Nick's Café Canadien

On the subject of a rather unimpressive 3-2 finish at UBC’s Pacific Cup by Nick Fowler and myself, I will say little. On the subject of the associated public speaking competition, I said little and will say more now.

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.

I am aware that at least some of my readership first arrived here by way of some involvement or interest in the campaign to oust Rob Anders in the federal election last June. If you fall into that category, it may interest you to know that earlier today, the University of Calgary Speech and Debate Society alumnus, Diplomacy player and current sitting Member of Parliament delivered a keynote as a guest speaker and adjudicator at the McGoun Cup (Western Canadian Debating Championships), this year hosted by his alma mater.

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.

Some advice to my regular readers: if I don’t post for a week, it’s usually because of something I call “deadlock”. In other words, there are multiple topics at hand that deserve a lot of attention, and the act of completing a post on any of them becomes an arduous task – especially when the urgency and topicality demanded by some of these end up negating each other. Nash equilibria, kids, Nash equilibria.

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.

Not to sound morbid, but believe it or not, there was one. If you weren’t there (and I wasn’t either), you missed out.

For those of you who, for some baffling reason, have not been following this year’s World Universities Debating Championship in Malaysia, here’s the rundown: one Alberta team in the break (Stephanie Wanke and Alex Ragan), and two Canadian teams in the Grand Final: Erik Eastaugh and Jamie Furniss from Ottawa, Michael Kotrly and Joanna Nairn from Hart House – well, unless you consider Mikey a UBC expat.

And Ottawa won.

In First Proposition.

Hot damn.

I have a request: that Spencer, or some other blogger who was in attendance, tell us all about the round. What use are these reverse-chronological websites for, if not maverick reporting on exactly this kind of event?

In the meantime, let me proceed with two funny stories; funny, mind you, but not ha-ha funny.

My very first encounter with Michael Kotrly in my novice year was when Stephen Potyondi and I faced him and Ethel Tungohan in Round 3 of the 2002 Hugill Cup, which was also a British Parliamentary (Worlds Style) tournament that year. Mikey and Ethel took a fourth. I paid no heed to it until two things happened later that day, one involving a gaping and incredulous Kawanami, and the other being slapped around by the same team in the Round 5 bins.

Since then, I have learned that the Round 3 in question was the anomaly, and given Mikey and Jo’s thundering paths of destruction on the CUSID circuit in the past year (Kotrly/Crossman at DDT, Nairn/Hoddes at Pac Cup, and the two of them at Boston University), ending up in the Worlds Grand Final is – while I wouldn’t say expected – a fully deserved reflection of their calibre.

Ottawa, on the other hand, secured the third Canadian victory at the WUDC, of which Malaysia’s turn was the 25th anniversary. The last two were at the first Worlds in 1981, a 43-team event in Glasgow, and on home turf in 1991, hosted at Hart House.

So to all those folks at the Kappa Alpha Literary Society who insist to me time and again that a KA by the name of Martin Kennedy was a former world debating champion – if he did, it sure wasn’t at the Worlds we know. It’s true that the U of A Debate Society’s records are spotty between the late sixties up to the mid-nineties, but we would be aware. I believe Alberta’s best Worlds finish on record is still Stef and Alex breaking to quarters and placing 12th in 2002 (other than Ajit Singh winning public speaking with his “privatize the Israel-Palestine conflict” speech I keep hearing about from those who attended Stellenbosch ’03), but I welcome corrections from those with a longer memory.

I also welcome information about this alleged Martin Kennedy and what, if anything, he won at Worlds. A speaking award, perhaps? Comedy night? So far, the only specific tournament victory I have uncovered is that he was definitely involved with the UADS at some point, winning Grant Davy’s with Grant Yiu in 1993. Stef Wanke won it with Grant the year following, so it’s not like we’re completely disconnected from that era.

He’s definitely not a no-name, but he’s definitely not a world champion either, or you’d think he would have mentioned it in his bio on Page 4 of this high school workshop package (a huge file in Word format dated August ’99; Ranjan Agarwal is on page 5):

Martin Kennedy is currently the Provincial Program Coordinator for ADSA. An alumnus of Archbishop MacDonald High School in Edmonton, he studied for a B.A. at the University of Alberta, and worked for two years in the field of native economic development. He began working for the Association in July of 1995.

