In which we talk about good debate citizens

We are in a hiatus for Presidents’ Day. It kicks off with the Harvard Tournament (don’t get me started on that one) and then everyone goes to Goa for winter break. Next up on my agenda is the Westchester Classic in a couple of weeks, about which much might be said when the time comes. 

Meanwhile, there is a concept we casually refer to as being a good debate citizen. There is, to begin with, a debate community. This community is a complicated organism that comprises everything from simple two-school weekday afternoon scrimmages to the NSDA and NCFL mega-tournaments to National $ircuit tournaments where rich schools travel across the country to purchase their TOC bids. In the middle of the debate community is the bread-and-butter of local tournaments, often within a local or state organization. Whichever, big or small, it is all one community, with many different speech and debate activities, and many different approaches to those speech and debate activities. And everyone in that community is a debate citizen, one way or another.

So what is a good debate citizen? In a word, it is someone who prioritizes forensics overall as compared to their own particular interests. It is someone who believes that debate (and here I’m including speech but I don’t want to keep saying speech-and-debate or the more complete but non-mellifluous forensics) is intrinsically of value, and aims whatever they do toward the end of supporting that value. It is not about their own team winning competitions, although of course they support their students and applaud their wins and commiserate over their losses. It is not about their personal idea of what debate ought to be, where they are right and everyone else is wrong. It is not about ignoring your region in aid of bigger goals, being willing to travel to Cooch Behar to get a bid while ignoring the local high school event just around the corner. Being a good debate citizen, in a nutshell, is doing whatever it takes to get students—all students—as many rounds as possible. It is seeing debate in the broadest terms of education. It is seeing competition as a necessary evil, a means to an end, that end being education. 

Why do I bring all this up? No specific reason, no recent slight or malfeasance, but I think it always bears mentioning, because it underscores everything we do. In a world today where knowledge is under attack, where history is being rewritten in the most bluntly Orwellian fashion, where free speech is a commodity limited by what that speech is saying and who is doing the speaking, where freedom is limited to what other people say you should be or do, the activities of the debate community are in the foreground of true learning, of true free speech, of true personal freedom. Being a good debate citizen, putting the activity above your own interests in that activity, is what keeps this whole thing going. And keeping this thing going means putting out into the world educated human beings who have the personal ammunition to withstand the worst a blighted national culture throws at them. Will truth win in the end? I don’t know. But at least good debate citizens are doing their best to arm their soldiers the battle for it.  

In which we have our heads in a book

Have Jim Butcher’s Dresden novels made it to the top of the Times bestseller list before? His latest immediately hit the top—more power to him—and I was reminded of an old saw in my Day Job, where we reckoned the best way to get on the Times bestseller list was to have been on the Times bestseller list in the past. There were a lot of reasons for this, and I won’t go through them now, but we thought this because some writers who had once been strong were now putting out something less than their best work, and nevertheless they were selling like the proverbial hotcakes. Authors’ names became brands, and people mulishly stuck to brandnames. I don’t think this is true of Butcher, though, that he’s past his prime. I like the Dresden books, but it’s some of his other work that I am really big on. The Codex Alera books were big hits with all of the DJ staff, and we passed these audiobooks around to practically everyone in the building. The Cinder Spires series is equally as good. Wikipedia says this new steampunk-ish series going to comprise nine books. I’m up-to-date, and a lot of books short of a nonet. C’mon, Jim!

In other publishing news, there have been a bunch of articles lately about the death of rack-size paperbacks. In a nutshell, as a business they’ve been replaced by e-books. I mean, I certainly do 90% of my reading on my Kindle, so I’m not surprised at this. Still, one can remember certain moments in one’s life that revolved around the little paperbacks. My parents used to dump me in the book section of Macy’s when I was a kid just past the Hardy Boys, and I could hang out there for hours. Later, in my adolescence, when one arrived at Grand Central Terminal for one reason or another there was a vast paperback collection at the bookseller downstairs, and walking through it one learned what literature was all about just by seeing the books there in real life. In the 70s there was a used paperback bookstore down the street from us on Columbus Avenue, which is now all mall franchise stores without the mall. It was from these piles of paperbacks in the mystery section that I randomly picked up a copy of Rex Stout’s The Doorbell Rang, and have since lost track of how many times I’ve visited the brownstone on 35th Street. At a church flea market in the 80s I bought half a dozen little Oz paperbacks when my daughter was 7 or so, having no idea that there was more than one of them, and subsequently spent countless hours thereafter reading them aloud, and every single other Baum and R.P. Thompson book we could get our hands on. 

So I wonder how the serendipity of book discovery will proceed in the future. The good news is that the number of independent booksellers in the US is growing, so the act of roaming the aisles and just absorbing the titles and the genres and the names of the authors will continue, but maybe a cheap portable book will no longer cap this particular journey. But books will survive. Reading is an elitist activity that helps define civilization. It opens us up to minds other than our own, going back as long as the written word has existed. It will keep on keeping on, one way or the other. 

In which we listen so that you don't have to

Music (audit division): There’s been a lot of movement in the audit queue that I haven’t been talking about. Time to catch up.

“Odyssey and Oracle” by the Zombies. There are those who place this among the rock album GOATs, and I have listened to it many times trying to figure out why. It’s not that I disliked it, but I didn’t find it particularly special. On this go-round, on the other hand, I really started to enjoy it. I may not be ready to put it into my own GOAT collection, but I put it right back into heavy rotation for another listen. All of which demonstrates how sometimes you have to give music a chance in order to appreciate it. (The album was released in 1968, so we're talking a lot of chances here. But over the years one kept seeing it come up in the conversation.) There has been enough music in my life over the years for me to realize that some music takes time and to act accordingly. Yes, more often than not you can dismiss something immediately for one reason or another (see below), but you need to discriminate. Is it an artist you’ve always otherwise liked? Was it really highly recommended by someone whose taste is similar to yours? Is it just different from what you’re used to? Be careful. A second listen never hurt anyone. 

