In early August, Berlin Debating Union (BDU) staged a fun tournament, the first Alternate Timeline Memorandum Cup, as is reported on BDU’s homepage. Twelve teams – some consisting of only one speaker who filled both positions of the team – debated bizarre and comical motions such as “This house would try to teach great apes the finite nature of their existence” or “This house would merge consciousnesses”. It was up to the individual speakers to decide upon the language of debate, be it English or German. In the preliminary rounds, the speakers functioned as their own jurors. That gave Hauke Blume and Niels Schröter, chief adjudicators of the competition, the chance to run against other BDU members. But in the final round, it was John Eltringham and Patrick Ehmann who won the tournament while debating the motion “This house would shoot the time traveler before they could tell something about the future”.