Fancy Store-Bought Dirt

Question Writing 101

Asking the right questions: It's not just for quiz-bowl people!

The Kansas City Royals quiz their players. So far so good.

I presume you call can immediately spot what's wrong with the structure of a question like "Before a game starts, what are the first two things a player should check?"

(My answers were "his cup" and "the scheduled start time." The former might not qualify among "first two," but surely the latter is a potential disaster if you mistake a day game for a night game.)

Odd Contexts for Flavors of Categorical Imperative

"'If Dick Tracy will do it, so will I." That is probably the most dangerous statement ever made. The street will be lined with scalded bodies tonight." –evie oh oh
--runner up for Comics Curmudgeon Comment of the Week

Meanwhile the other day, people who euphemistically describe spam as "an e-mail blast" came up in conversation. If I were teaching basic philosophy and needed good framing devices for what the categorical imperative does(n't) cover, e-mail spam would make an interesting contrast to driving during rush hour.

Charity Trivia

Saturday night I did my tax-deductible part to support local civic light opera at an event somebody described as a "trivia bee." Several teams of exactly three people each crowded a stage and wrote down answers to questions read out loud, 30 seconds per question.

Each team had its personal scorekeeper, a volunteer from a local high school who saw what answer we wrote down to each question, ruled the answer right/wrong, and changed a number on a music stand so that the whole audience could see each team's running tally.

First they read us 30 straightforward questions and 20 teams (plus ties) would make the cut. Everyone's score would go back to zero. Then 20 slightly harder questions for 10 teams (plus ties) to make the cut, and again everyone's score back to zero. Then ten even harder questions to award 1st through 3rd, with sudden death to break any ties.

Our team made both the first two cuts, then blew a lead (I think - not sure how much of one because we were in the back corner and liked it that way) to fall into a first-place tie. Then we honked the sudden death question.

A random sample of the questions I happen to remember, in no particular order:

The most inane question of the early round (in my opinion): What year did Disneyland open? (Even if you've never read a quiz-bowl message board you realize why questions that look for an exact year are overrated, right?)

I thought "everyone" knew this but for some reason it impressed the hell out of the room: On Gilligan's Island, what was the skipper's real name? (Neither my teammates knew this and our team was the only one of ten to get it right!)

I can't believe a teammate and I both blanked on this, and managing to miss it is arguably the reason we weren't first place outright: Binney and Smith are famous for inventing what? (My atrocious guess was Life Savers.)

This inexplicably stumped the field: Two Broadway musicals each managed to be nominated for 11 Tony awards without actually winning any of them. Name either one. (You've definitely heard of one of them.)

Another one that I thought "everyone" knew but that stumped a lot of teams: After Jackie Robinson's debut, who was the NEXT African-American to play Major League Baseball?

The claim to fame of the mistress of ceremonies was the record for most victorious Jeopardy! appearances by a female contestant. She claimed to be embarrassed to read this question. For a split second I had no idea but then it was obvious: I, [woman's name], appeared in what Bill Murray movie?

Is this inane? It was one of about a bazillion Broadway questions, at least, and we missed it: How long in years was the first run of A Chorus Line? (The only downside to all the Broadway was that they had literally zero non-Broadway music questions. Boo!)

This question was either inaccurate or very carefully worded. Probably the latter. We got it right but most teams missed it: Name BOTH the TV shows [...] Rod Serling.

Last but not least, the sudden death choke: Who did Time Magazine name in 1927 as its first Man of the Year? (Bonus points to you the blog reader if you can solve for the incorrect guess I suggested when none of us could think of the right answer. A teammate's wild guess was FDR but I explained why 1927 would be too early for him.)

Home Field (Dis)advantage

This article about why Academy Awards speeches are so bad cites psychological research indicating that when people believed they had a supportive friend on the other side of the mirror, they were considerably slower in [performing a difficult task] compared with when they believed a stranger was watching.

If those results also apply to competitive tasks, then apparently the home field advantage that sports teams enjoy is NOT related to fan support. Rather, one would expect teams with demanding, hostile "fans" (think Phillies or Red Sox) to have a relative advantage over teams whose fans resemble Cub fans.

One of my most vivid high school quiz-bowl memories is playing well against a team from Houston, in game at a national tournament in Houston. Every time their team got an answer right, the audience (very large by quiz-bowl standards) roared. Silencing the crowd made me happy and smug. (But no, I didn't do the hand-to-the-ear or any of those trash-talk gestures. We were one of those suit-and-tie wearing teams that wouldn't dream of being classless. Should I feel guilty that I dressed better as a high school championship player than I do as a high school championship assistant TD?)

Oh, getting back to Home Field Advantage: I imagine an overwhelming majority of the effect is the road team's inconvenience of travel.

Action Figure, Anti-Christ, SKVaibJQ*, All, or None?

*- Stephen King Villain, as imagined by Joe Queenan

A. Brent Musberger

B. Mitch Albom

There is no part C (yet).

A Paradoxical Reason Why Contract Lawyers Are (Unfairly) Reviled

If people chose their words carefully enough, there wouldn't be nearly so many of the ambiguous cases that come down to legal action.

On the other hand, the reason that trial lawyers are so reviled involves so many of them being sleazy money-grabbers who inflict a tremendous net loss on society (despite acting as though the opposite were true) -- at least on the plaintiff's side.

Quiz Bowl angle: A very inane question (that I don't think anyone would ever ask anyone else), "Do you like protests?" I think most players and officials dislike protests, to the point of (in some cases) disliking protesters. Nobody likes an angle-shooter.

I hate situations where protests arise, because with the best possible questions and game officials those situations just wouldn't come up. Any time a protest is worth deliberation, every possible outcome is somehow unfair - the trick is to find the least unfair outcome. Often being (seemingly) excessively rule-bound is the least corrupt way to get there.

Word Association of the Day

Page Six (recurring feature of the NY Post)

All Media Guide LLC

The Pittsburgh Penguins

...now give the common thread.

Accusations of Riggedness and Senses of Entitlement

Great quote from a few weeks ago that I somehow missed until now. I've replaced the original noun clause because I have no sense of whether the statement is any more true of the specific original noun clause than it is of most of humanity.

God, those [competitors] had an amazing sense of entitlement. If you don't succeed at something, don't try to understand what's going on and then act in a reasonable manner but rather blame the nefarious system. I mean, when systems are flawed, as all systems are, it seems more reasonable to accept that or stop going.)
--West Berkeley Flats

A mostly irrelevant aside regarding Brian's latest post: 1998 was my second year in BU Law. I don't think I saw either 1997 ACF Nationals (in the midwest somewhere?) or 1998. Mike H. and I did go to the 1999 tournament in Chicago and finished dead last.

J.J. as a teammate reminded me a lot of White Sox broadcaster Hawk Harrelson. Since I know a lot of people irrationally dislike Hawk's broadcasting style, I should stress that this is neither a compliment nor an insult. It's just a personality type, with a lot of emotional intensity.

TRASH Attrition

I thought I had at least six members of TRASH on that blogroll to your left there. As of this and this (the latter actually over a year ago?!), maybe not so much.

Well, as long as there's still Greg, JD, JQ, and Make Corn, we're good, right?

My 18+ Years of Quiz Bowl (Part 1)

Inspirations for this post (potentially a series of posts) include:

I've never met West Berkeley Flats (that I know of) and my knowledge of his part in qb lore is sporadic, though I've found his recent posts (and comments here) interesting.

Apparently my wife and I are minor characters in a recent work of non-fiction that I haven't gotten around to reading yet.

I realized the other day that there are people already playing college quiz bowl who weren't born yet the first time I picked up a buzzer in high school.

Since I couldn't decide which order of chronology to use, let's work inward:
I've been an NAQT member since 1999 and a writer before that. Most of my resulting time commitment involves writing questions. Nearly 100% of what I write for NAQT is tailored to the last-minute needs lists of specific packet set. For college, I read at Sectionals and at the Intercollegiate Championship Tournament (was control room at four ICTs but four is enough for me there). I'm in the control room for High School National Championship Tournaments (and in 2004 sent out the Request for Proposal that put us in touch with the Crowne Plaza Chicago O'Hare among other hotels).

Aside from that I read for Bay Area h.s. or college tournaments when asked to (if I can make it that weekend). I sometimes write trash packs to acquire trash tournament sets (you'd think I'd do something useful with the acquired questions). I used to send a freelance pack to the ACF Nationals set editor every year, really more for the exercise of writing in that style than the packet sets themselves, but that's time-consuming enough that it's been forever since I did.

It's been so long since I played at an academic tournament that I've forgotten when or where my last one was (thus achieving a goal), though I play TRASH Regionals yearly, made it to the 2004 TRASHionals, and might make it to Trash Master some year (not 2006). Speaking of "might make it," if I ever play academic questions again then the Vancouver summer tournament is as likely a place as any (should I brush up on Canadiana?).

On the flip side: I did MathCounts as a 7th and 8th grader. In 1988 (8th grade spring) I made it onto a local newscast's weekly profile of high-achieving local kids. The week my segment was taped, the segment that aired focused on a senior from the Booker T. Washington "academic bowl" team. They showed footage of practice and it looked like fun.

In my time at BTW, our big goal each year was to attend (and excel at) the championship tournament of Questions Unlimited: New Orleans in 1989; Houston three years in a row after that. Teams I was on went a combined 20-3 (give or take a win) counting both the "guaranteed" matches (was two per year, then bumped up to three per year) and the ensuing 32-team single elimination.

