Could you use a Taser to survive a zombie attack?
Saturday was a good day, for what little of it I was sensate. I got to judge a forensics tournament at my old high school (Go Vikings! Pillage and loot the village before razing it to the ground!) I love to judge the debate and forensics tournaments. I really need to get off my backsi… um… I mean tail, and call up the other schools to get my name and number on their lists of judges to call in for tournaments.
If you’ve never been exposed to forensics, here’s a brief rundown:
Saying you participate in forensics is like saying you participate in track and field. There will be periodic meets but in each one there are dozens of events. Forensics is like a speaking/acting track meet. People compete in events where they are judged on their ability to act (humorously or dramatically, singly or in pairs, prepared or improvised) or speak (on public domestic affairs, on international affairs, in an informative way, in a persuasive way) or in some less-than-prestigious tournaments like the one I was at, your ability to read someone else’s poetry out of a notebook.
I judged four events at the tournament (an event each round, plus finals). I got to judge informative speaking (first round), oration (second round), domestic extemporaneous speaking (third round), and international extemporaneous speaking (finals).
Informative speaking (informative for short) is a fun event, normally. Participants have to come in and give a 7 minute (or less, but more is favored) memorized speech on any topic of their choice where the goal is to inform the judge about some topic. People usually pick some interesting topic like the biography of some famous person, the history of a particular product (like chewing gum, say), or the existence of silly laws (honking your horn at cows in North Dakota when approaching railroad crossings or something). Typically, an informative requires some research and preparation just to get the material for the speech and then it still has to be memorized.
I got to see a speech on the lifecycle of your average garden gnome (apparently they come from a magical land with fairies and trolls, and I don’t mean David-the-Gnome style, either). The girl clearly was pulling this all off the top of her head and even graced me with her version of the gnome dance when an old gnome commits suicide to return to the magical land of his birth. Sometimes I wish I was ballsy enough to waste other people’s time in such a blatant fashion. I didn’t know whether to give her the best score for being so gutsy or tell her she ought to be disqualified.
I thought nothing could top that until my next speaker gave me a speech on zombies. I might have been interested in hearing a researched speech on zombification, as in the Caribbean Voodoo practice with drugs and such. No, his speech was about zombies – the flesh-eating, shambling undead who are animated by their hatred of the living. In a speech about how to survive a zombie attack, I would have expected at least a few references to Army of Darkness and chainsaws, but his speech wasn’t even that prepared. No, it was simply a listing of weapons you might use to kill zombies, like apparently, a crowbar.
Sigh. Domestic extemp. was about as bad. In “Extemp.” (whether domestic or international), competitors pull a question out of a hat (really) like “Should the United States adopt a hard-line stance on Iran’s nuclear ambitions?” Students then have 30 minutes to research the issue (with just the physical – not electronic – materials they have brought with them), write a 7 minute speech, and memorize it. Extemp. was always my hardest event when I was in high school. It just took me longer than a half hour to research, write, and memorize the speech. If I’d have had an hour, I would have been much better off.
One of the questions was about whether the United States should adopt stricter restrictions on the sale of Tasers. Apparently this issue was in response to several publicized Taser accidents in the past year or so. The speaker who answered that question for me did so with the following quote (I wrote it down after he said it because I couldn’t believe it):
“Opponents of Tasers will claim that they are dangerous and cause more accidents than they prevent. But Tasers are for more than just personal protection. The main reason to keep Tasers freely available is for personal recreation.”
Personal recreation? What the heck does this dude do with stun-guns, just for fun? Seriously, help me out here. I’m at a loss as to their purely entertainment value.
Sigh. The good news of the day is that when I returned, I was feeling a little under the weather (probably just a hangover of last week’s illness and my exposure to the frigid cold; it was 9 degrees when I left in the morning, and felt scarcely warmer than that in the school building). So I opted to reschedule my meeting with creepy neighbor guy for later in this week.
Maybe that’ll give him a chance to write another dozen pages or so. Who knows?
