Texas State University down in San Marcos has been running a hostage negotiation competition.
Now, I was not aware hostage negotiation was a competitive sport. My first question was, “How do you judge this? Number of ‘dead’ bodies at the end?”
During the competition, which continues today , each team works to resolve the same hostage scenario, and judges grade each team using the same criteria, which include composure while negotiating and ability to get terrorists talking during phone calls.
So this is like Olympic gymnastics without the Chinese judges. Good to know.
I’m waiting for next year’s event to show up on ESPN 8, “The Ocho”.
(in a double feature with something called “Medusa”, which looks like a real piece of crap; then again, “Fer-de-Lance” probably isn’t as good as I remember it being, either.)
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is Hasbro’s first attempt at a Squad Automatic Weapon (SAW). It was a surprise to many people that a company specializing in handguns and rifles, with no previous experience in the full-auto realm, would even compete for the contract, and there was considerable controversy when Hasbro won the competition. Our testing and evaluation showed many rough edges on the EBF-25; we hope that these are just early production issues that will be ironed out in the field.
, which was adapted into an Alan J. Pakula directed 
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