Next up, the Mavericks, their self-titled album. I liked them back when they first arrived on the scene, and I had a few of their albums on cassette back when one had albums on cassette. It is a cliché that rock and roll died back in the 70s and was reborn as country, and the Mavericks are proof positive of this. They show a lot of influences, and when they’re country, well, they're good enough country if you're in the mood, but when they rock, they absolutely do rock. An easy group to like. 

The group Peppermint Trolley Company brought us the original theme song to “The Brady Bunch.” Having never watched the TV show (I was in college when it came on the tube; it was aimed at the generation a decade younger than mine), I wasn’t inclined to appreciate this album from yet-another psychedelic 60s band. After listening to them, I am still not inclined to appreciate them. Not bad, just run-of-the-mill stuff in the shadow of the real thing. That I never heard of them at the time (as I say, I was in college, and like everyone I knew, an avid music fan) is pretty telling. I have this vision of some middle-aged record executive puffing on his cigar and saying "That's what the kids like nowadays so let's throw it against the wall and see if it sticks." This one didn't.

The Rising Sons is early work—1971—by, most notably, Ry Cooder and Taj Mahal. Definitely of historical value and perfectly listenable. 

Foxy Shazam: See above where I say that often you can dismiss something immediately. For me, this group fits that bill perfectly. Contemporary heavy metal, I guess. I didn’t listen to enough of it to pin it down. The Skip to the Next Song button was invented for a reason. Skip. Skip. Skip. Skip...

Moving right along. Next up was Shelby Lynne, the “Restless” album. Again with the country music slash rock music. I am a BIG fan of Lynne, especially her Dusty Springfield album, but most everything else too. “Restless” is among her best. (Not that you care, but Lynne is the former sister-in-law of the artist Steve Earle, also a favorite of mine. Steve Earle has been married 6 or 7 times, depending on how you count a rematch.) (Another curiosity: Lynne won a Best New Artist 1999 Grammy for her sixth album.)

The next thing that popped up in the queue was a single song from a group called Sand. I have no idea why. In a word, not my cup of chamomile. 

Finally, the group Grapefruit. I wanted to dismiss this quickly but I decided that, as noted above, sometimes you have to give music another chance. The stuff was catchy enough, but didn’t resonate. Given its Apple Publishing roots, I figure I’ll try again with their compilation album “Yesterday’s Sunshine.” It can’t hurt.

In which YOU get to decide

 

Hey, kids! Now you can play our game at home, starting with that old favorite: WHAT WOULD YOU DO?

Early in the day I had eyes on a student judge who I could tell was, to be gentle about it, ill-prepared for her inaugural adventures at the back of the room. Sure enough, she didn’t acknowledge her ballot for round one—the most important thing I tell people they have to do when I conduct an opening judge meeting, which some people actually hear and pay attention to—but I had just seen her in the tab room and then heading up toward the debate room, so I knew things were at least going to happen, if not exactly according to Hoyle. Since it was a tight tournament, she got another ballot for round 2. Lo and B, she didn’t acknowledge that ballot either. And this time she didn’t show up. Before long one of the teams she should have been judging, and their coach, came into tab to set things aright. I got the message and told the team to go back up to the room and wait for me to find a solution. Then I went out into the hall where I know there was an available judge lounging about, and sent him up to the room to take over. And then, back in tab I slotted him in and removed the prodigal missing judge. 

Keep in mind that some time had passed. Up went the substitute judge to the third floor, and shortly thereafter down came the substitute judge from the third floor. Not only had the prodigal missing first judge finally showed up, despite no longer being listed as the judge, but the other team—not the ones who were in tab with me and their coach—was asserting that the first team needed to forfeit because they had showed up late for the round. (One never did find out where the other team was through all of this before now.) The prodigal judge, happy, I guess, to be relieved of duty, accepted this and sent the teams on their way. What, the substitute judge asked, happens now? We were more than a half hour away from start time, and both teams had dispersed into the ether, thinking that the round was a forfeit. 

WHAT WOULD YOU DO?

Well, here’s what I did. First, I swallowed my inclination to find and throttle the delinquent judge—I simply removed her from the pool for the rest of the day—and then subsequently I swallowed my inclination to find and throttle the other team that had unacceptably asserted that a forfeit was demanded. For the record, we tell the judges that only tab can declare a forfeit. But a team declaring one? Jeesh. For one reason or another by now it was too late to simply hold the round, even if I could find the missing teams in the labyrinth that is Bronx Science. 

There was no question that the first team was not late for the round, because they were in tab telling me about their missing judge, who I then replaced, so you might say they had a really good excuse for their so-called tardiness, if you wish to call it that. But on the other hand, say what you will, the other team was right in that the first team had been AWOL way after forfeit time. 

What I did was a double bye. If the coach of the other team had been at the tournament, we would have had a congenial little discussion (I don’t mean that sarcastically) to enlighten his students about rules and protocols, as they had veered parlously close to unacceptable arrogance in the situation. But, sadly, that team was in the hands of mere chaperones. If I had not been literally alone in the tab room at the time, maybe something else would have been decided. But it just happened that I was all on my lonesome for that particular piece of time, and perhaps running 8 divisions by oneself with all sorts of judge balancing does stifle one’s creativity a bit. 

What would you have done?