If you’ve never been exposed to forensics, here’s a brief rundown:
Saying you participate in forensics is like saying you participate in track and field. There will be periodic meets but in each one there are dozens of events. Forensics is like a speaking/acting track meet. People compete in events where they are judged on their ability to act (humorously or dramatically, singly or in pairs, prepared or improvised) or speak (on public domestic affairs, on international affairs, in an informative way, in a persuasive way) or in some less-than-prestigious tournaments like the one I was at, your ability to read someone else’s poetry out of a notebook.
I judged four events at the tournament (an event each round, plus finals). I got to judge informative speaking (first round), oration (second round), domestic extemporaneous speaking (third round), and international extemporaneous speaking (finals).
Informative speaking (informative for short) is a fun event, normally. Participants have to come in and give a 7 minute (or less, but more is favored) memorized speech on any topic of their choice where the goal is to inform the judge about some topic. People usually pick some interesting topic like the biography of some famous person, the history of a particular product (like chewing gum, say), or the existence of silly laws (honking your horn at cows in North Dakota when approaching railroad crossings or something). Typically, an informative requires some research and preparation just to get the material for the speech and then it still has to be memorized.
I got to see a speech on the lifecycle of your average garden gnome (apparently they come from a magical land with fairies and trolls, and I don’t mean David-the-Gnome style, either). The girl clearly was pulling this all off the top of her head and even graced me with her version of the gnome dance when an old gnome commits suicide to return to the magical land of his birth. Sometimes I wish I was ballsy enough to waste other people’s time in such a blatant fashion. I didn’t know whether to give her the best score for being so gutsy or tell her she ought to be disqualified.
I thought nothing could top that until my next speaker gave me a speech on zombies. I might have been interested in hearing a researched speech on zombification, as in the Caribbean Voodoo practice with drugs and such. No, his speech was about zombies – the flesh-eating, shambling undead who are animated by their hatred of the living. In a speech about how to survive a zombie attack, I would have expected at least a few references to Army of Darkness and chainsaws, but his speech wasn’t even that prepared. No, it was simply a listing of weapons you might use to kill zombies, like apparently, a crowbar.
Sigh. Domestic extemp. was about as bad. In “Extemp.” (whether domestic or international), competitors pull a question out of a hat (really) like “Should the United States adopt a hard-line stance on Iran’s nuclear ambitions?” Students then have 30 minutes to research the issue (with just the physical – not electronic – materials they have brought with them), write a 7 minute speech, and memorize it. Extemp. was always my hardest event when I was in high school. It just took me longer than a half hour to research, write, and memorize the speech. If I’d have had an hour, I would have been much better off.
One of the questions was about whether the United States should adopt stricter restrictions on the sale of Tasers. Apparently this issue was in response to several publicized Taser accidents in the past year or so. The speaker who answered that question for me did so with the following quote (I wrote it down after he said it because I couldn’t believe it):
“Opponents of Tasers will claim that they are dangerous and cause more accidents than they prevent. But Tasers are for more than just personal protection. The main reason to keep Tasers freely available is for personal recreation.”
Personal recreation? What the heck does this dude do with stun-guns, just for fun? Seriously, help me out here. I’m at a loss as to their purely entertainment value.
Sigh. The good news of the day is that when I returned, I was feeling a little under the weather (probably just a hangover of last week’s illness and my exposure to the frigid cold; it was 9 degrees when I left in the morning, and felt scarcely warmer than that in the school building). So I opted to reschedule my meeting with creepy neighbor guy for later in this week.
Maybe that’ll give him a chance to write another dozen pages or so. Who knows?
posted by The Academian | 9:23 AM
2 Comments:
I'm a hardocore speaker. Oration was always my best (never made it past 3rd in State though), but I dabbled in Informative and the various extemps. 4-speaker policy debate was always my real love.
If you'd like, I can contact the people who are running my old school's debate/forensics program and have you put on their list of judges for next year for the Spring forensics tournament. And we usually have people who qualify for state or regional tournaments to which we need to bring judges, so there may be a tournament they could use you for later this semester. Let me know if you'd like that, because I can just shoot them off an e-mail and have you added for a year.
Post a Comment
<< Home