(ICT = Intercollegiate Championship Tournament)
After four years sequestered in control room, reading for the best teams in the country is such a revelation. Unless this weekend causes him to run away screaming, it looks as though the passing of the logistics torch was complete and successful. Go Joel!
(By the way for what it's worth, I think in most vocational pursuits people should think more about who's going to be doing in a couple years what they're doing now, and what needs to be done to make themselves dispensable. To be sure, there are times in corporate politics where one thinks he'd gain from making people depend on him, but that's often just dysfunctional, inefficient or both. In any case, one of the reasons why you want a successor at what you're doing now will often be your own aspirations for something either more powerful or less taxing, depending on context.)
Various random NAQT tournament handouts (no, not the rules, but rather auxiliary docs) have bits of prose that I wrote a long time ago. Seeing the passages brings back quirky memories and also makes me happy, not for the pride of verbal craftsmanship so much as the efficiency implied by people keeping what's there rather than reinvent the wheel. (True, "efficiency" might include a dash of "inertia," but "efficiency" is my story and I'm sticking to it.)
And sure, in principle I could take pride of verbal craftsmanship in my portion of the questions themselves, but anyone can do that. In fact, most people in a position to do that probably shouldn't. Very few people write questions of prideworthy of quality; I'm well aware that I don't.
You know, even aside from arguing about category distribution (after reading games from it, I think this year's set should have been much more academic than it was, and if I think that myself -- a "Nixon in China" metaphor fits very roughly here -- then surely on bulletin boards particular players are already vociferiously opining this), the more of a contribution I've made myself to an ICT set, the more foreboding.
Since I write to the main end of just making sure sets are finished, a higher contribution from myself implies a greater deadline pressure on a given set. But more importantly for the ICT set itself, in any given category the people playing on the question will know a lot more about the topic than I do, and it's never easy to write to quality if you're out of your element. All of which is to say that if you're deeply involved in quiz bowl and have high standards for questions (as you ought to), I highly encourage you to consider submitting questions to NAQT. We make it worth your while (somewhat: it's not as though your time would be more profitably spent writing questions than doing something professionally, not even close, but still).
Posted by Matt Bruce at April 9, 2006 11:29 PM