand (Duo); Kumar Juvaswami (HI); Ashley Ambrose (OO); Cartier Diamond (DI); Mordred Prentice (forensic activity unknown)

Staff: Raoul Walsh, principal; Margery Mooney, freshman English teacher; Harry Klein, teacher of Cinema Appreciation; Lav Bunbury, guidance counselor

Family and Such: The Buglaronis ; Braun Saxon (Cartier's married ex-boyfriend); Myra Moon (the mystery of Tarnish Jutmoll's past)

---

Nutmilk, Amnea

The Editor of Metro New York magazine, this solid, frizzy-haired, recently divorced woman is now coaching a new team for her son's new suburban high school, Bisonette Technical.

---

Nutmilk, Chesney

A Master of the Debate Universe, formerly of Manhattan Lodestone, now with Bisonette Technical. In his freshman year at Lodestone he won his first two Combat of Conquerors limbs, and from that point on there was no looking back. As a sophomore he took King Ivy. As a junior he made it all the way to the finals of the COC Tournament, and made it to semis in both the Catholic Forensic League Nationals and the Non-Catholic Forensic League Nationals.

---

Obomash, Seth B.

A man of many appetitites. Six and a half feet tall, this African-American first appears in Nostrum as the coach of Veil of Ignorance, a history teacher, district NFL chairman, and a dyed-in-the-wool Policy-first maven.

---

O'Connor, Bill ("Invoice")

He begins as Bill, a slightly overweight policy debater, successful partner of Tara Petskin at Veil of Ignorance. Thanks to francogrammatification, and some other changes, he becomes Invoice O'Connor, among other things.

---

Padrewski, Warner (Worm)

Worm is a Bisonette sophomore recruited by Chesney Nutmilk. Dark, unshaven, disshevelled, he has a voice like a depressed turtle.

---

Pat, Mr. Lo

The wheelchair-bound coach of Manhattan Lodestone. A debate god from the get-go, he has been around since the invention of around. His disability is the result of an accident.

---

Petskin, Tara

A pair of glasses, which seem to cover every part of her face that isn't hidden by her long auburn hair. Tara, a senior, is a serious Polician from Veil of Ignorance, the partner of Bill O'Connor. In her earlier debate career she partnered with Haircut Puente.

---

Prentice, Mordred

Mordred, a Nighten Day sophomore, is the familiar of Cartier Diamond. He is not known to participate actively in forensics, but he always seems to be at forensics events. Chubby, short, unattractive, usually red-faced.

---

Puente, Shavena (Haircut)

Haircut, at five-foot-eleven, with a closely shaved head and a shadow of whiskers and an intense look in his eye, is the classic image of the anarchist. You could imagine him organizing Wobblies in the middle west of America or riding the train to Finland with Lenin or sipping Pernod with the students in 1968 Paris or generally causing serious mischief against The System from whatever platform he chose to preach from. One time partner of Tara Petskin at Veil of Ignorance. Creator of the enormously successful www.haircutpuente.com web site.

---

Quilty Prep

Quilty Prep is a public high school allied with no university. Its founders considered the name Quilty High to be too banal for such a tony hamlet as Quilty, New York. Quilty Prep, on the other hand, wreaked of wealth and ivy and untold numbers of strings of polo ponies, if not exactly of common sense. So Quilty Prep it was. Quilty Prep has one of the largest forensics teams in the state, spread over LD and Speech but excluding Policy.

---

Ryan, Dan

The coach of Toulouse is a fiery Irishman of the Policy persuasion. Usually found in the tab room.

---

Santorelli, Bark

Bark is the original boyfriend of Gloria Fudless. He has long, stringy dark hair tied around at the back of his neck, where the head of a dragon tattoo can be seen riding up above his collar. Three gold earrings dangle from his right ear, and one from his left. He is a senior at Nighten Day, all of eighteen years old with a regular driver's license and his own ancient Buick.

---

Saxon, Braun and Brett

A young married couple. Brett is working toward her master's degree in archaeology, and is forced to travel often. Nostrum begins with Braun, offstage, having recently broken up with Cartier Diamond.

---

Sazo, Nip

Bowling fanatic and coach of the Algren-On-The-Beach, Massachusetts, team.

---

Screeds, Renate

Rail thin and older than justice, Ms. Screeds is the coach of Andrew Johnson.

---

Starbuck, Tom

Consiglieri of the Vitelli family. The lawyer, Starbuck, is a large, tall man, nearly completely bald, wearing oversized aviator-frame eyeglasses. His size and fitness and bronze skin exude health and vitality, while his small eyes behind the glasses add a definition of intelligence to his profile.

