Re: 2012 NAC (or, Part 1 of Why I Staffed the DC Phase)
Posted: Mon Jun 04, 2012 1:42 pm
My one-fiftieth of a dollar on what Sam said about the DC portion of the NAC, from the perspective of a recruited-at-the-last-possible-moment mercenary staffer follows. BTW, Sam, if you want to specifically discuss the questions from the playoff rounds that should be okay (in fact, I‘m going to do so below)…I was given to understand that while the preliminary round questions are the same at all sites (and therefore shouldn‘t be discussed till the Chicago phase is over), the playoff questions are different at each site. Also, I very much appreciate your comments regarding my role at the tournament and am glad that some people noticed that I was trying, as much as I could, to serve as a buffer between Chip and the attending teams and make the tournament as enjoyable and fair as possible for those teams, to the extent of playing Ardsley B in my room in a scrimmage (ended by fire alarm at halftime :/) on questions I hadn’t seen, so that they could get the sixth game that they paid for in despite the fact that their 0-5 opponents decided to sightsee and bail on the last prelim match (which especially sucked considering that Ardsley B had a playoff berth on the line in that last match). As much as possible, I tried to moderate in this tournament in the same manner I did at Atlanta…in an unbiased, no-extraneous-commentary-during-the-game or “I saw you on Jeopardy!” Beallish commentary to players, fashion where we got through the games in a timely and enjoyable manner. Only the players who I moderated for can say if I really succeeded at this, so they’d be the people to ask.
Here, in a nutshell, are the four reasons I staffed this tournament (for the people who have contacted me privately and have, in most cases politely, asked me why the hell I would consider doing such a thing):
1. Brooks Sanders, a close friend and colleague of mine, asked me to do so as a personal favor. (Apparently, last year’s quiz bowl-host contest winner from DC who was supposed to moderate fell ill at the last moment, Chip asked Brooks for advice, and Brooks recommended me.) I didn’t have a whole heck of a lot else planned for the weekend and enjoy moderating quiz bowl tournaments, and Arlington, Virginia is right on the edge of the distance that I will drive to moderate. Plus, on the way I dropped my wife and kids off in southern Pennsylvania and they were able to visit for the weekend with family members of hers that they hadn’t seen in forever. I didn’t staff New Orleans and will not staff Chicago.
2. Without going into specific detail, I’ll say that I was given quite a few more reasons to staff this tournament during the Thursday afternoon phone conversation, all of which had the pictures of Presidents and other prominent figures from early American history on them. All of my expenses were covered on top of that, which, btw, is practically unheard-of for any NAC staffer that is not currently married to Chip Beall. (They are generally paid a stipend, unlike at other national tournaments, but he generally does not pay travel or lodging expenses for his staff, and would probably not have done so for me if he hadn’t been desperate. Similarly, I think he was nicer and more social to me this weekend than he generally is with people for the reason that he knows that I bailed his butt out of a tough situation.) Does that make me a mercenary, even a whore, you might ask? Certainly, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. Thanks at least in part to this tournament, my four young children will now be enjoying their first-ever Disney cruise this summer, and their opinions of Daddy, when it comes down to it, are really the only ones I care about. So I will freely admit that $$$$ had something to do with my attendance at this tournament. As the Million Dollar Man Ted DiBiase used to opine on countless WWF broadcasts, everybody has a price, and NAC met mine.
Look, next year, if the dates work out, I am fully planning to moderate at every major national tournament - NAQT HSNCT, PACE NSC, National History Bee and Bowl (Dave Madden, if you’re reading this, please drop me a line at [email protected] so we can discuss some NHBB matters - for one thing, I’d like to help set up an upstate NY qualifier for next year as well as moderate at your national finals), HSAPQ NASAT (Matt Weiner, same thing…there’s a few things I’d like to discuss with you regarding questions for our upstate tournaments in more detail than we were able to do when we talked in Atlanta)….and NAC. The first four, I do or will do out of love for quiz bowl, and possibly expenses. The NAC…slightly different story, especially after a few things I saw in DC this weekend that I will deal with in Part 2 of this screed.
