John Mortell’s blog

I be sick. I’m wearing two jumpers, the heaters on and I’m still cold.

So, over the weekend I attended the Trinity College Dublin Debating Intervarsities.

It was a fun weekend, if a bit chaotic.

71 teams of 2 people each, along with judges and assorted hangers-on as well as the Trinity people themselves who obviously can’t compete at their own event. The end result was a lot of people, mostly drunk, having a laugh. Good times.

It wasn’t all good though, frankly the organisation of the weekend left a bit to be desired, the Trinity people seemed to forget that many of us had never been to the college and so didn’t have anything resembling a guide system to get people to the rooms they were debating at.
This was especially glaring as they had the rooms all over the campus – which meant that you could spend half of the 15 minutes that you had to prepare for the debate just getting to the debate.
Also, their arts building is incredibly confusing and on one occasion that I was there for (though I know it happened more often) a team I was debating with walked in just as the debate was starting – it having taken them 15minutes precisely to find where they were supposed to be.
Also, the food on offer wasn’t great and again, the occasional disorganisation went into this too – I doubt half the people there Saturday morning got the breakfast that Trintiy were giving out – and once again, this was down to poor organisation I felt.

I’m also a bit disappointed with my results at the competition, though I’m still trying to decide what all the results I was given mean. For example, prior to the quaters (I’m guessing that the tab, as it’s called, was printed up just before the quaters) myself and my partner came 51st out of 71teams. I assume that we stayed in that position as the only thing that should have changed after the tab was printed was the positions of the top 16 teams.

Yet despite our poor showing that that would seem to indicate (though we did beat half the UCC teams there – 11th out of 22 teams UCC sent), we seem to have better team speaker points than many of the teams that came above us in the tab. An example – we got 689 points (the top team got 795) yet the teams at 43rd,44th,45th and 46th all got lower than us. In fact, 46th had a speaker points of 580! So looking at this I’m choosing to take the ‘moral victory’ route – we were a better team, just against harder players.

My own tab came in at 73rd out of 142 speakers. Not too bad, though the numbers are a bit screwy as for example I’m one of 4 speakers at 73 and there no 142nd place, but there is two 141sts.. It’s a bit of a better an indication though, as this tab runs directly on how your speaker points came. I’m happy enough with my place UCC wise on this too – 16th of the 22 sent. Yet given that this was my first IV and that 10 of UCC’s speakers (all in that 16 I just mentioned) made it to the quaterfinals, I think i did ok.

This is a really interesting article about the statement made a few years back by the Iranian President Ahmadinejad refering to Israel.

Or maybe not.

I’m not 100% sure if I believe it totally but it seems to be on the ball. It does show how the modern media and organisations can change the worlds perceptions of events.

My friend introduced me to this completely mad and deliberately crap New Zealand tv show. Some of the clips are quite funny though.. Enjoy.

Blind Skateboarding

Vaseline Warriors IV

Walking The Tightrope

Or his equivalent anyway.. I hope this story is actually true… If for no other reason than I want to be there when they crucify the stupid bastard.

This is a Four part documentary by Aron Ranen left on Youtube. It’s very interesting stuff.

Theres slight overlap between the different clips but it makes following it easier.

It’s about 40 minutes in total.

Man, I am so looking forward to this film.

Here’s a link to The Story. I actually can’t believe these assholes at all. That Fox news is even considered a news service at this stage is insane….

Il be messing about with this for a few days – sick of my old background… Let us know what you think… I kinda suspect I’l end up back with the old background though….

Though Gavin has links to this I went looking around youtube to see if I could find anything else…

So I’m wondering:

Why would a search on youtube with the keywords O Reilly Colbert mostly give me porno clips of Paris Hilton??