Contrast that long-ago format (and QU's tournament at Oklahoma State, which as of 1989 thru 1992 was entirely a 32-team single elim) with the modern HSNCT, where 2006 was the nth year in a row that every team played 10 games Saturday and the double-elim playoffs (for every team that went 6-4 or better) gave the best teams several more games. (N.B. the intended point here is "then vs. now" rather than QU vs. NAQT. I really don't know what the former do now.)

Anyway, 50+ gamerooms running at once is pretty nifty, though it generates a whole lot of scoresheets (four full-time stat people doing data entry, plus me and two other bracketmeister types).

More some other time.

1996-97 in Quiz Bowl

I had to read this post three times to understand everything it was saying. I'd heard about the events in question but thankfully not witnessed them first-hand.

Apropos of nothing: After that year's (my first at Boston U.) CBCI Region 1 tournament, Jeff came up to our team and said "Y'all did better than I thought you would." In writing years after the fact it does come off as backhanded, though I didn't infer any backhandedness at the time and just assumed it was a simple compliment. One of my teammates made the exact opposite assumption. That was fun.

(I'm not sure whether that was also the year that we saw five Harvard players walking somewhere in unison and decided they looked like a "Which one of these kids is a drug dealer? The answer might surprise you" poster. We all agreed on who the drug dealer was, by virtue of her bearing the least resemblance to a stereotypical drug dealer.)

Back on topic, I think CBCI, Questions Unlimited, and on-line poker are all about equally rigged -- which is to say that I don't think any of them are, despite how widespread beliefs to the contrary may be. I can see where insiders might internally joke about some of the wilder accusations, though letting the jokes slip out is public relations suicide.

TRASH Regionals Overview

"Cash Cab for Cutie" won more than we lost, including our three closest matches.

We were never tripped up by the "titles must be exact" rule (which often unfairly penalizes people for demonstrating clear and accurate knowledge that isn't quite precise enough), in fact twice we won games with 10-point margins in which an opponent got tripped up. (Specifics to come once it's clear that questions may be discussed.)

For the second time in three years I traveled to an LA site and played with the Masons and an empty seat. This is a reasonable team with an obvious path to improvement (that empty seat really needs to cut down on its negs). Somebody saw the three of us and remembered our 2004 team name, even though that was a lame ad hoc fill-in name ("Purple America" - from these maps).

I think the three of us played together (with an actual fourth player, possibly a Caltech undergrad) at a Bay Area tournament about three years ago, though I forget whether this was academic competition, TRASH Regionals, or perhaps even both in one weekend.

Pre-Celebrity Cameos

We were watching an episode of Soap last night (original air year 1979) and I recognized "Red Forman!" in a scene in a Laundromat.

The closing credits did indeed name Kurtwood Smith (whose name in real life I couldn't pull out until seeing it). Morally that's 15 points, even though in a game situation I'd have blanked on the part where you get from Red Forman to Kurtwood Smith and taken an agonizing neg.

Anyhow, Danny thinks "Red" is staring at him because of the PDA with his girlfriend, when in fact Danny has mistaken Red's dryer for his own and is wearing Red's shirt.

The Bad Generalist

Third in a QB post trilogy.

A particular archetype of quiz player:
1. Skillful enough to convert tossups (and make good buzzes) on questions in any/every discipline, as well as to get the easiest 10 points of any given bonus.

2. Doesn't bring any particular depth of knowledge or categorical dominance to the table.

3. Not quite good enough to beat teams singlehandedly.

You'll see this person do very well individually, especially on B teams or at less-than-championship caliber programs. With a category specialist or two he could go far, though once you add the second category specialist, depending on the breadth of their strongest subject area, it's not long before the point where this heretofore dominant player doesn't add much to the team and certainly doesn't push the team to a championship.

Team Quiz Prowess

This post exists as a placeholder for an obvious point (I'll save the keystrokes).

Some players are so dominant that the need for teammates to produce (or exist) approaches zero. That's relatively rare, though.

The best quiz teammate I can think of had/has very good command of a very significant chunk of questionspace. There were particular questions you could be fairly confident he'd answer, to the point where more than anyone (aside from the aforementioned individual juggernauts), you could accurately say that he pushes a team towards a championship.

I'm reluctant to elaborate because I know so well the particular person I have in mind. (The reluctance is both that I'd be personally biased towards him, and that I'd be more aware of his accomplishments than of some relative stranger's accomplishments.)

Note that both this post and the one below it focus entirely on "academic" quiz-bowl (or more precisely, everything that isn't explicitly dedicated solely to "trash"). On the trash circuit, the set of legends and dominant players and good teammates is rather different, though even there the person I have in mind has well-defined core competencies.

Individual Quiz Prowess

Brian R's LiveJournal has a post, "Let Us Now Bury Unfamous Men," evaluating some highly reputed quiz-bowl players.

When people speculate about the best players of given quiz-bowl eras (i.e. the people Brian is responding to (who may or may not be strawmen: I've spent enough time around the source he cites by name that I could probably reconstruct what they do(n't) actually claim, though it never seemed to matter enough to go into serious parsing), not so much Brian himself), they tend to overlook the change in one player's degree of dominance over time.

In general, the diehard players get better and better as they accrue knowledge and experience, to such an extent that if anything the change appears to accelerate. Then they leave the game once they find better things to do with their time. Maybe they come back after awhile, though it's not quite the same.

Subash completely owned the Intercollegiate Championship Tournament field one year. Nobody else playing qb that year could have given him a serious challenge. I don't think anyone coming out of retirement could have (they would have been rusty). Maybe somebody could have taken a time machine (or put him a time machine) and created a battle for the ages, but still. Up until that year, he was a very good player constantly improving, though the period of singlehandedly crushing opponents is brief.

That form of progression, not only of people but also of the game itself, makes it very unlikely that any one player (even Tom Waters) would be (to use Brian's formulation) "the game's best player over the course of two decades."

At some point, based results at summer tournaments, Hentzel may had a reasonable claim to be "the game's best player," though in the mid 1990s there were some major tournaments/formats where he was not the best player on his team.

Yaphe has had similar levels of dominance, though there was one year when he played in the ICT after a hiatus and didn't seem to have as much of an edge he used to have. (Highly subjective observation, I admit.)

Rostron's praise for Jeff Johnson is well placed, since I never saw him be anything other than a dominant player, though even at that, I obviously never got to see him play for Tennessee Tech (and place nondescriptly in a CBCI Regional field) several years before he picked up a buzzer at Harvard.

(If Harvard's quiz team had been more functional in the early 1990s, and publicized itself better, who knows what might have been different. Then again, maybe not much -- Jeff did learn of and join the team in fall 1994 (there's a chance, though not a certainty, that he's the same guy I remember talking to at the start of 1994-95 when that guy saw me put a poster up by the Science Center and asked if grad students could play; it's possible there was someone else with vaguely that look and dialect, or it's possible that this is a fabricated memory altogether), and played basically until he lost interest.)

Getting back to the post that inspired this one: I don't think that anyone literally claims that "Tom Waters was the best player in Year N, Year N+1, Year N+2, [etc.]" for some long period of years. I've always taken the claim to be that in evaluating the balance of his "career," nobody else played that well that long. But the things, few people play that long, period. It isn't a terribly useful thing to evaluate, since the ones who do play that long are sometimes derided (not unfairly) as "dinosaurs" for never moving on with their lives.

I think for historical assessment of quiz-bowl, "peak value" is significantly more useful than "career value." (Incidentally, that's the opposite of how I feel about baseball.) For anything where participation usually centers on collegiate status, the idea of a "career" is sort of silly anyway. So... was anyone else (at their absolute peak) better than Subash at his absolute peak?

(Yeah yeah, it was Hentzel who had the 19-tossup game where he came within "EZ-Bake Oven" of running the table. Without taking anything away from him or the achievement or the opponents, the best way to put it is that those questions were uniquely poorly suited for that opposing team.)

Sports Geography Quiz

(Courtesy of Google Maps' satellite imagery.)

Name the athletic facilities shown in the extended entry. If a picture shows two facilities, please name both.

Old Update: All but one of these have been gotten. I'll give you a hint on #9: Look very, very closely at the area just above the North End Zone stands.

Latest Update: All of these have been gotten (kudos Mark).

Since Brick mentioned SafeCo field, here's Safeco Field and Qwest Field (note the conspicuous identifiers on the roofs).

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

I'm Sure These Unplanned Hiatuses Are Wearing Thin

No, not from this blog: From my favorite trivia company. Every now and then (average of twice a year?) I just have a complete mental block about contributing anything at all, even so much as responding to e-mails. There's no excuse for this - it's just a phase that comes and goes.

That said, the fact that there's no good reason for it always makes it even more awkward for me to get back into the swing of things. There's an e-mail from our President/CTO with the subject line "Incommunicado?" (ironically) that I still haven't opened because I'll feel silly responding to it.

Anyway, this latest hiatus is about to end, but until it actually happens and I'm routinely responding to e-mail (really the main thing is e-mail, though knocking off a few questions couldn't hurt), it's this lingering thing.

Do you ever find yourself in situations like that with some quasi-vocational obligation you have? What's the best way to stop the recurrence? What's the smoothest way to get back on that horse without awkwardness/guilt/etc.?

Typo? Alternate Spelling?

Let's be charitable and call it a creative spelling. (Anyone hungry?)

