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Birdofredum Sawin

As the Gaddis after HSNCT taught us, 200 tossups can take a surprisingly long time to read. I have already told people who aren't planning to stay for the SS/phil that I would try to have the trash tournament end at a reasonable hour, so I'm going to have to insist on keeping the lunch break on Sund...

Birdofredum Sawin

Following the example of Ryan's post on the CO itself, here's some details on the trash tournament. The tournament will be at Cobb, like everything else that weekend. Registration will start at 8:30, and games will start promptly (I hope) at 9:00. There will be 10 rounds; each team will play every p...

Birdofredum Sawin

I agree that any plan which requires Susan to juggle a bunch of different orders, or to be left holding the bag for hundreds of dollars in possibly unwanted food, is a bad one. But I also don't want to be told that I have to pay $10 extra for some heavy pizza I don't want to eat. Why don't people wh...

Birdofredum Sawin

There is some sort of "opt out" procedure, right? (The last thing I want for lunch during this kind of epic day of quizbowl is deep-dish pizza, esp. Lou Malnati's.) Which leads me also to hope that we won't be rolling right through lunch without any sort of break, but will have time to dri...

Birdofredum Sawin

I'd like to cast a vote for not making the CO weekend resemble the Bataan Death March of quizbowl any more than it absolutely has to. History into the night on Friday; then a 7:30 am check-in time for CO; then 17+ rounds of CO, uninterrupted by lunch break; then an immediate segue into the lit tourn...

Birdofredum Sawin

OK, with one team dropping and the Passner team confirmed, we now have a very convenient 14 team field. I'd like to stick at this number, so if anyone else is planning to drop, please let me know ASAP. 1. Susan, Ed, Mike Sorice, Andrew Ullsperger 2. Matt Weiner, Mike Bentley, Matt Lafer, Ryan Westbr...

Birdofredum Sawin

With the tournament about two weeks away, I want to try to finalize the field. As of now, I know of the following teams: 1. Susan, Ed, Mike Sorice, Andrew Ullsperger 2. Matt Weiner, Mike Bentley, Matt Lafer, Ryan Westbrook 3. Bryce Durgin et al. (not sure if this is a four-person team) 4. Chris Ray,...

Birdofredum Sawin

Here's yet another team update: Susan, Ed, Mike Sorice, Andrew Ullsperger: THIS TEAM IS FULL Matt Weiner, Matt Weiner's friends WHICH INCLUDES MIKE BENTLEY AND MATT LAFER AND RYAN WESTBROOK Bryce Durgin et al. Chris Ray, Jeremy Eaton, etc. Eric Douglass, Bryn Reinecke, Evan Silberman, Evan Nagler Qu...

Birdofredum Sawin

Just thought I'd post an updated team list: Susan, Ed, Mike Sorice Matt Weiner, Matt Weiner's friends WHICH INCLUDES MIKE BENTLEY AND MATT LAFER AND RYAN WESTBROOK Bryce Durgin et al. Rom, presumably playing with Bruce? Chris Ray, Jeremy Eaton, etc. Eric Douglass, Bryn Reinecke, etc. Quentin Roper, ...

Birdofredum Sawin

So I guess Lafer and Weiner joined forces? In that case, the team list is: Susan, Ed, Mike Sorice Matt Weiner, Matt Weiner's friends WHICH INCLUDES MIKE BENTLEY AND MATT LAFER AND RYAN WESTBROOK Bryce Durgin et al. Rom, presumably playing with Bruce? Chris Ray, Jeremy Eaton, etc. Eric Douglass, Bryn...

Birdofredum Sawin

OK, so here's a slightly more official team list than the one I posted in the discussion forum: Susan, Ed, Mike Sorice Matt Weiner, Matt Weiner's friends WHICH INCLUDES MIKE BENTLEY Matt Lafer's Army of Sullenness Bryce Durgin et al. Rom Chris Ray, Jeremy Eaton, etc. Eric Douglass, Bryn Reinecke, et...

Birdofredum Sawin

Hey, if you're going to be in Chicago quizbowling it up that weekend, you might be interested in playing or staffing our trash tournament on Sunday. I know that the following teams will be in attendance: Susan, Ed, Mike Sorice Matt Weiner, Matt Weiner's friends Matt Lafer's Army of Sullenness Bryce ...

Birdofredum Sawin

To expand a bit on my earlier post: I take it that a lot of the allure of a tournament like this is the sense that all bets are off, and we're really going to see what people know. That means, for instance, that the lit tossups might be on anything, and they'll have a lot of really obscure clues; if...

Birdofredum Sawin

Hey, I also really enjoyed the tournament. But I do have a couple of pieces of constructive criticism, which might be worth noting for whenever someone next attempts one of these (as I hope they will). 1. There was a problem, with some categories, of having the possible answer space narrow too quick...

