Aeturnalus

This past weekend I went to my first tournament outside of the Bay Area. The University of the Pacific (UOP) tourney was an interesting experience, showing a few differences from parliamentary debate in the Coast Forensic League.

First off, the tourney had a strictly-enforced 10-minute forfeit rule, causing 7 teams to be disqualified in their first round. This meant that 14 teams had zero speaks for at least one round, which I believe skewed results.

Secondly, the quality of the other teams seems to be held to a lower standard. In our second round, Betty and I hit a team which provided no relevant on-case arguments and spent the entire debate flaming us. They claimed that we were “lying” and “[didn't] deserve to be in parli”. Of course, we took offense, and gave around 10 joint points of order and clarification.

The judging at the tourney was really iffy for most rounds. Other than 2-3 flow judges, most judges were UOP students asked to judge a round. This meant that we only had legitimate judging for one round, and the rest were as lay as lay can be.

Overall, I thought that UOP was a pretty good tourney, and that it was a lot of fun. I do wish we could have gotten better than a 3-2 record, though… maybe next time.

The last few weeks have been pretty hectic for me, so I haven’t had time to post. Some notable things:

Last weekend, I went to St. Francis’ Robert Garcia Invitational with ChangChun Hwang. We went 3-3, and hit both Ott/Song and Rylan Schaeffer. It was pretty fun, and I got to experiment with some things during downtime. I also started playing Halo© again, mostly for the multiplayer aspect. Judging also happened to be quite good, with many policy flow judges. You can see my coverage of the tourney at Point of Information.

Over the week, I experienced a large amount of homework, as is common for people taking AP Calculus. I can’t say anything really happened… Although I did set up TTTH in order to shorten fileURLS for my webpages. For all intents and purposes, ttth.org is equal to aeturnalus.com except on the front page.

I just got back today from yet another speech and debate tournament: CFL Fall @ Menlo-Atherton. This time, I went with Sarthak Angal. Judges were ok, but not great. Through some stroke of luck (or unluck, really) I hit Schaeffer once more. This lost me the first round, keeping me from my undefeated record. I also got to talk to some people from other schools that do debate, and it was pretty fun overall. The tourney didn’t run behind, but they were pretty strict on CHSSA rules. A team apparently was even disqualified in the first round. Unfortunately, internet access was not provided in the tourney.

Something to mention about the two tourneys is that Ryan Lawrence, our head coach, wrote most of the resolutions.

Overall, it’s been a fun two weeks.

Dum de dum dum… a smart guy said this:

I remember, that as a student in high school, I would often question my math and science teachers after school about topics that we covered only superficially in class. A good 80-90% of the time, however, their reply would be “Don’t worry. You won’t be tested on it,” and out of politeness, I wouldn’t ask them any further. I was quite annoyed at that answer, since my reason to learn wasn’t to pass some exit exam or do well on the SAT’s. Currently, in Stanford, I’m learning the same topics that I queried about in high school, and that makes me realize that exit exams are a simple excuse to limit the learning of curious, intellectual students. –Upadhyayula Prajakta

Yesterday was the Lynbrook Speech and Debate Banquet. The theme of the night was the 1920′s, but many people conveniently ignored the theme and just went for semiformal (including me). The first hour or so of the banquet was pretty boring, since all we did was play various card games in a really loud room. A certain group of people decided to exclude everyone else and play a very un-fun three person game masquerading as a four person game.

After the food was finally put out, there was a huge line for over half an hour. Some of the foods were penne with marinara sauce, rotini with pesto sauce, ravioli with alfredo sauce, and some sort of italian bread. Overall, the food was pretty good, and better than I expected for a club banquet after hearing stories of the FBLA one (they got an “all you can eat” 4-pizza buffet).

After we finished eating, the leadership team did a passing of the torch, giving gifts to the new 2009-2010 leaders. A highlight was Carl giving Belinda a scarf:

As you can see, Belinda is very short… …I read somewhere that short people are colder because they are farther from the sun… … So I got her this scarf.

We also got to see a slideshow of pictures from throughout the year, with amusing captions added in.

Finally, Alice Lin presented the book to Sean, in JPEG form. This was mostly because we ended up with too little time to have it printed and bound, so we’re giving it to him later. If you’d like an electronic copy, go to the LSD forums.

Today was the Lynbrook Novite Tournament. While normally I’d not have gone to this tourney, Artem forced me to go to prep for iTOC (which is not happening, apparently).

I double entered in the tournament for both Parliamentary Debate and SPAR (Spontaneous Argumentation).  The Parli part was mostly normal, although partnering with yet another LD-er was an interesting experience.  From what I heard from certain sources, CC and I were pitted against the top novices (chosen by their coach) from the other schools.  I think that we managed to knock each other out of the running, because we lost our second round and won two others.

The 2nd Round of Parli was particularly interesting.  The topic was that video games were bad, and we were on the affirmative side.  When all three of our panel judges were teenagers, I’m not sure how impartial our ajudicators could be.  It wasn’t particularly helped by the close debate that happened.

SPAR was by far the highlight of the tournament.  The first round sucked, of course, since I had no idea whatsoever on how to do SPAR at all.  However, this seems to have slipped the notice of the other competitors – my opponent said I had done really well in the first round.

The second round was far more legitimate.  I’m not sure who would have won, but it was at least fun to do.  Since our topic was whether or not Science was dangerous, I felt the need to bring in Nuke War.  Conveniently, my opponents brought up StemCell, so we ended up with a decent case on each side.

The third round was no doubt the most hilarious.  My opponent and I were in the second set of speakers, so we thankfully avoided the first topic.  I felt really sorry for the first two debaters – the topic was essentially Britney Spears vs. Lindsay Lohan, and neither side knew much of anything about them.

My resolution in that round was Polar Bears vs. Penguins.  I was on the polar bears’ side.

Arguments:

• Polar Bears are smarter than Penguins
  • Penguins kicked out the one abnormal penguin because of discrimination, see Happy Feet
• Polar Bears are more influential than penguins
  • Polar Bears are the face of Global Warming, showing their damaged habitats and impacts to the natural world.
• People don’t care about the penguins.
  • My opponent had said that people paid over $200,000 to get a polar bear back to the Arctic; however, no one spends any money to get the penguin back to the Antarctic.