In which we start digging in

All right. We’re back. Not that we actually went anywhere, aside from a few days up at Mohonk. We are starting to venture out, inch by inch, but we aren't anywhere near going crazy. There's plenty of covidiots out there to do that for us.

And, of course, there’s a lot going on in the forensical universe, some of which is pretty interesting. Let’s see…

 

First of all, since Kaz will be in the virtual Midwest that day, she asked me to help out at the MSDL debate tournament the end of September. Of course, sez I. I worked at their championships last spring, where we piloted NSDA Campus, and I certainly know most of the players. Some of them, like Tim Averill, I’ve known forever. Speaking of whom, the sorting of his laundry during the championships in our virtual tab room is indelibly imprinted on my mind, and probably the minds of the rest of the tab staff as well. We’re hoping he sends things out to the cleaners in advance this time.

 

A key thing happening between Mass and the NYCFL is the pooling of, well, our pools. In a virtual world, we can open up more opportunities for students, and make better events at the same time. Often when we run a local event there’s a lot of same-school debating because we just don’t have the arithmetic diversity in a given field. For instance, if you give Regis unlimited slots for PF, they take them, plus a few more. (I think the formula for that is  

but my math is admittedly rusty.) I gather the same is true of Lexington and Policy up in the Commonwealth. After that MSDL September event mentioned above, there will at the very least be the season starter “Regis” NYCFL debate, now open to Masswegians, and a few weeks after that my favorite Little Lexington combined with the Bronx Fall Local, which I guess will be called the Not-So-Little-Anymore Bronxington Local with Connecting Stops to Boston, Howth Castle and Environs, Etc.

 

(And you thought I couldn’t get a finnegans wake reference in here anywhere.)

 

One other thing for now: today was the NYCFL advisors meeting. On Zoom, of course. Eric D won the prize for best looking digs (it’s got roughly the same number of paintings as the Louvre). The biggest deal, as far as I was concerned, was my suggestion that we run the Nov-Dec PF topic at our late October events. This was amended to running Nov-Dec only for novices (which I had in the back of my mind, but I wanted someone else to suggest it). I know that for a lot of novices, that one October event is the only time they’ll debate that topic, which is sort of nuts. Now they can learn the ropes and dig in for a longer haul before they get into the main swing of the event’s fast topic turn-around. Way more educational, if you ask me. The idea of a permanent novice rez, on the other hand, doesn’t really work in PF, which is so based on current events. Making this change, btw, is a lot less cumbersome than our work back in the day on the Modest Novice for LD. But the same general principles apply. I think it’s a good move.