And now for something completely different:

• Start with Michael Weingrad’s piece in The Jewish Review of Books about why there is no Jewish Narnia. Then proceed to Israeli sci-fi reviewer Abigail Nussbaum’s response and her survey of the conversation.

• My friend Stephen McCarthy, who is coaching Korean schoolchildren in the art of debate, writes about his cultural collision with corporal punishment.

• Anthony Gottlieb digests a survey of what philosophers believe. The data set covers English-speaking academia and skews heavily analytic, but I’m not one to complain.

• Not exactly “reading” per se, but it’s election time, and I can’t stop playing with The Guardian‘s lovely polling widget.

• Wikileaks is in the news again after releasing footage of American troops firing upon a Reuters photographer in Iraq. The BBC profiles who they are.

• John McWhorter parses Sarah Palin. Typically the way the print media scrubs audio quotations into coherent, well-formed sentences (or doesn’t) is a good indicator of media bias, but the thing about Palin is that it can’t be done.

• Julie Just asks where the parents have gone in fiction for young adults.

• What are marching bands playing these days? Shostakovich, that’s what.

• Dale Dougherty writes about the iPad and misses HyperCard. He’s not the only one.

• Cartoonist James Sturm leaves the Internet. I should do that too.

As you’ll immediately observe, the online component of the Tabbie software is really something. It tells me that Wallis and I finished in the top quarter of the 396-team tournament with 16 points, a tremendous improvement for us both (at Vancouver Worlds, her team and mine finished on 11 and 13 points, respectively), and goes on to offer a round-by-round breakdown of our performance that illustrates our place in the standings before and after every debate, identifies our opposition and adjudicators, and retells the story of our tournament by the numbers—from our Round 1 skirmish with the eventual semifinalists from Yale A, to the inexcusable and outrageous decision that knocked us off the warpath in Round 6, to our mathematical elimination in Round 7 when we unsuccessfully advocated for the assassination of Vladimir Putin, to the Alberta-versus-Alberta front-half faceoff in Round 9.

With a combined 62 points spread over four teams (not to mention Sharon’s second place in the Public Speaking competition, which she achieved in spite of being cut off a minute early), the Alberta contingent as a whole submitted its best performance since Toronto Worlds in 2002, when Stephanie Wanke and Alex Ragan finished in 12th place with 19 points and advanced to the quarterfinals.

Since I’m putting off posting my 900-some holiday photographs on Facebook, I thought I’d compile a summary of Alberta’s track record at Worlds. This will probably be of strictly local significance, but you could always skip it and scroll down for some general remarks on the statistical analysis of debates.

First, a quick nota bene on what the point totals mean, for the benefit of readers from the outside (if any exist): in the British Parliamentary style of debating used at Worlds, each round consists of four teams—an Opening and Closing Government in support of the given motion, and an Opening and Closing Opposition against the motion. Teams are ranked in any combination from first to fourth place. Achieving a First nets 3 points; a Second, 2 points; a Third, 3 points; and a Fourth, 0 points. Ties in the standings are broken by speaker scores. Distributions vary according to the size and competitiveness of a tournament, but as a rule of thumb, advancing to the knockout stage requires an average of 2 points/round. (At Worlds, a nine-round event with a four-round knockout stage, the top 32 teams that advance to octo-finals tend to have at least 18 points apiece, and many of the 18-point teams don’t make it.)

My source is Colm Flynn’s World Debating Website. I’ve managed to go as far back as Athens.

Athens 1998 (292 teams)
15: Leslie Church & Aly Kanji (86th)
13: Alan Skelley & Jennifer Wanke (165th)

Manila 1999 (171 teams)
13: Ranjan Agarwal & Talib Rajwani (90th)

Sydney 2000 (204 teams)
Did not attend.

Glasgow 2001 (284 teams)
14: Rahool Agarwal & Kirsten Odynski (86th)
13: Lisa Lemieux & Candace Rypien (104th)
[Note: Glasgow's break was at 16 points due to the cancellation of Round 9.]

