Had a fun weekend at TRASHionals, though I’m not otherwise a fan of spending my weekends in big cities. Played with a bunch of Rochester alums. The mother and sister of one of my teammates dropped by to watch, and wound up being drafted to fill out a shorthanded team for a round or two.

Obligatory anecdote: Trash tournaments, of course, are trashy. We’d complain mightily if they weren’t. They’re also aimed at an adult audience, by which I mean that they sometimes include questions that would get repeated daily on some of your better middle-school buses for several months running without losing their impact. One of the tossups in this tournament made reference to a sex act whose name I won’t post here. This isn’t because of prudery – I was quite prepared to speak its name if my own buzz had been tallied first – but because when people go Googling for this expression, I’d prefer that they not hit my blog. (I’m sure there are many people who would find pleasure in this activity; undoubtedly, these people are also aroused by aggressively scatological fraternity hazings, but to paraphrase Michael Palin: “No, we don’t morally censure. We just want the points.”) So, taking a cue from an old Millar and Hinds comic strip about the use of – er, flowery language, I’ll just refer to it as “daisy sniffing”.

As I implied in the last paragraph, I was narrowly beaten to this tossup. Fortunately, I was beaten to it by one of my own teammates. Unfortunately, it was the teammate whose relatives were in attendance. Or, as he put it: “I can’t believe I said [daisy sniffing] in front of my mother!”

Hey, it was worth ten points. And my teammate’s mother and sister, both very brave people, seemed to handle the whole experience pretty well . And at least it wasn’t my mother.

I think I’m getting this rationalization thing down perfectly!