(Sheepish confession: I got to that page by ego-surfing for something I already knew about myself, just to see if it was there for the world to see. Somebody mentioned it to me this weekend, years after my awareness of it had faded. The reference they saw is now gone, persisting only in Google Cache.)

(Now that I'm about to post this I really hope there are no glaring typos here.)

Inadvertment Reference To My Favorite Fark Meme

Some conference rooms at the Crowne Plaza Chicago O'Hare are named after world airports. One of those meeting rooms is Orly.

I hope there's a stunning come-from-behind victory in that room, pulled off by a team with at least one situation-aware Fark reader on it.

O RLY

Don't Mistake One for the Other

Opening clues of two otherwise unrelated tossups from this year's ICT:

"This group originated at the University of Deusto [...]"

"This band formed in 2002 at Barnsley College in South Yorkshire [...]"

Real-Time Swiss Pairs Personnel Question

(For the subset of you readers who are currently active in quiz-bowl.)

Out of idle curiosity, how many specific people do you know of who could plausibly (and would be willing to) run a large field (let's say order of 64, feel free to hedge your answer if 32 vs. 64 vs. 128 changes the field) Swiss pair style tournament without nontrivial delays between rounds?

I claim that the set of qualified candidates includes Jim Puls, Lyric Doshi, and myself*. Maybe Chris Sewell if he were willing. Who else?

*- To the extent that the 2004 and 2005 HSNCT pairings went up timely. In each case it took longer than I'd liked but apparently still much less time than typical Swiss pair contexts (mainly debate from what I understand).

Other people with significant tournament control room experience categorically reject (very wisely!) any desire or ability to do large-scale Swiss pairs themselves. It's a LOT of work and stress to do right, something I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy (even though for my own part I secretly relish it).

With the right software tools (must be sufficiently user-friendly among other things) that list could expand. I think everyone I mentioned by name above has a system he himself could use effectively but probably isn't quite robust enough for just any old TD to plug in.

Inconsequential Meta-Trivia Question

(It should be obvious enough how this post relates to the one below it.)

Suppose you're at a national championship trivia competition where your first seven rounds take you to four different rooms (no more than twice each, but three of them exactly twice each).

To what extent would you mind (or care) if your ninth and tenth rounds were your third and fourth times with a particular reader? To what extent would you mind (or care) if your opponent's tenth round (against you) were their fourth time with a particular reader whom you hadn't had yet?

I have a schedule template to clean up and make more user friendly (was supposed to do this several weeks ago but never did, thus not cutting a figurative umbilical cord as soon as it would otherwise have been cut), and while I'm at it some fairly picayune supposed improvements came to mind.

Room Double-Bookings and Campus Police

One more ICT note: There might exist a fifth-year senior whose quiz team was kicked out of a national championship gameroom by campus police twice in five years. (2002 Division 2; 2006 Division 1.)

Considering that an entire tournament bracket (plus four rooms from another bracket, so 40 teams in all) had to relocated to another building on the fly, I'm pleasantly surprised by how soon the tournament was back on track. As a paying customer of course your mileage may vary (beyond a certain entry fee you shouldn't have to worry about these things).

I wonder if other campus activities have to deal with this. On the flip side, though, I do remember BU's quiz team kicking out participants in some high school programming competition when our claim to the rooms trumped theirs (theirs may have been only squatters' rights).

Some Quick ICT Notes

(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).

Non-Pyramidal Mystery Years

Is it wrong to know cold the year "Madman on the Water" came out despite not being at all an Elton John fan?

I put it to you that of any random collection 10 distinctive songs from that year, "Madman" is certainly more than 10th most likely to trigger exact year recognition.

Why not just play several callers' wrong guesses from that decade to explicitly rule out those alternatives, then give the game away with a news snippet about Arab boycott-induced fuel shortages? Oh, wait...

Is it wrong to be annoyed when people who do trivia don't really know how to present it?

A Moment of Silence

...for my now badly outdated (and recently returned) bonus question in which Sheikh Ahmed (Ismail) _Yassin_ and Abdulaziz (al-)_Rantissi_ were parts B and C. (The leadin mentioned events of March 2004.)

No moment of silence is necessary for those people themselves, though it's funny how the manner in which an entity is newsworthy changes over time. For five seconds I intended to rework the question with 2006 events and resubmit, except that the aforementioned dudes make horrible quiz answers (why would anyone bother to remember their names?) and I'm glad they shall rot in obscurity.

Useless Metatrivia

I wrote fewer than 10% of the questions in NAQT's 2006 SCT Division 1 packet set. Though it's not convenient to look this up for sure, I think that's the first time in several years that the set was fewer than 10% "mine." There might have been a year or two in which that figure flirted with 20%, though I doubt it ever topped that.

I did write the question that at least two people on the same message board agreed upon calling the worst of the tournament, and their assessment seems about right, though it was for a very hard-to-fill subcategory that I would just as soon see disappear. (I wonder how many years that statement is true, and for completely unrelated subcategories.)

UPDATE: One poster has now started a thread to give savage criticism to specific tossups, round by round. Through the first two rounds at least, none of them are mine (whew!).

Debate and Religion

Apparently debate is big at evangelical colleges now.

I want to steer this towards qb-type discussion rather than political discussion because I'm curious about whether there are ways to get that kind of publicity for activities like ours that don't involve the sort of larger trends that someone like a Newsweek editor would find disturbing-therefore-compelling.

I'm also idly curious -- if the article's thesis that evangelical schools are doing really well at debate these days is actually a valid one -- whether there's any particular trait that correlates well with schools that currently have great quiz teams.

On the subject of religion (though really not debate), Julia is now a proud Pastafarian. Yesterday at work a discussion of the Christian music genre led to discussion of the distinction between atheism and agnosticism. I was just a captive audience until at some point I felt the need to share this movement with my colleagues. There's a fine line between being really clever and being a jackass know-it-all; I'd like to think I didn't cross that line but one never knows.

Oh, while we're here, even though I didn't want this to range towards politics, I do have to say that I'm strongly in favor of teaching about the Flying Spaghetti Monster within the context of an Intelligent Design curriculum. I'm dead serious about that! The noodly appendage theories should be in there precisely so that students grasp (by way of stark counterexample) what is scientifically valid and what isn't.

UPDATE: At the very end of that Newsweek piece is one of the most hilarious corrections ever: Correction: In the original version of this report, NEWSWEEK misquoted Falwell as referring to "assault ministry." In fact, Falwell was referring to "a salt ministry"—a reference to Matthew 5:13, where Jesus says "Ye are the salt of the earth." We regret the error.

How can one work for that prestigious a media outlet and be so ignorant?

Name That Presidential Candidate: #9

(previous posts here)

His mother was a Slovenian immigrant who died when he was 10. (The fact that his father was a coal miner will give you the wrong impression, though Wikipedia claims he was born in the same state he still calls home.)

He was a congressional aide when he accompanied a delegation that went to South Vietnam in 1970. Life magazine published the pictures he took of "tiger cages" at Con Son Island (South Vietnamese prison; ensuing scandal vaguely comparable to Abu Ghraib).

This sponsor of the Americans With Disabilities Act won the Iowa caucus by a wide margin but did not finish in the top three in the New Hampshire primary.

Name That Presidential Candidate: #8

(Previous installments: #7, #6, #5, #4, #3, #2, #1)

TWO ANSWERS REQUIRED:
8a and 8b were both being interviewed at the same time, when 8a was asked if he had anything to say to 8b. 8a responded, "Tell him to stop lying about my record."

Trivia-Based Meme Update

Presidential Candidate #7 needed a second clue.

I have no sense of whether people didn't get insight on the business trivia post or just flat didn't care. It's something I imagine would subtly affect the lives of people in finance (or project management), but what do I know?

At the risk of giving away the baseball trivia, would you rather have Manny Ramirez or Mariano Rivera?

Name That Presidential Candidate: #5

He not only survived a plane crash but also pulled Ted Kennedy from the wreckage of the plane.

Clue #2: His son has been touted as a potential 2008 candidate.

Name That Presidential Candidate: #4

(Maybe this time we'll make it past the first clue.)

A national sales tax was one campaign proposal by this Notre Dame alumnus and Marshall Scholar.

Name That Presidential Candidate: #3

Wikipedia claims that he cofounded a company that is now America's largest provider of worksite day care. He has been a U.S. Senator and also Secretary of Education.

Two Answers Required

(Who wrote the pack a few years back in which every tossup began "Two answers required"? Gerbils?)

If you were in Chattanooga this weekend, tell me something interesting that happened on any given question or in any given round. Bonus points if that question (or even that round) came from me.

TRASH Regionals

This post says discussion is now okay; I'll tentatively trust 'em.

A week ago I wrote up (but left in draft mode) a post with the list of all the tossup answers I'd gotten (or negged), as inspired by Cooch doing the same thing a year or two ago. Revisiting that post now it feels too much like an ego trip. My negs, however, are after the fold.

For what it's worth, over 20% of the tossups I got right were about baseball. Not just sports, but baseball specifically. (Paul beat me to Bud Selig but I think that's the only one I didn't get.)

Also, at least four of my correct tossup answers were names of corporations. While these are fine questions, I'm not entirely convinced that knowing that a Minnesota native named Dayton started Target or that Arthur Blank owns Home Depot (known via his owning the Falcons) is "trashy."

Right: Killer Uno
Wrong: Uno [prompt] [...]

