I've not had much to post about the last few days. Life's been pretty uneventful and we don't have any more college hockey until next week. In order to fill the gaps until something more interesting comes along, I'm going to pick up the "10 things I've done that you probably haven't" meme, but post them one at a time. Which will fill that longing for a week and a half of annotated personal navel-gazing that many of you have.

Thing #1 That I've Done That You Probably Haven't

Lost a playoff round at a debate tournament to an opponent who arrived at that tournament prepared for the wrong topic.

The year was 1987, the location Lexington (MA) High School. It being the bicentennial year for the Constitution, the LD debate topics for the year were all going to be Constitutionally-themed. Unlike policy debate, where there was one topic for the year, LD topics changed on some regular basis (monthly or bimonthly, though a handful of tournaments had one-off topics).

In any event, some wires got crossed somewhere and the folks from the Bronx High School of Science show up thinking that the topic being used was something other than it actually was. Bronx Science is a pretty good team, but I figure that this is going to hamstring them.

But I wind up getting paired against one of their folks in the quarterfinals. Clearly, they were better debaters than I gave them credit for. And, naturally, I lose a 3-2 decision. I don't remember much about the round, though I do have a memory of getting stumped on a cross-examination question that I'd answered with relative ease in other rounds.

In a way this round more or less summed up my performance as a debater. I averaged about one piece of hardware a year, generally at that level. My best performance, at least based by nomenclature, was a semifinal berth at the very first debate tournament I ever participated in. My partner and I (in novice policy debate) had to forfeit based on team policy, as our semifinal round was against another team from my school with a better record.

The closest I ever came to a national tournament was via student congress, where participants get to vote for other participants. Being the only person from my school who competed in student congress didn't help.

So there's more than you ever wanted to know about my debate career.