In which we scoot from topic to topic, including the topic of topics

Due to recent tabroom outages, a number of high-level tabbers have taken to writing song parodies in their unexpected spare time. Some of these parodies are indicative of, not surprisingly, great minds, all going to waste. I can only hope that tabroom settles down (I wonder which prime number CP is blaming the last crash on) so that these people can all get back to their day jobs.

The Tigger is now set, all fees frozen, all bets on the table. There are a couple of loose ends, but the judging looks good, there’s rooms enough and time, and, well, damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. The big issue now will be e-ballots in LD. Over the holiday weekend I’ll sort out the rooms so that the buildings are easy to handle. I expect Friday night to be a fustercluck, since that tends to be the starting position of virtually every tournament everywhere, but that we’ll settle down well on Saturday. I consider it a big deal to move e-ballots into an arena like Pton, where folks are in many many buildings all over creation. I think we have gotten the LD pool relatively well trained, though. We see fewer false starts, for instance. And we’ve prodded the cool kids to understand that, cool as they might be, not pressing start means you’re an asshat. I want that t-shirt, the one that says, "Don’t be stupid be a smarty, come and join the starty party,” but I don’t think it’s on sale to the general public. Too bad.

Meanwhile, the choices for the next PF topic should be coming out soon. If you were wondering, Pro ate Con for breakfast in November, anywhere between 60%-70% of the ballots. No one seemed surprised at this. Given that the world at large has already ceded safety to convenience in the electronic arena (my phone tells me which way to go to work in the morning when I turn it on to start my audiobook on my commute, even though I’ve never told it where I work, or when; Google knows more about me than anyone living or dead). Still, at least people got a chance to find out about the subject, and maybe learn that they are not so much subject to identity theft as to identity dilution as they sputter off into datafication. Now if I could only get to see online ads for products I haven’t bought instead of ads on the products I’ve just bought two minutes ago…

On the political front, which I usually don’t spend much time on, it’s great to see that freedom of the press is being threatened at the highest levels. It’s good to know that the dialectic of speech no longer synthesizes toward the discovery of truth. I’m pretty sure that the first executive order from the Trump White House will be a protection of fake news. Why should truth be given any priorities? Viva la booboisie!

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In which we recover from disaster

Well, now what? So said an awful lot of forensicians last Saturday when tabroom.com took an unscheduled vacation.

This, of course, is why I wrote a disaster plan. Which, by the way, we didn’t follow at Wee Sma Lex because it didn’t seem necessary. Honestly, given that we lagged-paired every round, it really wasn’t, since tabroom came back up before we went seriously off schedule. The key thing was to provide blank ballots to the sitting judges, since they could no longer enter their results electronically. I would imagine that things were not quite so hunky-dory at places like Glenbrooks, where the sheer numbers of people banging their heads against the wall can result in mass hysteria and, needless to say, serious damage to the wall. You know, I remember when I first started in this activity, when it was unusual for a tournament not to pull to a crashing unexpected halt somewhere in the middle while something or other got fixed in the smoke-filled back rooms. Why should tabroom.com be any different?

Of course, for the Tiggers, we will go full disaster plan. (And here it is if you want to try it.) It does not incorporate the new save-a-pairing backup, but I’m wondering if drawing on the backup server isn’t an invitation for even more problems when tabroom does come back up, as it inevitably does. Oh, well. We’ll find out someday, probably. Or not, the Good Lord willin’ and the creek don’t rise.

Other than that, as always, Wee Sma Lex was fun. As a tabbing exercise, it’s pretty straightforward. If you’re lagging, the key is always do it right away, before any results come in. Partial lagging punishes people; blind lagging may or may not punish people, but at least it’s punishing people across the board, rather than the handful whose results came in early. Lagging is a good way to get 4 rounds into one day before too many hours go by. There is also a school of thought that every other round in an invitational should be lagged, to preserve more fairness against potential side biases, but not too many people buy that argument. I think it’s a pretty good argument, but I’ve never actually done it, and probably never will. Give the people what they want, or at least what they expect. So it goes.