Right: Fiesta Bowl
Wrong: Holiday Bowl

Right: Frozone
Wrong: [...] (blanked on his name - early buzz on the right track, too, so frustrating)

Right: Moana Pozzi
Wrong: Cicciolina

Right: Don't Phunk With My Heart
Wrong: Brimful of Asha

Right: Temple
Wrong: Rutgers (buzzed twice on college football tossups, negged both)

Right: The Bleachers
Wrong: Tuesdays With Morrie

Right: MK-Ultra
Wrong: Operation Mongoose

Quiz Bowl Meta

Andrew Yaphe's post to begin this thread is the most interesting QB post I've read in awhile. (Caveat: I don't read many QB posts and have barely skimmed the thread of which his post is an off-shoot.) Having been ambivalent whether to post this here or there, I'll put some first impressions here and if they read well, maybe clean it up into a post there.

I do strongly agree with how he describes the thought process of a good player, as follows:

A good player listening to this tossup (or any other) is not sitting there, his mind a blank slate, waiting to hear the first trigger word that will cause him to make a knee-jerk buzz. Instead, he's mulling over what he's been told, formulating possible answers, ruling some of them out, and waiting until he hears something that will tip one of those possible answers from "possible" to "sufficiently probable for me to take a chance on it." If he's lucky, he'll hear some sort of confirmatory word (like "cyclical") as he takes the plunge. If he's unlucky, he'll hear something that suggests his thinking was terribly off-course. Either way, an active process of deduction has been going on the whole time.

I hate it when people seem to imply that the good quiz play boils down to cold knowledge of which clues fit which answers - playing the game often entails the deduction Yaphe describes, or the buzzes to which one could say "well solved."

I'm ambivalent about this factual observation in the next paragraph though. Up to a point the observation is true, though not completely, and I think I disagree with any normative implication:

That's one of the main reasons for the tossups in ACF to be as long as they are: to allow time for this to happen. At NAQT, there's basically no time for this kind of thinking to proceed: the game moves much faster, the tossups are much shorter, and people are either buzzing on clues they know or on instinct.

ACF [the general format rather than the specific entity] first: If the idea were solely to allow players time to think, then in theory there could just be periods of silence between sentences rather than string upon string of sentences. Of course, the idea is that the strings of sentences bring a steady stream of useful information. In a well-written pack this is true.

In a poorly written pack there will be a lot of filler words relative to clueful content. The filler words will parse very awkwardly and the act of distilling the clues from between them will be both tedious and taxing. (I don't think there was much of this at 2005 ACF fall. Packs were edited quite well, even if here and there some sentences were still quite a mouthful to read.)

As for NAQT [again, the general style rather than the entity alone - full disclosure: I'm an NAQT member and writer; if you write for NAQT then you're probably aware of Yaphe's own level of involvement], in a best case scenario the cap on tossup length forces tight enough prose to get rid of the chaff. Certain types of especially verbose clues become impossible to elaborate as well as one would like (which makes the ACF style indispensable as a format alternative) but you can do a lot in a little space - indeed, you have to.

When he says "there's basically no time for this kind of thinking to proceed," I think he underestimates how much thought processing players (including and especially those as good as himself) actually do in a relatively short time. Think of things smart people do a lot that requires split-second decisions where a lot of information might be relevant - anything from a doctor diagnosing a patient to a poker player at a casino.

A good analogy might be postal chess to over-the-board tournament chess. (Someone with a different take on quiz formats might claim that the analogy is postal to speed, or even normal OTB time controls to speed.)

In any case, the phrase "on instinct" is accurate enough and perhaps complete enough, though it's easy for that phrase to (appear to) short-sell what it describes. This is "instinct" in the sense that Malcom Gladwell writes about in Blink, I suppose.

As for writing and editing questions, a bad NAQT-length tossup is readily identifiable as crap, to the extent that it's random, abrupt, and nearly content-free. Writing a tossup to that length that avoids the pitfalls is difficult, though quite possible.

It's much easier to write a good ACF-style tossup, though all the more difficult to write a great ACF-style tossup, and deceptively easy to write a deceptively bad tossup that length. So much of this probably just has to do with making sure the prose isn't turgid, and to that end I apologize for the density of this post's prose itself.

Blogroll Sprucing

You'll notice minor reorganization on the left nav bar.

Among other things, anyone whom I've never met but who is otherwise well-known, is probably engaged in punditry rather than personal blogging. There are borderline cases (Mark Cuban, say) but you get the idea.

Of the remaining "Personal Blogs," people whom I haven't met:
Jeff from Beautiful Atrocities (not sure if I've ever known his last name)
Rick Stuart, KFOG afternoon guy
Any of the servicemen who contribute to BlackFive
John Heaton (Blue Armadillo), though I think Coen et al have met him
Suzi from Diary Date (also maintains the anti-Spyware blog)
Kim Swygert (the psychometrician from #2 Pencil)
Jesse Walker (Perpetual Jet Lag)
Any of the servicemen who contribute to Sgt. Stryker
Laurence Simon (This Blog Is Full of Crap)

So I've met 75% of the people whose weblogs are on that roll. In order, here those people are; school affiliations listed only because I met a vast majority of these people via their particular college affiliation; people who DIDN'T do quiz-bowl (that I know of) in italics (vast majority are/were into qb):
Mike Develin (Harvard) (and I think even he went to some practices and a tournament once), Mark Coen (BU), Brian Ulrich (Wisconsin), Jon Couture (BU), Victoria Groce (Georgia), Brick Barrientos (Maryland), Greg Sorenson (BU), James Quintong (Northwestern), Anthony De Jesus (CWRU), Scott Monty (BU), James Dinan (GW), Julie Stahlhut (MIT/WMU), Matt Levine (UC-Berkeley), Michael (Harvard), Paul Lujan (Harvard), Mike Philpy (Dartmouth/Michigan), Scott Wickham (MIT), Maribeth Mason (Illinois/Caltech), Brian Hight (Virginia), Eric Bell (Oklahoma), Dan Passner (Brandeis), Chris Nolte (Stanford/Caltech), Dwight Kidder (Cornell), Richard Mason (Harvard/Caltech), Craig Barker (Michigan), Joe Wright (Pitt/USC/Michigan).

The results are in: Of 36 blogs on that blogroll...
2 are group-blogs by people, none of whom I've met
7 are blogs by individuals I've never met
4 are blogs by individuals I've met through something other than quiz-bowl
23 are blogs by individuals I've met through quiz-bowl

How Not to Explain an Adjudication

Read this press conference transcript for what it's worth. Let's just say neither Mr. Reiker nor Mr. Eddings will staff any quiz tournament I'm involved in any time soon. (Not that it was likely they would, but you get the idea.)

Granted, in their shoes I too would probably get flustered and bollix the explanation, but then that's why you put meticulous experts in charge, people who can do what R. does (a reference that will make no sense to most of you random readers, but enough of you will understand to make the reference worthwhile).

Looking Ahead on the Dilbert-a-Day Calendar

Ogre, Nitwit, and $#!+head would be great team names for a school that sent three teams to an invitational.

The Tossup I Dreamed of Writing

That is, I actually did have a dream about it, rather than a figurative yearning to write it. I had the concept and the answer and agonized over how best to order the clues, among them some really weird stuff that went far beyond the real-life movie... and then I woke up this morning.

As best I can reconstruct it:

This adjective literally applies to the tragic fatal kiln accident of Fawn Leibowitz or to the molestation of the mayor's 13-year-old daughter, but technically does NOT apply to the ogling or food fights engaged in by Bluto while in a seventh year of studies at Faber College. For 10 points--what term for most of the hijinx of the Delta frat from Animal House connates somebody's second year in college?

Stark Illustrations of Two Things You Need To Succeed In Quiz-Bowl

1. Erudition (oddly compelling - if there were more quantity here I'd call this strictly superior to Cecil Adams, but then I was never as big a fan of Cecil as others).

2. Picayune knowledge of cultural schlock (not the main post so much as the comment thread).

Torch Passing

Most of what I do in professional/vocational life seems to involve my figuring out ways to make my own self superfluous. Maybe that's a good thing, as once I'm superfluous I can use the marginal time to find new projects or just goof off.

This doesn't rise nearly to the level of an official announcement, but since many of you readers are also frequent HSNCT/ICT game official types:

Joel Gluskin (Wash U. alumnus) will have more or less the same role for 2006 HSNCT and ICT that I had for those tournaments in 2004 and 2005. I'm trying to pass that completely to him for ICT; for HSNCT letting go is going to be incredibly difficult (think of Bilbo's increasing reluctance to part with the ring) but it's the right thing to do if only to avoid burnout. (There will still be plenty of work for everyone to fill our free time to the point of group burnout.)

I suppose the big exception is HSNCT stat room (even if it kills me - or an outside observer would assume it was killing me - I want that role, and assume that nobody else is crazy enough to come near it). Even at that, the better the stat programs get, the more superfluous I can become even in the HQ trench.

Best reason to blog this rather than, say, an HSquizbowl post: I assume competing teams themselves would have no sense of my role for either tournament. If you're playing at ICT, your main man is Barker; HSNCT, some combination of Bell & Kubicek.

How I Spent My Weekend

http://www.naqt.com/hsnct/2005/2005-hsnct-results.html
http://www.naqt.com/hsnct/2005/results/stats.html
http://www.naqt.com/hsnct/2005/results/personal.html
http://www.fraughtmachine.com/9minutes/

That last link has audio (podcast) for selected matches. (If you've ever wondered what it's like to hear Ken Jennings read questions instead of answering them, he's the moderator on at least two of what's posted there.) Championship round podcast files are coming soon, as are the playoff gamescores and final team rankings when NAQT's webmaster gets them up hopefully tonight.