3. I had written some of the questions used in this year’s tournament. In fact, if you heard a question in the DC playoff phase (Chip told me, without saying why, that he didn’t use any of my stuff in the preliminary rounds) that sounded even vaguely pyramidal, it’s about 80-90% likely it was one of mine…although, when I saw them in their final form, a decent percentage of them had been edited almost to the point that they were unrecognizable.
Some of the ones that I was responsible for (not an exclusive list, since I don’t have a copy of the question sets) at least the original forms of were the playoff questions on (it seems upon looking at the list that they put most of the trashier stuff I wrote at this site rather than the other 2, for some reason…the stuff I submitted that I didn‘t see used in DC and that will be presumably used at other sites was much more academic, as a rule):
- The Death of Ivan Ilyich
- Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Claude Debussy (the one with the lead-in clue about how he was on the French 20-franc banknote before France converted to the Euro)
- Poland (with the lead-in on the Jasna Gora Monastery)
- the question used in the final on Japanese-American internment camps
- the “Losers” bonus in the final - although the 15-point part that High Tech missed about Cy Young having the most career pitcher losses wasn’t my original query…it was originally a 20-point part reading “within 10%, what is the major league record for career pitcher losses”?
- “The Clouds” (semifinal question)
- Ayatollah Khamenei (semifinals)
- Robert Burns
- Falkland Islands (Malvinas) War
- kanji
- Pre-Raphaelite movement
- Kublai Khan (final)
- surfactants (semifinal)
- the warmup round question on prostitutes…the full original version of that one, btw, was “The four main female characters in the 1982 film Doctor Detroit, Kitty Warren in a play by George Bernard Shaw, the five women who appear in a Picasso painting set in Avignon and, according to one controversial public figure, a Georgetown Law student named Sandra Fluke, all share or allegedly share what profession?”
- Ivanhoe
- kiss (used in the final) - “Robert Burns wrote a poem about a “fond” one of these. The longest one in movie history is three minutes and twenty-four seconds, and is found in the 2010 film Elena Undone. It is the action that immediately precedes the movie line, “I know it was you, Fredo. You broke my heart.“ Sculptures by Brancusi and Rodin feature what action, as well a prominent painting by Gustav Klimt?”
- Rochester Royals / Syracuse Nats NBA question, used in the middle school final. BTW, to the guy who protested that St. Louis wasn’t accepted…when the question leadin includes the phrase “1951 NBA Champions”, that automatically eliminates the St. Louis Hawks, who won their only title in 1957. Rochester, at that point, was the only acceptable correct answer until the clues on Syracuse came in a second or two later, and in fact the moderator was instructed to only accept “Rochester” or “Rochester Royals” until he said “1955” (the year the Nats won the NBA title).
- Tchaikovsky (semifinal)
- a bonus round tossup on M*A*S*H that would have been used in the final but wasn’t gotten to: “ In a strange coincidence, the two actors who played the same character in this franchise both died of heart attacks within 24 hours of each other in 1986. One major character in the movie, Duke Forrest, never appears at all on the television show, and another important film character, Oliver Jones, mysteriously disappears after only four episodes of the television series. A mock funeral for a dentist in the film is the only occasion on which we ever hear the lyrics to its famous theme song. What is this franchise based on a novel by Richard Hooker that lasted eight years longer on television than the event it portrays?”
- another unused bonus-round tossup on agnosticism: “A common bumper sticker claiming that the driver is a “militant” one of these exclaims, “I don’t know and you don’t either”. This term was coined in a Metaphysical Society speech by Thomas Henry Huxley in 1869, but precursors of the philosophy behind it are found in the work of Hume, Kierkegaard and Kant. What is this term, from the Greek for “without knowledge”, which posits that the existence or non-existence of a deity is unprovable or unknowable?”
- Mossad (semifinal)…which was edited to make the Stuxnet worm the lead-in clue, and Jason Russell didn’t have the word “Stuxnet” completely out of his mouth in the Ardsley-High Tech semifinal before 8 fingers vigorously hit buzzers, all waiting to answer “Mossad”. The original lead-in as I wrote it was “A technical guru named David Peled in Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six book and video game series is a member of this organization”, which while trashy was at least not the giveaway that “Stuxnet” was.