Martin competed in Senior High Debate from 1986-1988, winning the Provincials and National Invitationals in 1988. He was a member of the World Championship Team Canada in the 1988 Australian competition, and has since adjudicated or competed at University debate tournaments in Calgary, Regina, Saskatoon, Montreal, Glasgow, Moscow and Kiev. He is a recipient of the Province of Alberta Achievement Award, the City of Edmonton Award, and the University of Alberta Gold Key Award. An 8 time University debate Champion, and Top Speaker at the 1989 McGoun Cup, he has instructed at workshops since 1988.

One of the dinos from the era in which we lack very much conclusive documentation, then. Oxford won Sydney ’88, but I do wonder how Alberta placed. Pass the Gateway bound editions, please.

Call this a transitory intermission. The original intention was that the next post in line would be one of a series on The Incredibles, but circumstances of all creeds have united to prevent me from carrying it out. The number of aborted attempts to update this blog over the past week is now up to at least three, each due to a different technical issue. Here, then, is one of those catch-all posts to affirm that my complete umbilical detachment from cyberspace has thankfully been met with limited success.

October civic election candidate Jung-Suk Ryu is, according to his campaign website (which is due to be phased out at some point in the future, the same future in which DemocracyNow might finally publish The Independent), “an award-winning public speaker that has won national awards at the high-school and university levels. He has won awards in Mock Trials competitions, Model Legislature competitions, and parliamentary-style debates.”

Next time he runs for office, that claim will have a touch more substantiation. Last weekend I debated alongside Mr. Ryu at the Hugill Cup, the U of A Debate Society‘s annual British Parliamentary (Worlds Style) tournament, and we sneaked into the semi-finals after a grueling comeback involving consecutive first-place victories that catapulted us from the bins to the break. He now has an engraved silver plate to show for it. That said, we were doing just fine until we tried to convince the house that the World Health Organization should quarantine countries that are unwilling to isolate their own epidemics. See, they can’t actually do that.

In movie news, Tom Hanks may be playing Robert Langdon in Ron Howard’s adaptation of The Da Vinci Code, the book I find the most enjoyment in subjecting to relentless mockery (though Geoff Pullum does it better, much better). Mr. Hanks is, in my mind, one of the finest thespians of this generation of cinema, but even someone of his talent has quite the challenge ahead of him. Even by airport pop-lit standards, Langdon is one of the most thoroughly boring characters I have had the misfortune to encounter. All he does is wear a tweed suit and a Mickey Mouse watch, freeze time in the heat of the action to deliver extemporaneous lectures on the ubiquity of the sacred feminine, and convulse in a claustrophobic shiver whenever it be convenient to remind the audience of his dislike of confined spaces (in the book, this comes to about twice). As a protagonist, he is as dull as the flat-ended prism of a fresh, unsharpened pencil.

Regardless, it still remains interesting to see what the Howard-Hanks collaboration does with a book that has always struck me as more of a first-draft screenplay treatment than a standalone work of literature. After all, this is the same duo that took Jim Lovell’s autobiography and transformed it into a Best Picture winner of a gripping docu-drama where Houston, they had a problem. With the right visual liberties, even the intellectual vacuity of something as dry as Dan Brown can be infused with substance.

Those of you who care have probably already seen the new Phantom trailer, and perhaps this “Angel of Music” clip. In brief, I like what I’m seeing – lavish sets, colourful and dynamic photography, traditional orchestration, that restorative transition from the auction to the opera house at the height of its glory. Speaking of which, seeing the chandelier light up and rise as the whole establishment goes back in time makes me wonder about the extent to which these elements characteristic of the stage setting of the Broadway original will be preserved.

One of the things that had to grow on me with respect to the otherwise wonderful Chicago was that it surprised me with how like its cousin Cabaret, it relegated the musical numbers to the stage, and distilled the showtunes from the narrative reality itself. Phantom isn’t doing this, which is good, because I can’t stress enough how much this needs to be a self-contained period epic like Oliver! or Fiddler on the Roof in order to work. So far, so good, but the chandelier is that dangling question mark just waiting to drop on our heads.

Ever-reliable David Poland is already calling Phantom 2004′s Oscar champ – as it well should be, if it does justice to its source material. That’s not to downplay my anticipation for both Alexander and The Aviator, though – or, for that matter, my admiration for The Incredibles. Oscar-wise, though, don’t count on The Incredibles to pull a Beauty and the Beast. It didn’t happen to Nemo (curse you, aqua scum!), and it won’t happen here.

