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For the last two days the weather has been somewhat like a snowglobe; we’ve had gentle falling snow that never seems to accumulate.  The snow powders the earth, and then the temperature just edges above freezing, so it melts; and then it drops another two degrees, we slip below the edge of freezing, and the earth is frosted again.

It’s magnificent.

This morning on Storrow Drive,  the world disappeared.  It was snowing thick, and the grey ground was covered with it.  A fog rose above the Charles.  The world shrank to the trees on either side of the Esplanade, the outline of Kendall Square’s across the river, and the bricks of Back Bay to my right.  And the line of cars with suicidal drivers zipping down Storrow going sixty, of course.

It was a great moment, when the world and nature intrudes on the city, and lets us know where we stand.  The weather can make the world dull brown, or it can make it shine silver in the morning, and we can only drive by and watch.

It’s elections like that that make me wonder why people make political predictions.  I suppose predicting the future and having others listen makes people feel smart.  I never make predictions, even as extempers always ask me for them.  This year is an especially good example; I can make a really compelling argument why no one will win the Republican nomination, but it’s not like the GOP is going to sit this one out or anything like that.  But anyway, no predictions from me.   I am, however, probably going to vote for Hillary.

So I had an utterly useless vacation between Christmas and New Year’s.  It was useful in the sense that I avoided the psychic despair that comes upon everyone sitting around faking it in a non-retail job that week.  Retail folks, of course, are in the middle of hell on earth, but that brand of hell is at least engaging, the way a tournament about to come off its rails is; that mix of fear together with the lack of time to contemplate it sure gets the blood pumping.

My company knows better.  That, or the management team all wanted to take the week off themselves, and were insufficiently pointy-haired to make us grunts come in anyway.  I work for good people, actually, which is a refreshing change from Harvard; I come up with an idea, instinctively try to remember the ways landmines might be placed in the way of that idea, shake myself, and then just go talk to Bruce.  I haven’t yet not returned ten minutes later with a “yeah, do it.”   Of course, it’s always good when your boss comes in and says things like “Uh, could you spend about $15,000 on a pair of new servers sometime today?”

Anyhoo, I digress.  My winter vacation, such as it was, was spent on various couches, reading, futzing around with the computer, buying presents for people I knew I wasn’t going to see before Christmas, cleaning the house, and whatnot.  It sounds nice, but honestly it wasn’t.  Being around the house means being around all the things I had to do, and that list is too epic for anyone’s good.  However, I also managed not to get very many of them done; I emphasizing the “futzing” part of “futzing around on the computer.”  “Futzing” does include “playing Civ4 until the Russians bled!” but does not include “starting in on the big list of changes I need to make to tabroom.com before NCFL Nationals. ”

There was also this general malaise thing going on; lots of folks were out of town and busy and I wasn’t particularly able to relax the whole time.  I’m happy to be back to the day job now (and back working full time actually; my schedule weeps, though my checkbook rejoices.)  That at least has a nice sense of balance and order, and gets me out of the cavernous house.

I also think that I need to learn how to go away for vacations.  I went to Florida for two weeks two years ago, missed a couple of tournaments, and nothing tragic happened at all.  Sitting around the house just isn’t the same.  I’ve always been bad at travel; I love New England, dislike uncertainty, don’t mind the winter cold that much, and have no one to go with by default.   Plus I travel so damn much for forensics that the few times I do find myself in an airport alone I get nervous because there’s no one to count or herd through security except myself.

Ah well.  I guess I should just plan a random trip.  I have a free round trip domestic flight coming my way because I took a bump on flight to Philly last August.   I wonder where I should go….

So the January Sprint is upon us in just one more weekend.   I have, in a row, our own Newton South tournament, the big Lexington Winter Invitational, Columbia, then Silver Lake & the NFL Congress together, then CFL qualifiers, and then Harvard.

And then a weekend off.

I have to get started on some things for Columbia.  That one always sneaks up on me, due to the schedule.  I always have plenty of time to obsess and nitpick the registration for Yale, but Columbia just coasts on its own.  Judges are easier to find in New York than New Haven, people don’t have the summer’s worth of staleness remembering how to work the registration system, and well, I also tend to punt and procrastinate this time of year.  But the tournament usually comes off just fine.  Maybe I should try less with the others; of course, if they ran equally well, then I’d be horribly exposed as the fraud I am.
I’m also really bad at vacation.  I spent most of the current one coding, or putting off coding.  And doing a really bad job of it too: wildly varying what I’m working on, not getting into the flow of anything, playing a video game here and there just to break up whatever is left of my concentration.

The world of Public Forum is confronted this month by a particularly Lincoln-Douglas style resolution. The rez declares that civil disobedience in a democracy is a good “weapon in the fight for justice” or some such bombast. I rolled my eyes and realized there was major work ahead of us. Nobody around Massachusetts seemed to understand the November topic except for us, given that it was aimed at extemp-like squads. Civil disobedience, however, is the type of thing any PF team that’s an appendage of an LD team will have reams of background on.

So I trotted out the standard “Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau and oh I guess Rawls” social contract lecture, to give the kids background on approaches the LD types will have down pat. However, PF is not just theory debate. We need facts, and examples, and to prove feasibility to make our case here. Despite that, PF bans plans and counterplans. And the topic is limited to democracy, so we lose the Burma and Tiananmen Square examples. In democracies historically, civil disobedience and expansion of rights usually coincide. Nobody knows if the civil disobedience caused the expansion of rights, but nobody knows that it didn’t either. So that’s not very debatable; we don’t have evidence or even a way of getting evidence.

So harumpf. So aff writes itself, but what do you argue on con? You can argue that other means are better but oops, that’s a counter plan, and verboten by the gods of Public Forum. You can stick to LD style moral justification arguments on why citizens ought not break the social contract, but then if the other side comes up with one good concrete example, most honest judges are going to go for that first. You can start swinging around wildly and say the tyranny of the majority is a good thing, but good luck convincing an average mom of that.

The problem is Public Forum was designed in reaction to problems in other events.  The founders of the event took a list of things they didn’t like about LD and Policy, and built an event that doesn’t permit those exact things from happening.  Therefore, most of its rules forestall negative trends, instead of encouraging positive ones.  But these rules and restrictions prevent more than critical, off-topic arguments; they also hamstring legitimate avenues of on-topic discussion.  That’s not a good way to create a coherent event. PF shouldn’t be the way it is because of negative trends in LD or CX; it should be what it is because it’s good for PF.

We’ll muddle through somehow.  Maybe we’ll come up with a clever way of imagining negative policy consequences to civil disobedience. But at the basic level I think the event as a whole could use some fine tuning, with the security needed to allow the students leeway to debate the issues fully.

I don’t like the coinflip either.  But that’s another post.