Toronto 2002 (228 teams)
19: Alex Ragan & Stephanie Wanke (12th, quarterfinals)
17: Rahool Agarwal & Kirsten Odynski (36th)
16: Helen McGraw & Roman Kotovych (61st)

Stellenbosch 2003 (193 teams)
15: Sharon Ohayon & Ajit Singh (60th)
15: James Crossman & Helen McGraw (65th)
15: Kyle Kawanami & Arthur Tse (74th)

Singapore 2004 (307 teams)
15: James Crossman & Arthur Tse (114th)
14: Greg Fingas & Mathew Johnson (146th)
14: Kyle Kawanami & Roman Kotovych (147th)
12: Sharon Ohayon & Chris Samuel (207th)

Malaysia 2005 (312 teams)
18: Alex Ragan & Stephanie Wanke (30th, octo-finals)

Dublin 2006 (324 teams)
14: James Crossman & Kyle Kawanami (131st)
13: Sharon Ohayon & Roman Kotovych (172nd)
11: Chris Jones & Julia Lisztwan (230th)

Vancouver 2007 (338 teams)
17: Alan Cliff & Sharon Ohayon (60th)
13: Maria Chen & Nicholas Tam (181st)
12: Sean Lee & Erin Reddekopp (212th)
11: Guillaume Laroche & Wallis Rudnick (247th)
[Note: Five Alberta adjudicators were assigned to debate at the last minute due to a registration error. Noah Dolgoy and Aaron Rankin scored 11 points, and some combination of Dylan Handy, Kiosh Iselin and Anno Laarman scored 12.]

Thailand 2008 (396 teams)
18: Alan Cliff & Julia Lisztwan (38th)
16: Wallis Rudnick & Nicholas Tam (95th)
15: Noah Dolgoy & Erin Reddekopp (136th)
13: Emily Cliff & Sean Lee (212th)
[Note: Alberta adjudicator Michael Thorpe was assigned to the swing team Composite B with Alice Easton from Princeton; they scored 11 points.]

Even in purely qualitative terms, there’s a lot of evidence for the broad sentiment that Alberta teams are steadily improving in the British Parliamentary format. What is not so clear is the effect of larger tournament sizes on the overall level of competition and the difficulty of reaching a certain point mark, and how that might be reflected in the point distribution of the tournament. We lack a method for assessing the level of competition at one WUDC relative to other ones, and I’m not sure a rigorous method could exist. We can’t just use speaker scores, for instance, because they are a relative metric within a tournament (or even within a single round), and not pegged to some absolute scale.

That said, it’s quite possible to establish a statistical model that normalizes a team’s performance to account for some of the factors that affect their rankings.

One of the stats I like to look at, when it’s feasible to do so, is whether or not a given motion favours a certain position. For example, in a given round, is there a significant disparity between the performance of Government and Opposition teams, or the opening half and the closing half? Of course, good teams are quite capable of capitalizing on apparently difficult positions, and bad teams are more than talented at squandering apparently easy ones—but a major aberration is still worth a look.

Another possibility: adjust a team’s performance to reflect the quality of the competition it faced (where said quality is based on the final standings). Taking a 2nd or 3rd to Oxford Union A, the record-setting world champions who took the top seed with 7 Firsts and 2 Seconds and never finished in the bottom half of any debate in their 13-round run, means a lot more than finishing behind a middling and inconsistent team that finished in the middle of the pack. Similarly, taking a First over a team like Oxford A is a substantially larger achievement than stomping all over bad teams in a lucky random draw in Round 1.

These metrics still don’t account for the year-to-year change in the quality of a speaker, team or institution, but they do allow us to distinguish between underachieving high-quality teams that are fighting their way past other struggling teams on the way up the ladder, on one hand, and teams that score all of their points in low-ranked rooms but stall when they encounter underrated and recovering opponents, on the other.

As for Assumption Worlds itself: I will probably have more to say at some point, as there are plenty of other matters to discuss—the Round 6 fiasco that effectively knocked us out of contention, the Triwizard Cup-like trophy dedicated to the King, the Convenor’s elephant ride onto the stage of the Grand Final—but for now, this seems like a logical place to stop.

