Specific Anecdote Discussion

[jinah]

As a bit of an experiment, I’m starting a thread for people to post anecdotes about their experience playing the set, even if it’s not particularly notable or worth “discussion.” I loved seeing these questions played, saw some excellent buzzes and amusing negs, and would love to hear about more.

[jinah]

I’ll start: this Christmas, I got Jordan the short story collection Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino, and he got me, among other things, Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi and a novel by Charles Yu. I was slightly dismayed to open the docs a while later and find that Mike had claimed tossups cluing the short story collection Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino, Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi and a (different) novel by Charles Yu. I was, however, selfishly glad I’d given the Herbert book to Jordan, and not, as I’d initially planned, Matt Bollinger.

If this anecdote strikes you as boring and overly personal, that’s exactly the level of interestingness I’d encourage you to include in your own posts.

[ryanrosenberg]

I buzzed on the "skateboarding" tossup on the clue about Mind the Gap; Marianna and I watched the first 30 or so minutes of it but had to stop because we were getting motion-sick from the tracking shots in the film (we are both unusually sensitive to this, so don't worry about it if you want to see the film!).

[Good Goblin Housekeeping]

I probably should not have giggled as much as I did while trying to make sure I was not misparsing the whitehouse.com clues after having micronapped through most of the tossup thinking "wasn't this on a last name?" (whether or not I had the ability to remember that whitehouse is a surname possessed by matt jackson's boss who I initially thought was a fictional character is separate)

[Mike Bentley]

For those who missed the note in the question on literary critics, I had suggested to Will that he add a clue that James Wood had been in a band called "Only Connect." Turns out I had messed up my anecdotes--Only Connect is in fact a tech support company in one of Wood's novels. Anyway, in my fruitless attempt to confirm this detail I emailed Wood. I received this response:

Thanks so much for your genial question -- I concede that "Only Connect" sounds just like the kind of band I might have played in, but in fact it's not the case. I've played in two bands: a Bennington-based band called The Doghouse Band (also stars the writer David Gates), and a Norwegian group of musicians who were kind enough to form a band when I was a regular attendee at a literary conference in Oslo for a few years. We named this band "The Fun Stuff", after the Keith Moon essay. (We all loved The Who.)

Here's a link to the Dog House band:

https://www.shelf-awareness.com/issue.h ... 747#m16248

And here's a link to the Fun Stuff band -- THAT group was really good fun, because the Norwegian musicians were all professionals. (Knut Schreiner, the guy on the extreme right in the photo below, is an absolutely brilliant guitarist). I can honestly say, without bragging, that I am a considerably better drummer than Karl Ove Knausgaard!

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/201 ... rock-star/

[reindeer]

Reading this set was like taking a walk through all sorts of unrelated memories that I would never have expected to come up in quizbowl! I really enjoyed the questions on the scriptorium, Piranesi, and LMNOP, having read books mentioned in each of them just in the past year or so. Also, I took precisely one music class in college and we read the McClary essay clued in the Schubert tossup. I remember this vividly because the discussion went approximately as follows:

Professor: so, what was the point of this essay? 

Student: that Schubert cannot have been homosexual!

Professor: ....no 

Student: [with precisely the same prosody] that Schubert must have been homosexual!

As a then-budding linguist/speech scientist, this naturally made a big impression. Which brings me to my favorite question: the linguistics question in packet 3. I don’t think I’ve ever related so much to a quizbowl question, having experienced both the dismay of the Praat logo change and the bizarre litigiousness of Jean Berko Gleason. I once wrote a pattern for knitted wugs and emailed her to ask permission to post it online (for free!). She copied her lawyer and said that anyone who used my pattern could be subject to “legal penalties”. Clearly I’m still at least a little bit mad about this, but very glad I'm not the only one!

[Auks Ran Ova]

I am likely to have more after I look through the (delightful, as always) set, but the one that I remember most involves the round 1 tossup on architecture/architectural photography, which I got a delightful early buzz on that is a good illustration of how my memory works. Cast your mind back to 2015, when the VCU Open side tournament SHEIKH had a tossup on Clarence Darrow that began with this clue:

2. This man’s father was a cabinetmaker called the “village infidel” who raised him in an octagonal house in Kinsman, Ohio.

Everyone (or at least everyone in the room where I played it) was pretty amused by this, so when the later Mike Cheyne-directed Tricon: The Next Generation distribution included a question on "A tossup that you think I might have written for College History Bowl", I wrote this:

6. In York County, Ontario, a number of these buildings were used as mortuaries. “Gravel wall” construction was advocated for these buildings in the book that popularized them, which was written by the phrenologist Orson Squire Fowler. Wikipedia claims that the Treaty of Ghent was signed, or more likely ratified, in one of these buildings built for John Tayloe. That building of this type, used by James Madison as a retreat during the War of 1812, is now the headquarters of the AIA. Perhaps the most famous example of these buildings is located in Kinsman, Ohio, and was where a cabinetmaker named Amirus raised, among other children, the future (*) defender of Ossian Sweet. For 10 points, identify these buildings, examples of which, as we all learned at VCU Open, include the childhood home of Clarence Darrow.
ANSWER: octagon houses [or descriptive equivalents like “octagonal houses”]

The AIA referenced is, of course, the American Institute of Architects. Plenty of relatively important day-to-day shit constantly slips my mind, but one thing I can do with perfect confidence is, six years after finding and using that clue in a ridiculous novelty tossup, buzz immediately on:

15. Phyllis Dearborn was one of the most esteemed photographers in this field in the Pacific Northwest. An organization headed in the Octagon House in Washington, D.C. [...]

[ThisIsMyUsername]

On August 11th, in a Discord conversation about Agatha Christie, I told Grace Liu that I'd been waiting years to get a science buzz off of poison in her novels. My buzz at Scattergories wasn't science, but I'll happily take it.

The night before Scattergories, Alston and I were discussing universities whose law schools are more famous than their undergraduate program. I mentioned Fordham as one, although I noted that they have a famous musicologist named Lawrence Kramer, whom I consider to be a complete hack. Lo and behold, he's the lead-in to the Schubert tossup.

[Auroni]

For ACF Nationals 2019, JinAh wrote a tossup on "property" that clued the article "Whiteness as Property" by UCLA Law School professor Cheryl Harris. In a groupchat conversation sometime after the tournament ran, William Golden excitedly noted that Harris is the mother of rapper Earl Sweatshirt. In short order, we discovered that Earl's father, Keorapetse Kgositsile, was a famous poet and activist from South Africa. I believe that in the calendar year of 2019, both of Earl Sweatshirt's parents were clued in hard academic tournaments.

This knowledge of the illustrious Sweatshirt family, and not any particularly deep engagement with the works of any of the three, helped me secure a fun just out of power buzz at Scattergories.

I buzzed in a similar place on the tossup on the experimental film Wavelength, purely from the sense-memory of Will Nediger's own excitement at getting to play a question on it in the unused second Finals packet of ACF Nationals 2017.

[Red Panda Cub]

I buzzed on the VFA TU on Instagram on the clue about Hans Ulrich Obrist's account, which I have long followed. Some quiz friends of mine already know this story, but Obrist is the director of the Serpentine Gallery in London. A couple of years ago, the DJ Yaeji was performing at the Serpentine, and I was unable to get tickets to the show. In my desperation, I DMd Obrist on Instagram, and he rudely ignored me. At least I got points.