In which we stop to smell the non-roses

Saw a preview of the New York Botanical Garden's 2026 Orchid Show last night. I would say it's the best one ever, designed by someone called Mister Flower Fantastic. (There's an article about him in today's NY Times.) I can't recommend it highly enough. It goes away some time in April. If you can, catch it at night. Great lighting in the dark.

Books: Embassytown by China Mieville. Finished this one yesterday. Mieville is concerned here with the meaning of language, which might hold some interest for the odd structuralist debater out there. Along the way, his world-creating is way above average. Another one I'd definitely recommend. 

Debate: The Bronx Winter Local registration closed yesterday. Today it's all the setting up behind the scenes. One of the key things to do is to isolate the high school graduate judges in the JV/Novice pools and pull them in to judge the Varsity kids. In judging, variety is the spice of life. And just because a coach has only a couple of novices in the game tomorrow doesn't mean they shouldn't handle a varsity round or two. It's all in the pooling. When folks register their judges they're asked to identify them as either students or HS grads. With that info in hand, I can then do a bit of scraping around. I mean, there's more to tabbing a tournament than hitting the Make It So button and watching everyone immediately rush to their rounds. (Come to think of it, hardly anyone ever does immediately rush to their rounds. There are some judges especially who like to play hard to get. Which is why at tournaments I wear both good walking shoes and a grim expression. It's the perfect combination.)

In which we cast our ballot and it stays cast

Debate: It ain't over till it's over, as the saying goes. In debate, on the other hand, once it's over, it's over.

The case in point: Saturday, after an elimination round ended with the judges voting 2-1, some time passed, and one of the judges on the winning side came in to change her vote. She had decided that she had voted the wrong way. At this point, anyone involved with the teams in the debate left the room, and the rest of us were tasked with deciding what to do. 

It was not a hard decision. As one person put it, in the olden paper-ballot days, once a ballot crossed the threshold, it was etched in stone. Submitting an online ballot comprises a similar petrifaction. This has long been the rule of thumb, and short of accidentally hitting the wrong button and coming running into tab immediately thereafter, waving your offending button-hitting hand in front of you and mea culpa-ing up and down the room including from the ceiling, which I have seen happen, once it's over the line, it's over. In the case in question, the original ballot stood. There was absolutely no disagreement among us. 

And here's the thing that happened, as we learned later, which underlines the correctness of this decision. In the round, after the ballots were cast, the one voter on the losing side, the squirrel as we say, gave their reasons first. Which means that after the round was over, an experienced judge laid out why they thought the losing side should have won. The person who came into tab was an inexperienced judge, and she had heard not only the round, but all these good reasons for voting the other way. After some thought after leaving the debate room, she decided that she really should have voted the other way, and came to us to try to effect that change. 

The issue was not the rightness or wrongness of the ballot. The tabroom is not responsible for insuring that every decision is correct. If for nothing else, the reason we have three-person panels in elimination rounds is that there is often reasonable disagreement on how a round went, and subjective analysis is, well, subjective. (There are also rounds where there is no question of who won, so there are both plenty of 3-0 decisions, as well as plenty of 2-1 decisions.) There may be no such thing as a "correct" ballot. But after a round, a judge sits there and decides, by whatever criteria, how to vote. They then cast their vote on that criteria. The ballots are collected, and that is the end of it. Anything could happen after a vote is cast: a judge goes online to research something in the round, a student who was observing talks to the judge and tells them why they're wrong (my students were always disagreeing with me), or as in the situation we're discussing, another judge's analysis of the arguments in the round changes their mind. 

If this were archery, whoever hits the target closest to the center would win. But this is not archery. Some of it is objective, some of it is subjective. Because of the subjective parts, we declare a moment beyond which a decision is set and irreversible. 

Case closed. 

(By the way, if we could recast our ballots after an election, wouldn't Harris now be President?)

TV: First of all, a little Eugene Levy goes a long way. On his show on Apple, "The Reluctant Traveler," he indeed goes a long way. I tired of it long before I ran out of episodes. Alternative travelers, if such a show type appeals to you, are Conan O'Brien ("Conan Must Go") and Richard Ayoade ("Travel Man"). And for the cosiest of cosy travelers, "Great Canal Journeys" with Timothy West and Prunella Scales. Three great series.

Digging back into the 90s archives (thank you, Amazon) there's "The Thin Blue Line" starring Rowan Atkinson. Need I say more? Sadly only two seasons, but I'll take what I can get.

And finally, we just finished watching "Dept. Q" on Netflix. It's one of those shows where you immediately are taken by the detecting team or, I guess, you're not. I was. And now we eagerly await season 2 in God knows how many years from now. 

In which we go bananeras

Debate: Normally I let the resolutions wash over me, since I don’t have to work with anyone on them anymore. And normally I don’t find them particularly problematic. However, with March-April LD, I’m glad I’m not in it.

Resolved: The United States military ought to abide by the principle of non-intervention.

There is certainly an accepted principle of non-interventionism, which goes into all sorts of areas like sovereignty and R2P—Responsibility to Protect—and the like. The Enlightenment philosopher in me likes all that. I even like arguing isolationism…maybe. What I wonder about is how this resolution will actually play out in the front of the room. If one simply thinks only or intervention and realpolitik in 2026 in the USA, one might prefer to do Model UN instead for these two months. And if one were thinking historically, one might look up military intervention on Wikipedia to be met with the opening warning “Not to be confused with United States military deployments or United States involvement in regime changes," followed by a list of about seventeen and a half gazillion examples of military intervention going back to the Mayflower. My personal favorite is the so-called Banana Wars, which has its own ring to it, but which sounds even better in Spanish, Guerras bananeras. I could go around saying Guerras bananeras until the cows come home. 

