TOURANMENT OF DEATH: ADVENTURES IN HOUSTON WITH ACU DEBATE - PART TERCIARY

WELL, the tournament of death is over, and NO, I DON'T WANT TO TALK AOBUT IT. Here to tell you about it is a Freshman with a clear perspecticve [aka HIS graduation is not at stake...]

Hey friends, this is your friendly neighbohood Freshmen Senator..aka...Brandon Smith. Well after a semi-fun night of PARLI, most of us felt as though we had achieved some level of success. O how we were wrong. We begin with our journey to the school....after draggin Josh, Cole, James, and Brandon Limmely from their room we were able to load our lovely 15-passenger van with ourselves, evidence tubs, a small army of expando folders, and of course varus colors of pens and beverages. For those of you who don't know, EXTEMP, the draw a topic and write a speech in 30 minutes event, requires that our team drag around with us several tubs of evidence, articles, and so forth. So we follow the clearly marked signs to the room were we will be able to drop of our tubs. Of course this was our first mistake: we looked to the signs poseted on the walls to tell us where to go, and believed the people who were running the tounrament knew what they were doing! Much to our suprise, we discovred that there is ABSOLUTLY ZERO PEOPLE in the clearly marked room for Extemp. I depart the group and venture up 7,904,435 stairs only to find other not so clarly marked signs pointing us to another room. It is at this point we begin to question our decesion to come to Houston...even though we really like papadeaux.

We finally got our first round of Extemp underway, the day seemed as it might still go well.

Next LD started, except it didn't! The highly imaginitive tournament directors thought it best to radomly assign time slots for the LD rounds, and then change them whenever it seemed benificial...for their own devious purposes. We all went to our LD round and commensed in the metophorical desemation of our competetors. However, intsead of compentent judges, the fearless, highly imaginative tourny director decided to rely on not only incompetent blubber idiots to judge us, but also contintued to reley on our fellow competitors in other events to judge us as well. After Extepm, James debated his Extemp judge. Liz nd Josh's parli competitors were my judges in Extemp. As most of you (assuming you have graduated pre-school, and have an IQ level greater than or equal to frozen yogurt, this is not exactly an ethical way to run a tournament).

Funny story: Liz debated an idiot freshmen, lets call him "Philip the Hun, with an ugly tie."(not to be confused with Mr. I need to cut my pony tail) decided to argue a theory from French author Focoult, without actually useing anything written by Foucult. Then continued to critiize Liz's use of a "French" author who was actually and American born in Idaho! lol, jk, jk, lol!

The time of eating was rapidly approaching, yet the meal provided by the ournament, was once again late. Finally, we were able to eat our sub-sanwitches, right before the final "i'm an angry democrat" topic was issued for PARLI. We finshed our entertaining debate over the wonderful mstery, and over-rated load of horse manuear that is the Clinton Legacy.

So after our rounds are over it is time to post who boke into the final rounds, and who did not. Much to our suprise, freshmen debaters who couldn't flow, let alone spell debate, managed to defeat nearly every person on our squad! Lizz broke in LD, EXTEMP, and PARLI.

tune in next time for the tourny results