---

Sworn, Haj L.

The coach of Farnsworth Catholic.

In which we ruminate

Twenty years is a long time. A lot can happen, and a lot can change. A lot can stay the same, too.

Chief among the reasons I’ve left coaching is that I no longer feel able to carry the responsibility of a team week after week. I’ve never been one to do what a lot of coaches do, things like cutting cards or directing arguments or, heaven forbid, writing positions and cases. That’s always felt to me like the sort of thing the debaters ought to be doing, and if I were to do it, it would be a disservice to them. After all, I’m an editor by vocation. We don’t come up with stuff, for the most part, although occasionally an editor will suggest an idea to a writer. We take what writer’s write and work with them on it to make it better. We’re a sounding board, in other words, usually with pretty good writing skills of our own that we turn to use in aid of others’ writing skills. I can make an unclear sentence clear. I can tell you when a scene is too long, too short, too obvious, too obscure, too anything. I’ve been doing this for a lifetime. If I can’t do it by now, I should be looking into a new career. Anyhow, it’s easy enough to adapt this skillset over to working with debaters. I might have an idea or two, but mostly I would try to work with them on their ideas. If they were good debaters, and this is also true of good writers, they would carefully consider my advice—always advice, never orders. They might disagree, but that’s fine, provided they’d analyzed it. In the end, it’s their work. And my goal was always that the debaters would learn to do this work, or if they already had good natural talents, which was often the case, to help them do it better.

This approach isn’t terribly competitive. Then again, I’m not terribly competitive. The really competitive students I’ve had over the years succeeded admirably, so I don’t think I held anyone back, but I never valued winning all that much. The educational value of debate that had nothing to do with debate—making friendships with new people, learning to travel, showing up prepared, chewing on new ideas, that sort of thing—were always more appealing to me. I really loved the old days when no LDer worth a peanut was able to proceed without a serious working knowledge of canonical ethical literature. I got to teach people that stuff, and I was pretty good at that. In LD, of course, the canon was long ago thrown out in favor of various reactionaries, which would make sense perhaps if the students involved already understood the canon, but to go straight from Dr. Seuss to Nietzsche or Judith Butler or whatever? Not such a great idea. To understand music, you have to first learn to play your scales. In aid of the win in a round, we’ve eliminated the metaphorical scale practice in debate and gone straight to Liszt and 13-key hand-spans. Then again, putting aside cause and effect, my going over to PF obviated the need for much instruction in the ethical literature. I may harbor a hope that eventually PFers understand that there is more to a winning position than a better card, but no one is seeing that happening at the moment. With a topic a month and maybe two tournaments at most debating it, maybe never.

There’s other things though than the nature of the debate beast informing my decision. Honestly, that was the least of it. As I’ve said from the beginning, time is a big issue. My day job becoming more demanding leaves me little time (or patience) for dealing with the minutia of running a team. Who signed up for what, reserving buses, reserving hotel rooms, adjusting and readjusting partnerships, submitting paperwork for reimbursements—very time consuming. And there’s another aspect to this, the safety issue. Twenty years and we've had only the most minor of incidents, the odd scrape here and there, and that’s about it. No major medical events, no major accidents, no major nothing. A charmed life, in other words, but that doesn’t mean that one doesn’t spend a lot of time worrying. There’s serious stress involved in shepherding students around week after week. After twenty years, voila, I made it with nary a scratch. After a while you get tired of playing this particular game of Russian roulette. I took it on voluntarily. I am in awe of those who have it as part of their job for the entire span of their careers. These folks are saints, and/or lunatics. I send them my compliments.

I wish I were leaving at a more settled time. As I’ve said, I intend to continue to work tournaments for the foreseeable future, at pretty much the same rate as before. But for a while now I’ve been moving away from things like the MHL and the NYSDCA, to let others deal with the issues of those groups. The hassles of getting the region more settled in light of the poor showings at the MHLs and the continued discomfort of two state leagues are a part of what I don’t want to address anymore. Again, too much stress and time consumption, time that I don’t have to spare. And to be honest, that I no longer want to spare. I feel I’ve done my bit as a grownup in the region. I’ve run the MHL, I created the Modest Novice, I started experiments with intermediate debaters in “Academy” debate, I’ve maintained websites and calendars and whatnot. Somebody else needs to step up to the plate. This stuff doesn’t do itself. Without regional leadership we’ll have a bunch of tournaments that work, and a bunch of weekends that will probably go wanting for lack of a vision to sort them out. We’ve got a boatload of debaters in the northeast. Keeping them debating at all levels, not just aimed at $ircuitry, is a matter of great and continuing urgency.

