"Next, solvency. ... They can't solve! Here's twenty reasons why!"
--lead-in to the "infamous Brian Bear 2NC solvency dump"

To be honest, Bear only gave eighteen, but that's probably because he only allocated four minutes to the solvency block (right), unless you count the three subpoints off of his number two. I managed to flow all of them, too, except for his fifteen, which I missed because I thought eleven through sixteen were subpoints of number ten...

So I'm back from the Ray-Pec Speech and Forensics tournament in Raymore, Missouri. I haven't had that much fun at a tournament in a long time. There was a lot of down time, however, so I did some typing on my Visor between rounds. A couple of highlights, one from my crappy hotel room and one after a novice policy round:

10:57 pm
No Gideon bible in the room
and someone nailed the phone book shut

4:41 pm
The second round I debated this morning was pretty one-sided. Well, more like half-sided, because one kid in the round was tearing it up, and the other three were just sort of wandering in circles across my flow. Halfway through the kid's constructive, she had already hit everything on the flow and was re-iterating her points one by one to waste time. I had more or less stopped flowing, and I was stared glazed-eyed at the kid as she talked when suddenly I noticed something--the girl looked like a hobbit! She might not have been a hobbit; I could see dwarf or maybe a half-elf, I don't really know. But she had the most curious long, angular ears that held stuck out in before this impossibly straight black hair as each ear bore one big hoop earring. An unworldly air hung about her, enhanced by the round glasses and big round eyes that sat above a pair of round cheeks and a strange, triangular pendant that hung from he neck over a sweater of a curious shade of blue. Add a tailored black petticoat thing and light brown skin, and the result was a hobbit girl, pontificating at a hundred fifty words a minute about a new strategic arms limitation treaty for a globalized nation at peace, America.
Jessica Guerrero, Hobbit girl!

That hotel room sucked. Besides staying there, the only other regret I have is not taking a picture of Guerrerro after the round. I had my camera, too. Oh well. There was a lot more, including one girl who had me convinced she was completely schizophrenic during a reading of Daddy and Lady Lazarus in the poetic interp finals. She actually had red hair, which made the ending a great deal creepier, which is saying a lot; by the line "dying is like an art," I was terrified of the kid. The other two judges and I would have given her first place if it weren't for an even better performance of something called The Wussy Boy Manifesto.

Debate aside, the most bizarre junk mail landed on my mail server while I was in Missouri. Google seemed to think that it was an address probe (great...) but also referred me to yet another gallery of humorous spam. Most entertaining.

Out of time now, but I will leave you with one more reading: the Daily editorial board reports that Inglis, Florida has banished Satan, and invites him to come to Ames. More on the story is available from The St. Petersburg Times. I'm not sure if the woman involved is daft, crazy, or just overzealous, but I'm sure that she can't be quite right in the head. That, or the town charter of Inglis, Florida doesn't allow the mayor too much power; I'm not really sure.

Postscript for personal reference: a Darius image gallery and a related Greek-to-Japanese conversion chart, should I ever need either. Darius is an odd series of games that can only be described as "the fish shooters." The artwork was a major factor in choosing rapidfish.org over two-by-four.net or something like that. I've since used it a couple of places on the site. Fun, eh?