96 teams. 48 rooms of simultaneous play. Over 100 game officials, over 500 players, over 500 particular matches.

10 rounds Saturday, teams paired against opponents with the same record or as similar a record as possible. (Same record for games through the first five rounds; then starting round 6 you get odd-sized groups at a given record.) Teams knew they had to go 6-4 or better Saturday to make the playoffs.

37-team double elimination playoffs Sunday. If you ever have to run a double-elimination tournament that size, the point where you finally see the light at the end of the tunnel is entering the fifth round, with 3 undefeateds and 9 single-loss. If the undefeated team wins the one cross-bracketed game then you're down to 2-and-5 and can post everything you need to post about room locations all the way through the finals. (Even otherwise, at 1-and-7 it's pretty straightforward what to do with the 7.)

A major public mea culpa to Greg, whom I utterly hosed with too quick a trigger finger on covering for supposed playoff no-shows. Replacing him Sunday because I thought he wasn't there wouldn't have been so bad except that:
1. He was setting up the buzzer in his/Coen's room at the time.
2. He'd brought the donuts that were sitting at the head of the room where moderators all met.

But my hosing Greg worked out to JQ's spontaneous gain.

Of the 100+ game officials we had Saturday, a vast majority did stick around for Sunday (including, obviously, everyone whom we flew in from out of town). Most of those were prompt and extremely helpful on buzzer set-up and so on. Aside from a handful of out-of-this-world readers, many game officials who've been doing this forever are about equally good at reading and certainly competent enough at scorekeeping.

Even with 37 teams in double-elim, there are "only" 18 playoff game rooms and 36 staff slots, of which six each become superfluous after 2/3 rounds anyway. I suppose one could add a third game official to all playoff rooms. The problem there is if more teams than expected turn out for consolation rounds.

Anyhow, many of you who were game officials also read this weblog; my immense personal thanks to you all.

(If you were wondering: We got 100 game officials on the dot, with six doing HQ work on Saturday and 94 in game rooms - so two people going solo. I came expecting us to have 101. Good news were the two people who'd fallen through the cracks on my staff list. Bad news were the three no-shows, all from two Chicagoland college quiz teams who shall remain nameless.)

The Infamous Palindrome Question

Pasted below is the bonus that's gotten (as far as I can tell) a strong plurality if not an outright majority of the question-specific negative question feedback from NAQT's 2005 ICT set.

It's mine, and I'm unfazed by the complaints given its nonacademic content. Aside from that, I can tell you it was originally intended for an intramural set and bumped up to ICT to my great surprise. I'd feared that teams would find it too easy (remembering A from childhood and solving B without much trouble), though if anything the complaints seem to be on the opposite tack.

Your own feedback welcome, and remember that I post this entirely from a writer's perspective. I won't even attempt to give an NAQT editors' take on this, other than that for whatever reason it did make it into the set.

"Mr. Miller committed a transgression" is a roundabout way of saying "Dennis sinned." For 10 points each--give these other palindromes from a rephrasing:

C. Devil, cause my iron-like pieces of classical music to swing back and forth in a pendular fashion.

Intercollegiate Championship Thread

I was in New Orleans for a week for this tournament. Those of you who were there... how did it go?

Of course the most efficient way to send NAQT feedback is by e-mail, with R. speaking for the company as needed. That said, some very good players read this weblog (more than you may think), and there are two particular contexts where I can give my individual perspective without (I hope) blurring the distinction between what I think and what NAQT thinks.

If you have questions or comments about a question I might have written, I'll gladly either disclaim authorship (if I didn't write it) or give a writer's perspective (if I did). ["I did(n't) edit it" is inapplicable - it's been awhile since I did anything more than read through a set or write back on difficulty/quality checks.]

To a lesser extent, if you have questions or comments about tournament logistics (particularly staff, schedule, and Division 1 control room), I can give you somewhat of an organizer's perspective -- again, speaking for myself, though if my choosing to say it is a good idea to begin with then that distinction should (I hope) be obvious.

Comment away, or just e-mail me (handle is the post-tilde portion of this URL, domain is Yahoo). Anonymity is fine, too, if you feel the need (my biggest blogging regret ever is being too thin-skinned in this same context two years ago).

Arabic Numerals

I have no idea how I felt about this until (figuratively) 15 minutes ago but I've become quite zealous about using Arabic numerals (i.e. 1, 2, [...]) wherever it's reasonable to do so and dropping the pretention of Roman numerals.

With no Super Bowl happening any time soon, there's really only one context where this comes up, and at that I'm sure I'll waste more keystrokes on this blog entry itself than are saved typing "D2" instead of "D-II."

Compared To Them, The Debate Kids Are Rock Stars

I have to say this piece did nothing to change how lightly I regard the whole Model UN cycle.

The side question is whether this reflects more my politics (three guesses how I feel about the real live UN) or my pro-quiz-bowl jingoism.

Unsourced Anonymous QOTD

This is pretty funny.

Every now and then I'm overcautious with "allegedly" in a current events question about a crime or trial. I tend to claim that even if a jury convicts someone of a crime, we don't know with metaphysical certainty that he did it, especially if he claims to be innocent. The law may have stipulated as a legal truth that he did it, but legal convention and quiz-bowl truth seem different to me. Hard to explain.

Stupid TV People Make My Brain Hurt

Philphy used this as a stop-disrespecting-Indiana rant, but it's abominable even if you leave the Hoosier state out of it. Assuming he quoted correctly:

"I've checked all nearby states including Michigan, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Iowa, and Kansas."

Okay, Philpy does use the "something like" disclaimer. I'm going to have to hope he was a little off on quoting them. How do you put Ohio in the neighborhood of Kansas?!? (Granted, you can get from OH to KS passing through only KY and MO, but even so, if you can't find a state that borders them both then two states aren't remotely "nearby.")

(My parents grew up in Ohio. One of them had either friends or relatives on the East Coast who had ditzy neighbors who asked them whether Ohio was near California and whether they liked to surf. That's worse than putting Ohio nearby to Kansas but it's still a howler.)

Literary Works of Historical Figures

At least twice in my quiz-bowl playing days I heard tossups that centered on the fiction writing of Benjamin Disraeli. I think the first was one of those 14-line "kitchen sink" tossups that exhausted his literary career and then also told you everything you'd hear in a question strictly about Disraeli's political career. The second time who knows how long it was, because somebody on another team knew the titles cold and got it early.

One of the references in this thread reminded me of that.

#72058 (not by me; actual author may claim credit if he or she sees this post)
He retold the story of 19th-century painter Adam Chmielowski [huh-mee-ell-AHV-skee] in the prose play Our God's Brother, though the verse play The (*) Jeweler's Shop was the only one of his works that was published for a long time, having appeared under the pseudonym Andrzej Jawien [AHN-jay yah-VEEN]. For 10 points--name this man who translated Sophocles' Oedipus into Polish before becoming bishop of Krakow.

answer: Pope _John Paul II_ or Karol _Wojtyla_ [voy-TEE-wah]

Your mileage may vary but I thought it was interesting that he even had a literary career. Apparently this isn't well known among quiz players (where Disraeli's fiction is), but why is that? Simply because somethings get asked a lot and some don't? (That's an honest question, not a rhetorical one.)

Now you take a fair bit of time and space talking about his literary works, through "translated Oedipus into Polish." The remaining options are to turn this into a longwinded tossup by concatenating the usual religious-based clues at the end; to leave off the religious element completely and let the question hang like that; or to use a clue like "bishop of Krakow."

If the latter is a really an instantaneous giveaway (that is, immediate buzzer race) of PJ2, then I'm really impressed at how quickly the best players parse things these days. I suspect that in most rooms, the light bulb went off in someone's head a second or two later. If two or more people had enlightenment at the same time...

Incidentally, assuming for the sake of argument that "bishop of Krakow" gives a question away. Consider a tossup where that phrase appears in the fifth line. If the tossup is strictly biographical/religious, it's not immediately obvious to me how the first four lines would read.

12 Hours in L.A.

As you'll see two posts below this, I went down to help at NAQT's West Coast sectional. Thanks to Southwest's fantastic rates on its shortest routes (and the play Julia and I saw Friday night), I flew. Left my apartment at 5:45 a.m., back at 9:45 p.m. Got a one-day car rental just to drive to the USC parking garage and back (cost far less than cab rides would have; before going I did look at public transportation but even without any delays it would have taken too long).

Oddly enough the 7:00 from OAK to LAX was completely full.

Getting from the rental car lot to the 105 is very unintuitive but at least the signs are prominent. In the morning the 105 and 110 were both almost empty; much heavier at 6:00 Saturday evening but still no backups. Having discovered the station in November, I now can't drive in Los Angeles without tuning to KDAY ("hip-hop from today and back in the day"). The rap just goes too well with the setting, just as there are places in and around San Francisco that require homoerotic dance music ("the beat of the Bay") as soundtrack.

The building that housed the tournament was wonderful: All rooms basically right next to each other, yet no sound issues. Between that and timed play, the tournament ran on time, actually a bit ahead of schedule.

(I overheard discussion to the effect that, counterintuitively, an on-time tournament has an experience-dampening effect in that everything's over so quickly; then again, people in the discussion I overheard agreed that the benefits far outweighed this effect.)