By the way, there was pretty decent, and warm, pizza in the Wee Sma judges’ lounge. What more could anyone ask for?

During all of this, I did get Columbia started. I have to look at their invite, but at least tabroom is mostly ready to go. With all-waitlist, there isn’t all that much to set up in advance. The real tinkering comes later. And the Tiggers are about ready to go, with fees set tonight and the last juggling of hireds tomorrow. I think we’re in excellent shape on that front in all the divisions.

And in a couple of days, Thanksgiving. Our dinner will have no Trump supporters, so we won’t end the meal in a duel to the death. At least not over the President Elect.

By the way, did you know that Donald Trump was elected president? Yeah, that Donald Trump. I hope this isn’t news to you. I would hate to be the messenger if that is the case. Then again, would you be willing to share the hole you’ve been living in with the rest of us?

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In which we look at three tournaments in their varying stages of preparation

I think the VCA understands that I do work for a living outside of the debate universe, and that the Day Job takes up, well, my day. I devote a lot of time to debate, but that is not DJ time, and there are only so many hours in the day, one way or the other, so while I attend to business(es) I don’t always keep up with the extras. In other words, I’m offering my excuse for not blogging as regularly as I would like. Then again, you might like if I blogged less, so what do I know? But if that is the case, why are you reading this? We are about to head into what will presumably be the most horrifying presidential experience in the history of the nation. You could easily spend hours a day following along as everyone and their mother-in-law prognosticates on the damage Herr Trump will do to the nation. Gospodin Trump? Whatever. You didn’t come here to read about that, so I won’t darken your mind with it. You want to hear about adventures in debateland.

I have gone over the Wee Sma Lex setup in tabroom. I didn’t change much, except for some leftover items from last year that needed to be set back to zero. I do have questions for Kaz when I arrive there tomorrow. We’ll have time to sort them out while she’s handling the tiny bit of housing that she’s offering some New Yorkers. Monticello has a little contingent going, for instance. Mostly, of course, the tournament is for locals. But it was always one of my favorites, even when the Hud was a rarity amongst those locals. Running our own tournament the week before, for novices, meant that my novices had fallen behind and needed some rounds. Plus my second-years could take advantage of the open division, which is intrinsically of the Lite variety, and get some good rewarding experience as well. Plus they could debate folks other than the usual suspects. I use to pack a big bus in the olden days. Then I would pack a little bus. Or the car, in the thinnest times. Now it’s just me. I’ll listen to a book and entertain myself well enough, but it won’t match the joy of watching students cringe with every song that comes out of my iPod. I never once turned any of them into ukulele players. Go figure.

I’ve begun clearing the decks for Penn. It seems early, and in fact it is early, but, well, the numbers won’t change terribly. We’ve got the rooms, alternating the varsity and jv debate events, but it’s going to be a long weekend. Well, all Ivies tend to be long weekends. We should all be used to it by now.

Princeton is about done. I have a little juggling of judges (judgling?) to do, but we’ve pretty much covered everyone. Now we can start meditating on our commitment to e-ballots for LD. That’s going to be a challenge, requiring great attention to room assignments to keep everything as compact as possible to allow for oversight. My guess is that the simultaneous novice and varsity on Friday night will be a nightmare, but that we’ll have things sorted out on Saturday. Then Sunday everyone will take forever and we’ll have to read the riot act that you don’t have half hour critiques, half hour prep and half hour setup time once you get into the room. I want to get home that night!

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In which we look forward to the Tiggers

I’ve gone from lollygagging around the chez, training the cat to fetch my slippers, to full-bore tournamentia.

I’m pretty happy with the Tiggers. Waitlists have been trimmed and hired judges assigned. As always, there are not enough of these to go around. I’ll pass this information along to the assembled multitudes tonight, and no doubt all Gehenna will break loose, but there are times when people have to realize that judges simply do not grow on trees. The vast majority of Tigger attendees are relatively local, and there is no decent excuse for them not to wrangle some of their alums to give back a bit. As the VCA knows, I always expect a good program to spin off a few lingerers who love the activity so much it takes them a while to get it out of their system. And if a program isn’t generating that love, there’s something wrong with the program. Of course, most programs in fact do generate that love, to some degree. Plus, I used to pay my alums to judge, following the logic that either I’d pay a stranger or I pay one of my own grads. Can indeed buy me love, in other words.