My personal goal is to start finding more tabbers. We don’t have many people who want to work the boiler room these days, and CP’s thoughts that we’re heading towards an automated tab system notwithstanding, we need people to run things, to make tournaments happen and then to make rounds happen. Tabbing will be fully automated when all the judges show up in their rounds on time prepared to cast electronic ballots in a timely manner at tournaments that have flawless wifi. They will probably, at the same time, have to duck all the flying pigs. So I will actively be soliciting new hands. I’ve got a couple in mind already, who have done a little work greasing the machinery, and I’ll grab them. But I’ll try to grab more. It requires a certain mindset to enjoy tabbing, and it does mean not rubbing elbows with your team for the duration of the tournament, no scouting rounds, no intense prepping, none of that stuff that a lot of competitive coaches think needs to be done. Instead you’re doing the math of prefs and balancing judge commitments and throwing more wood into the engine to keep things moving. I’m not arguing which is the better choice, just pointing out that it is a choice.

So I continue to assert that I’m not gone yet. I’ve got plenty of work to do. But aside from continuing to do the work of tabbing that I enjoy so much, and which gives me needed respite from the DJ (tabbing a tournament, for me, is a battery refresher), I have set the goal of getting my replacements lined up.

Uncle Jim needs YOU!

In which we think about other things to do

As always, not going to a debate on a weekend takes a bit of getting used to. It’s not as if I don’t appreciate things like sleeping in and enjoying normal pastimes like reading a magazine and taking a walk, but I’m not quite used to it yet. Needless to say, this would be happening even if I were still coaching the Sailors: they’re season is over no matter how you slice it. I’m personally not completely over for the season yet, though; there is still NDCA. Then I’m truly done for a while. I figure about a month before we start drilling down into things like the Pups… Life goes on, and I go on with it.

I’ve been spending my writing time editing the Epistles of St. Jules to the Forensicians. Amazing stuff, in that half the time I have no idea what I’m talking about. Although I’m often accused of this in my general existence, seeing written material that has come from these typing fingers that I can’t make heads nor tails of is revelatory. Apparently I knew a lot more then than I know now and have forgotten it all, although honestly, most of it seems pretty evanescent. It’s interesting to see how much Jules and the Mite didn’t like Hillary, even then. Or Bill, for that matter. 15 years later? Same lack of love lost on my their part. Then again, the material does bring me back. The Nostumate, Unix the Nostrumutt, Mr. Ma ‘N’ Pa, the miracle of the meat-packing plant, the Falutin sisters—glory days, eh?

I have other plans for the off-season. I need to update my website for a formerly coaching perspective, for one thing. And there’s a bunch of planned writings, like my Tournament Director’s Handbook, that remain started but unfinished. Working with the folks at the Bronx talking about next year, a guide to running a tournament in-hand soonest isn’t a terrible thing. They have Big Bronx to contend with, and are coming to it cold, although they’ve already got the tab team committed, with all its attendant expertise. One of the big reasons I packed it in Sailorwise was wanting never to run Bump again, but helping other people run their tournaments? No problem. As long as I’m not the one left holding the bag when it’s over.

In which we ramble on about why we're only partially leaving the activity

If you want people to read a post on your blog, tell ‘em you’re hitting the road. Jeesh. I got more hits Tuesday than Pete Rose, Ty Cobb and Hank Aaron combined. (Of course, members of the VCA know full well that this metaphor did not come trippingly to the typing fingers: I googled it. The thing is, it’s probably been three or four years since my last sports reference, and I thought the time was right.)

As I indicated in that post, I’m not quitting debate altogether. I enjoyed the few encomiums that were tossed my way (much as I enjoy tossing the word encomium your way—use it three times and its yours), and it was nice to hear from some of the old-timers who, I assure you, meant very much to me as I attempted to befog their brains at the height of their adolescence. They still do. The thing is, my role in debate has shifted over the years. For a while the Sailors had real boatloads of people shipping out to all the tournaments. McLean and I were reminiscing Saturday about how we always had big buses and every flavor of debater from dabbler to debate-is-my-life. That went on for years, and we had incredible successes at all levels. But I never did have control of recruitment. Debate at Hudville was always over on the side, and never a mainstream activity. My also being over on the side didn’t help that. A lot of S&D talent is recruited mano a mano, when a teacher recommends a student to the coach, but that’s something that I was never a part of. We relied on word of mouth and sadly inadequate recruitment visits to the middle school, and not me pulling them out of AP English and sitting them down and telling them that they were debaters so shut up and read this copy of On the Genealogy of Morality.

