Prison Bowl Discussion
Posted: Sun Feb 15, 2009 5:40 pm
I'm assuming this is allowed to happen now?
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I hardly believe Achebe's poetic titles can ever be a buzzer race in more than 3 rooms even at Nationals, and the same goes for his short story. Though Man of the People is maybe a line early, I see no real issue with this tossup. But this goes back to the discussion you already started.The Laughing Man wrote:The question on Achebe bothered me because I think that starting a tossup with a title without providing a description is asking for a buzzer race especially when the work is (I think) fairly famous.
The Laughing Man wrote:Also, I think the Chromium tossup should have been reworded to say something along the lines of "An oxide of this metal appears in... the Jones reagent" because the lead-in technically applied to H, O, S and Cr (I negged with S off that clue.)
These questions were among my favorites as well, though I would warn against any future high school tournaments placing more than the couple film questions featured here. Until the college level, there are few academic studies on films, therefore allowing teams to either fraud answers from trash, or just receive many zeros. I think in smaller quantities, this set demonstrated the latter issue can be kept to a minimum.The Laughing Man wrote:I was really happy to see a well written Auden tossup and I enjoyed the various really interesting clues that came up in the Spain, Portuguese and Colonial America literature tossups. It was nice to see a good Naipaul question too. In spite of the fact that I negged on it, the Japanese invasion of Manchuria question was pretty neat. The film questions were cool too. Thanks Hunter + WJ!
That was not a kind tossup for me, as "distance to a galaxy" could either be Doppler Effect, Cepheid Variable, Nova, or just plain Variable Star, while most people only associate it with the first. Also, Kerr came a bit early in the Black Holes TU, I thought.cdcarter wrote:Similarly the doppler effect tossup, it was very easy to figure out after hearing "distance of a galaxy" and caused at least one buzzer race.
The opening clue is so-so at best. Very few people know or care about the college careers of baseball players. Very few people know the specific years that players were drafted by teams. Numerous baseball players were pitchers converted to different positions. So far, you would get people with encyclopedic, dare we say "trivial" knowledge of colleges and draft years, to perhaps buzz, rather than people who might be familiar with notable things that Markakis has done in his career. It then mentions that he is Greek. There are like one or two notable Greek baseball players (Markakis and Aaron Miles), so this is like mentioning the dreaded "Finnish composer" clue. It then gives a nothing clue: "since 2006, he has hit .299 and 59 home runs." Who the hell knows that? Nobody studies baseball players like that! Give specific years' stat lines if you're going to do stat lines. After FTP, it proffers an opinion, which wile probably true is not really something to say in a tossup ("franchise player"), before basically giving a giveaway that will be worthless in a year or so (the extension part). When you break it all down, this tossup asks you to identify the Greek Oriole right-fielder. None of the other clues basically help that much.He refused to sign with the Cincinnati Reds twice, choosing to go to Young Harris College, where he was an outstanding pitcher. His current team drafted him in 2003 and decided to convert him to a power-hitting outfielder. He played for Greece in the 2004 Olympics and since his major league debut in 2006, he has maintained a .299 average while slugging 59 homeruns. For 10 points, name this player, often considered the franchise player of the Orioles, their left-hand hitting right fielder, who recently signed a six-year $66 million extension.
Wait, what?cvdwightw wrote:The Prince Fielder tossup was a less-egregious version of this too, in that he's a major player on a team that has recently had some significance at the national level, but failed to mention the clue that most average sports fans would know, the whole issue about his conversion to vegetarianism.
That really should have just been "Massachusetts Bay Colony" or something like that; MBC was acceptable when I buzzed in and apparently the entire quesiton is talking about the MBC. In general, I'm not a big fan of "polities common links" in literature unless they are used to expand the canon.The worst tossup of the day was probably the colonial america tossup. I had no idea what was going on throughout the whole thing, and almost ended up negging on it. The pronouns were not very clear, and that is a hard answer line to get people to say.
Agreed. For the love of god, just write a tossup on the actual progroms and use the crusader massacres in a tossup on something to do with the crusades, where they can actually be made clear. Oh, and the Hebron massacres are (to me) not as famous as the actual progroms.Oh and that massacring Jews tossup was bizzare and bad.
