In which we move our can and our grunts

It’s weird doing Bump stuff. Over the weekend I shoveled up all the old tropheic detritus in the chez basement and put it into the back of my car for delivery on Saturday. There were some NFL District awards from the early 00s that were unrecyclable, so they went into the gar-bahge. But there were also plenty of Sailor medals and mugs for Baby Bump on Saturday, plus the odd gavel or two. Most of all, there was the Traveling (Fruit) Cup. I’ve never seen my spouse so happy that something was leaving the house, never to return. Then again, it did have pride of place in the family room, distracting from the unknown skull remains and the Alfred E. Neuman buttons and the WDW cocktail stirrers. What to do with the cup is up to the Sailors. Maybe they’ll eat it. It’s their call. It’s their fruit.

Catholic Charlie will be helping out, which is very nice of him. He’s always dropped by at Bump over the years (he lives over in the next town) but usually he’s had a CFL event to run. Which means we’ll have our Pups team together again. We hardly screwed anything up too much that weekend. The only thing I can recall was a mistake I made that cost us a bunch of time on Saturday afternoon, that I conveniently blamed on the Paginator as the youngest person in the room. Old age has its benefits. One of the down sides to the weekend is that we won’t have the grammar school, and therefore the piano. I’ve always enjoyed serenading CC with the greatest hits from the grammar school music library, the titles of which are, unfortunately, too lewd to reprint on a family blog. To tell you the truth, I think that’s mostly why he would stop by in the first place. He’s going to have to settle for the Paginator’s Iron Mike collection.

Someone on our circuit raised a question about the viability of the March LD topic, which is about democracy in the Middle East, which looks to me pretty standard issue and probably a good choice for the NSDA and CatNat qualifiers around here. You can run very high level stuff that can appeal to less circuity judges. Out of curiosity I glanced at the March PF topic, which is about removing US troops from Okinawa. There’s a hot topic for you. I did a bit of quick research, and there’s plenty of stuff. Okinawa is apparently tired of its 25K or so randy marines tossing Budweiser cans out of the jeep windows during their drive-bys, but no one else on the archipelago is dying to take them in if they relo. Which means that debaters can dive into boringly parochial albeit factual evidence to their hearts’ content. Why not just resolve that the US should move out of Japan in toto? At least that would have forcibly raised the question of the US presence, vs. simply the site of the US presence. Oh, well. That’s PF for you. (And not me, since I don’t coach it anymore. YAY!)

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