As time went by, the team got smaller, and meanwhile I was getting more and more involved in tournament management. I’ve heard people blame the failings of present-day LD on the drift of people from the back of the room to the tab room, but that’s glib rationalization. Tournaments don’t run themselves. At the college level, the lack of stable Tournament Directors is an issue, although the ones I’ve worked with have learned well how to keep the lore in the team so that the good that TDs have done doesn’t disappear when they graduate. Nevertheless, a stable adult presence allows registrants to feel secure that the tournament will come off reasonably well. At the high school level, well, simply put, there aren’t a lot of people who want to go into the tab room, period. The vast majority of coaches prefer coaching, for some strange reason, and tabbing greatly interferes with one’s ability to work with one’s team. Plus, the vast majority of coaches aren’t interested in solving the problems that tabbing presents. Tabbing is an odd mixture of high pressure, gut math, boredom, ukulele music and coffee consumption that either you take to or you don’t. Tabbing means going out with a computer and pushing ballots on the fly in the midst of total confusion. Tabbing means holding hands of people who should have their hands held and slapping the hands of people who should have their hands slapped, and knowing the difference (which Kaz is arguably the best of us at). And yes, tabbing is giving up a lot of direct experience of rounds from the back of the room, but obviously a concerned coach can find plenty of opportunities to both tab and judge at different tournaments, if that is the goal.

Anyhow, as I said, I’m not quitting altogether. I like tabbing and will continue doing it if asked (and, if necessary, provided a hotel room in lieu of tab discounts), so that’s simple enough. But also I really feel that the region needs some new tabbers. We need to have a handful of people who can work the machines and provide mature leadership from the back room. I’ll be around for quite a while, I hope, but when I finally pack it in, someone’s got to step up and take my place. People have to learn to be comfortable with the tabroom.com software, and more than that, understand what tabbing is at the level of tossing cards. For a way long time now we’ve created machine plunkers, going back to TRPC, who understood the program but not the underlying process. It’s like knowing how to use a calculator but not being able to add 2 + 2. I love that calculators exist, but on the fly, I like knowing that 2 + 2 = 4. There’s a difference.

I’ll be actively trying to recruit tabbers next season. If you’re interested, let me know. I’ll be working the registration sheets to find people I can pull from the judge pools to the tab pools. When I finally do go off into the sunset, I want to go off feeling that I’m not leaving problems behind for others to solve.

If this is Wednesday, it must be Nostrum

I'm going to guess that it isn't hard for people to connect the dots of a revival of Nostrum and my leaving the Sailors as being marginally related. That should make it clear that it's been on my mind for a while. 

I always enjoyed the real debate life on its own merits, don't get me wrong, but I also appreciated it as a source of the fictional universe I was creating. Let's face it: I'm a frustrated writer. I've had a couple of successes, but the vision I had of myself feverishing polishing my Nobel Prize speech on the flight over to Oslo never came to pass. Oh, well.

Anyhow, we continue presenting the cast of TOS. I noticed on my Nostrum website that I seemed to have intended a combined DP of both TOS and TNG, but it never happened. Maybe someday in the future, now that my time has been freed up a bit. 

And, oh yeah, I hope to get the book finished and out this weekend.

Goldbaum, Griot

Nighten Day’s smartest student, a senior who’s already racked up perfect 800s on his SATs. He is short and chubby, with curly black hair sticking up from the top of his head like a tangle of holly bushes. A long mandarin mustache gives him an air of oriental mystery, in keeping with his being the only full-blooded Inuit not only in Nighten Day High School, but in the town, the county, and perhaps even the state (with the exception, of course, of his immediate family). Griot is something of a mystic, and the number-one schematic interpreter on the circuit.

Hannah and Hughes

Hebrides High School’s leading Duo team.

Hand, William

Originally half of the blond, blue-eyed Duo team of Hand and Brillig, William has recently come out as gay. (Welcome to the Bahamas!) As an aside, William can listen to the soundtrack of “Rent” twenty-four hours a day.

Hyphen-Emdash, Tilde

Star debater from the Algren-on-the-Beach, Massachusetts, team. She is a tall, dark-haired girl, in appearance somewhat resembling Morticia Addams, only slightly more funereal.