The article is part of a series on ostensibly nerdy student groups—there’s one about the Comic Book Appreciation Society and Subspace 6-20 (“The nerds’ revenge”, 7 October 2007)—and is at least personally notable for being the second time I’ve been mentioned in ed in conjunction with the great pastime of Scrabble, which is something that interviewers consistently seem to know about me without my having told them beforehand. I recommend the accompanying video under “Related Links”, in which Sharon and Noah engage in a sporting repartee about all the tail debaters aren’t getting in spite of their super-cool sweatpants.

Scores by team here. Scores by speaker here. Scores by round MIA.

Since I’ve obviously been preoccupied this holiday, there hasn’t been much time to catch up on cinema. That said, let’s make another attempt at offering a few capsule impressions of what I’ve seen since the last film post, though I do want to engage in a more thorough discussion of Children of Men, which I saw tonight.

The Fountain: I’m usually reluctant to call something the best film of the year until I’ve seen it twice. So I reluctantly offer that The Fountain is the best film of 2006, noting that I still have a lot of catching up to do. This is Darren Aronofsky’s most digestible film, and probably his finest. Its tripartite structure delivers storytelling of the finest visual intricacy, and its mythic ambitions to be a tale of life and death undisplaced – a mortality play, if you will – elevate its soft, human underbelly to transcendent heights of splendour. While there isn’t anything quite as iconic as its predecessor, Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, the cosmic imagery (a microbial visual effect) is more emotionally grounded. After reading the online impressions of others, I have to say that I’m quite surprised at their fixation with what’s “real” and what’s not, as if that were central to understanding how the movie fit together. Personally, I don’t see how what the diegetic realities are or aren’t have any effect on the experience as a whole: besides, so much of The Fountain is about writing yourself into a fiction, and living it. I can’t wait to see it again.

The Queen: An admirable production, fuelled by a quintessentially British dignity. I feared it would take the easy way out and simply subvert the relevance of the royal family by humanizing them in the name of populist social critique. Instead, I find myself questioning the state of the Great British Public if their media-driven obsession with the former Princess of Wales empowered them to exert so much pressure on their fragile monarchy. Is this the result of a commanding manoeuvre to show that the Queen is only human for the subtle purpose of sympathizing with her threatened position of isolated privilege? Or is it evidence of an unintended failure to make a bold republican statement? It’s hard to tell. At any rate, historical dramas – good ones – have a way of making a news item, or an entry in a chronicle, a much bigger deal than you remember. To me, it is an interesting experience as a filmgoer to see events from my youth pass into historical subject matter, as they do in The Queen.

The Good Shepherd: I’m not at all surprised that Eric Roth’s screenplay drifted in the flotsam of development hell for over a decade before Robert De Niro picked it up, because this is safe, old-fashioned Hollywood filmmaking. I never say that as a pejorative, so don’t take it as one. The Good Shepherd is a film replete with gripping moments that stay with you long after the credits roll; De Niro is a capable visionary, and Matt Damon’s performance carries the day. It does, however, encounter some serious and perhaps crippling problems. The first is the shallowness of its supporting characters, which is not, by all indications, the fault of the cast. As for its complexity, there comes a saturation point when the plot’s capacity to baffle is no longer, I suspect, solely due to the audience’s interpretive inadequacies. Most problematic is the movie’s willingness to reduce history (the failure of the Bay of Pigs, for instance) to a coincidental series of individual happenstances that all conveniently lie within the main character’s personal orbit. It’s fiction, of course, and I’ll buy it if it’s done within reasonable bounds of plausibility. I bought it in Forrest Gump, where it was more of a joke.

Children of Men: I used to go on and on about how Terry Gilliam would be a great choice to direct one of the Harry Potter films. Then Alfonso Cuaron came along and made what is far and away the best of the Potter movies, The Prisoner of Azakaban. In Children of Men, Cuaron enters the realm of dystopia, which is very firmly Gilliam territory (please refer to Brazil and Twelve Monkeys, both of which I cherish). However, he does it quite differently. The film that Children of Men is closest to is, in many respects, Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds: there’s the same logistical marvel of extended tracking shots that immerse you in a gritty anarchistic spectacle, and the same backgrounding of man’s destruction, self-destruction and miraculous renewal to a secondary concern that occupies little to no exposition. This movie is sublime in virtually every aspect of filmmaking technique.

