Last week, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, Ph.D. visited campus for, amongst other functions, an "open forum" (a Q&A session). This morning, as part of the same speaker series & in another open forum, the campus hosted the P.B.S. NewsHour's Gwen Ifill. In both instances, I was the first person to walk up to the audience microphone & pose a question. On neither occasion had I any real wish to do so, but a great many people seem to believe that microphones are unaccountably lethal & will not approach them until they have successfully failed to kill another human person (thank you, Shawn "Sean" Spencer). The Lord only knows how long we would have sat there, increasingly embarrassing ourselves in front of our guest, before someone else had taken any action. If not me, who? If not now, when?

I know, I know, what a sorry state of affairs.

Master Debating, 1 of 4: West Conn
Ours is a minute debate team, & ad hoc to boot. At other, more traditional colleges, debate is a longstanding tradition, steeped in institutional comfort & stability. Not so with our strange little troupe, which has taken six different debaters ('twas supposed to be seven before one chap—an awful, inarticulate brute of whom we were all pleased to be rid—bailed the very morning we departed for Claremont, back in September) to seven different tournaments, with only one stable duo: Too Sly & your humble narrator. And we had to scrape together those six debaters with bailing wire & insincere smiles; by contrast, Cornell brought eleven teams to West Conn (twenty-two debaters), plus sundry coaches/judges & spare debaters, with all indications that there were yet another horde available back in Ithaca. But we have aspirations of building a program that will outlast our tenures, & as such have recently taken to decision to give our debate squad a formal name in the traditional style. Having previously described ourselves as the "debate team" & the "debate squad" (before April '10 the "speech & debate team"), we are now the U.M.F. Debating Union. We hope to print T-shirts or hooded sweatshirts one of these days.

Western Connecticut State University
Danbury, Connecticut
25-28 February 2011

West Conn was the first debate trip since the inaugural tournament at Adelphi University (on Long Island) in November '10. Only a trio had made the Adelphi trip, our coach: The M.A.P., Too Sly, & me; West Conn was our first trip with the broader team since the Horror of Hart House in October. Love/Hate (now reviled within the team as "The Hasshole") had been a complete disaster, haranguing her partner & fellow novice, Sugar, whenever they didn't win a round, willfully ignoring our patient explanations that winning a Worlds round is no easy feat. It was not as if Love/Hate was the world's most luminously brilliant debater & Sugar a millstone around her neck; they were both novices with much to learn before they had any right to expect success. With The Most Dangerous Game absent a partner (the aforementioned brute), at Claremont The M.A.P. had rotated the three girls so that each got at least some experience. At Hart House, The M.A.P. allowed Love/Hate's boyflesh (almost uniformly derided as her "beard") to debate, his first & only time, partnered with The Most Dangerous Game. West Conn would be the debut of the new, stable partnership of The Most Dangerous Game & Sugar.

The much-desired stability was not in the cards, I'm afraid. After the second round on Saturday, Sugar, in great pain, asked to be taken back to the hotel to rest. Some time later, she began inundating my mobile with calls, as she did not have The M.A.P.'s mobile's number. I couldn't check my phone during rounds, but in between I heard her plaintive cries to be taken to hospital. Holy cow! I relayed this dire message to The M.A.P., who dashed off to the rescue. By the end of the day's four rounds, Sugar was in Danbury's hospital with The M.A.P. at her side, her physicians still attempting to divine her ailment. More than that we would not know until late at night.

I suppose I was tasked with leadership because of the seniority of my age; my first problem was to get Too Sly, The Most Dangerous Game, our two foster teammates from Regis University (Denver), & me from the West Conn campus to our hotel, & thence to procure dinner. The M.A.P. had suggested that we bum a ride off the gigantic St. John's team, but St. John's had enough personnel to fill both their eleven-seat vans. Their coach noted with some concern that he'd be willing to come back for us after he'd dropped his own team off at their hotel, but then seized on an alternate idea & asked me to hold on for just a sec. He asked an independent judge, but with some affiliation to St. John's, to give us a lift; the kind fellow agreed. There were five of us to transport, plus the judge, in his four-seat sedan. The Regis coach had not made the trip from Colorado to Connecticut, entrusting his two lads, The Beanpole & Meathead, to his good pal, The M.A.P. With The M.A.P. ministering to Sugar, the Regis boys became my responsibility. I thought it best to get them & The Most Dangerous Game back to the hotel as soon as possible, & volunteered Too Sly to stay with me on campus until the second shuttle run. I instructed The Game to order pizza as soon as she got back to the hotel, & subtly tasked Meathead & The Beanpole with her protection. Off they drove into the cold, dark Connecticut night with a man we didn't know from Adam.

