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Theory Of The Leisure Flask

"Most of his early works were motets and madrigals" Not having looked at the set: is this Monteverdi? ed, having now looked at 2008 and 2007: Yeah, there are quite a few vague "clues" here, my above guess notwithstanding. Looks like it's a heck of a lot better than last year, th...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

Yeah, so about that "Penn-ding Bowl-eque" delay: That was a combined screwup between Mehdi and I; Mehdi thought we didn't have enough staff and so decided he'd read a room and leave all the stats entry until lunch. (Of course, we *did* have the necessary staff, as it turns out.) By itself ...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

wd4gdz wrote:Hmm...did you guys use that packet written by Ahmad by chance? That would have been a great FINALS packets.

Yes, that was the finals packet. It needed (and recieved) much less editing than the rest of the questions.

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

Brief results: Charter A won a one-game final over Maggie Walker 285-270; State College defeated Walter Johnson in the third-place game. I don't know who the high scorers were. Either Charter C or Half Hollow Hills A won the consolation knockout rounds; I don't remember right now who prevailed. Mehd...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

So, in the context of "what"s actually central to the poem", not necessarily "what comes up in quizbowl", Andrew's 100 percent right. Tiresias is basically the main character, if there can be said to be one. What he sees is the substance of the poem, after all. And Madame So...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

I think the fact that questions are getting easier across the board is working against parity--and I think it's a good thing. The reason a Swarthmore 2004 could beat a Maryland 2004 once in a while is because there was always that one terrible, unedited packet per tournament where every game ended ...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

Okay, if you're going to do some sort of serpentine player draft at a master's tournament or something then of course you're going to find parity. But once you get into actually looking at the full circuit, with actual non-masters collegiate teams playing at all experience levels, then I have to dis...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

So this was a top-notch tournament as expected. Minor nitpicks: the repeats (Engels was read in consecutive rounds at our site), Carter was a pretty big hose for Nixon (damn, I was glad to have lost that race), Sgt. Pepper shouldn't have begun with quoting lyrics and Saint-Saens shouldn't have begun...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

The really good packets were almost overwhelmingly written by teams who are relatively new to college quizbowl. Eden Prairie, Penn, Missouri, UCSD, and Cornell wrote especially excellent packets, and there are certainly other new teams who wrote submissions worth praising. Um, Penn's not all that n...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

The principle many tournaments operate on is that the tossup is by definition too hard if it can't be converted by 85-90% attending without resorting to cross-distro or otherwise unacceptable clues. However strange a glee the idea of Sachs-Wolfe tossups at HSNCT inspires in me, I would have to give...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

We have 16 teams for sure, and possibly two more. I want your imput on how the structure the tournament. I am thinking two groups for round robin and then a short playoff (2 rounds) involving the top four teams. The top Div I team and top Div II teams will receive trophies and we will have book pri...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

theMoMA wrote:To my knowledge (and according to a thorough search of my Gmail), I haven't received any packets from Penn. Who would have sent it?

Mehdi Razvi told me it got in a few days ago.

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

theMoMA wrote:Packet submissions (for discount purposes):

If you do not see your name on here, get into contact with me.

I'm pretty sure Penn A sent in a packet?

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

Knowledge and interest in the Civil War is not limited to southerners. One of my old teammates at Swat had very thorough knowledge of (and interest in) the war, but was from New York and in fact actively hated the South. I personally have no opinion regarding the Civil War questions (I suck at all h...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

Overall, this tournament represented an unfortunate trend in quizbowl of being less accessible to new teams, and simply an exercise for grad students with years of experience and the occasional brilliant freshman. I anticipate that, as a result, quizbowl at the college level is going to shrink away...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

If there was a post-ACF Nats weekend of Harvard International/ROBOT, I'd try to come. I especially want to play the fine arts, but family (and likely workload as well) takes precedence on Easter.