- United Nations Secretary-General (final)
- View of Delft (semifinal)
- the early-playoff-round tossup on “Guernica” that had the lead-in on the description of it in Our Dumb World. (“accurately depicts the brutal assault on a group of flat-faced weirdos by an army of vicious triangles”)
- and finally, Betty White. (used in the semifinal) They requested trash, so I figured I’d at least try to give them well-constructed trash: “She ranks second all-time to LeVar Burton in number of Winner’s Circle wins on the Dick Clark Pyramid gameshows. She is also the only person to have appeared on all four versions of Password, which is not too surprising since she is the widow of the man who was the original host of that show, Allen Ludden. Name this actress who turned 90 in 2012, a former “Golden Girl” who is also the oldest person to ever guest host Saturday Night Live.”
Would many of these have passed muster at HSNCT or NSC? Almost certainly not. But for the tournament they were actually being used in, I’d like to think they represent at least a small step forward. Ryan Rosenberg and Grace Liu, who certainly would have voiced their opinions to me if they thought the questions completely sucked and who of course are welcome to weigh in here with their impressions, didn’t seem to have a problem with them. As Sam said, though, an unacceptably-large percentage of the questions were still one-or-two line speed checks, though I will say that for the most part they were confined to the early warm-up (5 or 10 point) rounds. None of those, however, were mine. I was also told that Chip, rather than Jason Russell, did most of the editing of my questions, which in a perfect world I wouldn’t have wished for, but once Chip’s check cleared (which it did), they’re his questions to do what he wants to with.
I had nothing to do with any of the audio, visual or mathematics questions - in fact, I was specifically instructed not to write any questions on mathematics or Norse mythology…yeah, I know…I decided I‘d really rather not know and decided not to ask. Although as it turns out maybe I should’ve had a lot to do with the latter, since they were the subjects of the two major protests of the tournament, both of which I was asked to “rule“ on, although in Irvington‘s case my ruling was not accepted by Beall, and the reason that Irvington lost that protest was not because their protest was incorrect - in fact, I ruled in their favor on the substance of the question since their point was 100% valid - but because Beall screwed up logistically in not properly adjudicating the protest before the teams were allowed to leave the room and the result was finalized. (Full disclosure: the reason I was asked to rule on them is because I have mathematics degrees - bachelor’s from Cornell, master’s from Flinders University of South Australia - and was therefore really the only staff member present at the time competent to rule on the facts of the questions themselves, although Ariel Schneider has the proper science and math background where she could have made a competent ruling if it had been brought to her.) I’ll talk more about this in an upcoming post (since I really have to go get some lunch first). The other one, which was lodged by High Tech B, I will not go into detail on since it is a preliminary round question that will be used next weekend in Chicago (with my recommendations for acceptable alternate answers appended to it), but it concerned an acceptable alternate answer to a pyramidal non-computation calculus question that I immediately ruled in their favor on since they were indisputably correct, and in this case, for whatever reason, Chip approved my ruling despite the fact that he would reject the later one involving Irvington. BTW, something many of you might find humorous is that Chip specifically instructs people who write for him to never use the word “namesake” in a question, for the sole reason that he thinks NAQT and PACE NSC overuse the word. I wish I was kidding.
4. Ithaca High School sent 2 teams to this tournament and, being friends with the guys (and girl) on the team, I wanted to see how they’d fare. After Ithaca A finished at 3-3 and out of the playoffs, I heard them muttering that they should have attended NAQT HSNCT (which they qualified for) since the questions suited them better (I told ya, guys ;)), and in future NAQT I think will be their national tournament and format of choice, although since there are tournaments up here that offer free NAC entry to the winners I think they’d come back to NAC so long as they didn’t have to pay for it. Also, Cooperstown, who won a tournament that Brooks and I staffed this winter, unexpectedly showed up and finished a very creditable 3-3 despite the fact that Ithaca A would’ve toasted them and swallowed them whole on a HSAPQ or NAQT set. Again, this speaks to the completely-fair assertion that NAC questions are not a good predictor of who would do better on a “real quiz bowl” set. They’re not -exactly- two different games, but they’re close. The correlation coefficient is much closer to 0 than it should be, let’s just say, although it’s also not negative.
