The Quizbowl Resource Center

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I bring forth the example of Grant May, who was president of 6 clubs (Quiz Bowl, Science Olympiad, Debate, Newspaper, French, and German) his senior year. He managed to be insanely good at Debate, pretty good at quiz bowl and Science Olympiad, and produce a decent newspaper.

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David McCullough is really good. I'm not just saying that because he graduated from my school. Otherwise, that massive 3 part Shelby Foote Civil War series is pretty good. I can't say I've actually made it through all of the books, but I read about half of the first one, and it was very helpful.

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Textbooks tend to have just masses of useless stuff in them, while review books tend to be more stripped down. Maybe this is just a personal preference, but I really don't need to know what life was like in Miami in the 1990s ( The Enduring Vision taught me all about that). I'm just not a big fan of...

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I like using SAT II books, AP books, my old textbooks, and somewhat more specific works I have. For example, I have a large reference work on the Civil War. The first 2 of those are really only suitable for high school, but my textbook goes a little bit farther. Lots of libraries also have encyclope...

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This is simple: Matt doesn't want to bother with having a 300 post argument about high and low culture. Also, the last time I talked about opera with a non quiz bowler was in July. The last time I talked about rap was 5 minutes ago when I compared the relative merits of Black Thought and Chali 2na. ...

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cvdwightw wrote:NEW DISTRIBUTION

I heartily endorse this event or product.

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Unless you are playing ISHA format with 4/4 compmath per round, then your time would be best spent learning about literature, science, history, fine arts, social science, and RMP. Is that good enough justification? I'd be more than willing to let you have the 2/2ish that shows up in a NAQT round in ...

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One problem that I had with Mr. Reinstein's questions was that they still seemed to reward the quicker calculator over the more knowledgable mathematician. The stronger mathematician could take the first clue and slog through the math required to answer it, while a weaker mathematician could wait a ...

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12. One early author of this type spoke Oscan and wrote his Annales in Saturnian meter, while another feuded with Metelli and wrote the Bellum Poenicum. In addition to Ennius and Naevius, they included one who discussed the Catalinian conspiracy, Sallust, as well as Suetonius. One noted writer of t...

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Things to do before posting: look at the set so I don't sound like an idiot! The Cesaire Africa flip flop was a result of the poetry course I took last trimester where we grouped him with African poets. I agree with Daichi on the common link thing. Both archaeology and historians were laterable and ...

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I don't really have a problem with what was asked in the world lit distro. I have more of a problem with what wasn't asked. Other than Achebe, I can't think of any African lit tossups. You could probably get away with Cesaire, Gordimer, Soyinka, Coetzee (or Disgrace ), Fugard (or "Master Harold...

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Carey...isn't that hard for an Austrailian author. Either Carey or Oscar and Lucinda is way too hard. Both of those are either hardish hard parts or insane middle parts. Carey isn't well known enough to justify both him and a work of his showing up in a bonus. Also, I loved the insane difficulty of...

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This tournament was awesome. I'm willing to forgive some repeats, because, to paraphrase Meryl, Andy attempted to replicate Gilgamesh's feat of staying up for seven days, and because everything was really well written. Kudos to Andy, Kyle, and everyone else who did anything. Once I actually bother t...

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The way I see it, you can either use problems with higher barriers to entry (calculus), or problems that will merely test the fastest calculator (Kyle is painting a room...). Neither of these are desirable, because the first option does not allow anyone who hasn't taken the course to answer the ques...

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After having played (and lost badly to) Brookwood B yesterday, I can say with certainty that Brookwood is really good. If I remember correctly, their A team was able to do win a game of two in a very competitive top bracket.

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elitism - 1. The belief that certain person or members of certain classes or groups deserve favored treatment. 2a . The sense of entitlement enjoyed by such a group or class. b. Control, rule, or domination by such a group or class. I fail to see how this applies, except for maybe in that many peop...

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I have to commend Ted for the inclusion of multiple jazz tossups. While I'm no expert on jazz, I was very excited to hear it come up. The Lepanto tossup was pretty nifty, except the Cervantes clue came up way too early. All 6 hands in the room I was in hit the buzzer upon his mention. However, the S...

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Upon second reading, I'm an idiot. Not really a complaint at all, more of a factual statement. I guess what I was trying to say is that I shouldn't get computer science, but I take any points I can get, so, once again, I'm an idiot. Move along, nothing to see here.

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The Oregon bonus was a little odd what with its trash/geography conflation. I think I would have thirtied it (it wasn't my bonus) based on knowlege of Oregon trail (Willamette) and watching Pac-10 football (Eugene and Corvallis). Yeah. I went through the exact same process, except I got the bonus. ...

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I liked: My Last Duchess, Lee Harvey Oswald getting shot by Jack Ruby (my favorite), Scotland, the riot bonus, Alger Hiss, the Dirty War/Peron/Falklands War bonus, Rastafarianism, Octaivio Paz, The Great Fire of London, The Sorrows of Young Werther, Guy du Maupassant, Plains of Abraham, Li Po, Sarge...

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I obviously have no experience with your situation, Ian, but, just looking at it from the perspective of tight fisted administrators, I'm not sure if that will work. I could see them saying, "Why do you need two clubs, when you could just combine them?". If you have a really good rationale...

