Ashvin beat me to it (thank you Ashvin), but I want to actually elaborate on this. There's a few points here.Ashvin in the other thread wrote:"Name these two scientists who showed that anyone, even Chris Ray..."
"Name this physicist who suggested the existence of M-theory and showed how anyone, even Chris Ray..."
"This confection, inscribed with the names of the deceased, is also offered on the Day of the Dead, but is more commonly gobbled up by kids. The nearest candy store might still have some, Chris Ray."
"Anyone, even Chris Ray, can prove the general unsolvability of quintics by showing that..."
"Players of Age of Mythology, show Marshall Steinbaum that heraldic beasts are the new tactics by..."
"Name some places that someone from Chicago went the weekend that he wrote this, for 10 points each. Oh, and even if it isn’t, let’s pretend that that person is Marshall Steinbaum."
"Ike is a foreign trader in the Ashanti Empire."
"Bruce has travelled back in time and became a court jester for the Hapsburgs in the late Renaissance."
"A person, let’s call him Bruce, demands the following responses from you regarding tariff law..."
STOP DOING THIS FOR PETE'S SAKE. This isn't even all of them!
I realize this is Minnesota Open, and pretty much the only people playing this tournament is on the High Council or the Cool Kids Club or whatever you want to call it, but there's a difference between cracking a joke and the joke actually interfering with your enjoyment of the game. The bonus about Marnold's law class or whatever was made infinitely harder to parse with the jokes in every bonus part, esp with the moderator stumbling over every other word. This isn't even restricted to bad moderators; everyone gets tired and stumbles when there's packet after packet of long, difficult tossups, and this kind of thing really doesn't help. If you want to do something like "Answer some things about string theory that even Chris Ray knows, FTPE:" and then actually have the body of the bonus devoted to substantial clues, then that's great. I'm ok with a little metahumor, it makes me laugh, but don't let it interfere when points are on the line.
The other thing I'm going to paraphrase as a lesson that a wise old nephrologist gave an idiotic classmate of mine: "That's the thing about jokes, [classmate], they have to be funny". You know how many instances of these things are actually funny? Almost zero. Especially in a game-type situation. So tone it down and make sure you're actually being funny. I'm not really that enthused about imagining Bruce going back in time or Ike going to the Ashanti empire (what? what's the point of this? Did Square Enix relocate its headquarters to Kumasi or something?), and I'm sure other people weren't either.