5. Morbid curiosity. Before this weekend, I had never actually met Chip Beall and had never been to an NAC (my high school team, Thomas Edison from Elmira Heights, NY, attended the 1987 and 1988 ASCN tournaments and made the quarterfinals of the latter, where we went out by 5 points to the eventual champions Savannah (MO), and qualified and intended to attend the 1989 NAC, but our school board was being a sack of ahems and wouldn‘t allow us to go), and I wanted to get a firsthand view of what this tournament was really all about. Part 2 of this overly-long post will contain those more detailed impressions and complaints.
Lunch time. I'll have Part 2 coming up later, probably sometime today.
--Scott
Here, in a nutshell, are the four reasons I staffed this tournament (for the people who have contacted me privately and have, in most cases politely, asked me why the hell I would consider doing such a thing):
1. Brooks Sanders, a close friend and colleague of mine, asked me to do so as a personal favor. (Apparently, last year’s quiz bowl-host contest winner from DC who was supposed to moderate fell ill at the last moment, Chip asked Brooks for advice, and Brooks recommended me.) I didn’t have a whole heck of a lot else planned for the weekend and enjoy moderating quiz bowl tournaments, and Arlington, Virginia is right on the edge of the distance that I will drive to moderate. Plus, on the way I dropped my wife and kids off in southern Pennsylvania and they were able to visit for the weekend with family members of hers that they hadn’t seen in forever. I didn’t staff New Orleans and will not staff Chicago.
2. Without going into specific detail, I’ll say that I was given quite a few more reasons to staff this tournament during the Thursday afternoon phone conversation, all of which had the pictures of Presidents and other prominent figures from early American history on them. All of my expenses were covered on top of that, which, btw, is practically unheard-of for any NAC staffer that is not currently married to Chip Beall. (They are generally paid a stipend, unlike at other national tournaments, but he generally does not pay travel or lodging expenses for his staff, and would probably not have done so for me if he hadn’t been desperate. Similarly, I think he was nicer and more social to me this weekend than he generally is with people for the reason that he knows that I bailed his butt out of a tough situation.) Does that make me a mercenary, even a whore, you might ask? Certainly, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. Thanks at least in part to this tournament, my four young children will now be enjoying their first-ever Disney cruise this summer, and their opinions of Daddy, when it comes down to it, are really the only ones I care about. So I will freely admit that $$$$ had something to do with my attendance at this tournament. As the Million Dollar Man Ted DiBiase used to opine on countless WWF broadcasts, everybody has a price, and NAC met mine.
Look, next year, if the dates work out, I am fully planning to moderate at every major national tournament - NAQT HSNCT, PACE NSC, National History Bee and Bowl (Dave Madden, if you’re reading this, please drop me a line at [email protected] so we can discuss some NHBB matters - for one thing, I’d like to help set up an upstate NY qualifier for next year as well as moderate at your national finals), HSAPQ NASAT (Matt Weiner, same thing…there’s a few things I’d like to discuss with you regarding questions for our upstate tournaments in more detail than we were able to do when we talked in Atlanta)….and NAC. The first four, I do or will do out of love for quiz bowl, and possibly expenses. The NAC…slightly different story, especially after a few things I saw in DC this weekend that I will deal with in Part 2 of this screed.
3. I had written some of the questions used in this year’s tournament. In fact, if you heard a question in the DC playoff phase (Chip told me, without saying why, that he didn’t use any of my stuff in the preliminary rounds) that sounded even vaguely pyramidal, it’s about 80-90% likely it was one of mine…although, when I saw them in their final form, a decent percentage of them had been edited almost to the point that they were unrecognizable.
Some of the ones that I was responsible for (not an exclusive list, since I don’t have a copy of the question sets) at least the original forms of were the playoff questions on (it seems upon looking at the list that they put most of the trashier stuff I wrote at this site rather than the other 2, for some reason…the stuff I submitted that I didn‘t see used in DC and that will be presumably used at other sites was much more academic, as a rule):
- The Death of Ivan Ilyich
- Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Claude Debussy (the one with the lead-in clue about how he was on the French 20-franc banknote before France converted to the Euro)
- Poland (with the lead-in on the Jasna Gora Monastery)
- the question used in the final on Japanese-American internment camps
- the “Losers” bonus in the final - although the 15-point part that High Tech missed about Cy Young having the most career pitcher losses wasn’t my original query…it was originally a 20-point part reading “within 10%, what is the major league record for career pitcher losses”?
