Debate Team Recruitment Film #1: Debate As Drunken Fight Outside Bar at 2 A.M.

**Update Note 8/18/08 7:20 P.M. MDT: It's been a long, uncommonly popular day here at 'ol Burque Babble. Between being linked by real web sites with actual traffic and such and other web sites that aren't quite as famous, but still have 100,000 times more traffic than this little blip on the Internet Superhighway, we've been visited by aliens, viral cruisers, the depraved and the inquisitive. In other words, your typical "tubes" crowd.

Meanwhile, the linked video below has been pulled by its YouTube originator..I'm still somewhat looking for a suitable replacement, but my heart isn't really in it. Time to move on, Internet masses, time to move onto the next shiny object, mooning its audience or otherwise. Thanks for playing.


***NSFW Caution: Burque Babble tends to be one of those PG blogs where saying "Hell" and "Damn" is fine, but unfettered f-bombs and obscure nudity is not. After all, I'm a middle school teacher with a reputation to uphold, for Shiva's sake. But the video below is about Debate (well, kinda) and we're using this fact as lame justification to throw our established social propriety out the window. Let it be known that Burque Babble will return to its high, high standard of propriety in future postings, unless, that is, we find something that combines obscure nudity with policy debate. NSFW Caution***
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We're starting a new ultra-low maintenance feature here at Burque Babble. It's called "TIRA" or "Things I Ran Across".

The idea is to provide a venue for me to spread meaningless information I discovered during my hours of wasteful Internet activity, without having to expend any real energy "writing" about them.

For this week's inagural issue of TIRA we have a YouTube video of two people yelling obscenities at each other. It also includes a "mooning", some pushing and varied body gestures that kinda reminds one of Mr. Bean meets Martha Graham.

No, it's not a video taken from an Albuquerque City Council meeting or the teacher's lounge at Jefferson Middle School, but does feature supposedly erudite "professionals" caught doing all this in a workplace setting of sorts. As I understand it, the scene is Emory University in Atlanta and stars debate coaches from the University of Pittsburgh and Fort Hays State College in Kansas. These two academics are evidently having a post-round discussion of the finer points in the round they have just witnessed.

As one who has "coached" debate in the past at the high school level, and always make sure to include plenty of formal debates as part of his middle school Humanities classes, I can't help but think to myself as I watch the video below: "hmmm..maybe I should be a college debate coach".



I ran across this little bit o' improv primal scream therapy while looking for test scores in Wichita last week. As you might expect, not everyone in Kansas is enamored with the idea of having its taxpayer-funded college debate coaches acting like this. The story has gone national (YouTube virals as "news") and claims of everything from racism to Marxism have resulted.

Maybe I should be a college debate coach. I like the university dress code policy in particular.

Enjoy your weeds-gone-wild fecund, rainy Sunday everyone.