Birdofredum Sawin

Since people seem to be making lots of "hey, I want to play in [such-and-such tournament]" posts here, I thought I'd cross-post a reminder to get in touch with me (and/or post here) if you want to play the trash tournament at CO. Thus far I know that Jerry will be staffing, and that's abou...

Birdofredum Sawin

Of course there was flawed work by the editors, even taking into account the mass fuckout by some of our editing staff. All of us will freely admit what we did wrong when editing our subjects. But, just as an aside, it's not like your nationals were completely pristine and not at all characterized ...

Birdofredum Sawin

While I can completely sympathize with Eric's posts here, I'm also taken aback by them. ACF nationals, much like all other ACF tournaments, much like all other packet-submission tournaments, invariably suffers from poorly written and/or tardily submitted packets. If I had wanted to do so, I could ha...

Birdofredum Sawin

Since you bring up the religion distribution, what I'd really like is to see that pared down and filled only with religion questions, with more room made elsewhere for philosophy and myth, because it sounds like "religion" (or "religious literature", or whatever) is not a very w...

Birdofredum Sawin

I think the point was that we were all operating under the assumption that the distribution wasn't going to change and were focusing on how to improve the questions given the distribution. But certainly if given the option to not have science CE, I would vote for that. As for elements, I think good...

Birdofredum Sawin

I know this has been declared a verboten topic, but maybe if it's so impossible to write science current events, and everyone admits the science current events questions are fairly weak because they are pressed out under sub-ideal circumstances, and no one particularly is clamoring for science curr...

Birdofredum Sawin

I wrote and edited the Popul Vuh bonus, which I coded as "religious literature" (since the Popul Vuh is a sacred text); that's part of the lit sub-distribution. One upshot of this discussion is that NAQT isn't as bad about RMP as it might seem (and as it used to be). First, there are fixed...

Birdofredum Sawin

Um, what? Are all trash questions required to have parts on things which came out in the last few years? There were plenty of questions in this set on post-2000 trash topics (e.g. Air Bud). There were also questions on older trash topics. Unless you're seriously claiming that "there cannot be ...

Birdofredum Sawin

Did Air Bud count as a sports question? There were decent tossups on Chuck Noll and manager of the Cubs and less-decent tossups on Colt Brennan and NL Rookie of the Year. There was also a Connie Mack tossup and something on the Arena Bowl, so I didn't feel any subdistribution of sports was unfairly...

Birdofredum Sawin

One might get the impression from reading the ICT set that Sandra Bullock's career ended in 1993. I was seven years old in 1993. I was not watching Sandra Bullock movies. I heard the lead-in to the bonus and was thinking I might be able to get 10 points on it because I have (unwillingly) watched Tw...

Birdofredum Sawin

This is the OFFICIAL and long-awaited announcement of the CO weekend trash tournament. The Erik Axel Karlfeldt Memorial Trash Tournament ("EAKMTT") will be held on the Sunday following the Chicago Open, which as I understand it will be Sunday, July 20. It'll be held, um, somewhere at the U...

Birdofredum Sawin

Hey, there's a venerable history of assembling all-star line-ups at summer masters tournaments. To give a few examples, remember the "Legion of Superheroes" that dominated Tennessee Masters in the '80s and '90s; the Tom Waters/Jim Dendy/Al Whited powerhouse that showed up at Philly Experim...

Birdofredum Sawin

It seemed to me that the humanities questions were quite a bit harder overall. I'd be interested to hear from those who thought it was too hard. I don't remember any real qualms with the humanities tossups, but I did have an observation about the bonuses. A number of them were "reasonable part...

Birdofredum Sawin

I played about half of the set with Stanford's A team for ICT. While my ignorance of the science is to be expected, they seemed to think that a lot of it was over the top, difficulty-wise. By the way, I know that the set was written to approximate the NAQT distribution; did you also try to follow NA...

Birdofredum Sawin

Will the other contain lit that is mostly along the lines of the past two CO trash events (meaning, recent legit lit like the McEwan Letham or "The Terrorist" tus, old important non-academic stuff like Tintin and Maigret and maybe a smattering of recent non-fiction?) Also will sports be b...

Birdofredum Sawin

Reading back through the Keller tournament, it seems I've misjudged the distribution of that tournament. There were a healthy number of other questions, although I guess the meta cut into some of that. I would like to see (and from countless dicussions on this, other people do as well) more videoga...

Birdofredum Sawin

Is the distribution going to be the same as Weiner's (proposed) tournament or the 2006 tournament? From what I recall of the 2006 CO Trash tournament, there was almost no questions outside of the big four of music, movies, sports and television, and there were also less recent questions than I woul...