Obviously the point of this resolution was its theoretical side. But in today’s LD, and in today’s America, good luck with that. I mean, I would go so far as to worry that although non-intervention is a recognized term of art that implies the word foreign, in these ICE-y times… Fortunately there isn’t much debate at this point in the year, at least around here, aside from the odd qualifier. Oh, yeah, and also our State Finals. Note to LDers at NY States: there’s a lot of lay judges sitting in the back of the room. If you don’t debate for them, your Sunday in the Bronx is going to be very, very peaceful, without the interruption of elimination rounds to disturb your solace. 

Listening (audit division): I am not big on cover versions of songs that do little more than imitate the original. If I want the original, I'll go listen to it. A cover version needs to be in some way a reimagining. Which isn't always easy.

Reimagining certain artists is especially difficult. In the age of artists who compose and perform the songs and are knee-deep in their arranging and production, the end result, as much as is humanly possible, is exactly what they wanted. This is very much true of the Beatles, who were, with their guru George Martin, pioneers in the recording studio (see "The Beatles Anthology" on Disney+). Recorded Beatles music was the apotheosis of Beatle music. What more could be said? So good covers of Beatles music is rare. After Joe Cocker, name two. So it becomes interesting to hear versions of Beatle songs that are reinterpretations or reimaginings or deconstructions or whatever that successfully break from the original recordings stuck in one's brain, and that challenge the canon. Different rhythms, different harmonies, radically different voicings—yes, please. I'll listen to that, out of curiosity if nothing else, but normally I would expect to be disappointed. Which brings us to the subject at hand, the album "This Bird Has Flown," from Reimagine Music in 2005. (Reimagine Music was the brainchild of a man named Jim Sampas. Jack Kerouac was his uncle. I'm sure we'll be dealing more with Sampas in the future.) this album is all of the US version of "Rubber Soul" by different artists in different ways, and I really like it. One or two of the songs I'm not a fan of, but most of it is not only  enjoyable but revelatory. The takes on the music are different from the originals, thus bringing out highly different aspects of the originals that you might not have thought of previously. At the same time, you hear how amazingly good these songs are simply as songs to begin with. I mean, yeah, sure, "Rubber Soul" is on my GOAT list, but at some point one may only be listening and not hearing. Now on this album I'm hearing these songs again fresh, both in the new interpretations and the recollection of the originals that inform them. As it turns out, most of the artists on this album are new to me, and I've captured them on the queue for the future, so we'll deal with them separately when the time comes. In the meanwhile, you can do worse than checking this particular album out now.

By the way, there's apparently at least a 50th or 60th anniversary tribute album as well. Much more to look forward to!

(I was going to write something very long and tedious about this one, but after much thought, I decided against it. It was either too obvious, or too complicated. And hell, it's long and tedious enough as it is!)

In which I don't know's on third

Last weekend was the Pennsbury tournament, officially known as the Pennsbury Falcon Invitational. This is a major hoop-de-do in the shadow of the Sesame Place theme park with well over a thousand entrants in every forensic event known to humankind. I was there helping out in the LD/PF tabroom. Pennsylvania Jeff, a graduate of Pennsbury and the coach at Strath Haven, is the chief cowboy at this rodeo, and he does an excellent job. This event is relatively overlooked east of the Hudson, which would be a shame if the PFI wasn’t already bursting at the scenes. 

Our venue, Pennsbury High School, comprises two major buildings, East and West, about a fifteen minute walk apart. This separation does not, apparently, mean that students stay in their building for classes during the school day. It’s minus ten degrees and the sleet is ripping the chrome off the Tin Lizzies? Get out there and walk over to your World Geography surprise quiz. Lexington in Massachusetts similarly sends its students into the rain and heat and gloom of night, but at least at that one it’s a quick pop out and pop back in. Fortunately the PFI debate tab staff was not subjected to any of this, with PF/LD running at East and CX running at West. In fact, the LD/PF tabroom even had a couple of comfy reclining chairs. Those Pennsylvanians know how to live, aside from subjecting their offspring to the rain and dark and gloom of night. 

Of course, as at any tournament, stuff happens. One of the biggest entrants, so big they required two buses, had one of their buses break down first thing Saturday morning. This meant that LD and PF got off to an hour-late start. Various ideas were kicked around for handling this situation, until finally Pennsylvania J figured a way to adjust the flighting of the first elimination round with augmented judging from a different division. It worked. That night we still finished up at the original scheduled time with the originally scheduled round. The best thing about this was that nobody panicked. We just went about our business, explored every imaginable possibility (none of the other cowpokes in tab was exactly at their first rodeo), and made it work. The nice thing about tabroom.com is that it makes it so that almost anyone can run a tournament. The nice thing about an experienced tab staff is that they can handle every contingency that would send any inexperienced tab staff out the window. A number of the tournaments in our region are run by virtually the same staffs that run the major end-of-the-year national tournaments. This group knows what it’s doing, even when the tournament doesn't.

A few things happened that are grist for further, lengthy discussion, and we’ll get to them eventually. Meanwhile, is there any way you can’t enjoy when you have to assign a substitute judge, and the name that pops to the top of the possibilities is named Hu? “Who is going into that round?” “Yes.” “I mean, who is judging?” “Yes.” This didn’t go on for long, but it does show that Abbott and Costello will never go away. 

In which drumsticks do not come into play

I am resolved to the idea that I am not exactly au courant. If I look at, say, the red carpet at a major cultural event, I can identify virtually none of the celebrities. It's not that I don't recognize A-listers anymore, but that even their names don't come close to ringing a bell. I do not find this particularly bothersome. I still know a lot of other stuff. It's not that I'm losing my mind to the ravages of age, but that my mind does not travel the realms of, say, contemporary pop singers, influencers, sports stars other than golfers (who are seldom on red carpets), etc. These are generational issues. I'll stick to my times, you are more than welcome to yours. 

