In which we pray

I’m looking at the numbers for Saturday’s CFL qualifier. (We always call it CFL Grands, but I’m not sure other dioceses do likewise.) 16 and 14 in LD and PF respectively. Normally, this would play as a glorified round robin, but Grands is anything but normal. The people who attend put a high premium on these results: they really want to go to CatNats. So we have to scrupulously insure that the fairest process is in place, to reward the most deserving performances at the tournament. It’s one of the ones where we go over everything umpteen times, to insure both accuracy and bias-free placements. We’ve gotten pretty good at it over the years, but not without a bump or two. This year we won’t have Kaz to kick around, as she’ll be doing something Massachusettsian this Saturday. I don’t think we’ll miss her though; we had her to kick around this last weekend, going down to the Met and having dinner with JV, and then breakfast with the Paginator on Sunday. We did have to carefully explain to the P how clocks work for Daylight Savings Time. Apparently he was so distracted by having to tab policy at his state tournament that he couldn’t tie his shoelaces, tell time, or drink anything that wasn’t in a sippy cup. That whole sippy cup thing got him into some sort of fracas at a Starbucks somewhere, because: 1) they don’t served their drinks in sippy cups, and 2) they don’t serve Manhattans. He might have gone into some detail explaining this, but I couldn’t hear him with my jaw dropped that far.

I might have committed to tabbing the NY State tournament when we were with Joe. I'm not sure. I do remember him bringing it up and I don't remember saying no. 

I did start playing with a new Fb page. There is only so much one can do design-wise. It ultimately boils down to what you put on it, and I’ve started to figure that out. My guess is that I won’t push it until mid-summer, when people start thinking about tournaments again, but maybe I’ll launch sooner. We’ll see. At the moment, it’s just cogitation.

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In which we outline some future plans

I’m thinking of trying something different, to wit, a Facebook page for debate stuff. I’ve been working on an Fb page for the DJ, and as I learn more about it, it seems like a good thing for my debate stuff. Fb allows two-way communication, and sharing, and things like that, which isn’t really part of the functionality of a blog. Especially since a lot of what I do is for the general market, for example, how to do an electronic tournament, and I know that most people really don’t know how to do that or a lot of other things, I figure why not put this material out more publicly. I would still write articles here, but I would also post them there.

I’m going to play with the idea.

That raises (but does not beg) the question about why I do this at all. The Vast Coachean Army isn’t exactly vast, but it’s not exactly tiny. Considering that I mostly talk about debate, and usually from the very specific perspective of the tab room, I nevertheless have a few hundred readers for every post. Occasionally a post that seems no more relevant or meaningful or, shudder, funnier than the others shoots up to a couple hundred more, and I have no idea why, but to be honest with you, even if there were only a small handful of followers, I’d probably keep at it. I like to write. But that ought to have been evident to you by now. I have all this writing juice and I like to use it. It just so happens that what goes on behind the scenes at tournaments is of interest to a reasonable number of people.

Anyhow, I was talking to a colleague about what one does in one’s interstices, those moments during the day when you’re taking a break from the main business. Me, I write Coachean Life. And in the past, Nostrum. I go on Fb a couple of times a day to see what my friends are up to, although I’ve pared that number lately because the politics has become monotonous. I’ve been posting entertainments as my personal oasis from all of that. On the other hand, I’ve become obsessive about Twitter, where I enjoy the politics, and where I follow a bunch of different reasonable points of view (as compared to the boneheads who support everything Trump does and the boneheads who support nothing Trump does, and offer nothing but boneheadedness to warrant their venom), and where I tweet myself fairly regularly, in the belief that unquestioned immorality is condoned immorality. It’s my moral compass, of course, but who else’s do I have?

And, of course, there’s the writing for work. I write blurbs and memos and articles and all sorts of things, and I really enjoy doing it. It’s fun. For a lot of people, writing almost anything is anything but fun, but that’s not me. And I also spend a lot of time dug deep into manuscripts, doing some pretty heavy duty editing, a craft that is akin to doing crossword puzzles, although not exactly drawing on the same skillset.

So, a lot of writing. And some social media. More, now that I’m working on the DJ site. I’m going to see next if I can do something meaningful in Fb, mostly explaining tournaments and discussing tips and techniques and the like. Maybe, when all is said and done, I’ll be able to get all the Cool Kids convinced that they won’t lose their street cred if they hit the Start button. That alone would be worth the effort.

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In which we offer 11 Pieces of Advice for Recovering English majors

Read an Anthony Trollope novel. He gets rediscovered every couple of decades, and who knows, you might be at the crest of the next wave. Or not.

You’ve always felt that you needed to be older to enjoy Henry James. Well, guess what! You’re older. Theoretically, that means that now is the time. But you were probably wrong, and you’ll never be old enough, and that copy of Portrait of a Lady is still going to sitting on the shelf five years after they bury you.

Since you haven’t come close to reading a book by Charles Dickens since you read the Cliff’s Notes on A Tale of Two Cities, which is as close as you were able to get given that the midterm was the next day, why don’t you try one now? Read Barnaby Rudge. No one else ever has.

When someone tells you they hated Moby-Dick, act as if you a) read it twice, and b) loved it both times. Who is going to argue with you?

Throw away your copy of Finnegans Wake. Stop kidding yourself. You’re never going to get past the third page, so why pretend otherwise? All your handwritten notes in the margin that end halfway down the second page are a dead giveaway.

If you want to get back into the game, read something by a Nobel Prize winner. And no, reading the liner notes on one of your old Dylan albums doesn’t count.

Remember how you used to write poetry in high school? No? Good.