Too Sly & I waited outside, in the cold, so as to be sure not to miss our rendezvous. As is so often the case in situations where the interval passed might prove interesting knowledge, I forgot to mark the time at the beginning of our wait; I'd hazard a guess that we stood there for twenty-five minutes, on a five-minute one-way drive to the hotel. We reviewed the events of the day & worried about Sugar, cracked jokes & gossiped about our chances of being socially accepted into "the circuit," a subject of great concern for Too Sly. In the fullness of time, our ride returned. The very kind judge, who was going out of his way to aid us, told us that they had gotten lost on the drive back to the hotel, to be rescued by the satellite navigation on The Most Dangerous Game's smart phone. (We live in such an age of marvels that we take them for granted.) We stopped at a filling station on the way, but were soon back at the Holiday Inn, where the judge was also staying. We thanked him for coming to our rescue & went to find our fellows. They regaled us with a tale of the judge's insistence that The Most Dangerous Game share a meal with him at a Chinese buffet along to route twist the campus & the hotel. Was his plan to leave The Beanpole & Meathead to wait in the car whilst he & she ate? I was glad the boys had been there to watch over her. I was less pleased to learn that she hadn't yet ordered the pizza. They could have ordered in the fifteen or twenty minutes during which the judge motored back to campus, picked us up, stopped to fuel his motorcar, & finished motoring to the hotel. Why hadn't she? She didn't know what we wanted on our pizza. Why hadn't she called either of our mobile phones to ask? She shrugged. The Most Dangerous Game' most infuriating character defect is her petulant insistence that no one may be in charge but her, exacerbated by her paralysis & inability to make a decision once in command. (This trait would have dire consequences for the Econ. Club, as I shall chronicle soonest.) Soon enough we had pizza in our bellies & anxiety for Sugar in out hearts, & all retired fairly early.

Very late, but not yet early, The M.A.P. contacted me: Sugar was afflicted with multiple kidney stones. This was quite a relief. When I was a lad, I woke up one day at my maternal grandparents' house to find that my mother had been whisked to the hospital with kidney stones. This was stupefyingly terrible news to my young self, but by the next day Mom was returned from the hospital & I learned the lesson that kidney stones have a worse bark than they do bite. Not so the case with Sugar, who has more health problems than I could chronicle even were I to devote the whole of The Secret Base to that effort, & who is still afflicted with at least one remaining kidney stone over a month later, but we knew none of this then. After the conclusion of Sunday's debates, we trucked over to the hospital & greeted a very drugged-up Sugar as she was released. We shepherded her back to the hotel, where she was soon asleep, & were able to get her on & off the aeroplanes on Sunday without serious incident. She enjoyed being wheeled through the terminals at Detroit Metro & Flint Bishop in her wheelchair, but really at that point she was so high on a cocktail of pain medications that she enjoyed everything. Her mother met us at the Bishop baggage claim & thanked The M.A.P. profusely. We all wished Sugar, who really is the sweetest girl in the world, a swift & full recovery.

As for the debating, the purpose of the journey to the westernmost extremes of Connecticut, that went pretty well. As at Adelphi in November, Too Sly & I "broke" into the "out rounds," the tournament portion of the weekend's debate tournament. At Adelphi we had broken as the five seed into semifinals (№ 5 of 8, out of a total field of 24). At West Conn we did proportionately better, breaking as the eight seed into quarterfinals (№ 8 of 16, field of 52). Alas, also as at Adelphi, we didn't advance beyond the first out round. We "hit our heads" on a ceiling; we're better than most of our fellow debaters, but we're not yet an elite duo. We experienced this in an earlier round where we debated fairly well, but were still clearly the 4. But it was some consolation to see that one of the two semifinal rounds was exactly the same as that preliminary round, except for us. We sometimes get our arses kicked, but only by the best. Still, The M.A.P., who is not profuse with his praise, expressed pride in the pace of our development; by only our fifth overall tournament, just over a semester's worth of experience, we had proven ourselves a consistent break team. Too Sly & I were eager to fly to Portland the following weekend for the next test of our steadily-increasing skill. The Most Dangerous Game was sanguine, too; the hybrid partner St. John's had supplied her as a replacement partner (producing a hybrid of two different schools, & thus the term) proved both competent & kind.