It turns out, sadly, that there seem to be similar generational eras of language. I wanted to make a point about a debate issue this weekend at Pennsbury, so I turned to my young colleague and said that we needed to talk turkey.* She looked at me with that glazed expression that says to one and all, what do turkeys have to do with it? Later some minor issue arose, which I referred to as small potatoes. I would have thought that this one was common enough, but aside from her wondering if I planned to catalogue an entire Thanksgiving dinner, I did not get much of a response from her. When later I remarked, when I knew she had heard me perfectly well, that I don't chew my cabbage twice, we decided to call it quits on the idea that we were speaking a shared language. Later Kaz reported to me that someone she had been speaking to gave her that glazed expression when she used the word milquetoast. Given that the program I am writing this in accepts the word milquetoast without offering any absurd alternatives, I am left with no absurd alternative myself but to offer that theoretical glazed expression in return now. 

We are not talking about slang here. Slang comprises words that come and go with the speed of how long it takes from its invention by young people to its utterance by old people, at which point young people are no longer using it. We are not talking neologisms versus paleogisms (ironically, a neologism). We are talking about idioms, figures of speech if you will, or maybe tropes. The expression "talking turkey" can be traced back to the 1840s. We are talking the aspects of language that make it different from mathematics. And we are talking well-educated people here, teachers entrusted with the minds of impressionable adolescents. And these teachers simply do not understand English as she is spoken anymore. 

We are doomed. 

Debate: When my colleague and I were, I had hoped, about to talk turkey about debate, I referred her to the very long essay I had recently written that was, ultimately, a defense of parent judging. Immediately upon seeing the article on the screen she gasped a TL;DR** and scrolled down to the comments. There she read from some yabbo that I should be talking more about debate as I used to do in this blog and less about all this other crap. Since I almost never read the comments, I would have otherwise missed this insightful response to what I'm doing here. The thing is, as I no longer coach, I don't theoretically have any skin in the game. But I am what you might call a debate entrepreneur, or maybe a debate proselytizer, and even though I am no long working with debate students, I am still working with debate in general. I am very much a part of the debate ethos, so to speak. So, my fine feathered yabbo, I agree with you, and I will, going forward, get back to talking more about debate per se. 

* When I was in trade publishing, I had an author who spoke a brand of English that some say arose from the suburbs of Philadelphia. Maybe the Jersey Shore was more like it. He once brought a serious issue to me, saying that we needed to sit down and discuss turkey. Language, obviously, both evolves and devolves. 

** If this article had a halfway decent copyeditor, they would have flagged this and commented that you can't gasp a TL;DR.

In which we take in a show

We hit the road yesterday to see the National Theatre Live performance of Mrs. Warren's Profession. These filmed performances are very well put together. The last one we saw was The Importance of Being Earnest with Ncuti Gatwa as Algernon. (The team that filmed Merrily We Roll Along could learn a thing or two from the NTL.) There is no question that watching these are very much like being at a play rather than a movie. This one shone brightly because of Imelda Staunton in the title roll. Her work in the third act as the embittered mother is absolutely thrilling. You get chills watching her. How often does that happen watching anything? On the surface, of course, the play is about prostitution—it was banned all over the place in its early days—but with Shaw, one sees hints of his complicated political thinking throughout, reading into it what one will. I haven't seen a play like that in a while. It makes me wish that NYC theater was more available (I find the costs ridiculous), and it makes me reconfirm my desire to see more plays when we visit London (where the costs are reasonable). 

The first play I ever saw was on Broadway was Peter Pan with Mary Martin, so I do go back a long way theaterwise, seeing all sorts of original casts over the years. The best of it was when we lived in Manhattan in the 70s. Chorus Line, Chicago, Sweeney Todd... Obviously my bent was for musicals, but there were straight plays too, including bunches of Stoppard. The only difference is that with the straight plays you don't take home the original cast recording and play it for the next five decades. Nowadays, aside from family trips to London—last time there we introduced my granddaughter to the spectacle of The Lion King—our theater these days is mostly limited to the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, which we support as patrons because of their education program. 

We live in a historical moment where the arts are being hit hard. Supporting the arts, sure, but also just bathing oneself in the arts is highly recommended. See Stoppard's Rock and Roll, for instance, for further elucidation. 

Listening (audit division): "Paradise and Lunch" by Ry Cooder. I'm rather happy that I didn't find out about Ry Cooder when I was younger; I don't think I could have financially afforded to keep up with his amazing output. I would have had to give up theatergoing! A brief bio: Cooder has played with [everybody] [ever] in addition to his own albums. Cooder discovered [most everybody else] [ever]. This album at hand is great. If nothing else, I'm a sucker for slide guitar. (And pedal steel guitar, while we're at it, which is probably somewhere in the Cooder resume). I've got a boatload more albums to queue up that are him, and then there's the "appears on," and then there's the ones he's merely associated with, e.g., "Let it Bleed." We'll be seeing more of Mr. Cooder in the future. 

In which we will do anything Carol asks of us

Watching: I was enjoying "Pluribus" quite a bit, but when I went to watch my next episode last night, I discovered that I had already watched the final episode. Good gravy! Talk about your cliffhangers! I mean, it should have been obvious, but I really wanted to see what was going to happen next—and then it didn't. So I went back to "For All Mankind," starting where I left off at the beginning of Season 4. I've seen this show referred to as one of the best shows no one is watching. Could be. I've been putting off going back for a while to it simply not to O.D. on it. I recommend it.

