Quote:
Originally Posted by Ashartus
I guess I have a few claims to fame:
- My team won "best delegation" at the Model UN, edging out teams led by Naheed Nenshi and Ezra Levant.
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Funny, I was classmates with both Naheed and Ezra. Naheed in junior high and Ezra in high school. A couple stories:
Naheed and I were part of a 3 or 4 member "problem solving club". We competed in a city or province-wide problem-solving competition where we were given one or two current issues and basically had a fixed time to brainstorm ideas. Our handwriting was terrible, and the office secretary had to type up our response. The resulting submission was almost unreadable - one of our proposed solutions was "mak it lee avalibilee" (make it less available) which we'd quote as an inside joke for a while afterwards. Amazingly, we did pretty well and moved on to the finals. I didn't participate though (I think it was a scheduling conflict) and our team ended up not doing so well. I'd like to think it was my absence, but really, I had no clue what was going on the whole time. Naheed, even back then, was really in his element.
Ezra blew our whole class away in our history classes. I had never met anyone with his level of debating skill/knowledge of world events before. Even then, he was unabashedly right-wing, which came out in two very memorable class projects. The first was in support of Western Separatism, highlighted by its title "What Price Alberta?". I had never seen rhetoric like this before, and could only think "where's the verb"?. The second project was his detailed comparison between the (then) impending collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Roman Empire, which included the insight that the destruction caused by rampant alcoholism in the Soviet Union mirrored the deaths by lead-poisoning in the Roman Empire due to their use of lead in their pipes and/or cookware. Agree or disagree, he was always entertaining.