Socially, the weekend also saw our cause advanced. As aforementioned, Too Sly is obsessed with being "accepted" into "the circuit." We had our first interactions with the Ohio Wesleyan (O.W.U.) debaters, our nearest Midwestern neighbor, who were due to host their own inaugural tournament in three weeks' time. Unlike us, theirs is a student-led program. The M.A.P. is a communications professor, he teaches a variety of courses within the Comm. Department, but part of the reason he was hired as opposed to some other candidate is his extensive debate background. Running the now-Debating Union is part of his official duties, & because of his love for debate he was only too eager to ditch the "speech" part of the old "speech & debate team" in favor of devoting our energies entirely to B.P./Worlds debating. The O.W.U. kids are lead by a blonde whirlwind, the irrepressible Miss Alaska (after her comeliness & home state). She is the driving force behind recruitment & the principal driver of the van (also unlike us, they do not have the budget for air travel). We saw Miss Alaska last year at Nationals (April '10, both ours & The M.A.P.'s first Worlds tournament, in Denver, co-hosted by Regis University & the University of Denver), but had no real interaction with her or her then-partner, now moved on to another school. We hadn't seen them at any of the fall's tournaments—Claremont, Hart House, & Adelphi—due to their scarce resources, but now the moment to bond had arrived & it went swimmingly auguring good things for the fast-approaching Wesleyan tournament. We were also warmly greeted by everyone we met from Cornell (Wayback Machine.*), including a really good team who handed us our heads in the aforementioned hitting-our-heads-on-the-ceiling round. We saw them twice, in that preliminary round & again in our quarterfinal. They were especially complimentary after that second encounter. I mention this because ti is unusual; previously, the best teams, the teams capable of walloping us, had been standoffish, in some cases even condescending. (As in all things, debate has its share of jerks.) The representatives treated us with more warmth than we had experienced from any similarly skilled team, & for that we hold them in high esteem.

Though we did not advance out of the quarterfinals, Too Sly & I had broken in our second consecutive tournament, thus collecting another piece of hardware for the Debating Union's rapidly-filling trophy case on the fourth floor of the White Building, outside of the Communications Department. And I collected a speaker award, finishing № 7 out of a field of 104 speakers. More importantly, I drew even with Too Sly, who had drawn first blood at Adelphi by collecting a speaker award while I was edged out by some ridiculous novice who was the beneficiary of "speaker fairy dust," an unreasonable inflation of his speaker points.

In the dollhouse-sized aerodrome in White Plains, New York, Too Sly & I found ourselves sitting across the aisle from an amusing fellow named Mike. He was a living caricature of a working-class New Yorker, though my knowledge of New Amsterdam is not sufficient to parse whether his accent indicated a Queens or Brooklyn upbringing. He had wonderful stories of not taking crap from anybody, his sainted mother, & the love of cooking he'd discovered only in middle age. Neither of us will ever forget the way in which he said "chicken parm," though I confess that Too Sly's imitation is more spot-on than mine. Otherwise, our return from the Nutmeg State (by way of the Empire State) was unremarkable.

Next time: West Coast v. East Coast, Niflheim, & Comrade Coquettish!

Autobahn
I saw more Fiat 500s in formation today, this time a trio of them instead of a pair. Jumpin' Jack Pratt, those things are barely bigger than a breadbox!



*I've recently learned that the time machine from The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show was called the W.A.B.A.C. Machine, not the Wayback Machine. "Wayback Machine" hyperlinks on The Secret Base have always been intended as a reference to Sherman & Mr. Peabody's voyages, not specifically the internet archive the Wayback Machine (itself a reference to the W.A.B.A.C. Machine). Should I continue to call those hyperlinks "Wayback Machine" or switch to the more accurate but less visually pleasing "W.A.B.A.C. Machine"? Your thoughts would be greatly appreciated, dear readers.

The Rebel Black Dot Song of the Day: SKApril
Save Ferris, "The World is New" from It Means Everything (T.L.A.M.)

Commentary: Save Ferris's Monique Powell has the most intoxicating voice this side of Kay Hanley. Her onstage persona, however, is the perfect antidote. Save Ferris was one of the first ska-punk/third wave bands to start shedding their ska sound; more's the pity, their mostly non-ska sophomore album, Modified, is dreck.