I don't binge, btw. I have 4 streaming channels to speak of, and I watch whatever I'm watching on one, then the next night I rotate to the next channel, and so forth, continually going around in a circle. I try to vary the mix so that they're not all SF-ish, but that's easier said than done. In addition to Mankind at the moment, there's "Fallout," "Stranger Things," and "The Punisher." More on all of them when the time is right. 

Listening (audit division): "Surfin' U.S.A." is very early Beach Boys. Most of it is filler behind the popular singles hits, which was the norm back then when somebody hit the charts: package their handful of hits (or hit, singular) with a bunch of passable fodder and make an album out of it. Those kids will buy anything! (For all I know this is still the norm; you can probably tell I don't really follow popular music much.) But there is no question that, if they weren't yet at their peak, the Beach Boys harmonizations were definitely already in place. Good old sibling harmony (with a cousin and neighbor thrown in for spice)! BTW, it's got mono and stereo versions of everything. Word on the street is that in these situations, the mono mix is preferable. 

Next up in the queue was The Incredible String Band. I've never really taken to them much over the years, and after listening to them juxtaposed against the BBs, I now clearly know why: they are bad singers. I mean, there are other bad singers out there who I like—Neil Young quickly comes to mind—but as Tolstoy would have put it, every bad singer is bad in their own way. The Incredible String Band plays relatively harmless music that you would have to fall over it at night in a drunken stupor for it to even marginally register with you, so any singing that isn't comparably light and airy is going to grate on sensitive ears. Even when they're singing the right notes, which happens occasionally, their voices are not up to the task. I will be giving up on this group now that I understand that, in the light of day, they are nowhere near incredible. 

In which a cabaret fan makes a damning announcement

Music (audit edition): After listening to Bobby Short live at Town Hall, I've finally decided that I'm just not a fan of Bobby Short. Don't get me wrong: I love cabaret. I've been to all the various venues in NYC, and I used to own a vast record collection of the stuff, including Bobby Short, back when one owned vast record collections. But ultimately there's something about Short's style that just doesn't work for me. What can I say? The man who owned the Cafe Carlyle is not my cup of tea. But if you haven't tried him yourself, you should. Maybe the Gershwin or Porter albums. He is, after all, a legend. If there is any argument here, I am definitely on the wrong side of it.

Next up was the Pretty Things. It was their last studio album, and the first time I've ever listened to them. Interesting enough to go back and queue up their first album. We'll see. 

Following which, "There Are But Four Small Faces." The history of Small Faces is complex, to put it mildly, and the albums on Spotify seem to be all over the map. My first real exposure to them was when "Ogden's Nut Gone Flake" was released, which I immediately bought because of its round album cover. Today I consider it a GOAT. I used to have a CD of one of their early albums, or maybe it was a hodgepodge of their early music, but what's on Spotify now are hodgepodges on stilts. The album I was listening to this morning contained a bunch of songs, a bunch of the same songs in mono, some radio versions of those songs and other songs, some US radio versions, some remasters, some remasters of radio versions, some UK remasters of remastered US versions of acoustic demos of radio versions (in mono and stereo), a Captain Billy Whizbang secret decoder ring, etc., etc., etc.  Anyhow, the music is prototypical British rock, and for some reason the group never hit in the US, aside from the single of  "Itchykoo Park." After Steve Marriott left the group and Rod/n moved in and they were no longer Small, it was another story entirely, at least in popularity. In any case, always one of my favorite groups, Small or not, to this day. 

Games (sporting edition): I watched most of both of the playoffs on Sunday. Both teams I favored won. Go Mets!

Weather: When I walked out this morning to clear off the fire hydrant across the street, the snow in the driveway was up to my knees. The good new is that the forecast shows it will all start to melt around the middle of February. Meanwhile schools around here were closed today, but apparently kids were expected to attend virtually. We now live in a world without snow days. And that world is a sadder place. 

In which we go on a bit about the state of high school debate

I debated for a year or so in high school. Back then, debate comprised two-person teams, arguing what we would today called Policy debate. It was the only debate available. There was one topic a year, which we studiously researched throughout the season until my partner Duncan and I had a whole shoebox filled with index cards. The topic was socialized medicine in the US. In the ensuing 60 years Policy went from shoeboxes to giant Rubbermaid file boxes to computers. The evidence grew, going from hundreds of facts (our index cards were all facts about something or other, discovered through The Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature and deep digging in the stacks of our local libraries) to fact-like items to general opinions to God-knows-what that would take up today's norm of a computer memory's thousands of "cards" — at least the designation remained the same. Curiously, the topic hasn't changed much either, insofar as government + medicine hasn't quite been resolved yet, sixty years later, and comes up regularly in one kind of debate or another. 

As time passed, and the ability to amass information began to grow, things changed accordingly. Eventually what emerged were not a couple of schmeggies like me and Duncan, researching when we had a few spare moments, but machine-like team operations with dozens of students all researching regularly and pooling their resources. Big-time teams dominated, because they had the labor power to amass virtual Everests of evidence. Duncan and I would never have had a chance, even using the same modern tools. Giants ruled the earth.

There were also a lot of changes in the sense of what was going on in the rounds, with, shall we say, the hermeneutics of debate. For one thing, if you had a million pieces of evidence, you wanted to introduce as many of them as possible into your argument, so you had to talk fast. Really fast. Like a tobacco auctioneer (do they still have those?). So fast that only people trained in fast talking, e.g., other debaters and tobacco auctioneers, could have any idea what you were saying. And there was the introduction of the latest rhetoric theories and arguments from college debate, since as often as not college debaters were working with high school teams, and even more often than not judging their rounds. One of the most startling things I heard early on in my years as a coach was that a local debate coach with a national reputation, one of the leaders of the activity, considered himself unable to judge Policy. 