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

Criticizing people for their mistakes only further discourages their involvement in future tournaments, No, criticizing people for their mistakes generally makes them do better next time. Nobody in this thread wants Colin or anybody else involved to stop being involved in things. I don't want to th...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

I would personally love an Mid-Atlantic ACF Regionals in NYC, and I wouldn't be surprised if the rest of the Penn team agreed. It's certainly closer than Virginia, and lets us take commuter rail up, which is always a good thing. I see no reason why it couldn't coexist with a Boston (and, hell, a Nor...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

Maybe I could ask for some critiquing of the musical clues that I used. I played an instrument through tenth grade, so I am reasonably familiar with terminology and stuff, but I don't know what's buzzable. If you ask me, that St. Paul's Suite tossup had fine musical clues, but may be too hard to be...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

I agree with the harder-than-advertised criticism, and wanted to offer up a few more specific tossup issues: 1. The tossup on Different Trains contained a factual error: Short Ride in a Fast Machine was not written by Philip Glass. 2. The tossups on ablutions, assassination attempts on both Rooseve...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

This was a fantastic set, and a fantastic tournament. Kudos to MIT for hosting the mirror, and for Minnesota for a top-notch editing job. I do agree with Jerry that it was a good deal harder than advertised. A couple quick specific things: *The economics bonus on Giffen goods/Veblen goods/complement...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

"second movement consists of only two chords which make a false cadence" = Brandenburg Concerto #3 "coda modulates from C Major to E Major and features trombone glissandi" = Bolero "two major triads a tritone apart" = Petroushka I would just question how sure you are t...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

I further assert that there are no (or very nearly no) uniquely identifying musical clues that are also not trivial. To take up your example, the "Leningrad" Symphony's quotation of other works could be said to be trivial (or not musical per se .) If you agree with me here, you must ackno...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

On the subject of music tossups, I can't really provide any specific insight as I know next to nothing about music. I only hope that at a tournament clearly designed for novice players no one is buzzing and giving Grieg's Piano Concerto as an answer. In general, I'm not sure what to think about wri...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

This is what the community should be going for: looking at works in the context of everything as opposed to 2008 . For example, the nationalization of an Icelandic bank is pretty important right now, but 99% of non-Icelandic citizens will forget about it in a week, while the US presidential electio...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

I'd like to disagree with you, Chris White, on two important points: Firstly, you're claiming a near-total understanding of the working of the minds of many great artists (from declaring unequivocally and without irony that Shakespeare's plays were "dashed off" to relegating Johann Straus...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

While you and I may disagree about her influence, there is one corollary that this statement needs: It is unacceptable to use this as justification for adding recent topics like Harry Potter into the academic canon so soon, I agree. My point is less about "more trash" and much more about ...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

I rather think that quizbowl is reactionary in this area; that, when we say "academic," we're appealing to a no-longer-current standard of what important, serious literature is, since the trend, even in academia, is to debase the idea of literary merit by letting pretty much anything in f...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

As for lit, with 4/4 per packet I'd say there's a small but nonzero place for well-written sci-fi/fantasy/mystery/horror/children's lit, especially when you consider that the most well-remembered of those works tend to lose their genre labels as they age. No one is going to object to a question on ...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

Winning some sort of big timey prize (Nobel, Pulitzer, Booker) should be good enough to get you consideration in the lit distribution. However, if it is one of the latter two of the aforementioned prizes, much more caution must be used, because those are far more ephemeral and do not focus upon the...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

I said ability to be analyzed. I can analyze the poems scratched into the doors of bathroom stalls, if not so profoundly as I can other authors (soon, on top of canonically anonymous authors like the Pearl Poet we'll have the "Here I sit, / broken-hearted" Poet) but that doesn't somehow i...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

I said ability to be analyzed. I can analyze the poems scratched into the doors of bathroom stalls, if not so profoundly as I can other authors (soon, on top of canonically anonymous authors like the Pearl Poet we'll have the "Here I sit, / broken-hearted" Poet) but that doesn't somehow i...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

I took a class on children's literature (along with some study of the role of children in literature, so we also read Lolita, Turn of the Screw, et cetera) last term. That said, it didn't include Eragon. (Granted, it did include Matilda and Charlotte's Web. But principally we read Alice, Peter Pan,...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

If quizbowl existed in the 19th century, I suspect that folks like Dickens and Rossini would have been trash.

