We be the smart ones

I'm sorry to do this to Mark, but he's the reason that this post is being written. I should make it clear that there are few people that I hold in higher intellectual regard than Mark. However, his comment on the last post brings back an old memory.

10 years ago, as a sophmore in high school my sister was going to try out for the Academic Decathlon team. As it sounds, this is a team which competes in 10 academic events. Basically a group of kids study a whole bunch and then try to take multiple choice tests better than their competition. It's a really lame idea, whoever thought of it. Infinitely more lame, however, is how I got involved. I was waiting around for my sister to try out for AD so I could get a ride home. So, rather than sit around and do nothing, I tried out, and lo and behold, I was the youngest person on the team by 2 years. But that is neither here nor there.

One of the very few perks of the whole thing is that the AD team gets a shirt made up, so we can keep track of who we were when we go off to that big scantron extravaganza. My high school colors were green, white and orange, but really, the student body tried it's best to ignore the orange and focus on the green and white. But, for whatever reason, the AD team decided that we would get burnt orange shirts. Apparently they weren't fully done, because when we got them, they were more of a flaming orange. But that isn't the point of this story either.

(As a side note, I'll bet that my sister Suzanne would know where this story is going, and she is probably the only person on Earth who already knows.)

We got our shirts, tried them on, wore them to the competition where, as the brightest collection of 9 students that could be duped into studying and competing we placed 3rd in the district. That was a quite respectible showing. It was only after all of this, however, that any of us first noticed that we had not managed to spell "Academic Decathlon" correctly on our own shirts. We had proudly declared ourselves to be part of the "Academic Decathalon". Yikes. I guess that's why we placed 3rd.