Jutmoll, Tarnish

The Nighten Day coach. A small man, barely five feet tall, with a white goatee below a wild range of similarly white hair on his little skull. One long white eyebrow stretches the entire ridge above his dark, probing eyes. He inevitably seems to have just come indoors from a windstorm, and one might mistake him for a tiny wizard or a large elf if one is partial to fantasy universes. His main anchor to reality is his bow-leggedness, his knees seemingly far enough apart to allow the passage between them of a pair of Siamese twin toddlers clutching black market Sleep-and-Snore Ernie dolls. There is mystery in Jutmoll’s past: the accident, Myra Moon ... Jutmoll teaches Social Studies, plus a half credit debate class. He has no family.

Juvaswami, Kumar

Nighten Day’s Humorous Interper, who always seems to be in a world of his own. A senior.

King Ivy

The big Ivy League tournament in February.

Levi al-Chaim, Sister

Sister Levi is the forensics doyenne of Hebrides High School. She has been in the nun business for fifty years now.

Lewton, Val

The principal of Bisonette with a leering aspect that Amnea Nutmilk finds suspect.

Lloyd, Harold

Monsignor Lloyd is the principal of Veil of Ignorance.

Manhattan Lodestone

A magnet school. Home of the OriginalVaganza Tournament (all other Tournaments are Extra), which includes a notorious LD Round Robin.

Coach: Mr. Lo Pat; Erstwhile asst, Lisa Torte

Debaters: Kalima Milak

Marcellus, Jon

Aka Binko, a motorcyclist with a severe five o’clock shadow, although five o’clock of which day is probably up for grabs. He could be seventeen, twenty-two or twenty-seven. A cigarette smoker, he someday wants to get a major-paying job for some heartless corporation, but first he has to graduate high school and go to college, and his bet is that “having debate on my resume will not be a bad idea.”

Maru, Camelia

Shy younger sister of Jasmine Maru, and a potential Master of the Debate Universe from Nighten Day.

Maru, Jasmine

At five foot one and ninety-one pounds, she is tiny and dark and as Japanese as the Emperor. A Nighten Day LDer, serious like her younger sister Camelia, perhaps a bit too romantic for her own good.

Melvish

A novice LDer from Quilty Prep, rather unpopular with the team seniors.

Messerschmitt

The Messerschmitt Mess O’ Forensics is the first major high school tournament of the school year, encompassing every forensic event. Messerschmitt College is in Miami, Florida.

Milak, Kalima

From Manhattan Lodestone, the toughest girl on the circuit, both in debating ability and life experience. She commutes over two hours on a variety of buses, subways and Conestoga wagons to get to her school every day from a foster home at the furthest reaches of Staten Island. Rumor has it that she is armed at all times, and she apparently wears a human ear as a necklace.

Moon, Myra

It will be a while before we’re ready to tell this story....

In which we make an important announcement

I am announcing this tonight to my principal and to my team:

I am hereby resigning as the debate coach at Hen Hud. The season this year has effectively ended, and the timing is right. I have made this decision entirely because of new responsibilities in my regular job that make it impossible for me to continue to devote the time and effort necessary to run the team.

I have been the coach now for 20 years. It has been both challenging and rewarding, and I have always appreciated the support the school district has given to speech and debate. I trust that this support will continue for the students in the future, continuing Hen Hud’s proud tradition in the activity.

Good luck with the team in the future.

Despite this change of personal direction, I am far from finished with the activity. I have made way too many friends, and enjoy the process of working tournaments way too much, to give that up. It’s the daily grind of coaching— monitoring students, arranging travel, the general bureaucracy of leagues and school rules and such— plus the headache of the full responsibility for running Bump, that I am resigning from. I do intend to continue volunteering to work behind the scenes at tournaments, and have already made numerous commitments for next season. My only request will be that schools that wish to take advantage of my tabbing and advisory skills provide hotel accommodations for me so that I don’t incur any personal expenses.

In other words, I will continue to show up at tournaments as long as the people running them want me there. I will continue to blog and theorize and whatnot. What I will not continue to do is coach any particular team anymore.

I’m not quite sure what role I will play as we take on a fairly major reorganization in the region. We have already seen a need to reinvent the MHL/NYSDCA, for one thing. And the impact of recent events in the Bronx are far-reaching and need attention (although I hasten to point out that my decision to leave Hen Hud predates those events quite a bit and is in no way related). I will do what I have to do to help out in the reorganization, but when things settle down, it should be other folks providing the future direction and leadership.

So, I will still be around, but in a somewhat modified role. You can’t get rid of me that easily.

In which we debrief on the NYSDCA Championships

The NYSDCA Championships is always havoc-filled. We were organized way better than last year, though, and I think we kept the confusion down to a minimum, or more to the point, managed the confusion better. And confusion there was.

