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Lagotto Romagnolo

The set is clear. Mods, you can make these threads public.

Lagotto Romagnolo

The hardest I've ever laughed at a quizbowl tournament was at the 2009 Tyrone Slothrop lit singles. After the question on Slothrop himself (which clued many of the more grotesque scenes from Gravity's Rainbow), our room giggled. Then, just as we quiet down, we hear several people laughing the next r...

Lagotto Romagnolo

Mike Bentley doesn't get enough love. He's invested so much time into PACE, and the organization would not be where it is now were it not for him. He's written countless questions pro bono. That, and his work spreading quizbowl in the Pacific Northwest.

Lagotto Romagnolo

YES! Sign me up.

Lagotto Romagnolo

Also represents his thoughts on the rebracketing process at Lederberg 2.

Lagotto Romagnolo

A notice on the door of the control room at FICHTE 2 @ Illinois.

Lagotto Romagnolo

First of all, I most certainly did not gripe about the Messiah tossup on those grounds! I argued only that I was surprised by his choice of lead-ins and middle clues, as I thought they were more well known than they apparently were. That was a fine tossup. I think I am on record in writing as consi...

Lagotto Romagnolo

Philosophical cohesion is a very hard thing to maintain across a tournament of 25 packets, and using it as a filter for rejecting otherwise good questions is a bad editing strategy unless you've got way more time to spend on editing than I do. In fact, the announcement to this tournament explicitly...

Lagotto Romagnolo

I suppose, then, I should get out of the way the category where my objections are strongest: the Music answer-lines had many excellent answer choices (though I might be prejudiced in favor of this, because the sub-distribution seemed heavily skewed in favor of the eras and genres I care about, and ...

Lagotto Romagnolo

The physics in this set was among my favorite of all time. It touched on current hot research areas while at the same time anchoring itself in the core, and never felt overwhelming. Kudos to Jerry for the excellent sense of balance there.

Lagotto Romagnolo

Yale wins the first game, starting match against Penn.

Lagotto Romagnolo

I can't speak for the humanities, but it's worth noting that some areas of research put more restrictions on you than others. If you're a theoretical physicist crafting a new set of equations, you can get a lot of work done with just a few books, even if you're on a 12-hour flight to a conference on...

Lagotto Romagnolo

Graduate school is not a glib proposal. It's something I definitely would not recommend for people who are just "unsure" of what they would do or would need to take out a significant chunk of money in order to do so. .... Undergraduate advisers frequently do their students a disservice by...

Lagotto Romagnolo

RyuAqua wrote:Not every Great Book is actually a great book.

Like Uncle Tom's Cabin and the like? (I'm going off Orwell here). Perhaps some fantasy and sci-fi will become 'lit' with time. I can see Lord Dunsany and Algernon Blackwood getting asked in an academic question.

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The critique of myth is not that the texts are artifacts; it's that they're anachronistic bullshit. The argument that's been put forward in favor of myth is that it has an impact on literature, but the point I made above is that you don't get to then come back and say "this is totally differen...

Lagotto Romagnolo

I'm not a fan of the idea of handing Britain 1/1 of its own history distribution. The reason why literature gets more British content is because as an (unofficially) Anglophone country we're more likely to be studying the original Anglophone literary tradition. But there's no particular reason why ...

Lagotto Romagnolo

Thoughts: 1. I agree with less religion. I have argued that the more interesting, accessible portions of religion can be addressed in myth (the cosmic stories), literature (some texts), social science (thinkers/thought), philosophy (ditto), or geography/other (some practices, tossups on countries o...

Lagotto Romagnolo

vcuEvan wrote:less religion

Any specific reason why?

Lagotto Romagnolo

OK, this makes a lot more sense than what I had in mind, thanks. The only caveat I would have is that your assertion that opera questions are no longer ersatz literature questions with a very small number of music clues thrown in does not seem to be true in my experience. Jacob has a good point her...

Lagotto Romagnolo

I'll try to give some more comments once I see the actual questions, but in the meantime, here's some data on points per bonus from the five regular-difficulty tournaments from this year (note that SUBMIT still has mirrors to run so I omitted it from the second graph). Average PPB from all sites Pen...

Lagotto Romagnolo

In light of recent events, I would like to request that this thread be moved to or copied to the 'Best of the Best' subforum. I will go out on a limb and assume that many others on the forum feel the same.

Lagotto Romagnolo

I wrote that question on the Somme. Sorry if the description wasn't great, but from what I could tell the creeping barrage tactic was really important there and throughout the war. (Note: I am not a military history specialist either)

Lagotto Romagnolo

It seems exceedingly suspicious when the rule has been said to primarily exist because of antipathy towards one specific and often orientalized culture. It is more suspicious when this antipathy is based on perceived "shortcomings" with a culture whose perceived presence fails to trigger ...

Lagotto Romagnolo

Auroni is absolutely right. Just make sure that you don't write submit another question on Central Asia in the world history distribution, if you submit the Great Game bonus as a Euro history question. Likewise, if you want to put an ancient Egypt bonus under 'Classical history' that's probably fine...

Lagotto Romagnolo

Ah, thanks for the reminder. I should be able to re-word that without too much trouble.

Lagotto Romagnolo

gamegeek2 wrote:Sorry that I don't have much more to add, I just wanted to express appreciation after my earlier comments.

I very much appreciate your appreciation. Glad that people have enjoyed the set.

Lagotto Romagnolo

A joke clue like "this French guitarist" (he was better at flute anyways—and he could actually be described accurately as a conductor or music critic) for Berlioz doesn't really help anyone, and, for all I know, could have confused some teams. How is this clue a joke? All the information ...