But like War of the Worlds, it’s not enough for this movie to be sublimely visceral when it has to present the argument that a few individuals’ struggle for survival is a microcosm for the salvation of all mankind. The former must happen before the end credits, and the latter almost certainly can’t (though we are meant to believe it eventually will). Does anyone remember Reign of Fire, where we were meant to believe a global infestation of fire-breathing dragons would just bugger off and leave us alone as soon as the main characters blew up a particularly important dragon? Children of Men comes dangerously close to doing just that.

Like most dystopic speculative fiction, the science of Children of Men – an unexplained eighteen-year cataclysm of global infertility, redressed by a miraculous and similarly unexplained birth – disappears into a corner and pleads for suspension of disbelief. We’re implicitly told that we are not to concern ourselves with scientific causes, but political effects. That’s okay by me, mostly because everybody else does it. And in many cases, perhaps no explanation is preferable to a bogus one. It’s a concern, yes, but a relatively minor one.

It’s very easy to fall into the trap that the Turkey City Lexicon calls “As You Know, Bob”: since there is no need for the characters to speak to each other at length about the state of the world, which they already know and take for granted, the story’s speculative history has to be presented by other means. Indirectly, we are given a state of affairs in 2027 where widescreen LCD panels are cheap and ubiquitous, but man has made no other discernible progress because everyone is too busy rioting in the streets and making life miserable for everybody else, given how the species is going kaput anyway.

Do we buy this? Can we accept the idea that a two-to-three-generation extinction warning is sufficient cause for the human species to go completely bonkers? Children of Men never attempts to establish a causal connection, but I think it does so implicitly: if there’s no model of cause and effect, there’s no reason to put the infertility problem, the oncoming global apocalypse and the nightmare of a fascist Britain in the same movie instead of three separate ones, one of which is entitled V for Vendetta.

The logic, as far as I can discern it, is that as soon as people realized the human race was doomed, they did one of two things: a) without any long-term obligations to the prolongment of the species, they could act out of immediate self-interest alone, which does not entail happiness, but rather, the seizure and consolidation of power; or b) they turned to the eschatalogical reassurances of religion, which inherently devalues our material existence and therefore condones the collapse of earthly societal order. This is my own interpretation, but Children of Men comes off as a film that is intelligent enough to be conscious of it, if only just.

What about Britain’s sudden turn to fascist isolation and its refusal to accommodate the refugee crisis of the end times? If the Nazis proved anything, it’s that no government is incapable of abruptly becoming unimaginably horrifying. There are no limits to the political plausibility of what a reign of terror will do. However, we are also asked to buy the notion that the far right is so preoccupied with stuffing illegal immigrants into cages that the survival of the species is nothing to them, and a refugee baby is no baby at all. Then again, when the palace guards have traded in their bushy hats for the pointy hoods of the KKK, this isn’t so far-fetched. Autocracies are not known for making plans for long-term sustainability.

I haven’t read the P.D. James book on which the film is based, The Children of Men, but I’m quite interested in what it has to say on the subject. Obviously, Cuaron’s film is equally informed by what I would begrudgingly call post-9/11 politics, and overtly so; the novel, published in 1992, is not.

Since I only saw the film a few hours ago, I can’t guarantee that any opinion I harbour will still be true in the morning. Naturally, I recommend it quite highly; it remains to be seen how much. The scope of imagination in the visual narrative outstrips that of the actual content, and I think this is primarily responsible for my ambivalence. Children of Men dismisses considerable avenues of exposition in favour of confining itself to the perspective of Clive Owen’s character, Theo; I at least appreciate that this is done consistently. Like Theo, we can very easily get too caught up in the frantic action – which is terrific, by the way – to concern ourselves with the details of how and why.

Does it all make sense? And if the movie does just enough to open up a universe of causal possibilities, but too little to explicitly commit to anything, does it matter?

You’ll recall that upstairs in my capsule gushing over The Fountain, I said it didn’t. With respect to Children of Men, I haven’t decided yet.