A monster had been created. 

Instead of trying to defeat the monster on its own ground, some teams, small and poorly financed—these monster teams by this point were traveling around the country almost every weekend to debate other monster teams—came up with the idea of not fighting the monsters but fighting monsterdom. They ran cases that were critiques of the situation, saying that the playing field was not level and arguing that not only should they not have to debate on an non-level playing field, but that they should be given wins because the situation was clearly demonstrating intrinsic unfairness. Some of this was based around race, and it almost became a cliche that if a Black team was running a racial critique, not voting for them for the win was an act of racism on the part of the judge. This was not exactly non-controversial. In any case, critiques became a common things, critiquing all sorts of aspects of the debate, as well as approaching topics from feminist, ageist, ableist, queer and other perspectives. They became known as kritiks, and ultimately Ks. 

Meanwhile, the National Speech and Debate Association (called the National Forensic League back then, resulting in an obviously problematic acronym) started up a new kind of debate to make up for the growing esoteric nature of Policy (seen if nothing else as too fast for human ears). Lincoln-Douglas was born, comprising one-person teams and theoretically dedicated to what was called Values. The idea would be not that Socialized Medicine was a good thing because 63.92% of people in the Okefenokee Swamp would not catch the yaws but because Kant had demonstrated that people giving other people medicine was deontologically the right thing to do. One way or the other, deontology vs consequentiality became the underlying positions, and/or the individual versus society. Enlightenment philosophy was the coin of the realm.

LD, as it was quickly abbreviated, became very popular. The speed wasn't there, and the content was relatively accessible compared to what the Policy monsters were up to. Read a touch of Mill and Locke and Kant and you were on your way. And coincidentally, how many other high school students were reading such things, so you were now way ahead of the game simply in general albeit hifalutin knowledge. When you finally got to college, you would have philosophy 101 knocked. 

The problems that eventually plagued LD were analogous to the ones plaguing Policy. The pedal kept getting closer to the metal and the speedometer just kept registering faster and faster. Then the blight of postmodernism struck. The college students who were coaching and judging high schoolers were themselves caught in the last gasps of PoMo in their college classes. At the point where most academics finally admitted that Derrida & company were mostly incomprehensible, college students were still knee-deep in the murk. Some of it was, indeed, fun (I enjoyed Baudrillard, for instance, one of whose ideas was that the best part of Disneyland was the parking lot) and some of it was materially useful (Foucault, definitely) but much of it was just impossible. I mean, where does one pull an ethical structure—remember, we were arguing right and wrong—from crazy old Nietzsche? (BTW, Policy in its own way wasn't immune to this sort of stuff.)

The next thing that happened to LD was that the topics, rather than concentrating on philosophical conundrums, started dealing with real world issues, the arguing of which required real world evidence, the sort of 63.92% of people in the Okefenokee stuff that Duncan and I had been dealing with, eventually evolving into the same God-knows-what of Policy. It was becoming for all intents and purposes one-person Policy. The whole K thing arrived at its doorstep as well. And I became that debate coach who couldn't judge his own activity. 

So what we had in the debate universe was a two-person event dominated by powerhouse programs, arguing about hermeneutics and critical theory and obscure philosophy at rates of speed incomprehensible to normal humans, and a one-person event dominated by powerhouse programs (because LDers too were now regularly traveling around the country in what was called the national circuit) arguing about hermeneutics and critical theory and obscure philosophy at rates of speed incomprehensible to normal humans. As an aside, all this cost a lot of money for plane tickets and private coaching and hotels and registration fees, which, of course, becomes yet another subject for a K.

At around the turn of the millennium, NSDA wanted another type of debate aimed at solving the problems (if you want to call them that—many people don't) of Policy and LD. NSDA wanted an activity that wasn't esoteric. With the financial support of Ted Turner, they created Ted Turner Debate, quickly renamed Controversy, and subsequently quickly renamed Public Forum. The  theoretical paradigm was that a general population lay audience would act as adjudicators. Certain people, essentially the "professional" college student type judges, were literally barred from judging the event. Among other things this would eliminate blazing speed as counterproductive. The topic would change every month, thus establishing a physical limit to the amount of research that could be done. And that topic would be something about current events, so that the debaters might actually learn something along the way other than how to debate. That is, by the way, the long and the short of it. What was the goal of debate educators? To learn about all sorts of content not covered in normal classroom, be it history or politics or morality or the like, or to learn how to debate in an academically rhetorical vacuum? Much of modern Policy and LD is the latter. The NSDA wanted the former. 

What happened quickly in PF, which certainly had its growing pains, with various rule adjustments as time went on, was that it became the main general debate activity. It didn't require a coach to learn all sorts of esoteric skills like the ones that edged out me and that famous policy coach from being able to judge our own activities. The general content meant that almost any teacher could have a go at it. And best of all, your judges were free. You didn't have to hire college kids for a tournament: you turned instead to the parents of the debaters. After all, the event was intended for a general community audience. And you wouldn't have to pay parent judges, who could also act as chaperones if needed. Parents were promoted from handing out cold debate ziti at local tournaments to virtual partners in their children's extracurricular education. 