The numbers were workable in all the divisions, so in tabbing terms we were okay. We mandated that judges' obligations would extend for the whole tournament, and we had few problems there; fewer than I expected, to tell you the truth. CP was in the building, so we had him fix an issue with the judge pools, and apparently he also finally knocked the bye problem. So, technically, we were fine.

But let’s face it. We were working on the fly. There's something about the Middle School universe—all those parents trying to find their children, or uncles trying to find their nephews (What School does he/she go to? I don't know. Oh. That's helpful.) Stuy is a great venue, and it’s not as if we hadn’t been there before, so that was okay. Except that Sunday there was a mini-marathon that closed down the West Side. Of course, I told everyone about this Saturday, but one school decided not to pass this information along to the right people, so our 9:00 start on Sunday was 10:00. Outrageous and alarmingly dumb. Rule number one of attending a tournament: read the emails to the coaches. “No one told us this, that or the other” always boils down to no one on the team having read the emails. And on our end, we couldn’t forfeit the leading teams in half the divisions. Sigh. But I was indeed ready to pull the plug on them 3 minutes after they pulled into the building, so they just beat the clock. I mean, even if they hadn’t bothered to read the email, could they maybe have read one of the dozens of warning signs on the highways all week? Feh!

Breaking down responsibilities worked pretty well, although I think I expected to do less than the others expected me to do vis-à-vis room pools and the like. I get it. A real plus was Mama C running the table for us. She’s a budding tabber, but this weekend we needed her keeping that machinery running, and she was great. She also had two awesome Stuywegians helping out. There’s kids at tournaments that want to be in charge of everything and sit at the table eating Chinese food and watching Netflix episodes and ignoring things like ballots and schematics and questions from the guests, and there’s kids at tournaments that do everything that needs to be done, from judging to judge-chasing to logging in the Luddites, and it is the latter who are the stars. These two, Alex and Katherine, were Superstar quality. We gave them trophies for Achievement in Awesomeness.

The late start and the lack of building availability into the wee hours forced us to shut down a couple of divisions early, but most everybody got their rounds in. I had the beauteous moment of pairing semis in one division and seeing that it was 2 closeouts and therefore going immediately into a final. That hardly ever happens, and it warms the cockles of a tabber’s heart, let me tell you. You can’t have enough closeouts if you ask me.

I also visited with old alum McLean, who was around for the weekend. He’s getting out of law school and already set up with a career. Jeesh! And The People’s Champion traveled back and forth from Hudville with us, and we went out to dinner with him Saturday night and talked about what he might be doing now that he’s graduating. All these great lives on the beginning of the curve of adult accomplishment—makes one proud. Come to think of it, all the alums over the years make one proud. What an amazing group of people I’ve had the good fortune to know. If my daughter hadn’t done debate, there would have been an awfully large hole in my life. I have Kate to thank for all of it. Nice thought.

In which we further gird our loin chops for the Championships

As me sainted mayther used ta say, I’ve been as busy as a one-armed paperhanger these last couple of days. The State Championships has 13 divisions. Gaul, just to provide a comparison, had a mere 3, and it cost Caesar and his mighty armies quite a bit of effort to manage. If Caesar and his mighty armies had also had to schedule Middle School rounds, Brutus might not have had to turn on his old buddy after all because Caesar would have already retired and gone fishing off the Norman coast. Oh, well. I think I’ve put together a reasonably doable schedule, I’ve got rooms for everybody, and we almost seem to have enough judges. Great googly moogly, this is a lot of work.

I have to admit that I have no dealings during the year with middle schools, and they seem to run on a different dynamic from high schools. It’s not just that the students are younger (duh), but they don’t have the coaches who go to tournaments week after week who have a basic sense of what happens. (I realize that I’ve just implied that the coaches who do go to tournaments week after week have a basic sense of what happens, which is totally absurd, but I’m just trying to provide a basis for analysis.) I keep getting messages from parents wondering what’s happening with their teams, and they don’t often seem happy with the answers, which include things like “What team?” Oh, well. We can let people in up until  we’re actually in the rounds; we need not be sticklers. We want entrants, not people who we’ve turned away, especially the little MS kids. Although at Lakeland, a little MS kid came into tab with a problem, and he must have been all of four and a half feet tall, and we thought he was the nicest little representation of a future debater, until we asked him what division he was in and he said Varsity PF. Okay, I know I’m getting old, but Kaz’s former NFA judges were sitting with us and they had to put tie themselves down to keep from falling off their chairs at this announcement.