Winners: Mike Kotrly and Jo Nairn. That’s two victories in a row for Canada, and a vicarious one for the West, with Mikey being an expatriate and all. Was I betting on them all along? Yes. Is it still a thrill to be acquainted with orators of this calibre? Yes. The highest congratulations are due, and I know they’ll receive it by one channel or another since I know Mikey has made fun of this blog in a round of debate on at least one well-earned occasion.

I wasn’t there, but I expect reports from readers like you and you and you.

And now, back to reading cross-tables.com. It has everything short of individual game scores, which are never officially reported for ratings calculations anyway. Avert your eyes from my five-year performance graph, or at least ignore the discouraging lack of a net rating gain in the past two years. And then there’s the mountain of statistics from the records of the Calgary club, but it’s missing everything from late 2003 to the relaunch of the website in October 2005. Did I really lose a game with a score of 506-190 back in September 2001? Yikes.

I will be investing in repeat viewings. You should too. Come for the exorcising voice of Christopher Lee and classic Mexican calavera cabaret in the same tradition as the epitome of interactive literature. Stay for the first and second best scenes involving pianos since that Polanski war film from a few years back, and stop to notice the Harryhausen nameplate.

So UADS alumnus Alim Merali, who has already taken his place in CUSID history by serving up the textbook example of a low-burden case, has self-published the introductory book on competitive debate that he’s bandied about for the past three years or so. Talk the Talk: Speech and Debate Made Easy has a strong pedigree of blurbs behind it already; a free PDF version of the whole text is available for online perusal. I can’t say I’ve dug into it myself, as the 152-page CUSID Central Debating Guide compounds a backlog of incredible girth.

As an aside, I normally entertain mail from my readers, but any and all instances of “So where’s your book, Nicholas Tam?” will be ignored with extreme prejudice.

You really can get anything published nowadays, though. Just ask Stephen Lanzalotta, author of The Da Vinci Diet: Weight-Loss Secrets from Da Vinci and the Golden Ratio. Picture me as suffused with ennui as I am once again forced to point out for those fetuses joining us after the commercial break that first of all, his name was Leonardo, and secondly, Dan Brown wouldn’t know the Golden Ratio if the plus-minus sign ripped the square root off the unsuspecting five and shoved it up his sacred feminine. Never you mind the inherent ridicule of this unwanted circumstance.

All-nighters, asymptotic complexity proofs and three-day Scrabble marathons don’t admix.

The polluted realms of the Internet, dumped on what was virgin soil not a decade ago, bear witness to little history; so it is not often that the hunter stumbles on the relics of the ancients. Yet today’s sojourn saw better fortune, for I discovered one such relic. Come, children, and let us share this great treasure of antiquity by the afterglow of the starlit bonfire. Tillikum, how-how.

I bring forth, from the online archives of the University of British Columbia Library, a PDF scan of an issue of the student newspaper The Ubyssey dated 17 January, 1936. This may be the classiest thing you see today, and a lot of the readers who regularly traverse this place will know why from the top story, “U.B.C. and Manitoba Meet In McGoun Debate Today.”

“The number of cars on your campus gives us an impression of latent wealth. We think it would be a great place for Aberhart,” stated William Palk, visiting debater from Manitoba who, along with Cecil Sheps will meet Peter Disney and Dorwin Baird today in the McGoun Cup debate.

Mr. Sheps also wished to know whether U.B.C. stood for “University of Beautiful Coeds.”

The debate, admission to which was a whopping ten cents, was on the resolution “That Canada’s Foreign Policy should be one of Isolation,” with “isolation” agreed upon beforehand as withdrawal from the British Empire and the League of Nations. Read on, you crazy diamond.

But wait! There’s more! And astonished as I am already to see a second-page report on fiercely competitive auditions for a student production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Pirates of Penzance”, turn to page 3 for this very model of a modern major headline:

Alberta News – Dance Interferes With McGoun Debate – Dates Clash

University of Alberta, Edmonton, Jan. 14 – “It appears that all the king’s horses, not to mention his men, will not be able to get the debating and Engineering societies together on the matter of which should have the sole rights to the evening of Jan. 17 for the Inter-Varsity debates and the “Undergrad” respectively. Last year’s Council argued for 1 hour and 17 minutes last Wednesday evening before peace was restored by appointing a committee with full power to look into the matter.”