I am seriously thinking about submitting a paper for The Witching Hour, a Harry Potter symposium taking place in Salem, Massachusetts next October. That time of the year tends to conflict with the Western Canadian Scrabble Championship (speaking of which, I heard Dan Lazin’s story finally ran in the Post; please confirm or deny), and to a lesser extent, school. It’s a pity that to my knowledge, there is nothing next year akin to Convention Alley which was held in Ottawa in the summer – perfect for me in any other year, though I had to miss it on account of New Orleans.

My Nintendo DS is now on pre-order, to be picked up on Sunday. More on that when I get my grubby hands on it.

Oh, and if anyone from CompuSmart reads this – get your act together and hurry up already.

Okay, so maybe the Diefenbaker Cup was not such a great success for myself and Mr. Jones. Apparently, some people don’t think orthographic prescriptivism makes a very interesting debate topic.

I’ve seen some really good promotional websites for major properties like motion pictures – this one, for instance, or this old classic – but here’s a most clever discovery that tops them all. Some of the clues should be dead giveaways to those who are familiar with the subject matter underneath what they are looking at. Placing the purported UFO sighting over Calgary, of all places, is a personal bonus in my books.

I did manage to make my way to the Garneau yesterday for the encore screening of the OIAF ’04 winners, but a number of commitments preclude me from going into more detail at the moment. I do wonder, however, if there’s any way I can get a hold of some of the featured shorts that did not originate from the Internet.

Ah, the Internet. Isn’t it funny how you can close the book on a website – what, with the election being over and all – and only then does the dialogue truly explode?

I do a number of things for the University of Alberta Debate Society over the course of the school year, one of which is the maintenance of the website to which I just linked. I put it together over the course of a few afternoons back in the summer of 2003, and the only real change I have made since was changing the typeface from the now thoroughly out-of-fashion Verdana to the slimmer, more scalable Lucida family.

Looking back at it now, there are a number of things I would do differently. In fact, when I have time, I want to give it a complete overhaul. I did that site after about two years of dormancy from the wild, wild world of web design, so it represents a kind of blend between old and new. By “old” I refer to the liberal use of <table> as a layout device in the old three-panel tradition; by “new” I mean that it was with this site that I swore off <font> tags for good and used CSS for all my formatting. As is the case with this weblog, I eventually want to redesign it with a pure-CSS layout and pretty it up with some glitzier, more flexible design elements.

Good debate society websites are hard to find – on the CUSID circuit, I see Carleton as the role model, which is no real surprise since it is by Wayne Chu, who runs Freethought.ca and served as CUSID’s Executive Director before I took on the job. (He also plays a mean trumpet – or did, anyway, back when we were both in the Sir Winston Churchill Symphonic Band under the direction of Judy Wishloff.)

The other big project I do for the Debate Society is a quarterly newsletter entitled The Times Tribune. I spent most of last night working on the latest one (split into two PDFs about a megabyte apiece, here and here), which features an, er, interesting comic strip on Page 2. I do all of the layouts in QuarkXPress, but its handling of image scaling is becoming an increasing source of irritation, as is evidenced in part by the girth of the resulting output files. Cost-related prohibitions notwithstanding, I would ideally get a hold of something like Adobe InDesign, just for the smoother integration with other Adobe tools.

The first UADS meeting of the 2004-2005 season was earlier tonight, and I was one of the participants in the annual demonstration round, arguing in favour of negotiating with terrorists. There was some serious head-eating going on, only part of which was alleviated by a reference to Star Wars. No more will be said of this.

On a Gateway-related note, yesterday’s issue featured a Letter to the Editor from Gary Wicentowich, whose turn it apparently was to deliver the ritual explanation of why it is the Engineering end of campus sees so much in the way of development, facilities and cash. This is one of those issues that pops up in the Letters page rather frequently, probably because the complainants never read the responses. I’m beginning to think the Engineering Students’ Society should just prefer a standard draft statement on the subject, they’ve had to explain it so many times.

I do, however, wonder about a slightly tangential remark on Gary’s part:

Finally, I’d like to take this opportunity to give Mr Sobchak a good old-fashioned sack beating, because believe it or not, very few engineers are “huge nerds.” Continuing to perpetuate the idea that people who are good at math and science are nerds is not only outdated and unjustified, it’s also rather offensive.

To which my immediate reaction was: really? I wasn’t aware that this commonly-propagated sterotype was either a) inaccurate or b) derogatory. More than any period in contemporary cultural history, now is the time that wearing the geek subculture on the sleeve is becoming a chic thing to do. Are the films of The Lord of the Rings not enough of a flagpole? Be proud of being absorbed in the high romances of intellect, I say.

Of course, take this here online writer’s word with a grain of salt; he’s not exactly speaking of this as an outside observer.