Birdofredum Sawin

As Seth Teitler posted in a separate thread, I will once again be in charge of the trash tournament following the Chicago Open. (I'm sorry not to have posted earlier; Seth and I discussed my running the tournament last week, but I've been busy and neglected to put up the announcement.) Anyway, the t...

Birdofredum Sawin

This discussion is illustrative of why it's often not a good idea to begin a bonus "For 10 points each, name these three things associated with X." From the standpoint of a writer, it is much better to start out like this: After a visit to the Marabar Caves, Adela Quested levels an accusat...

Birdofredum Sawin

friedman

Birdofredum Sawin

For comparison purposes, that gives mythology the same quiz bowl prominence as physics, world current events, and the visual fine arts. To me, personally, that seems awfully high. It does to me too. I also felt that Greek myth probably appeared more than it should, but the overall proportion of myt...

Birdofredum Sawin

Just one comment: In my opinion, there should not be ANY trash or geography in NAQT packets. No NAQT packet, at least not at D1 level, should ever contain a single trash or geography question. Everyone hates these kinds of questions and there is no valid excuse for continuing to include them. Hey, ...

Birdofredum Sawin

Hey, let me jump in and pour some more vitriol onto the fire. A number of posters in this thread, as in so many "I hate NAQT threads," have been proceeding on the assumption that "ACF=good" and "NAQT=bad." I don't really get this. "ACF," per se, is not good. I...

Birdofredum Sawin

Yeah, these questions pretty much blew. Lots of pointless, unbuzzable sentences as the "lead-ins" to tossups; lots of giveaways in the first words; lots of packets where nobody bothered to distribute the questions (e.g. four science tossups in a row would be followed by four lit tossups in...

Birdofredum Sawin

Maybe this is better placed in the discussion subforum, but I'll just reiterate briefly what I've already pointed out about IS question sets. 1) These are not college questions; they are at best advanced high school questions only suitable for hosting tournaments targeted towards new players. 2) If...

Birdofredum Sawin

As for the distribution, yes, I love 19th century American history, but I don't think it was overrepresented in this set. It was 1/0 of the distribution. There were more questions on Europe than on North America -- in fact, there were more questions on Asia than on North America. As for military hi...

Birdofredum Sawin

A few observations: 1. A summer tournament entirely written by Bruce Arthur is probably not best taken as an accurate reflection of the current "state of the game." He adores military history and 19th-century American politics; unsurprisingly, those topics were exceedingly well-represented...

Birdofredum Sawin

I'm not going to attempt to justify what happened, especially since I really don't care much about trash and it would be presumptive toward the people who were really looking forward to that event or would've changed their weekend plans significantly had they known. But, lots of tournaments (especi...

Birdofredum Sawin

I don't know whether official results will be posted, but here's a brief synopsis: The CO mirror was won by my Stanford B team, which went 9-0 after a triple round robin. Stanford A was second at (I believe) 6-3; Berkeley was third; UC-Irvine was fourth. I "won" the lit singles, which cons...

Birdofredum Sawin

I don't mean to preempt the praise which should continue to be heaped on last weekend's tournaments (especially the much-lauded lit singles, which was indeed superb), but I'm really troubled by the mysterious collapse of the trash and science tournaments which were also scheduled for the weekend. In...

Birdofredum Sawin

The story I heard was that as of Saturday night they were 100 tossups short for some reason. It was decided that they wouldn't be able to get the questions done that night so the tournament was canceled. Hopefully Weiner will have a much more complete story when he gets back (I think he drove, so i...

Birdofredum Sawin

I think the actual announcement for BASQUE has been moved to the archives, so I'll post my request for more information about the tournament here. Is it definitely happening? On the weekend of the 4th? If so, would it be possible to get a team list and some sense of which subsidiary tournaments may ...

Birdofredum Sawin

But still though, we need some QB action up here, including some trash only (not piggybacking an academic tourney) tourneys. P.S. Birdofredum Sawin: Why are you in Palo Alto for the summer? You aren't by any chance a future lawyer working at a law firm over the summer are you? I ask because I am a ...

Birdofredum Sawin

If it's a Berkeley mirror, I'm there. Let's work this out, people!

Birdofredum Sawin

I know that in the very recent past, the CO and my trash tournament have been mirrored in the Bay Area. Is nobody interested in running this? It's going to suck if the year I move to California is the year that the tradition of West Coast mirrors finally dies out.

Birdofredum Sawin

I was under the impression that, in the past, there has been a California mirror of the CO and a few of the associated tournaments (e.g. the trash). Is anyone planning such a thing this year? I'll be in Palo Alto this summer, and would love to play a mirror at Stanford or Berkeley.

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