Everyone was friendly (especially the USC club members) and happy to be there and happy to have me there.

Not Just A Snob: A Slytherin

As I was falling asleep last night I realized I was a Slytherin. That doesn't mean I like Draco Malfoy or his henchmen in the least; in fact, I somewhat resent Rowling for going out of her way to emphasize how nasty those particular students are, especially Pansy Parkinson.

(On the other hand... well, one of the reasons Order of the Phoenix is my favorite of the five books I can't share without major spoilers, so I'll just say there was a moral ambiguity that I found really thought-provoking.)

Anyhow, two years in a row I've been one of the two readers for NAQT SCT West Coast Division 1 while most of the tournament itself was D2. I sort of wish I'd gotten to see some D2 teams play; then again, the West Coast D1 teams are an absolute pleasure to read for, as good people and also immensely talented teams.

Speaking only for myself, I'm somewhat disappointed that so many players stay in D2 as long as they possibly can without choosing to move up to greater challenges. (Then again, I suppose if the cutoff is national championship qualification, then until you play D2 well enough to qualify, I can see where you'd feel you haven't "mastered" that level yet.)

This is the time of year when I get heavily involved in national tournament planning, and (among other things) assign readers to divisions. "Which division do you prefer?" actually solves most of this, as reader preferences tend to be just balanced enough. It's also very interesting (in a people-watching sense) to see these preferences expressed. Given the theme of this post you can guess my own leanings. (Also, as long as I'm in the D1 stat room and this gentleman is in D2's, divisional affinity makes for nifty friendly rivalry.)

Other things in life that mark me as a Slytherin include (but are not limited to): My preferred political party (of the two major U.S. parties) and my Harvard house affiliation, from back before randomization when house stereotypes were rampant.

(Anecdotal evidence suggests what you'd expect: Now that students are randomly assigned a house, the stereotypes have diminished.)

In my day Eliot was notoriously elitist (actually no: a few years before my day this may have been true, but unless a whole lot of subtext went over my head, in my time it was a somewhat outdated image that we had fun mockingly living up to, and indeed my class year (1996) was the one where a big blocking group of gay politically activists got into Eliot more or less to subvert the dominant paradigm). Anyhow, you could say Eliot was to other Harvard houses as (in some ways) Harvard was to other universities.

Adams was artsy and avante-garde; Dunster was progressive and activist. (If Dunster was UC-Berkeley, Adams would be a more academically rigorous version of UC-Santa Cruz.) Houses up in the old Radcliffe quad were heavily African-American and also heavily pre-med, both group majorly self-selecting to be with each other and to get peace and quiet, respectively.

"Months of Preparation"

Good grief!

Tindall-Gibson said bees require several months of preparation and man-hours to pull together, but "if participating in a bee provides an educational benefit, then you may see students from Lincoln on stage after all."

What on Earth takes months of preparation to put a spelling bee together? Are these people that stupid or is this just bureaucratic padding?

As hobbies go I can't believe sometimes how badly I screwed myself: Trivia requires hours on end researching and writing questions. But a g'd'n spelling bee can get words... oh, I dunno, maybe from the dictionary?!?

(To be sure, you need some guidance as to which words are "easy"; "intermediate"; "hard"; etc. I'd be willing to bet you can buy a spelling bee reference guide organized along those lines for the price of a good DVD TV season.)

Sometimes inefficiency makes me want to cry. (You think I'm kidding.)

Draw Your Own Wikipedia-Based Conclusion

12-year-old finds five errors in Encyclopedia Britannica. He brought those errors to their attention; depending on the EB publishing cycle, you'll see corrections in - what - a few years, maybe?

Had they been errors on Wikipedia he could have fixed them himself immediately. (Then again there would have been more than five errors.)

Advantage: Wikipedia, at least in my opinion.

Saturday Games Roundup

Six friends gathered around a table on a sunny but cold Saturday afternoon... with six (and not 4 or 5) and no desire to split into groups, we eschewed Settlers, Puerto Rico, et al. I'd brought Zertz (exactly two players; you could think of it as Go with training wheels, except that I'm still terrible at it, having only had a chance to play on one occasion) but again, none of us wanted to split into groups if avoidable.

Carcasonne: The other game I'd brought, and I didn't even realize one of the expansions included a sixth color (gray). In a very abstract sense, things you do to succeed in Carcasonne resemble things you do to succeed in business: Find something that helps you but also helps someone else (so you're both motivated to help each other); play moves that accomplish two or more seemingly unrelated things at once...

Of course you can't make this too literal. I'm not sure there's a real life situation where the rule of thumb should be anything like "Wait until the geography is stable, then put your big dude on a pasture and let the (f)arms race begin."

For that matter, I don't know if 6-player games should use the big dude, at least not without removing some little dudes. Meeple scarcity was a non-factor. Maybe just as well. Wide disparity of Carcasonne experience among the players. I won easily, though nontrivial good fortune contributed to the "easily" part and maybe even the "won" part.

Canadian Fish
(This game and the one below it are described here.)

All six of us were relatively new to this one, unless someone was hiding it really well. Even comparatively I was terrible at it. Fun, but very taxing.

Napoleon
Bidding to win all 16 face cards is fraught, if it turns out the kitty has enough face cards that you have to discard two trumps just to keep all 16 face cards available. Sure, I could have switched the trump suit from hearts (KQ obviously the A would be secretary) to diamonds (AKQ), with the slight problem that it's impossible to win 17 face cards if there are only 16 in the deck.

Then two people had to leave and the remaining four were 30-45 minutes away from having to leave, not quite enough time for a well-played strategy game.

No-limit hold em
Always with the poker. Details in the Extended Entry, maybe. What intrigues me here is that now when we think of poker we naturally think of money. I don't think anyone considered putting hard currency on Carcasonne or the other card games (would it even feel right), and yet for the poker it made perfect sense for four Lincolns to assemble for allocation to the winners.

Long story short we completed a four-player no-limit "tournament" in 16 minutes. (60 chips/player, blinds starting at 1/2 and going up at regular time intervals.)

Several hours and a totally different set of friends later, at a dinner party...

The '80s Game
Interesting premise but literally the worst set of trivia questions I've ever seen. Naming music albums or the actors who played minor characters is fine, but you shouldn't have in the same set a question that asks "This legislative body..." and mentions the president and the Supreme Court in the text of the question. We took to renaming the Events category "Congress."

I know people who could write much better '80s trivia than this. IP law is even favorable if you're careful, but then I suppose card stock is costly if you lack economies of scale.

More on the poker: Player to my left raised me all-in with (it turns out) an outside straight draw on a Kxx flop. I called him immediately with KQ suited, placing him on a worse kicker. (He raised a bit too nervously to have AK or better.) We might have both had running flush draws but the last two cards didn't change anything and I had him covered.

Player who'd been across from me (and now to my left) is someone I've never been in a pot with in a larger tournament. I perceive him to play tightly and I'd never had good cards in a larger tournament on a hand where he bet or called. (Also we'd never both been part of an endgame of three or fewer players; there was that time we were in the top four together, but the other two were the big stack and a player we both thought was really bad.)

Anyhow, this setting was the perfect time to get in some hands with him, and raise him all in whenever he bet, precisely because he'd bet. (I don't mean do that with nothing but... well, if you care enough about poker to be reading this at all, you sort of know what I mean.) And no nervous pauses before the raise - you really have to channel Norm Macdonald's impression of Burt Reynolds as a celebrity Jeopardy! contestant and raise all-in very brusquely.

K8x flop (king-high flops were the theme of the day apparently), I raised him all-in with second pair and a flush draw; he folded.

Later, K98 flop, I raised him all in with 98 and he called with Kx. Nothing helped him.

Then the showdown hand was my 3's vs. Ax (x > 3) and no help.

Smoke Rings in the Dark

He "gave in" (his words).

I wonder why a particular set of my colleagues have overwhelmingly clustered the titles of their new weblogs towards the same part of the alphabet. Probably just a coincidence, but if you're looking for any particular contributor to this org, if he or she has a blog at all, it's probably under "S" or "T".

Trivia From The Vault

"Sorry, just not material I want to ask at the ICT" --R.

NAQT's loss (from, what 4.5 years ago?) is your gain. Comment if you know 'em.

Guinness Records decided in September 2000 to split its "Most Downloaded Woman" distinction between free web sites and pay sites. For 15 points each--name:

A. The longtime holder of the free title, whose images in lingerie and bikini wear were seen by 53 million between April 1999 and April 2000.

B. The web entrepreneur whose nude images attracted 240 million downloads in 1999, most of them for a small fee.

Unfortunate Comment on a Long-Rejected Question

I think this is slightly hard and really bland. People will know immediately that the answer is one of those missing people, but won't know who at the end. (I also suspect that this case hasn't gotten too much attention outside of San Francisco.) I also tend to dislike "missing person of the week" questions.

Editor shall remain nameless; the answer to the question (written almost two years ago) should be obvious. (The question actually was pretty weak, but it was rejected for entirely the wrong reasons.)

Lyrics Quizzes and Recognition Rounds

First, welcome Joe to the random-shuffle music lyrics quiz genre. (And Greg!)

Be sure to take a look (or a second look, or an nth look) at Joe's songs, David's songs, Mark's songs, Richard and Maribeth's songs, and of course Craig's done it twice. And my own songs (just scroll down, or hit the music category archive).