- “The Clouds” (semifinal question)
- Ayatollah Khamenei (semifinals)
- Robert Burns
- Falkland Islands (Malvinas) War
- kanji
- Pre-Raphaelite movement
- Kublai Khan (final)
- surfactants (semifinal)
- the warmup round question on prostitutes…the full original version of that one, btw, was “The four main female characters in the 1982 film Doctor Detroit, Kitty Warren in a play by George Bernard Shaw, the five women who appear in a Picasso painting set in Avignon and, according to one controversial public figure, a Georgetown Law student named Sandra Fluke, all share or allegedly share what profession?”
- Ivanhoe
- kiss (used in the final) - “Robert Burns wrote a poem about a “fond” one of these. The longest one in movie history is three minutes and twenty-four seconds, and is found in the 2010 film Elena Undone. It is the action that immediately precedes the movie line, “I know it was you, Fredo. You broke my heart.“ Sculptures by Brancusi and Rodin feature what action, as well a prominent painting by Gustav Klimt?”
- Rochester Royals / Syracuse Nats NBA question, used in the middle school final. BTW, to the guy who protested that St. Louis wasn’t accepted…when the question leadin includes the phrase “1951 NBA Champions”, that automatically eliminates the St. Louis Hawks, who won their only title in 1957. Rochester, at that point, was the only acceptable correct answer until the clues on Syracuse came in a second or two later, and in fact the moderator was instructed to only accept “Rochester” or “Rochester Royals” until he said “1955” (the year the Nats won the NBA title).
- Tchaikovsky (semifinal)
- a bonus round tossup on M*A*S*H that would have been used in the final but wasn’t gotten to: “ In a strange coincidence, the two actors who played the same character in this franchise both died of heart attacks within 24 hours of each other in 1986. One major character in the movie, Duke Forrest, never appears at all on the television show, and another important film character, Oliver Jones, mysteriously disappears after only four episodes of the television series. A mock funeral for a dentist in the film is the only occasion on which we ever hear the lyrics to its famous theme song. What is this franchise based on a novel by Richard Hooker that lasted eight years longer on television than the event it portrays?”
- another unused bonus-round tossup on agnosticism: “A common bumper sticker claiming that the driver is a “militant” one of these exclaims, “I don’t know and you don’t either”. This term was coined in a Metaphysical Society speech by Thomas Henry Huxley in 1869, but precursors of the philosophy behind it are found in the work of Hume, Kierkegaard and Kant. What is this term, from the Greek for “without knowledge”, which posits that the existence or non-existence of a deity is unprovable or unknowable?”
- Mossad (semifinal)…which was edited to make the Stuxnet worm the lead-in clue, and Jason Russell didn’t have the word “Stuxnet” completely out of his mouth in the Ardsley-High Tech semifinal before 8 fingers vigorously hit buzzers, all waiting to answer “Mossad”. The original lead-in as I wrote it was “A technical guru named David Peled in Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six book and video game series is a member of this organization”, which while trashy was at least not the giveaway that “Stuxnet” was.
- United Nations Secretary-General (final)
- View of Delft (semifinal)
- the early-playoff-round tossup on “Guernica” that had the lead-in on the description of it in Our Dumb World. (“accurately depicts the brutal assault on a group of flat-faced weirdos by an army of vicious triangles”)
- and finally, Betty White. (used in the semifinal) They requested trash, so I figured I’d at least try to give them well-constructed trash: “She ranks second all-time to LeVar Burton in number of Winner’s Circle wins on the Dick Clark Pyramid gameshows. She is also the only person to have appeared on all four versions of Password, which is not too surprising since she is the widow of the man who was the original host of that show, Allen Ludden. Name this actress who turned 90 in 2012, a former “Golden Girl” who is also the oldest person to ever guest host Saturday Night Live.”
