Joy Upon Joys! For a semester and a half, I have lain in wait! I have assembled my navy and consolidated my plan of attack! At long last, on April Third in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand Twenty-Two, all my hopes and all my efforts have come to fruition in the Intramural Battleship Tournament!

Yes indeed! I have meticulously curated an 18000-man-strong Spanish Armada, adapted to fit the size and chlorination of the Intramural Battleship swimming pool! My Armada is comprised of the following: twenty-two galleons of Portugal and Castille; one hundred and eight armed merchant vessels, including of course four war galleasses of Naples; two thousand four hundred and thirty one artillery pieces, and several thousand highly motivated seamen and fighters plucked from the streets of Georgetown. I have trained my battalions in the great naval traditions of Themistocles and Alfred Thayer Mahan, of Horatio Nelson and Zheng He. We recognize no definition of overkill. We know nothing but the sea. For nearly a year, we have abandoned all trappings of landed civilization and lived, half feral, out of the swimming pool in Yates and the Great Potomac River, subsisting off piracy and goukou raids, preparing.

I began constructing my Armada before this Intramural Battleship Tournament was even announced – nay, was even conceived! The idea came to me in an act of God in October of last year. I was in Lauinger library, when a sudden bolt of lightning knocked me away from my economics books and face first into a dusty tome on the history of naval warfare. I heard a majestic choir of angels calling my name, telling me to revive the Spanish Armada and make good on the promise of His Majesty the Hapsburg Emperor! I knew exactly what I had to do: I legally applied to change my name to Alonso Pérez de Guzmán y de Zúñiga-Sotomayor, 7th Duke of Medina Sidonia, GE, and set out on a talent search for the most brilliant sailors and shipbuilders on campus. How did I recruit my 18,000 warriors? Good question! Don’t you remember – at the last CAB fair, the little booth that said JOINETH MINE ARMADA 🙂 with the sign-up sheet and QR code and various assorted promotional materials? That was me! That sufficed for 17,359 members of my fleet. For the remaining 641, I merely had to walk about the city asking politely.

My eighteen thousand talented and courageous, clever and valiant and strong, lithe, powerful, men and women and others, have been training for this moment since that day. One can scarcely imagine my joy when the opportunity to put our fighting skills to use presented itself, in a moment of pure serendipity, in this upcoming Intramural Battleship Tournament. I remember that moment clearly, when I thought to myself – what luck! I already have a gigantic Middle Renaissance fleet at the ready for precisely this occasion!But mark my words: We will lay waste to your pathetic excuse of a navy. Rehearse all you want, it is no use. Protest all you want, that I am “taking this way too seriously” (LAME!) and “completely out of my mind” (boring!!) and “shooting at us with real cannons??!” (who cares??!) and “not acting within the spirit, or the code of conduct, of the Intramural League” (the silly protestations of the vanquished!) We will win this tournament, and then set our sights on the wholesale conquest of the DMV area. We have all put our civilian classes on hold, and changed our majors to “boats.” We are united by shared purpose, military valor, the power of friendship, and the mutually reinforced emotional disturbances of early-stage scurvy. We channel the martial energies of the Spartans, the Navy SEALS, the Green Berets, the Roman Legion, the Ottoman Janissaries, the Hyksos, the Zulu, the Sacred Band of Thebes, the mercenaries of the Venetian condottieri, the Mongol Horde, the ARMADA! Cower before us, ye nations of Georgetown University! Cannons Ablaze! Die Die Die Die Die Die Die Die!