Everyone in the preceding paragraph stole that bit from Craig, but then Craig stole it from Steve Allen.

Now, the interesting follow-up question specifically for quiz players: Many of you reading this have played Charlie Steinhice's "K-TEL Hell" rounds at TrashMasters. Those of us on the West Coast have done post-tournament music recognition quickies courtesy of Jon Pennington and/or Matt Levine, who might have borrowed the concept from Charlie. (Having never done K-TEL, I don't know how the Berkeley ones differ in format from K-TEL, if at all.)

Of everyone who's posted a lyrics quiz, literally any of us could easily do a post-tournament recognition round, so long as we're willing to bring our computer to the tournament in question and so long as we have decent speakers.

I'm now seriously jonesing to run one myself, tempered by the drawbacks to any particular tournament where I offered my services:
NAQT ICT or HSNCT: I'm going to have so much to do getting these off the ground that organizing a music round will be the last thing I want to add on to the mess -- not to mention making sure with NAQT membership that this was kosher, securing the roomspace, etc.

NAQT SCT: There's a chance I can get away with flying down to LA Saturday morning and flying back Saturday night (need to doublecheck the schedule with USC).

[Random West Coast invitational.] I have no idea what's coming up this semester but will keep eyes and ears open. Hmm, will Berkeley host ACF Regionals again? Ooh, I just remembered a mildly amusing piece of West Coast gossip that'd mean nothing to most of you but edify the people to whom I'm about to e-mail it...

Anyhow, if you were reading at or playing at one of the above, and an ad hoc music recognition thing were offered up right as the tournament proper ended, would you be in on it?

An Ironic Defense of Wikipedia

All week in blog and/or geek circles there's been running debate on how useful or how (un)trustworthy Wikipedia is. All week I've thought I'd mention this when I got around to it.

Here's the critical article a co-founder wrote and the ensuing Slashdot thread. Meanwhile, Jeff Jarvis is an ardent defender.

Now the somewhat ironic part: Glenn Reynolds took issue with the Instapundit Wikipedia entry, yet by the time I saw his post both the major factual error and the weird content had been removed from that entry.

On balance, any particular entry in Wikipedia is generally accurate and highly useful. Any particular single fact in Wikipedia should be treated as suspect and not relied on without a corroborating source, your personal knowledge and common sense, or both. (There's that old Reagan arms control quote of a (possibly apocryphal) Russian proverb, "Trust but verify.")

By the way, have YOU ever added or edited a Wikipedia entry? Speak up if you have. I've edited (two entries: one a random typo fix, one a clarification on a subject near and dear to me), never added.

Medicine By The Book

This is fascinating. Most medical emergencies are situations where the best treatments are pretty well agreed-on. You'd think there'd be a checklist to go through, to make sure heart attack patients get aspirin, elderly get pneumonia vaccines, and so on. But apparently there isn't.

Anyhow, hospitals that made a point of training doctors and nurses to follow standard procedures saw a 40% drop in mortality. Reminds me of when I roomed with someone whose boyfriend was an EMT. Very life-or-death job, but he said it wasn't stressful because the procedures to follow were so tightly defined that going through the list was neither physically nor mentally taxing.

Assigned this to category "QuizBowl" because of a sudden memory of a discussion thread from ten years ago where I vehemently defended this company for writing questions where the answer nearly always turned out to be "the obvious choice" from among the possibilities* that the early clues might make you think of. I strongly argued that anticipation is not only a skill, but directly applicable to real life, that in some situations it really is very important to make the "obvious" diagnosis quickly.

(Better still to have contextual reasons to make a good decision on whether the obvious answer is the right answer, and when it actually wouldn't be, but that's a major theory-of-quiz-bowl digression.)

*- As in different people, different works, different places, or different things, NOT as in figuring out whether the answer will be a person, place, or thing. The pronouns should always make it obvious what TYPE of answer is sought, but from among instances of that type there can be many choices. If the question is implicitly about a Russian composer, will it turn out to be Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Moussorgsky, Shostakovich, or Glinka?

Trashmasters

Speaking of Coen's Knoxville mention, how'd Trashmasters go? Sure I could look all over the web for various pieces of feedback. Then again, you could all just come here and save me the trouble.

As usual my thinly-veiled real reason for asking is did they use my questions and were they any good?

The One Who Beat The One Who Beat Ken

So if you don't watch Jeopardy! but do watch various other talk shows, then this week you saw a lot of KJ as well as a fair amount of Ms. Zerg, arguably the most famous exactly-one-time champion ever.

You would have apparently seen absolutely none of the wealth management analyst from New Rochelle, NY, who through yesterday's broadcasts was reigning champion. Granting small sample size, she's pretty good. I'd join her fan club.

Post Mortem

One of the Harvard teams wrote a Bastogne question for some Terrier Tussle that I edited (possibly the February 1997 one). Until then, despite being the son of a proud owner of the Patton movie, I had no idea what that place was actually named. (I knew all about "Nuts" etc.) At the time I actually wondered whether the question was too hard aside from a lame Bastogne/Boston punnish giveaway (possibly added by me).

Obviously I've known Bastogne ever since then, but still... didn't actually "learn" it until law school (obviously not in the classroom).

Had no idea on the French hat thing.

To borrow an insider meme, at least 25% of high school quiz teams would miss H&R Block on the clues given. I knew it pretty confidently (or rather, would know it so confidently even aside from Internet gossip) but only because my mom worked for H&R Block for several years.

I and 80% of you readers knew Turner Field, Joe Louis Arena, and Nassau Coliseum stone cold. Then 10% of you would have no idea, unless you not only were prepping for a game show but also had the presence of mind to think of this as an askable thing/category. Odds of it coming up are so low that it probably wouldn't have been worth your time to learn these if they didn't come naturally to you.

Give Me Money, At No Cost To You

(By the way, you should also [definitely not] click on one [any] of those Google ads at the top of this page nearly every time you visit. I'm far too vain to solicit money from you, but if you like what I write, why not [please don't] enrich me? So far, I don't think I've even earned enough to do anything useful at Starbucks.)

Instead of typing "amazon.com" into your address bar, you should use this link, thereby indirectly making my trivia company more profitable (and even more indirectly enriching me).

Same link is coming soon to both the left nav bar here and my Geocities page.

Redundant Stalking

(Redundant because it seeks information that I've long since already known.)

I wonder how many people have landed here via this Google search.

(I'm also surprised at who in particular doesn't show up very high in these results.)

Trivia Quote Of The Day

As sent to me in an e-mail, Saturday, January 31, 2004, 22:56:22 -0800 (PST) [whatever that means; I forget whether Yahoo! servers are on PST or GMT].

"It would be pretty cool to break the old 5-day limit, but I have to admit, I am keeping my expectations a little lower."

Zero points for identifying who wrote this and about what.

Today's TrashMasters Spoiler

It says here that 30 Years of Adventure: A Celebration of D&D contains a foreward by Vin Diesel.

Vin Diesel?!

Grammatical Construction Of the Day

Tonight I received an e-mail with a grammatically correct sentence containing the phrase "I now consider myself to have been being [adjective]".

Knowing vs. Reckoning

Kudos to Joe for finding the perfect vocabulary to present a distinction that's been on my mind ever since getting deeply into quiz bowl.

For what it's worth, I'm a bigger fan of the reckoning side of things than nearly anyone else I know in this context. I especially enjoy those situations where getting a quiz question (especially a bonus part) right will lead someone to exclaim, "Well solved!"

The main downside to reckoning situations is when you fall into the Trivial Pursuit pitfall of making the reckoning too easy. (Their questions are clue-sparse enough that it's hard to hit the sweet spot: Either it's too obvious, or you get left hanging with one of those "Throw me a frickin' bone?!?" questions.)

The Politics of The Incredibles

This has been discussed on a whole lot of weblogs including your own (for some of you readers), but nowhere as incisively as by Richard.

"Exactly what is the point of Dash collecting trophies by competing against non-superpowered individuals, while actually running far below his real limits in order to avoid suspicion? Should he continue to add to the trophy case by running against younger kids as well? Disabled kids maybe?"

So here I suppose the question is whether there's a discrete (as in "not-continuous"; I don't mean discreet as in "avoid suspicion") act of "using" his superpowers? If so, then it'd be easy, just don't go into superpower mode. But otherwise... if it just happens to be that his talent is that great...

Instead of track meets against kids his age, Dash should be running track against high school or college kids, in my opinion. (This is all really hypothetical, since of course Dash's speed advantage over other people grossly exceeds the speed gap among real humans of a given age group.)

I actually lived through something like this in ninth grade, competing in a goofy quiz-bowl format set up for 8th and 9th graders (most of the competing schools were in districts were 8th and 9th were at the same school; ours was a district where middle school ended at 8th and h.s. started at 9th). They'd have 16 short tossup questions in each of five categories, one of which was math (i.e. computation).

Most of the time I could have gotten all 16 math questions myself (of course that means not only getting it right but also getting it first). I'm 90% sure I was literally never beaten to a math question that I attempted. But for reasons that are hard to fully explain, I always "tanked" three or four questions per math round (didn't bother solving them or ringing in; I can't remember whether I wrote on the scratch paper to keep up appearances), as much as anything to avoid looking like a freak. In hindsight I wish I hadn't. Still, we were never in serious danger of losing a match.

