In which the meatloaves come home to roost

I guess we should take it as a milestone that we now have the Official Meatloaf of the MHL, but if you followed the excitement on Saturday, you know that there was some dispute on how official this meatloaf really was. It looks as if O’C, having scarfed down enormous quantities of said loaf up at Monticello (and I can’t imagine when, since he wasn’t at the tournament, so he must have shot up there some other time specifically to serve loafish ends), and proclaimed it the best to ever walk the earth, so to speak, the chef responded by baking another one especially for him (although it must be noted that, if the rumors are correct, if wasn’t exactly baked yet, but I may be wrong about that). Upon its arrival at Horace Mann, the niftiest tournament site since they stopped letting us use the Taj Mahal, O’C immediately publicly announced the officialness of the item, thus leading all and sundry to believe that there was meatloaf in our luncheon future, only to have our hopes dashed when it turned out that there was meatloaf solely in O’C’s future, no doubt in between trips to Japonica, which as I understand it does not serve meatloaf, and sees in this pile of meat a grave threat to its hegemony over O’C (whose mayoralty is in serious meatloafian jeopardy over this whole incident). Much agina was felt over all of this on Saturday, and promises were made, but I will point out that the meatloaf disappeared way before lunchtime and never was served to the teeming masses, and anyone who wants a slice will apparently have to go Chez O’C to get it (unless he left it behind at HM, abandoning it in shame, or maybe he was fearful of carrying it on the subway—if there was ever a mugger magnet, the Official Meatloaf of the MHL would be it).

The MHL Blowout lived up to its reputation. This is the tournament where people draw superpowers (or whatever you want to call them). Maybe they get a new topic in PF. Maybe they get an extra speech, or the judge gets to make a running commentary of the round as it progresses (a highly coveted power for judges, needless to say). My favorite is that you can add or subtract a single word to the resolution, although I was also kind of fond of the PF round where one side was Pro and the other side had to be even More Pro. Everyone accepted these with good humor, and we spent a lot of time announcing them and milking them for all they were worth. We of course only got three rounds in, but we expected that.

We also give medals to every novice attending, as an acknowledgement of their work over the year, regardless of how they did competitively. It is not whether you win or lose, but how much you learn that ultimately matters, but still, it’s nice to win, and it’s nice to get awards. Here we theoretically bow to the idea of Unnecessary Enhancements to Self-Respect, but with the extra fillip that every award has a name, bestowed by the novice’s teammates. Some of them were pretty nutty, and all of them were fun, and nobody had to carry home a big heavy box of medals, allowing them instead room to carry home a big heavy box of, ahem, meatloaf.

And thus ends another season of the MHL, not with a whimper but with a blowout. Nice.