Lagotto Romagnolo

4. One leader of this dynasty built the palace of Chehel Sotoun, and the traveller Jean Chardin published an account of the coronation of another leader of this dynasty. This dynasty traced its origins to a mystic order based in the town of Ardabil, which was led by such men as Joynad and Haydar. T...

Lagotto Romagnolo

EDIT: and yes, I understand that trash taste is subjective blah blah, but who in 2013 cares or thinks about the Battlestar Galactica reboot or a song off of American Idiot? Enough people for both of those to get powered in several rooms, that's who. 1) It really struggled with clarity about what is...

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MorganV wrote:Kay Li and I did not play the Round 1 game against MSU B so we should each have one fewer game played

Fixed.

Lagotto Romagnolo

Cheynem wrote:Is that because Auroni is a subaltern?

Perhaps, but my joke was referring to this

Lagotto Romagnolo

Well this is a surprising twist. Two days since the tournament and not a single music comment (is that a good thing?). I have mixed thoughts about Auroni's argument regarding those types of giveaways. I agree that some of those questions may have been a bit too top-heavy, thus leading to more buzzer...

Lagotto Romagnolo

-van Dyck was Flemish and notably NOT an Englishman, though he spent a lot of time there. Yeah, I made that edit to one of our docs in Google Drive but it didn't make it to the final packet; sorry about that. Here are the questions on topology and pions: 12. One of the most celebrated results of th...

Lagotto Romagnolo

madviking wrote: I was just wondering if there was a place to talk about the tournament? I have some questions about some of the tossups.

In the private forum. Go to your user control panel and request to join the "DRAGOON Discussion"

Lagotto Romagnolo

-I think the Cyprus question mentioned Guy of Lusignan way too early. Agreed, we fixed that for the Sunday mirror. -I don't know if tossing up the Rig Veda is a good idea at this difficulty level because of the restricted answerspace on non-epic Hindu religious texts (i.e. I don't think the Upanish...

Lagotto Romagnolo

Was the PAC/soft money/527s bonus classified as CE? Yes, that was CE (or general knowledge, if you prefer). 1. This tournament felt very "regular" in that there weren't a whole lot of cool answerlines or real difficulty outliers. This was good in the sense that there weren't a whole lot o...

Lagotto Romagnolo · Re: DRAGOON @ Illinois (11/16/13) Stats are here

Stats are here

Lagotto Romagnolo

We'd like to extend our thanks to our corps of playtesters: Tristan Willey, Zack Moser, Greg Baboukis, Alex Pandya, Alex Fregeau, anyone I'm forgetting, and especially Mike Sorice, who provided invaluable help balancing out the difficulty and overall quality of the tournament.

Lagotto Romagnolo

The Two Hearts of Kwasi Boachi wrote:I loved the KGB/NKVD/Cheka bonus, since we went over all of those at various points in my classes.

So people have heard of the Cheka. Glad you enjoyed it!

Lagotto Romagnolo

This is probably the best post I've seen anywhere about writing music questions. This part deserves special emphasis: I think the number one problem players without much knowledge of music have is thinking that good music questions need to include music theory or score clues. I agree that when score...

Lagotto Romagnolo

This is probably the best post I've seen anywhere about writing music questions. This part deserves special emphasis: I think the number one problem players without much knowledge of music have is thinking that good music questions need to include music theory or score clues. I agree that when score...

Lagotto Romagnolo

It's irrelevant? Matt, I think he means irrelevant to the announcement thread for the MFT mirror. I won't go into "don't use that tone" territory, but I agree that such a comment would be more relevant in another thread, i.e. one that actually discusses Princeton's high school tournaments.

Lagotto Romagnolo

I really apreciated those warnings before tossups with multiple answers and important italicized words; I'll need to start doing that more. Well done. My comments: -No matter what the world or the dictionary says, that bonus on chords was a pleasure to read. -the NOT tossup was a well-executed idea ...

Lagotto Romagnolo

We found a red, blue, and green jacket after the tournament with the words 'Respect the Game' on the back. Please send me a PM if this is yours. Thanks!

Lagotto Romagnolo

Nothing else is protestable, including but not limited to: judgment calls of any kind such as calling time, whether a tossup had begun before an accidental buzz as described in E.11, whether verbal conferring occurred, or the failure of the question to require a prompt on an opposing team’s answer....

Lagotto Romagnolo

The Quest for the Historical Mukherjesus wrote:This tournament will have 12 packets of 21 tossups, and no bonuses.

The Quest for the Historical Mukherjesus wrote:DISTRIBUTION
4/4 Biology
4/4 Chemistry
4/4 Physics
2/2 Earth Science
2/2 Astro
2/2 Computer Science
2/2 Math (Including Applied Math)
1/1 Trash/fun(n)

All teams playing this tournament automatically get 0 PPB!

Lagotto Romagnolo

I can't make it to VCU open but I'd love to co-write a packet. Send me a message if you're playing this and know about Arrested Development.

EDIT: Shan and I are now writing a packet.

Lagotto Romagnolo

For those who are curious, a team of Raynor Kuang, Sid Dogra, Collin Parks, and Roger Cain defeated a team of myself, Morgan Venkus, "Carson Davis", and Madhav Kumar in a very entertaining all-star game. In light of which, PACE will donate $400 to Amnesty International and $100 to the Ame...

Lagotto Romagnolo

BlueDevil95 wrote:I emailed Aaron Rosenberg yesterday night, and just wanted to make sure he got the email. Norcross WILL be able to attend the NSC. We are looking forward to it!

I received it.

Lagotto Romagnolo

grapesmoker wrote:We did?

Yes, at The Emergency. But most of the people playing that had staffed the NSC that weekend and were thus already used to bouncebacks. So I agree, best not to experiment here.

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