Psycho Sensei

Sunday was the first time the Psycho Sensei attended a tournament of anything other than Tae Kwon Do or gymnastics, in checking out Psycho Sister's fencing tournament up the road in Silver Spring. It was a rather confusing affair, with many people wearing strange white outfits, strange plastic chest protectors under their strange white baseball players pants and ever so French looking tops, and cage mask things.

The players plug themselves into a large wire thing with cute little pulleys so that they can move around without much inhibition. They beep when one person "touches" the other with the strange looking sword thing. They call it a "touch" but sometimes it seems much more like a "thwap." In any case, they dance back and forth poking at each other until one player reaches 15 thwaps. The thwaper is then declared the winner.

Psycho Sister's first bout was against a very nice girl that Psycho Sister thwapped 15 to 14. Psycho Sister was most happy. After a break, during which we watched "saber" bouts which consisted of people slugging each other with swords and being very loud about it, Psycho Sister had her next bout. As I watched, she seemed to do pretty well, though she lost 15 to 9. Sister was rather annoyed, until she found out she'd done 9 points against the #4 seeded player in the country :-). Psycho Sister won the top unclassified spot. And as I well know, she is indeed unclassified.

The most amusing after fencing incident was when Psycho Sister met a cicada up close and personal in her hair. Psycho Sensei was most amused. Too bad there was no film at 11.