It’s not quite Function Room ’36, but I see our student legislators were once as efficient as ever.

I earned my way to my first public speech final by way of such pseudo-quotable platitudes as “People don’t kill people; Dan Brown novels kill people” and a mini-thesis on why grammar is the new exorcism. In the latter, I spoke of false prophets and the erroneous prescriptions on the part of Strunk and White in The Elements of Style, particularly the prohibition on using “however” at the beginning of a sentence. Immediately after the speech, Lindsay Eberhardt from Alaska gave me a look of utter shock as if I’d just pronounced something totally wacko, like “There’s no such thing as Silicon Heaven” or “Mustafa Hirji is running for Students’ Union President.” “You can use however at the beginning of a sentence?” she exclaimed. “My grade school teacher would kill me!”

Immediately after the tournament, Language Log came to the rescue. Timely of them, really. The criticism of the fallacy of the “however” prejudice should be nothing new to people who are already well informed about how syntax actually works, but here’s an eye-opener from the second post cited above:

But what I am suggesting is that if you look at works published around the time of White’s birth and in the early years of his lifetime, works published when Strunk was in college and early in his teaching career, you find good statistical evidence that literary English really did favor however in second position but not first position in sentences.

Strunk, then, was simply insisting that the use of English by others ought to conform to the statistical patterns prevalent in the literature he knew. And fifty years later White was sticking to the same dogma. The grammar of however is not so simple, though: the word did sometimes occur sentence-initially in the 19th and early 20th century, as Mark’s investigations showed; it just wasn’t so frequent, and Strunk and White missed the subtlety of a word with two competing positional tendencies showing different frequencies.

With that said, to those of you who were present at the speech final, do excuse me for the three minutes of verbal haemorrhaging. To those of you who were absent: you don’t want to know.

Some brief observations are in order, as Mr. Anders said a number of things that were, to say the least, intruiging. Mind you, it was neither as amusing as Gary Mar doing impressions of Belinda Stronach at last year’s McGoun, nor unorthodox as Dr. Juris Lejnieks delivering a crash-course analysis of A Canticle for Leibowitz at Hugill ’02, but it provided some valuable insight into Anders’ approach to political discourse.

The speech began with the standard recognition of the tendency for debaters to be Leaders of the Future involved in all manner of political muckraking; nobody ever pays much attention to those of us who do it not as a stepping stone towards enacting any tangible change, but for the inherent thrill of what is fundamentally a logic-driven word game. The utilitarian approach to debating naturally favours politics and law, and I would posit the conjecture that the predominance of those fields in the game’s culture follows as a direct corollary. I get the feeling that lot of seasoned competitors find that elusive love of the game and stay for precisely that reason, but even then, applicability prevails as an excursive justification.

Anders cited varsity debating as being an experience more valuable to him than his degree, which is probably very true. He then proceeded to criticize the House of Commons as not really being a forum for debate so much as it is a facility for the procedural exchange of reports – “going through the motions,” as it were – again, probably true. He went on to explain that he felt most at home whenever he was heckled, as he found it a rare moment of genuine interaction that reminded him of his debating days.

The question is this: which was it that induced his reminisces of rhetorical competition – the interaction, or the heckling?

It may, in part, be the latter. Anyone who has done a half-hour’s reading on Rob Anders knows that he has a reputation of being, in many ways pertaining to extroversion and tact, the Mike Hudema of the federal right. In other words, he is for all intents and purposes a heckler, though sometimes in a non-verbal way; and as we should all know by now, acts of discourse – especially heckles, which are really just performatives of dissenting interruption – are never limited to the realm of the verbal.

But how does this relate to debating? After all, are heckles not frowned upon at the upper echelons of competition?

Well, yes and no. If my understanding of Western Canadian debating history is correct, while heckling is now all but non-existent except for its occasional acknowledgment as a discouraged annoyance, it was once a far more prevalent factor. Over the years, and I believe for the better, Western Canada has been borrowing more from the inertia of an evolved Canadian Parliamentary convention and exposure to Worlds Style, and less from the high school environment. This was not always the case.