Admit that the only Jane Austen novel you ever read was Pride and Prejudice in junior year of high school and that you have no idea what all the fuss is about. Then to make up for it, watch Clueless again and realize that it came out 22 years ago and Alicia Silverstone is now in her forties.

The simplest way to avoid Proust is to claim that after Swann’s Way neither of the translations is terribly satisfactory, and that you were thinking of learning French so that you would be able to bypass the middlemen completely and stick with the original. The only difficult thing is keeping a straight face while you’re claiming this.

All you need to know about Russian literature is that, in The Brothers Karamazov, the butler did it, and in War and Peace, the guy gets the girl in the end. Knowing these two facts frees up a lot of time for activities other than reading.

Speaking of not reading, if you want to catch up without actually cracking open a book, pretty much every classic ever written is streaming on Netflix. So is Gray’s Anatomy. Be strong, my friend. Be strong.

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In which we debrief on the Land of Lakes

I refer to Lakeland on my web schedule as beyond category. Or something from a painting by Hieronymus Bosch. The 2017 edition followed the usual program.

For all practical purposes, Lakeland is the end of the season for debate. Stefan, the TD, has what we might call an open door policy. He has two divisions of MS, one in Parli and one in PF, plus two divisions each of Policy and LD, and three divisions of PF. He doesn’t mind having non-school entities (which we never see anymore anywhere else, but maybe that should realistically be phrased as I never see anywhere I run things, because, well, me). Kaz and I ran everything other than policy and maybe LD, and Brian M ran policy and maybe LD, but over time LD segued over to us. Which makes sense, as we tend to always do LD and PF as a package. Of course, running seven divisions is a bit of a job, although all of them were large enough to run of their own accord, except MS Parli, which was mostly just one school and we just did whatever they wanted and kept out of it. The key thing was judging. We were as tight as, well, there were often literally no extras, and more than once we threw the odd Lakewegian policy kid into a novice round and said they’d love it and get going.

So it was a continual scramble. Most people behaved themselves judgewise, but there were the usual questions about obligation and the like, and people with better things to do once their own kids were eliminated, the sort of thing I send endless emails about before a tournament to head ‘em off at the pass. At Lakeland I’m just a cog in the machine. But nothing really horrible happened. Aside from the one schmegeggie who went home without entering his ballot on Friday night, we did fine. Curiously, the middle school PF division, of the 4 PF divisions, ran the smoothest. The judges showed up on time, clicked the start button, judged the rounds and entered decisions. The too-cool-to-start judges were mostly in policy and the PF varsity divisions. I harassed ours. Brian just assured himself that they were working and let them proceed on their merry way. My feeling is that until we have people trained to act like professionals, they will act like the adolescents that they are. Given our general success this season getting everyone on the same page, I do not feel it is impossible. I do, however, feel that it is impossible to run a tournament without knowing that it is, indeed, running, an issue that magnifies at the colleges. But, then again, those are my problem, and Lakeland isn’t. I have nothing to complain about; I got out around 6:00 on Saturday, leaving the last few rounds in Kaz’s more than capable hands, since she wasn’t going anywhere, as she had teams still in it all over the place. (It was a good weekend for Lex.)

My only remaining gig is the CFL qualifier the weekend after St. Patrick’s day. We’ve got this pretty well knocked, but it is different from everything else we do, and takes a lot of attention. And then it’s off to foreign climes and new levels of Bioshock and warm weather on the patio watching the butterflies flutter by. Ahhhhhh.

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10 Things You Probably Don't Want to Hear on a Blind Date

"I thought tonight I’d try going out without my medication."

"My parents really don’t set a curfew for me anymore."

"You know, you really can’t live on unemployment benefits."

"I’ve got some really good jokes written down if you’d like to hear them. Or you can just read them yourself on my phone."

"I was innocent. At least I got off with time served."

"I hope you like cats. A lot."

"They know me at that restaurant… We should probably go somewhere else."

"Want to come up and see my tats?"

"Do you think people should pay all that much attention to the sex offender registry?"

"I voted for Trump."

In which we reveal shockingly predictable plans for the weekend

My bags are packed, my travel reservations are confirmed, I’ve got my visa secured and set up my TSA PRE: I’m going to Lakeland this weekend.

There was one Land o’ Lakes, a few years ago, where I had no students and didn’t go, leaving Kaz to go it alone. She said it was fine, but afterwards she came at me with a butcher knife, so I figured I probably shouldn’t do that again. After all, Lakeland is in the next town over, so it’s no big deal, and I sort of like tournaments that are, shall we say, unique. Land o’ Lakes has 9 debate events, not counting the PF RR in Manhattan that precedes it, everything from Middle School Parli to Varsity bid-level CX and, for the first time, a finals bid in PF. Everything runs relatively normally, except a lot of eyeballing is necessary in the smaller divisions, plus CX has rounds committed versus judges just going and judging the damned thing. The VCA knows how I feel about that. Yes, it does allow the judges more time to nap and eat donuts, but it means that the teams’ prefs are made less desirable. Who is the customer here? Still, tournaments get to do what they want to do, and while I offer oodles of good advice in the TD toolkit, that doesn’t mean anyone ever reads it, much less follows it. Whatever. In any case, with this many divisions, one way or another something is always going on, and it’s fun, albeit tiring.

The good news is that we will have a nice dinner Friday night, at the restaurant whose existence I refuse to reveal, otherwise you’ll be there, you spalpeen, taking up my table, and we’ll be able to plan for the next weekend, when we’re thinking about hitting NYC for fun and frolic. After that it’s NYCFL qualifying, and then, over and out for a while, at least debatewise. I see you quiver with antici

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