Return of the Mack

So we went back to the Twin Cities for about a month. Pretty much exactly a month actually, and we are finally home. It has its plusses, it has its minuses, you know how all that shitty goes. We will get to all of that and allow you to determine for yourselves the significance of the whole time. I mean, if you figure out some great significance to the occassion you should let us know, since it wasn't all that interesting to either Katie or I. I mean, we liked seeing nosotros amigos and shit, but there were very few life changing dramatics. Maybe that is because Andy didn't have a chica with him. Anyway.

We got home on a Tuesday, we spent a couple nights hanging out with Karly (Katie's sister) Tom (Katie's dad) and the whole in town crew (pretty much the Kev-hold, Reuter, Andy J, and Maroney). On Friday we had made plans to have lunch with mi madre and her girlfriend, whose name is Deb. I wasn't especially nervous, though Katie seemed to imagine it would be awkward. Deb is about my mother's age, I would say, though her kids are apparently younger than myself and the sibs. She looks like a Minnesota mother too, for the most part. We had lunch at Chang O'Haras, my choice since I hadn't been for a while and knew my mom would be paying. I had a couple Summits and they got there late, since they were coming from Deb's place in St. Cloud. Anyway, we talked about random stuff, nothing especially interesting, but she certainly seemed nice. We would end up seeing Deb several more times, but we will get to that in at some point soon.

We left Chang O'Hara's and headed towards Roseville High School, where we were juding at the combined Southern-Central NFL district tournaments. Blake managed to qualify, which was hella sweet, though I thought they weren't going to make it after a big loss to Edina. I judged alot of high quality high school rounds, some good Edina teams, Mankato West like 4 times, Wayzata, Rosemount, etc. I didn't see the Eagan team that was supposedly good, though their second team was not awful. I voted against Mankato West to Edina's top team in round 5 or 6 on topicality, not surprisingly. I'm fundamentally a T hack anyway, but it seemed that no one at the tournament had even prepped for them. I know they haven't had a great season or anything but come on, the judge pool at this tournament was the most liberal in Minnesota this year. You should recognize that adding Katie, Klemz, Dave Cram-Helwich, and myself into a pool makes the K slightly more viable as an argument than with Dean Eyler and the K-Sarff.

Regardless, after Edina and Blake have qualified, a debate-back occurs between Man West and Wayzata. I have been told that both of these teams are pretty good and had seen Mankato West debate somewhat silly arguments fairly well most of the weekend. The panel ends up being myself, Dave, and Chris Stinson. Wayzata's strategy is really really bad. Pretty much just procedural arguments and an attempt to "PIC" out of the transversal dissent part of the aff. That didn't work so well for them, since they didn't answer the only serious argument that was made by the 1ar. Anyway, the decision ends up being a 2-1, Dave's and my decisions were virtually identical and Mr. Stinson disagreed on one fairly minor point which made absolutely no sense to me. Anyway, the women from Wayzata went ballistic. It would have been much easier if Stinson would have just voted aff so they would have had no basis (instead of an extremely small basis) to yell about. But they did, for a long time too. We were pretty patient, I thought, and explained to them why we voted how we did. Stinson had to back us up on all points except one as well, so it was mostly just Ehsan (coaches at Wayzata, debated there with the Faulty-sack a couple years back) Sarah, and Katelyn yelling. The even funnier events have occurred afterwards, when apparently Wayzata started telling people that they won't be returning to the NFL tournament, since they don't have a chance to qualify anyway. I have had a number of conversations with different coaches about this nonsense and thought it was pretty funny. Look, no one is biased against you. You qualified a team to Nationals maybe 7 years ago. You missed going this year in the debate back. This is the best fucking district in the country, last year all three teams in it finished in the top fucking ten at nats.

I want, of course, to extend some mad props to all the qualifiers and all the competitors. Though a little controversy was generated by the round, it was solid debating. Good luck to all who were involved.

The Blake tournament occurred the following weekend, but there are no real debate stories to be told about it, just random good times and funny shit. I will continue with that either tonight or tomorrow. Good to be home, welcome back to my electronic apartment.

Peace,

MB-K