I like MS debate, of course. Why wouldn’t I? I wonder if they shouldn’t stay entirely at MS tournaments, though, aside from something like the Championship. They are little kids after all, and high schools can be overwhelming to them. Maybe I’m wrong. I’m certainly no expert, and I really don’t know what goes on in the MS debate universe. I’m having enough trouble keeping up with what’s going on in the HS debate universe.

If this is Wednesday, it must be Nostrum

I'm looking at the weekend after the coming one (which I'll be working States both days) as my opportunity to port things over to Kindle. Continuing in my wallow in the past, here's the d.p., C through F. And yes, Hans Castorp is stolen from Magic Mountain, but isn't that better than stealing from, I don't know, 50 Shades of Grey?

Castorp, Hans

Hans Castorp, a German emigre, is a Hollywood wunderkind with a thick Teutonic accent and shoulder-length dirty blond hair. He is having difficulty casting his next picture.

Combat of Conquerors

Inevitably referred to as the COC, a tournament held at the end of each school year. An advisory board to the COC analyzes every tournament around the country by such criteria as the number of participants and the number of states from which these participants come, and jumbles it all together and comes up with the COC limbs: at certain points in a number of tournaments, perhaps at quaterfinals or semifinals, or at very big tournaments even at octofinals, COC limbs are granted. If you make it that far, you get a limb. If you get enough limbs to stand on—usually two but some years three and some years only one if you have a ghost limb or a wooden limb (don’t ask!) — then you are allowed to participate at the Combat of Conquerors.

Cratch, Bob

The secretary of the Quilty Prep forensics team. Bob Cratch is a perfect choice for the position: he is serious without being joyless, and he is capable of maintaining accurate records, which is more than can be said for many adult coaches. Even Bob Cratch’s appearance is serious but not joyless: tall and beefy with his blond hair in a Marine buzz cut, bright red flannel shirt over faded carpenter pants, giving off the sense of an apprentice lumberjack. This is his second year as secretary, and in that time he has never missed a registration deadline and never failed to obtain the maximum number of slots for his team.

Davidson, Disney

A vegan freshman at Northeastern Agricultural Institute, and former Nighten Day LDer.

Devans, Alida

At six feet tall, the most formidable coach on the circuit aside from Seth B. Obomash. Alida Devans, 53 years old, coaches speech at Brooklyn Behemoth. For Alida, it’s not about competition, it’s about winning. As it is hard to foster a mindless, prejudicial hatred unless you yourself are somehow tainted by the thing you hate, it behooves us to point out that Alida was raised a Catholic.

Diamond, Cartier

Nighten Day’s contribution to Dramatic Interp. A senior with shoulder-length blond hair, blazing violet eyes and a honey-soft feline voice. She usually dresses in black and is tall enough and pretty enough to be a model; Tarnish Jutmoll often gets the impression that she is only pretending to be a high school student to bring back notes from the field.

DiBella, Ellie

Once known as De Belle of Debate before she settled down with Trat Warner. A Nighten Day LDer, Ellie often  manages to break into elimination rounds. Both Ellie and Trat are seniors, and have already decided to seek early admission at the same college. No one doubts that they will be buried together about eighty years from now.

Dwindle, Chip

Representing Farnsworth Catholic’s LD contingent, Chip is his real—baptismal—name. Presumably there must be a St. Chip, therefore, celebrated somewhere in Catholic liturgy. Chip’s father, who often judges, is notorious for always dropping Jasmine Maru.

Farnsworth Catholic

From Manhattan, Farnsworthians always dress similarly in blazers and chinos, a recognizable uniform of exception in the otherwise uniform debate sea of inclusion of dark gray and blue suits. To a degree Farnsworthians are interchangeable cogs in their school’s attack on forensics, always running the same cases at blazing speed, leaving nothing behind but a whiff of incense and a hint of irony—they are Catholic to the core.

Coach: Haj L. Sworn

Debaters: Chip Dwindle

Fleece, Had

Six foot two with a linebacker’s solidly muscular build, he is golden and blond and chiseled thickly from the WASPiest of blood stocks. Had is neither conceited nor pompous about his debating success, any more than he is conceited or pompous about his classical good looks or his consistent high honor roll average or his perfect 1600 SATs achieved in his junior year. His lack of conceit and pomposity have made him the most popular boy in his Toulouse-Lautrec class, another fact about which he is neither conceited nor pompous.