Observe the occasional Alberta high school tournament that is conducted in impromptu parliamentary style. Unless expressly instructed to do so, inexperienced debaters will heckle simply on the grounds that the rules say they won’t be penalized (and layperson judges may even be inclined to reward them for wrangling a provision of the format). Without a dominant inertial format, or better yet, a strong emphasis on substantive analytical matter, high school style spills over into university.

You can still see this happen today with something that feels uncomfortably different at first, but is at the end of the day hardly that big a deal: at the University of Saskatchewan, which is hosting the McGoun Cup next year, Points of Information are directed through the chairperson. As something that has been phased out of the rest of Western Canada, this procedural difference has actually become the distinguishing mark of what is a unique Saskatchewanian style. My understanding is that this is actually something carried over from the Saskatchewan Elocution and Debate Association, which governs all secondary school debate in the province – hence its usefulness as an illustrative example.

It could very well be the case that heckling was a commonplace tactic, albeit perhaps heavily abused, in the early 1990s when western integration into the CUSID environment was in its infancy at best. According to Alberta alumnus Martin Kennedy, who by my reckoning was around when Rob Anders was active at the UCSDS, western involvement in national-level intervarsity debating was practically limited to occasional appearances at Winter Carnival and Nationals.

At the tail end of the Anders speech when the floor was opened to questions, and afterwards, several of my peers commented that he perhaps put a disproportionate emphasis on the system of political parties. It is true that most of his speech was a case for political parties as the best, and indeed the only, medium by which one could ever hope to have a political voice. (In other words, if you ever get Rob Anders and Steve Smith together in the same room, bring popcorn.) A lot of people seemed to find these admittedly pragmatic remarks terribly interesting, and not just because Louman-Gardiner/Pauls had just defeated Kawanami/Kotovych in a quarterfinal on public funding of elections that covered exactly those issues of partisan imbalance. In the meantime, his aforementioned statements on the subject of heckling seemed to go largely unnoticed, but this here observer found them to be just as notable, if not more so.

But the great irony of all this ballyhoo about partisanship lies elsewhere. Of a panel of seven, Anders was one of four adjudicators in the final round who awarded the victory to Teddy Harrison and his partner, Spencer “Slate-Killer” Keys.

As for my own performance at the tournament, let it be known that it was less than spectacular. I credit the failure of Guillaume Laroche and myself to break to quarterfinals to a disastrous misjudgment of the depth to which Chris Jones had studied Alberta private investigation licenses in somewhat more rigour than yours truly. “I’m sorry to tell you, Nick,” he said, “but life is not a Philip Marlowe novel.” Lies, I tell you, all lies.

First of all, there really isn’t much I can say about my rather disappointing performance at the 12-round New Year’s Marathon, where I went 5-7 (-84). I could harp on such trivialities as how, revealingly, the last word I played at the end of a bitterly long day was CUNT; or how it took until Round 9 for me to get my act together and score a tournament victory in the 500 range (a four-bingo 533-243 wipeout over a decided unlucky Jeff Smith) after a very long drought of not doing so – but neither of them make up for the fact that for the first three rounds, I missed bingos like crazy, and played way too safely for my own good.

A tip for players who want to move up the ranks – and I say this as someone who has learned this both the hard and the easy way: play with confidence. Nothing teaches you what the phoneys are like taking a risk and playing one; nothing is so rewarding as the feeling of playing a word you are uncertain about out of desperation, drawing a challenge and unexpectedly winning it. It’s like what Indiana Jones discovers as he faces the test of the Path of God on his way to the final resting place of the Holy Grail: it takes a leap of faith.

Then again, your stupid words may get challenged off in a jiffy, whereupon you lose.