This.cvdwightw wrote:The only real issue that I did have with the set was length. Tossups were generally fine, but four-line bonuses really need to go away. I realize that these tournaments are all about learning, but don't take four lines to give two lines' worth of useful clues.
I WONDER WHO WROTE THIS BONUSCheynem wrote:The only time I can recall which featured a flagrant presentation of "too many clues" was the linguistics bonus which basically give like a lecture on linguistics and then asked for some pretty simple stuff.
yeah i guess my ideal of quizbowl-as-pedagogy doesn't work because people don't actually care about learning linguistics :(la2pgh wrote:I WONDER WHO WROTE THIS BONUSCheynem wrote:The only time I can recall which featured a flagrant presentation of "too many clues" was the linguistics bonus which basically give like a lecture on linguistics and then asked for some pretty simple stuff.
Packet 8, Bonus 2 wrote:For 10 points each, name some features of languages which are TOTALLY WACKY.
[10] Romanian is the only Romance language with these as suffixes, thanks to influence from Slavic languages. In the other Romance languages, they generally developed from the Latin unus, meaning “one”, and the demonstrative pronoun ille. English examples include “a” and “the”.
ANSWER: articles
[10] Some languages like Basque have the ergative and absolutive type of these, where the subject of an intransitive sentence is treated like the object of a transitive sentence. Hungarian and Finnish have a ton of them, and better-known examples include the nominative, genitive, dative, and accusative types.
ANSWER: noun cases
[10] Hungarian and Albanian are two of the very few languages with this type of voiced plosive. English has this type of approximant represented by the letter y, and Russian has consonants colored by this point of articulation.
ANSWER: palatal (accept word forms) [GT]
Packet 5, Bonus 19 wrote:How much do you know about your own language? Let’s find out, for 10 points each.
[10] English is a member of this gigantic language family whose other members include such diverse languages as Lithuanian, Italian, and Hindi.
ANSWER: Indo-European
[10] English is becoming more and more like Chinese in that the former distinction between unvoiced and voiced plosives word-initially is turning into a distinction between the presence and absence of this characteristic, present in ancient Greek in the letters phi, chi, and theta.
ANSWER: aspiration (accept clear-knowledge equivalents like “a puff of air afterwards”)
[10] English has long since lost this phonemic distinction, which exists today phonetically in pairs like “bat” and “bad”. In Ancient Greek, it distinguished epsilon from epsilon-iota, and it is marked in Hungarian and Gaelic by an acute accent.
ANSWER: vowel length (accept clear-knowledge equivalents) [GT]
Yeah, this was something Daichi advocated, and in retrospect I wish I would have heeded it more in editing.Jeremy Gibbs Free Energy wrote:Yeah, I'm not going to lie, at this point I'm not sure I see any reason to have bonus parts be more than 2 lines long.
Prison Bowl bonus wrote:This rule can be used to determine the number of positive or negative roots for a polynomial equation. It states that the number of positive roots equals the number of sign changes when the terms are arranged by decreasing exponent, and the number of negative roots equals the number of sign changes after negating the odd-powered terms.
Prison Bowl bonus wrote:In order to collect information on tanks before writing Achtung - Panzer!, Guderian consulted the writings of this Frenchman. He would later lead the forces that had captured Diego Suarez during Operation Ironclad and used the Cross of Lorraine as their symbol, and twenty years after that, become President of France.
Prison Bowl bonus wrote:This exception to the general rule of increasing atomic radius is because of the poor shielding ability of 4f electrons possessed by the elements in its namesake series. Because of this phenomenon, elements 58 through 71 are smaller than expected, giving the rare earth elements pretty similar properties.
These are all TOO LONG for bonus questions.Prison Bowl bonus wrote:Part of the Legalist policies enacted by Lǐ Sī included ordering the burning of books related to the teachings of this man, who emphasized filial piety as one of the five basic relationships, which also included husband and wife and ruler and subject. His works were developed further by Mencius, and he’s kind of important in China
Why do you need to make a bonus pyramidal? This is ridiculous. I know the original point of the bonus was to ask about "electromagnetic radiation," and i'm certainly no SCIENCE! guy, but this is just too much.Prison Bowl bonus wrote:This quantity in a vacuum is the upper speed limit of all objects with respect to any reference frame. Cherenkov radiation occurs when electromagnetic radiation travels faster than this quantity for any given medium. In a vacuum, it is approximately 3 times 10 to the eighth meters per second.