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More relevantly to this discussion, I think it's an empirical fact that more high school quizbowl players know trivia like "there is some place in Russia called Nizhny Novgorod that was renamed for some writer named Gorky" than know anything whatsoever about Gorky's literary works. I stil...

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Hey Lily Chen,
You're pretty cool for making this.

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I'd venture to say that The Lower Depths is less obsure than the geography clue. Like, it is a really important work of Russian literature, and Ninzhy Novogord isn't a tremendously important Russian city.

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Trevor et al.,
Thanks for a good tournament. Easily one of the best quiz bowl experiences I've had.

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Hey State College,
You don't need all 5 of those teams, do you?

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I mean, okay, the second are better if you don't like trash , like me, but they certainly aren't really distinct in theory, right? Just translate teams somewhat in ability and it's not meaningfully different to have a different-subject giveaway and for a question to have a different-subject middle ...

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Are you talking about those tossups that cruise along for like 3 lines with clues generally on literature or history or whatever and then devolve into "name this European country, home of Rammstein and Kraftwerk"? Or are you talking about common link-y tossups that incorporate just about e...

Terrible Shorts Depot · Re: DATE CHANGE: Billy Joel Comedy Subtitle (11/15/08) Count me in.

Count me in.

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I'd be willing to play RMPfest, but I don't know what time we are leaving. So, if the times work out, I'll play. If not, I'll staff or something until I have to leave. I kinda suck at all three of those things, but I'm eager to learn.

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I would probably play (assuming I can get to wherever it is), mostly because I'm down for anything. I was just wondering if there was any sort of demand.

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Find me 11 skilled high school geography players. Seriously.

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History would probably get really high demand. In fact, I'm demanding it right now. High school quiz bowl doesn't really need more geography.

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If I write a bonus on William Shakespeare and find that 100% of teams are converting Shakespeare, 80% are converting Romeo and Juliet, and 60% are converting King Lear, then it's clearly not a good bonus regardless of how difficult I or anyone else I think it is. On the other hand, if 25% of teams ...

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Shady Side Academy in Pittsburgh, PA is considering holding a tournament using (theoretically) HSAPQ questions on our Senior School campus in Fox Chapel (a Pittsburgh suburb) on January 10, 2008. Would any of you consider attending? If you have any questions, you can post them here in this thread or...

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Part of me wants to say that easy parts should be harder, because some of them are insanely easy. Some are so simple that I would be shocked if anyone gets it wrong. However, some people do get them wrong, which leads me to the other part. We don't want to discourage teams from playing just because ...

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I second Guy's point. I'd prefer mid to late June (as opposed to May or early June), just because I want to be done with high school before I jaunt off for weekends of quiz bowl goodness.

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I think that both of Mike's posts are spot on. The idea of deconstructing questions is very good, because not only does it give people an idea of clue placement relative to other clues, it gives them an idea of what goes into a question. Lists are a nice way to start out and get some points, but the...

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Get a frequency list and go through it explaining the plot and whatnot of each work. Delve into the other works of the authors on the list. Don't bother with Andric; deal with the masters. It isn't too hard to get a basic grasp on easy lit, because there isn't a huge set of authors who come up all t...

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Let's not try and destroy NAQT. They do lots of good things. From personal experience, I've found that A sets are worse written than IS sets, and IS sets are written more poorly than the HSNCT. My point is that as the difficulty goes up, the quality goes up. The way I was told to deal with A sets wh...

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I would be interested in playing. Will it be singles/doubles/triples/quads? Also, what time do you think that it will end (flights need to be booked)?

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We will bring a buzzer.

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If you have a local TV tournament, you can contact the producer of it for a list of the schools that play in it and their contacts. If anyone is dying for a list of Western PA contacts, I can probably provide it. Otherwise, good people to contact are gifted coordinators or people who serve a similar...

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The thing that makes the works that come up in quizbowl important is almost unequivocally the work-in-the-world, and not the work-in-some-point-in-history. Harry Potter-in-the-world is children's fantasy literature which has little academic relevance. Ragged Dick-in-the-world is a text that informs...

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Winning some sort of big timey prize (Nobel, Pulitzer, Booker) should be good enough to get you consideration in the lit distribution. However, if it is one of the latter two of the aforementioned prizes, much more caution must be used, because those are far more ephemeral and do not focus upon the ...

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I wouldn't say that Brisingr and Twilight are inherently trivial (they are, however, inherently bad). They are definitely non-academic and non-literary, but they are not unaskable (but they must be trash). On that note, what makes someone askable under the literature distribution? Do the Nobel and t...

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Since I live in a quiz bowl desert that is 4 hours from everything, I have yet to attempt some sort of 18 round quiz bowl marathon. That doesn't mean I don't want to, though. In fact, if someone will direct me to a tournament that has more than 15 or 16 rounds of play in a day, I would definitely at...

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I think that a good way to convince this new coach to let EP go to U of M tournaments would be to mention that Gautam is an EP alum. This would allow the coach to have a known quantity as a contact at U of M.

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I'm not sure what sports you all are playing, but I've never experienced temporary blindness or vomiting after quiz bowl. Mental fatigue does exist, however.

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Trivia is usually worthless/ interesting only in that it is quirky. For example, knowing that elephants can't jump is trivia, but knowing the difference between Indian and African elephants isn't. There is a qbwiki article on the topic here.

Woohoo! 100th post.

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