Regarding my earlier post on Martin Kennedy – I’ve had it verified by numerous sources, including Mr. Kennedy himself, that he was a former World Schools Champion, having claimed victory at the inaugural event in 1988, the same event that Calgary is set to host in February. That year, like the WUDC, the WSDC was also held in Australia. This is also why CUSID history is not the place to look if you want to fill in the gaps in the UADS chronology, because ten to fifteen years ago, there really was no CUSID West – at least, none that counted. Back then, what we now know as British Parliamentary (Worlds Style) was not even hard-coded into the Worlds format, let alone accepted in any capacity by Canada.

Now that we have multiple BP tournaments a year attended by those who aren’t even on their way to Worlds, I’d say intervarsity debating has come a long way since those forlorn days.

Speaking of which, if at this point you still haven’t read the Globe and Mail story on Jamie Furniss, read it.

And now for something completely different. Those of you who are in the Gateway distribution area will have noticed a letter published today in response to Production Editor Dan Kaszor’s picks for 2004′s five worst feature films in Tuesday’s year-in-review issue:

In regards to the Gateway‘s bottom five movies of the year list by Daniel Kaszor (11 January), I was shocked and dismayed to see the list dominated by “urban comedies”.

Mr Kaszor – who I assume is white – puts down these films that were clearly created for an audience that he does not understand. Just because the movies aren’t made for you doesn’t mean you have free license to pan them in the press.

Maybe next time you want to unleash your cultural imperialism on the world, Mr. Kaszor, you should decide against it instead.

Now, being an unapologetic cultural imperialist myself, maybe I’m not the most unbiased person to write in Kaszor’s defence – but there’s a reason why I commonly point to him as one of the very, very few people I have encountered on this campus who not only knows how film works, but knows it damn well. If you read what he’s written on movies in the past, you should know that he is exactly the kind of filmgoer who should be writing about what he sees – in that he appears to value good filmmaking most of all above any trivial genre-bias that you often find proliferated amongst casual audience.

Now, this isn’t to say that I agree with him on every occasion. For instance, I don’t think Alexander is nearly as total a disaster as he describes. But like all the critics for whom I have some respect – that is, people who know what they are talking about – the skill of presenting a value judgment about movies lies not in what that judgment is, but how it is reasoned.

In other words, maybe people who are so quick to defend “movies” such as White Chicks and Soul Plane should realize that the cultural sympathies of an individual audience member do not excuse the narrative failings of a woefully inadequate stinkbomb.

(I rarely use boldface for emphasis in this manner, but I thought that mantra was sufficiently deserving of special treatment.)

There is a reason why “urban comedies”, loath as I am to dignify them as such, generally suck. They are patterned after one another on the momentum of commercial appeal, oblivious to the valid criticisms of those of us who care about the filmmaking art form. Being made by black people for black people, should one be so clueless as to resort to such crass self-applied stereotypes, isn’t enough to justify stupid storytelling by stupid storytellers.

I happen to think that cross-dressing and rap “music” are pretty yucky (especially the latter, though I do admire some of the technical production work that goes uncredited), but I enjoyed 8 Mile and absolutely loved Some Like It Hot. Why? Because they are good films.

And until there’s a good “urban comedy” – and one would think it would need to be a) urban, and b) comedic – films of the genre deserve to be spat upon. The same goes for the mercifully dying fad of the “teen comedy”, which has only ever given us one film worth mentioning, that being American Graffiti (advantaged by a pre-Star Wars Lucas at the helm, fast cars, Ronny Howard, doo-wop music and not being gross). But as long as these “movies” keep imitating each other, they can go ahead and assert their place in the cinematic wastebasket.

I could go into further detail about why critic-bashers are by and large fundamentally ignorant about what good criticism actually entails (but with an admission that bad criticism is certainly out there in droves), but that’s one of those hot-button issues that I am keeping at bay until I can present my philosophy in a way definitive enough that I can just copy and paste from it in the future.

The frankest way to put what I’m saying here is this: qualified judgments of films are not simply matters of personal taste, and those who leap to the defence of works that are so devoid of merit as to be critically indefensible neither understand movies or know how to watch them.

Oh, is it ever bothersome to deal with the proponents of the bottom of the barrel. At this rate, I’ll never get around to finishing my comments on A Series of Unfortunate Events, The Aviator and A Very Long Engagement – not to mention all the other actual movies coming down the pipes.