The Tigs hoped to expand and add more PFers, and I would say that the extra 60 or so who signed up is indeed an addition. It will force us to do seven prelims to break all the 5-2s, whereas 6 rounds wouldn’t even come close to breaking all the 4-2s. That makes for a long day, but if you’re in it to win it, you need all those rounds. I hate the idea of a 4-2 screw. A 3-2 screw is bad enough, but at least 3 and 2 sleep together at night, whereas 4 and 2 have twin beds in different corners. It just feels wrong. 5-2 demands a break, and will get it.

Of course, when people hear that they need to provide judges, they’ll drop off a bit. And for that matter, they’ll drop off anyhow, as they always do the week before fees are set. Still, it’s going to be a helluva big tournament. Or a Gehennava big tournament. Pick your own perdition.

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In which we debrief a little Scarswegia

All right. Let’s get back to business. Enough of this fom toolery.

Last weekend was the Scarsdale tournament. How was that? you ask. Fine, I answer.

As originally conceived, Scarsdale would have two divisions of LD, with the varsity division judging the novice division in alternative single flights. This was a nice little touch, making the tournament unique, and, I think, more education-oriented. In the beginning, virtually everyone in varsity judged and debated. Nowadays, it’s a lot fewer. This may be because the pressure of LD is different these days. It was always a burden, but an interesting one. Now it may just be too much, but then again, about half the debaters doing it this year did break, so it’s hardly impossible. I think a bigger difference might be that too many people are too worried about the competition per se rather than any opportunities to train their students. I don’t know if that’s a difference over time or just a difference over a new cast of coachean players. Whatever. Maybe it’s just sunspots. In any case, it was a lot easier to keep track of than in the old days. Simple creating the odd judge pool in tabroom does the job, although every time I said the word pool everyone jumped at me. Apparently CP thinks I don’t do pools right. Right, in his definition, is the way he does it. If that is the case, don’t write a program that allows people to do it their way, or, as I like to put it, my way, or better still, the real right way.

Feh. Tabroom worked fine all weekend, so we had to go out of our way to blame something on Palmer. Or at least I did.

The most telling thing, which I’ve already mentioned, is the size of the PF field. Numbers talk, as they say. We used to get about 30 VPF or so when all was said and done, both at Scarsdale and back when this weekend was Bump. We’re over twice that number now. This is true everywhere. (At Princeton, PFers are breaking down the proverbial doors.) I noticed a posting on Fb bemoaning the state of debate at the moment. But that posting was in fact about the state of LD. In a word, it’s become policy. The evolution has reached its apotheosis. It’s never going to “get better.” It will be different, but now that it has become completely a specialist activity, understandable (and palatable) only to specialists, it just doesn’t matter what its state is. What is great about forensics, no matter what branch, is its educational benefit. Forensic events that give the least of that benefit still give that benefit, but events at the other end of the spectrum, which give the benefit to more people, with great accessibility, are the real strength of the activity. Is LD “better” debate than PF? Probably, according to certain criteria. Is it better according to my criteria? Na’ah. It hasn’t been for a long time. When virtually every coach I know hates to judge it, it’s gone over the bend. It’s an activity for young people. That’s fine, as far as it goes. But activities for all people are better, because they go further.

No, LD won’t die, any more than policy has. But it will eventually be similarly over in the corners, as people who throw tournaments to make money (oh, the horror) progressively go more and more to where the money is. Little divisions of LD will join little divisions of Policy in the buildings furthest away from the center of things. Diehards will die hard, or more to the point, they won’t die, and they’ll just pretend that they’re hale and hardy. Fine. No problem.

Game over for everyone else.

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