That is WAY too many clues for a simple Teddy Roosevelt bonus question that was originally on him being in an equestrian statue. Then it goes on to give three easy clues that my entire inclusion-level 10th grade history class could get. Not good.Prison Bowl bonus wrote:Looking at Central Park from outside the Museum of Natural History across the street is this 28th president sitting on a horse. He succeeded William McKinley after organizing the Rough Riders and before losing the presidential election on the Bull Moose ticket.
What does the original clue have to do with this bonus? These are listed out of order and the "lead-in" clue is hereby confusing, stupid, and useless to players. If you're going to use "hair" as a clue and say that rulers alternate between "baldness and having hair," then why aren't you asking them in order?Prison Bowl bonus wrote:17. In case you have not noticed, Russian leaders follow an alternating pattern of baldness and having hair. For 10 points each:
[10] Born in Georgia, this hairy General Secretary sports a trademark moustache even as he replaced the New Economic Policy with his Five Year Plans and led the Soviet Union through the Great Purge.
ANSWER: Joseph Stalin
[10] This balding General secretary enjoyed a short-lived tenure as the General Secretary, during which saw the downing of Korean Air Flight KAL-007 and received a letter and a visit from 5th grader Samantha Smith, the “youngest ambassador of the United States”. Predictably, his predecessor was the hairy Brezhnev.
ANSWER: Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov
[10] A senior political officer during the battle of Kursk, this hairless leader was known for his Moscow Metro work. He ceded Crimea from the Russian SFSR to the Ukrainian SSR, and withdrew Soviet troops from Romania. He was known as Comrade Latrine Lover for deploring poor sanitation habits among Yuzovka’s miners.
ANSWER: Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev
This, however, is the greatest introduction to a bonus series that i've seen in some time. Congrats.Prison bowl bonus wrote:Much like Chip Beall, the people of this time period were anti-pyramidal, eschewing ostentatious tombs for ones cut out of rock, which were easier to conceal and protect. For 10 points each:
I'd think the clue that most average sports fans would know is that he's a big fat dude who plays for the Brewers.cvdwightw wrote:the clue that most average sports fans would know, the whole issue about his conversion to vegetarianism.
Achebe's poetry collection is not, in fact, famous in any way. You know a lot of things! That's not in any way bad, but don't commit the "I know it so it's easy" fallacy.The Laughing Man wrote:The question on Achebe bothered me because I think that starting a tossup with a title without providing a description is asking for a buzzer race especially when the work is (I think) fairly famous.
Yeah, jumping straight from Basque/Gallic myth to the pretty famous clue about Cadmus was rather ill-advised.la2pgh wrote:as Chris said, the cows tossup was a tad antipyramidal.
What? No way is Bret Harte too hard of a tossup answer. The clues used don't make it particularly hard either.la2pgh wrote:Bret Harte was way too hard
It's kind of impossible to ask those rulers in order since they don't all succeed one another. The leadin crops up again as clues like "he succeeded the hairy Brezhnev." I think you are wrong.What does the original clue have to do with this bonus? These are listed out of order and the "lead-in" clue is hereby confusing, stupid, and useless to players. If you're going to use "hair" as a clue and say that rulers alternate between "baldness and having hair," then why aren't you asking them in order?
My point, Charlie, was that the answers (if you list Soviet leaders from #1-8 in order) are numbers 2, 6, and 4, respectively.Jeremy Gibbs Free Energy wrote:It's kind of impossible to ask those rulers in order since they don't all succeed one another. The leadin crops up again as clues like "he succeeded the hairy Brezhnev." I think you are wrong.What does the original clue have to do with this bonus? These are listed out of order and the "lead-in" clue is hereby confusing, stupid, and useless to players. If you're going to use "hair" as a clue and say that rulers alternate between "baldness and having hair," then why aren't you asking them in order?
Don't ask me; my source was Hey! Spring of Trivia.Caesar Rodney HS wrote:Also, the "alternating hair" stuff is wrong if you count the ruler after Stalin, Georgy Malenkov, as the third ruler of the USSR. He was, indeed, "full of hair" and was in charge for 6 months. Is he being skipped for convenience? (probably) Or because he was forgotten? (possibly)
The whole "I am physically ruined, so here, let me still make great art" motif tends to be famous for those who partake in it: I think it's pretty famous for Matisse.la2pgh wrote: Speaking of round 7, the paper cut outs clue came way too early for Matisse. I was under the impression that his use of collage was very famous.