Would many of these have passed muster at HSNCT or NSC? Almost certainly not. But for the tournament they were actually being used in, I’d like to think they represent at least a small step forward. Ryan Rosenberg and Grace Liu, who certainly would have voiced their opinions to me if they thought the questions completely sucked and who of course are welcome to weigh in here with their impressions, didn’t seem to have a problem with them. As Sam said, though, an unacceptably-large percentage of the questions were still one-or-two line speed checks, though I will say that for the most part they were confined to the early warm-up (5 or 10 point) rounds. None of those, however, were mine. I was also told that Chip, rather than Jason Russell, did most of the editing of my questions, which in a perfect world I wouldn’t have wished for, but once Chip’s check cleared (which it did), they’re his questions to do what he wants to with.
I had nothing to do with any of the audio, visual or mathematics questions - in fact, I was specifically instructed not to write any questions on mathematics or Norse mythology…yeah, I know…I decided I‘d really rather not know and decided not to ask. Although as it turns out maybe I should’ve had a lot to do with the latter, since they were the subjects of the two major protests of the tournament, both of which I was asked to “rule“ on, although in Irvington‘s case my ruling was not accepted by Beall, and the reason that Irvington lost that protest was not because their protest was incorrect - in fact, I ruled in their favor on the substance of the question since their point was 100% valid - but because Beall screwed up logistically in not properly adjudicating the protest before the teams were allowed to leave the room and the result was finalized. (Full disclosure: the reason I was asked to rule on them is because I have mathematics degrees - bachelor’s from Cornell, master’s from Flinders University of South Australia - and was therefore really the only staff member present at the time competent to rule on the facts of the questions themselves, although Ariel Schneider has the proper science and math background where she could have made a competent ruling if it had been brought to her.) I’ll talk more about this in an upcoming post (since I really have to go get some lunch first). The other one, which was lodged by High Tech B, I will not go into detail on since it is a preliminary round question that will be used next weekend in Chicago (with my recommendations for acceptable alternate answers appended to it), but it concerned an acceptable alternate answer to a pyramidal non-computation calculus question that I immediately ruled in their favor on since they were indisputably correct, and in this case, for whatever reason, Chip approved my ruling despite the fact that he would reject the later one involving Irvington. BTW, something many of you might find humorous is that Chip specifically instructs people who write for him to never use the word “namesake” in a question, for the sole reason that he thinks NAQT and PACE NSC overuse the word. I wish I was kidding.
4. Ithaca High School sent 2 teams to this tournament and, being friends with the guys (and girl) on the team, I wanted to see how they’d fare. After Ithaca A finished at 3-3 and out of the playoffs, I heard them muttering that they should have attended NAQT HSNCT (which they qualified for) since the questions suited them better (I told ya, guys ;)), and in future NAQT I think will be their national tournament and format of choice, although since there are tournaments up here that offer free NAC entry to the winners I think they’d come back to NAC so long as they didn’t have to pay for it. Also, Cooperstown, who won a tournament that Brooks and I staffed this winter, unexpectedly showed up and finished a very creditable 3-3 despite the fact that Ithaca A would’ve toasted them and swallowed them whole on a HSAPQ or NAQT set. Again, this speaks to the completely-fair assertion that NAC questions are not a good predictor of who would do better on a “real quiz bowl” set. They’re not -exactly- two different games, but they’re close. The correlation coefficient is much closer to 0 than it should be, let’s just say, although it’s also not negative.
5. Morbid curiosity. Before this weekend, I had never actually met Chip Beall and had never been to an NAC (my high school team, Thomas Edison from Elmira Heights, NY, attended the 1987 and 1988 ASCN tournaments and made the quarterfinals of the latter, where we went out by 5 points to the eventual champions Savannah (MO), and qualified and intended to attend the 1989 NAC, but our school board was being a sack of ahems and wouldn‘t allow us to go), and I wanted to get a firsthand view of what this tournament was really all about. Part 2 of this overly-long post will contain those more detailed impressions and complaints.
Lunch time. I'll have Part 2 coming up later, probably sometime today.
--Scott