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

I heard a rumor that the Illinois Open mirror at Maryland is going to be moved to Saturday the 15th. Also, there's nothing going on around here on November 22 that I know of. Anyone who feels like throwing a tournament that day is more than welcome... A Saturday IO mirror would probably have much b...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

If Penn chooses to play as much in the DC area in 2009 as they did in 2008, they could notch some Top 3 hardware; I whimsically have included them in the Northeast predictions instead. Since this thread has apparently been resurrected: It's not whimsy that puts us in the Northeast bracket, it's the...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

Long as we're talking about the finer points of "minor science", how much statistics was in this tournament? I seem to remember there being one stat question all day, but I wasn't keeping count. I don't know how many stats questions there were in this tournament, but given that stats are ...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

Long as we're talking about the finer points of "minor science", how much statistics was in this tournament? I seem to remember there being one stat question all day, but I wasn't keeping count.

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

Obviously, the Round 9 delay has been touched on, and I'm not really qualified to critique 90% of the questions at this difficulty level. And I must stress that it was good to be thrown into the fire for my first tournament back in three years, so no problems there. But before I shut up, one little ...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

Matt Weiner wrote:I will now celebrate my on-schedule status for VCU Open writing by taking a break to compose a rambling, semi-coherent prediction post under the influence of writer-performance enhancing drugs.

(cut for pages of prognostication)

Yes, how about that on-schedule VCU Open!

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

Now that I've decided that Sunday morning Amtrak is my best option going home, I can commit to this.

If I get even a single question, it'll be a miracle.

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

If this second car from up north (i.e. Jerry, it looks like) materializes, will it have any spare room? And if so, is there any chance that I could also humbly beg for a ride? (Assuming a stop in Philadelphia isn't too far out of the way, of course.) Note: Given that I'm ~90 percent sure to be not ...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

If this second car from up north (i.e. Jerry, it looks like) materializes, will it have any spare room? And if so, is there any chance that I could also humbly beg for a ride? (Assuming a stop in Philadelphia isn't too far out of the way, of course.) Note: Given that I'm ~90 percent sure to be not p...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

-Alternatively, I'd say ordering in food for everyone, if logistically possible, seems like the best way to cut down on excessive lunch delay. I hear bad things happened with this once though. Back when I was at Swarthmore, we would routinely order pizza for all the teams competing, because a) it s...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

-Alternatively, I'd say ordering in food for everyone, if logistically possible, seems like the best way to cut down on excessive lunch delay. I hear bad things happened with this once though. Back when I was at Swarthmore, we would routinely order pizza for all the teams competing, because a) it s...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

Alright, looks like my plan is to be on the Sokol/Stroud/etc. team for Saturday's tournament.

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

If there's any team that's interested in a free agent for Saturday only, there's a 50 percent chance I'm available- email at chris.u.white@gmail.com. I definitely want to come, but logistical and time issues might prove insurmountable (I don't own a car, will be moving at some point around then, and...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

Hi folks. Most of you probably don't remember me, or joined after my time, but I might as well throw my hat in the ring. Anyway, I'm Chris White, Swarthmore '05, and I'm finally heading back to grad school, getting a Masters in Urban Planning at Penn. It's highly unlikely that I'll be competing much...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

I for one could be dredged out of my current quizbowl-ignorant status for a masters or open tournament anywhere along the Northeast Corridor (basically, College Park to Boston). Despite the pleasant layer of rust that's been accumulating on my brain for almost a year now, I'd welcome the opportunity...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

I agree 100 percent.

This is exactly why my old team stopped attending TRASH events, despite the fact that lowercase-t trash questions were consistently among their favorite material.

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