When I was in high school, the collages were literally the only thing I knew about Matisse.everyday847 wrote:The whole "I am physically ruined, so here, let me still make great art" motif tends to be famous for those who partake in it: I think it's pretty famous for Matisse.la2pgh wrote: Speaking of round 7, the paper cut outs clue came way too early for Matisse. I was under the impression that his use of collage was very famous.
Yeah, when I think "Matisse," I think collages. My mom is a big fan of them, and we have several reproductions around the house. They're generally what I first associate with him.Theory Of The Leisure Flask wrote:When I was in high school, the collages were literally the only thing I knew about Matisse.everyday847 wrote:The whole "I am physically ruined, so here, let me still make great art" motif tends to be famous for those who partake in it: I think it's pretty famous for Matisse.la2pgh wrote: Speaking of round 7, the paper cut outs clue came way too early for Matisse. I was under the impression that his use of collage was very famous.
I, for one, will never forget when his younger brother Owen kicked his leg out of his leg.Cheynem wrote:Man, ya gotta learn your Bret "the Hitman" Harte stories.
As people might be able to tell from my profile pic, I'm a big Brewers fan and was indeed the one who wrote the Fielder toss-up. I originally had the vegetarianism thing in there, but due to length, cut it out because I didn't think it would be a very useful clue for most people since I thought it wasn't that well publicized. I believe I did mention that he is quite portly in the giveaway.Ukonvasara wrote:I'd think the clue that most average sports fans would know is that he's a big fat dude who plays for the Brewers.cvdwightw wrote:the clue that most average sports fans would know, the whole issue about his conversion to vegetarianism.
JelloBiafra wrote:I think that the Kenzaburo Oe tossup in the finals wasn't scaled very well. If you're going to write a high school Oe tossup in the first place, it is important to mention a title or two after every one or two plot clues. The progression also went straight from The Pinch Runner Memorandum (which is still like ACF Nats hard) to Nip the Buds and then his most famous two novels.
I mean, it's not like it just drops the name of Nip the Buds. I don't really see a problem with this one.18. This author’s nonfiction works include a study of religious fanaticism, Somersault, while the title isolated teenager sexually assaults women on crowded subways in his novel J. He wrote about a man’s attempt to assassinate Patron in The Pinch Runner Memorandum, and in another work, a plague strikes a secluded valley where teenage boys have been evacuated. Bird tries to kill his deformed son in one work, while another ends with Takashi leaving a suicide note saying “I told the truth” to his brother Mitsusaburo when attempts to incite revolution through soccer fail. For 10 points, name this author of Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids; A Personal Matter; and The Silent Cry.
The first four clues are about works that are all nats or regular college level material. Instead, you could have put in The Catch and Aghwee (which high schoolers know more than that), had a clue of those aforementioned works still present, and then proceeded to more thoroughly discuss his best known works (and specified that he was japanese so that people that have heard the name oe but couldn't associate him with any works might still have a shot at conversion by the end)Sir Thopas wrote:JelloBiafra wrote:I think that the Kenzaburo Oe tossup in the finals wasn't scaled very well. If you're going to write a high school Oe tossup in the first place, it is important to mention a title or two after every one or two plot clues. The progression also went straight from The Pinch Runner Memorandum (which is still like ACF Nats hard) to Nip the Buds and then his most famous two novels.I mean, it's not like it just drops the name of Nip the Buds. I don't really see a problem with this one.18. This author’s nonfiction works include a study of religious fanaticism, Somersault, while the title isolated teenager sexually assaults women on crowded subways in his novel J. He wrote about a man’s attempt to assassinate Patron in The Pinch Runner Memorandum, and in another work, a plague strikes a secluded valley where teenage boys have been evacuated. Bird tries to kill his deformed son in one work, while another ends with Takashi leaving a suicide note saying “I told the truth” to his brother Mitsusaburo when attempts to incite revolution through soccer fail. For 10 points, name this author of Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids; A Personal Matter; and The Silent Cry.