For some reason I never felt comfortable just flat out dominating a quiz game in high school. (Who knows how good a college player I could've been without that compunction...) Then my junior year, Eric B's senior year, he really did make The Leap as a player. There was one particular format (at Oklahoma State) where he got each of the first eight or nine questions against us, fast enough that I was nowhere near the right answer most of the time when he rang in. At the time I felt a near-homicidal rage (not as much of an exaggeration as I'd have liked it to be); now of course, I'm quite proud to be part of the same quiz outfit with Eric.

Back to Richard, and a point so brilliant (and so impossible to disagree with) that I can't believe nobody else has brought this up:
"Supposing it were possible for say, Orville and Wilbur Wright to keep the secret of the airplane to themselves, and just use it on a personal level to fight crime as the Amazing Flying Duo, does anyone really think that would have been desirable? For anyone?"

The Effect on Marketing of Internal Criticism

Mark Cuban has been fined by the NBA for comments he made on his own weblog (at least that's what he himself says; I have no sense of how widely sports media outlets have reported this).

I presume the offensive comments are in the paragraph that begins, "Tuesday is when it gets real. I won’t say what i really think about the genius that started the season on election day since it’s probably the same person that started the season on Halloween in previous years. There’s only a presidential election 1x every 4 years. We start on that day..Genius." [etc.]

He asks, himself,
"Do the customers and fans of the NBA or other leagues, feel it makes the league appear stronger, weaker or unaffected when a player, owner, coach, GM, or executive publicly criticizes the league?"

My real reason for caring about this question has to do with quiz-bowl, more specifically NAQT. We have a fundamentally different situation there: "Customers" aren't game spectators but rather game participants.

I actually really like to see constructive criticism from players and coaches, even if (especially if?) it's in a public forum. Tells us what we need to improve on. My guess is that how such criticism affects customers depends on two things:
1. Their esteem for the people making the criticism.
2. How effectively "we" respond to it.

As for internal criticism (of us, by "us") gone public, I think this would adversely affect customer esteem. Not enough to justify a league fining an owner, but enough that the highest-profile of "us" know better. (Individual member blogs can be found here, here, here, and here (and of course what you're reading right now), maybe others I don't know about.)

I worry a bit about people who don't actually speak for NAQT, but who are high-profile enough that someone might get the impression that they do. Only a little bit, though.

20 Things About Los Angeles

To journalists it's a "three-dot" column. (Sentences strung together by ellipses to mask their lack of cohesion, or even lack of coherence.) To Cooch it's the preferred way to sum up a trip if you're too busy to write a true travelogue. Now I get to borrow the format myself.

1. If that's what traffic was like on the 101 at 1:30 Saturday afternoon or 6:30 Saturday evening, I'd hate to see the weekday morning or afternoon commute times.

2. But I do really like Los Angeles driving. The signage is highly informative; the other drivers are courteous and attentive. If you need to merge they'll let you, but they won't waste their own time or the time of drivers behind them.

3. Julia's brother, sister-in-law, niece, and nephew are all just the best.

4. Da Ali G Show is hilarious but hard to sit through. It's as if Sascha Cohen decides to hold onto a joke as long as he possibly can just to maximize the discomfort. Like Maribeth I watched a whole lot of the same show the day before TRASH Regionals. For quiz purposes our experiences were about equally useful.

5. They have Panda Express in at least one of the main places-to-stop-for-food along Interstate 5. Come to think of it, I was in the mood for some semblance of Chinese food, particularly the "orange-flavored chicken." (Panda does this so well, yet I've literally never had a satisfying experience with either orange or lemon chicken at any other Chinese fast food place, nor any "real" Chinese place.) What would it take to package Indian food or Thai food in such a way that you could have ubiquitous and uniform franchise at every highway exit and restaurant-theater-industrial complex in America? Could you put yellow curry in one of those squirt bottles Taco Bell uses for sour cream?

6. Julia's right that the Coffee Bean is way better than Starbucks, especially the "black forest" iced coffee drink.

7. Satya, just east of the Caltech campus, remains unparalelled among Thai places; Richard and Maribeth remain unparalelled among potential dining companions for lunch at a Thai place.

8. We went 4-6 "the easy way" at TRASH Regionals. Eight teams total. Two I knew going in were clearly better than us. I thought going in that more than one would be clearly worse than us, but at most one actually was (and even the team we beat twice, one of those wins was on the last question). Anyhow, we were in the process of laying an egg in the round robin, then picked up the last game and swept the bottom bracket.

9. Quiz experience that's never fun: You're facing a team that you assume isn't as good as you (though of course that assumption could be just wrong). First question, your team gets a neg on a perfectly reasonable buzz; other team gets the tossup and 30's the bonus. Rest of the game your team gets the lion's share of the tossups but can't convert enough on the bonuses to build your lead up to anywhere near a comfort zone. This is probably a serious personality flaw, the sort of thing that would show up in psychological profiling and deep-six my NFL or military officer career, but in those situations I easily slip into "play not to lose" mode.

10. Do you buzz more or less aggressively depending on the perceived quality of your opponent? One of the two best teams rolled over us in our match, but in the process they took a lot of negs where if they understood the limits of their opponents' knowledge base, they wouldn't have rung in nearly so early. Fortunate for them that their run of negs didn't correlate with a pack full of Stuff We Know (rather than Stuff They Know). I suppose if you're a really really good team, whose long-run goal is a national championship, if you start thinking too hard about your opponents you'll fall into bad habits, "sitting on" tossups and so on, that'll bite you against your fellow juggernauts.

11. Three of my own negs were against the team that ultimately won the whole thing (without much surprise). I took some chances and if they'd come out right... well, we'd have still lost, given how that round ended up, but I know we couldn't have beaten that team playing passively.

12. The scorekeeper that round mistakenly gave at least two of my negs to Maribeth, for what it's worth (which she and I agreed was close to zero).

13. With statkeeping like that, I take my 5th place finish in individual stats (round robin portion) with a grain of salt. Take the 2nd place finish in individual stats (if you count all 10 rounds, which they didn't for all the right fairness and opponent-quality issues) with an even bigger grain of salt.

14. Very first tossup of the first round of the tournament... I don't want to spoil it in case these questions will still be used somewhere. Suffice to say I got it. Come to think of it, I think I've gotten the first tossup of the first game in N straight of the TRASH Regionals I've played in.

15. I also relished winning the first-clue buzzer race on a tossup with some pr0n content, then hearing the other player curse that he'd been beaten to it. (Though rather than frequenting the racy stuff ourselves, I suspect Paul and I both knew the answer based on seeing the same story here.)

16. At least one question involved material that was the subject of argumentative comments on this blog between myself and a TRASH author. (Not even CE/politics stuff.) It was high-profile enough material that really anyone in TRASH could have written that question; no idea who actually did.

17. This would have boggled my mind from the Boston University days, but I was on a team that "lamed" a sports bonus to get to a science fiction bonus (obviously we didn't know what the next bonus would be), then got 30 points of stone-cold knowledge on the sci-fi (not sure how stone-cold it was, though Richard had no doubt of any of the answers). We would have likely had zero on the sports bonus, or 20 fewer than if I'd paid better attention to some particular Bill Simmons columns.

18. Only once the whole tournament did we get 30 points on bonus where I had to say out loud, "Wow - we didn't deserve that." It was a baseball question, where maybe my background/bias leads me to think of baseball questions as too easy.

19. One of USC's players played quiz-bowl for Harvard at the same time I did (at most my freshman and sophomore year, maybe just my freshman year), yet embarrassingly I had no memory of him. Not until he mentioned Jordan a couple times did I finally vaguely place him. (And then there's As [pronounced "Oz"], whom of course I remember, and who was one of the readers this weekend.)

20. When one of our players dropped out at the last minute, my attempts to convince Julia to play with us failed. (Instead, she spent time with her niece and nephew Sunday, which worked out extremely well as their parents could go out of the house and be kid-free for awhile.) Just as well, since there was nowhere near as much Julia-friendly retro pop culture content as I'd have hoped for.

Google As A Form Of Caller ID

Someone attempting to lure convention business to San Jose called me just now. She (from the web hits I presume it's a "she") didn't leave a message.

In fairness, I knew the area code of the number on caller ID that the call originated from San Jose. Given some e-mails I sent last night (to cities all around the U.S.), I could easily guess the nature of the call. But it's just really nifty to confirm this via Google and still have a chance to pick up had I so desired.

(I'm not yet ready to talk to people live; want to see who-all responds in the first 24 hours and with what, then first thing next week let the phone calls commence.)

Also in the appropriate e-mail inbox is an 18K message with the subject line "Pittsburgh, PA." My guess is this tells me all the wonderful things about Pittsburgh, of which (for my purposes) arguably the most wonderful is just the proximity of Dwight and his peeps. What visiting high school players would do for fun in Pittsburgh I don't know (I'm sure there're things - If Kansas City has the "Worlds Of Fun" waterpark then surely Western PA has a good comp to that - just not things I'm personally aware of yet).

So these Convention and Visitor's Bureau web sites are comfortingly similar. In all cases I am a "Meeting Planning Professional," even though really I'm just amateur. I'm surprised at how many of these sites openly encourage random Internet users to send them e-mail with attachments. Couldn't someone find a way to mask a nasty virus under the .doc extension and ruin it for us all?

Not that I mind, of course. My doc is spiffy, at least I'd like to think so. Much better to attach the doc than to type the same repetitive doesn't even capture the flavor of the event basic into into the same web forms -- or worse yet have to sign up for one of those excuse-to-spam-you web sites.