Although PF started slowly, with lots of incumbents considering it second-rate debate, that bias eventually dissipated. While schools offering Policy and LD were dwindling, schools offering PF were beginning to boom. At tournaments, the Policy and LD fields were dwindling while PFers were breaking down the doors. (Not to put too fine a point on it, since PF was 2 people you could charge twice as much as LD while using the same space resources; all you had to do was put out another tray of debate ziti.) In my region of the northeast today, Policy is virtually dead, with only a handful of programs fielding any sorts of teams. LD, having taken the same road to esotericism, is also dying, but more slowly. When I started out in the mid-nineties, there were 6 schools within short driving distance doing LD and Policy. Only one of them still has a serious program, while only one new school has relatively recently started up an LD-only program. 4 high-level tournaments in the area have disappeared from the calendar, without any replacements. The numbers at surviving tournaments around the northeast tell the story. They're all PF teams up the wazoo, whereas it-is-what-it-is in LD and Policy (if Policy is even offered at all). 

(And this does not cover leagues of inner-city schools and the like, which are mostly or entirely PF, and/or middle schools that have taken up debate as an educational sideline and who use PF as their medium. Because PF is accessible to kids, teachers and lay judges, it is booming beyond its old boundaries. Nice!)

One thing I haven't mentioned that plays into PF's growth, which is in most cases at the expense of Policy and LD, is student burnout. To be a competitive debater in those older activities requires that, in effect, debate becomes your life. When you're not researching, you're on the road attending high-level tournaments. Plus you have to keep up your schoolwork, presumably at the A+ level that makes you a competitive debater. That was how I lost some of my best debaters: they just didn't want to do it anymore. They wanted a life that wasn't limited to debating. I can't say as I blamed them. Meanwhile, if for no other reason than that the topics kept changing rapidly, PF didn't really reward or require giving up your life for it. There was no such thing as a longterm casual LDer or Polician, whereas a PFer could do other things with their time if they were so inclined. I consider that a positive. 

In the end, it is the parent judging that has kept PF from going down the same road to extinction of LD and Policy. Some of the best PF people dislike the idea of parent judging. They can't do all the fancy stuff their colleagues in LD and Policy are doing. Of course, if a team gets assigned a college student judge up on all the latest, they can (and do) go to town. But the bread and butter of the activity is the parent judge. The debaters can't use extreme speed to load up evidence, and besides, the topics change too rapidly to amass that evidence in the first place. Ks are baffling to this audience, where Herman Uticks was a kid they vaguely remember from second grade. And since parents are cheap judging cannon fodder, they aren't going away any time soon. Most debate budgets have been slashed and slashed again over the years; the pandemic speeded up the process in many cases. The average public school doesn't have the money to employ high-level college student debate judges as ad hoc assistants or judges. The average public school has had to cut its participation because it can no longer afford bus transportation. Money, or lack of it, talks.

So, in this essay on present-day high school debate, we see Public Forum as the main event. And we see it staying relatively as it is. It is an event in which any school can start a program, at about as cheap as it can get. It's good for teachers, it's good for students, and it's good for parents, even if I haven't cited the benefits to them, chief among which is having a part, however small, in their teenagers' lives, which can be a difficult rarity at best. I'm sure PF will continue to evolve in some ways, but I don't think the underlying structure is going anywhere. Nor do I think there are many people who want to change that structure. They may have good reasons to want to do so, but can those reasons stand against the status quo? 

You know what I think. 

By the way, don't get me wrong. I do not dislike LD or Policy. Or Student Congress or Original Oratory or any forensics event. Each is valuable in its own way. And LD and Policy aren't going away completely. Large programs especially continue participating in those events, and there are certainly strong pockets of each around the country. In fact, we created the Online Debate League precisely to provide outlets for Policy (and later LD and PF) where there is no local tournament presence. I want every activity to live and thrive. I do think that LD and Policy are irretrievably lost in the doldrums, but they are not lost to the world at large and probably never will be. Hell, I'm on the team trying to save them. But I understand their problems and virtues, as I understand PF and its problems and virtues. At the core, I love high school debate for many, many reasons. If PF as it is practiced today is the most accessible and popular form of high school debate, and middle school debate, count me as all in on preserving it and, more importantly, keeping it growing. 

And there you are. Thanks for reading this to the end. You may be the only one who has. 

In which take a few pots

Music (audit division): Yet another artist on permanent rotation in the queue is Yusuf / Cat Stevens (the slashing is his current stage name). The album was "Matthew and Son," his first. It's interesting listening in some ways, because you can hear some Cat Stevens in it, but it's a mixed up and/or nascent Cat Stevens at best. Sometimes it sounds like he wants to be a mid-sixties rock star, and at other times it's messy and overproduced and doesn't know what it wants to be, and then it becomes folk music. It was not a hit in the US, nor were his two follow-up albums. It was "Tea For the Tillerman" in the US when I, and the rest of the country, heard the real, sui generis Cat Stevens for the first time (although I did shortly after Tea's release go back to "Mona Bona Jakon," released only months for Tea, which is also the real Cat Stevens but didn't have Tea's popularity). If nothing else, Tea has "Wild World," one of my favorite songs of all time, despite its controversiality as sexist. I don't know... 

Anyhow, since the days of Tea I have followed Y/CS closely and mostly with fondness. I was extremely happy when "An Other Cup" was released, marking his return to popular music. In today's America, he is persona non grata, and was apparently unable to obtain a visa for his most recent tour. His numerous humanitarian awards are listed on Wikipedia. 

Games: In other news, last night was our monthly poker game, in which most of the conversation revolves about who's in and whose deal it is. There are certain poker norms that would eliminate these fascinating discussions, namely betting in order around the table and, as we use two decks, leaving the shuffled deck to your right for the next dealer. But I seem to be the only one who believes in these ideas. And then there's the whole playing past their bedtime. We're lucky if we can get a game, which starts at around six o'clock, to last beyond eight o'clock. I'm not exactly a night owl, but I can usually make it until after sunset. [Sigh.]

Then again, I did win all of $11. This great fiscal success was, of course, the result of always betting in order and leaving the shuffled cards to my right.