Fudless, Gloria

Originally known as Gloria What, the word that would best describe her first appearance in Nostrum is undead. Her hair is dyed black, and she wears black eye makeup and black lipstick. But her voice is deep and rich. She appears—representing Bisonette Tech—at her first NDL in a short black skirt, black tights, a black shirt and a black jacket; you can take the girl out of the night, but you can’t take the night out of the girl.

In which State keeps marching on

Well, if the State tournament doesn’t drive me crazy, nothing will.

I have been sucked into the vortex and seem to be answering questions nonstop. As always, most of the questions are the ones that are answered in the invitation (which I rewrote and distributed) or in the last email that I just sent, but since when does that stop anybody? Favorite question: What if my judges don’t feel like coming on Sunday? Favorite answer: I’ll go their hovels and drag them out of their mangers by their hangnails and bring them to Stuyvesant myself.

Jeesh.

The tournament is in quite good shape, actually, although I had to pull judge hiring out of the mix. I just don’t have the resources or the time at this late juncture. Having all the crowned heads of NY in one place will also be good for things like planning next year’s MHL activities, which I think I’ve mentioned I want to meld into the very lively NYUDL. Ne pourquois pas, eh? Whatever floats the forensic boat, as they say, whoever they are. Probably the same people who make all those decisions in tab that everyone is always talking about. “They say there won’t be any break rounds.” “They say that next December we collide with Mars.” “They say all the PF judges are obligated to judge 6 additional rounds of Policy." As, theoretically, one of the alleged they, I never have figured out where this stuff comes from, or why people believe it. Whatever.

The tab room this weekend is something of an All-Star Game. Vaughan, Kaz, Semple, Palmer, myself, plus a few extra hands like Mama Bendi. Aubrey was hesitant to run tabroom.com, which he’s never done before, partly because the whole CAT thing threw him off (an older tabbing system that we don’t use). When I told him CP would be there, it sort of alleviated any of his concerns. If CP can’t train him on the system, who can? Of course, I don’t mean this rhetorically. I mean, what if CP can’t train him. Does CP even know how to run this thing? Oy!!!

As for food at the tournament, we’re telling people to get outside and get some fresh air and, while you’re there, also get a knish or something. Speaking of which, we’ll probably use whatever fees we collect to buy knishes for the judge lounge. Talk about playing it by ear. But we do have the trophies on their way; JV and Kaz took care of that last weekend.

So, as I said, it’s coming together. It’s been a rough week for everyone, but we all seem to be schlepping through it. What else can we do?

In which we send a whole bunch of folks to Ft. Lauderdale on Memorial Day weekend

Last Saturday was our CFL qualifier, always a most interesting tournament. Kaz, who obviously is unaware that she lives in Massachusetts, was there to help out. Thank goodness. Given the nature of the beast, all hands are definitely required on deck.

CFL Grands is a small event. I think there were 16 in LD and 12 in PF, but in terms of competition, it may be the stiffest one people face all year. Every team in the hunt is potentially capable of qualifying. Results are based on ballot count, and it is rare that everyone doesn’t pick up a ballot or two. From a tabbing prospective, first there’s the issue of the judges. We allow judging on the opposite side, but only after the first three rounds. We want as much cleanliness as possible, but the tournament would be unrunnable if we didn’t allow alternate sides in round 4. More interesting is the pairings. Round 3, at least, has no side constraints, but now you have everything from 0 to 4 ballots, plus usually 3 teams from one school (multiplied a couple of times). We do this by hand, needless to say. For round 4, we now throw in side constraints, since even PF is set sides, a la CatNats (and, for that matter, the NYCFL during the regular season). The thing is, occasionally you can bye people out of that final round. What we do is a whole bunch of math analyzing the prospects. If there’s no way someone can not qualify, we might bye them. If there’s no way some can qualify, we might bye them. Sometimes you need to keep people in to have someone for them to debate, like giving someone with 2 ballots, who might qualify, a round against someone with 1 ballot, who can’t. Very complicated, in other words. Fortunately JV and Kaz can almost do this stuff in their heads, but still, cards are tossed like nobody’s business. To tell you the truth, this is some of the most fun we have all year in tab, because of the challenge.

One good thing about Saturday was that we were at Stuyvesant, and their administration was quickly and efficiently able to step in and make a venue switch for next week’s State Championships, which were originally scheduled to take place in the Bronx, and which will now be on Chambers Street. Tough times can bring out the best in people. And we were able to figure out most of the details of what needs to be done and get people involved to do it. We’re going to have a great tab room lineup; what I need to do next, after registration closes tonight, it put together a workable schedule.

After which, with the notable exception of NDCA, my tournament season will be over. I’m looking forward to a little rest and relaxation.