Dec. 11th, 2004
Day of the Lame Categories
Dec. 11th, 2004 05:40 pmColumbia: So, Vlad didn't show. Neither did George, but he doesn't matter so much.
Thus, we decided on the following teams:
A: Me (captain), Chris, Noam, James, Andrew
B: Mark (captain), Josh, Emi, Mitch
C: Molly, Caroline, RJ, Simon... don't know who was captain
Originally we had all 5 sophomores on C, with Andrew on B, but then we decided we would rather have a 5-person A with both James and Andrew, so we were going to move Molly up to B, but she wanted to stay on C for some reason, so we moved Mitch up instead.
Oh, we also ran into Tan Dan before the competition. I had no idea he was even from around here... but apparently he goes to Pingry. And is on their A team. But he didn't have a Pingry shirt. In fact, most of them didn't. Strange.
Hm, I don't seem to have any scoresheets or schedules on me. So I'll just have to go by memory.
First round: Vs ... er, I forget.
Immediately we notice that the categories are a bit... bland. "Math", "Geography", "Literature", "Recent Events", "Earth Science"... these are categories? What happened to the weird categories? Sure, there's always a few that are just like "Geography", but - well, the next round, a bunch of the categories were the same! Huh?! What happened to "Martial Arts" and things like that?
Well, we win the first round without too much trouble. We get a good lead towards the start and don't lose it. Ranking is done first by score, then by win/loss, we're somewhere in the top 8.
2nd round: Pingry B. Oh boy. We don't lose *horribly*, but we lose pretty definitely. Pingry gets an early lead with high-valued questions, we don't manage to get the lead back. No longer in the top 8.
3rd round: ...I forget again. I'll have to go look this up when I find a schedule. Was it Jonathan Dayton? We're behind by the first lightning round, but they keep going for lower-valued questions, so we quickly catch up and overtake them. Back in the top 8; tied for 7th.
4th round: ...what were they called?! Well, they were in 4th-to-last before this round, and there they stayed. We crushed them. They got 100 points total that round. So, yeah, we're in the playoffs.
Quarterfinals: Livingston A. Yuch. It's like our match with Pingry B. They steal the high-valued questions and we can't get back. They also get nearly all the grammar category! Gah! We should be getting that! We lose, take our trophy and go home, though (due to our bus taking a while to get there), not before hearing that the teams going into the semis will be Pingry A, Pingry B, Livingston A, and Livingston B. Wow. And they're not even having the A teams play the B teams so that the finals won't be one school against itself.
So, we failed to defend our championship. We pretty much totally failed all the literature and fine arts categories. Having Emi might have helped a bit, but not much.
Also, there were a lot of really hard lightning rounds this time - ones that both teams got barely any of. (At least those didn't have lame categories. Well, compared to last year, they weren't as good, but at least they weren't "Physical Science".) Eg, given a person, name the year of his assassination (or the assassination attempt on him). No, not to within 2 years or anything like that. Probably the worst, though, was "Give the papal name of the pope, given an event that happened while he was pope and his papal number". Yuch.
It occurs to me that Mr. Sayres never actually did send out the advertisement...
Addendum:
Bizarre quote of the day: Noam, to Andrew: "I could make out with you." (He was actually referring to their relative heights.)
Also, I left out the quarks. For a bit we were trying to decide what names we should use should we end up playing Pingry in the buzzer rounds[3][4]. We eventually decided on quarks: Andrew is up, James is down, I'm strange, Noam is charm, Chris is bottom, and Mr. Gupta[0] is top. Of course we never ended up getting to the buzzer rounds, so...
For quite a while there was the suggestion of being the 5 elements as presented by Captain Planet, but Noam refused to be Heart. I said if we were going to be 5 elements we should at least really use Ether instead of Heart, and then of course Chris insisted on calling it Quintessence. Later I suggested using the Chinese 5 elements, but by that time we had already settled on quarks. Other suggestions were 5 different Jedi (Obi-Wan, Luke, Yoda, Qui-Gonn Jinn, and Mace Windu... I forget who was supposed to be who) and, my own suggestion that nobody else liked, the 6 original Mega Man bosses (again assigning one to Mr. Gupta). On the bus back I thought of using the 5 Discordian seasons. Not that any of this matters. My original point, I think, was that it's harder to think of good 5-things than it is 4-things.
Annoying question of the day: "Name one natural transuranium element." But... there aren't any! Um... plutonium? "No. There aren't any." What?! You can't do that!
-Sniffnoy
[0]Mr. Sayres isn't coming to the tournaments anymore; I think I mentioned this before.
[3]Should that be round, singular? I forget.
[4]If you don't understand why we're doing this, see Bloomfield, last year.
--
"Anyone who goes to a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined."
-Samuel Goldwyn
Thus, we decided on the following teams:
A: Me (captain), Chris, Noam, James, Andrew
B: Mark (captain), Josh, Emi, Mitch
C: Molly, Caroline, RJ, Simon... don't know who was captain
Originally we had all 5 sophomores on C, with Andrew on B, but then we decided we would rather have a 5-person A with both James and Andrew, so we were going to move Molly up to B, but she wanted to stay on C for some reason, so we moved Mitch up instead.
Oh, we also ran into Tan Dan before the competition. I had no idea he was even from around here... but apparently he goes to Pingry. And is on their A team. But he didn't have a Pingry shirt. In fact, most of them didn't. Strange.
Hm, I don't seem to have any scoresheets or schedules on me. So I'll just have to go by memory.
First round: Vs ... er, I forget.
Immediately we notice that the categories are a bit... bland. "Math", "Geography", "Literature", "Recent Events", "Earth Science"... these are categories? What happened to the weird categories? Sure, there's always a few that are just like "Geography", but - well, the next round, a bunch of the categories were the same! Huh?! What happened to "Martial Arts" and things like that?
Well, we win the first round without too much trouble. We get a good lead towards the start and don't lose it. Ranking is done first by score, then by win/loss, we're somewhere in the top 8.
2nd round: Pingry B. Oh boy. We don't lose *horribly*, but we lose pretty definitely. Pingry gets an early lead with high-valued questions, we don't manage to get the lead back. No longer in the top 8.
3rd round: ...I forget again. I'll have to go look this up when I find a schedule. Was it Jonathan Dayton? We're behind by the first lightning round, but they keep going for lower-valued questions, so we quickly catch up and overtake them. Back in the top 8; tied for 7th.
4th round: ...what were they called?! Well, they were in 4th-to-last before this round, and there they stayed. We crushed them. They got 100 points total that round. So, yeah, we're in the playoffs.
Quarterfinals: Livingston A. Yuch. It's like our match with Pingry B. They steal the high-valued questions and we can't get back. They also get nearly all the grammar category! Gah! We should be getting that! We lose, take our trophy and go home, though (due to our bus taking a while to get there), not before hearing that the teams going into the semis will be Pingry A, Pingry B, Livingston A, and Livingston B. Wow. And they're not even having the A teams play the B teams so that the finals won't be one school against itself.
So, we failed to defend our championship. We pretty much totally failed all the literature and fine arts categories. Having Emi might have helped a bit, but not much.
Also, there were a lot of really hard lightning rounds this time - ones that both teams got barely any of. (At least those didn't have lame categories. Well, compared to last year, they weren't as good, but at least they weren't "Physical Science".) Eg, given a person, name the year of his assassination (or the assassination attempt on him). No, not to within 2 years or anything like that. Probably the worst, though, was "Give the papal name of the pope, given an event that happened while he was pope and his papal number". Yuch.
It occurs to me that Mr. Sayres never actually did send out the advertisement...
Addendum:
Bizarre quote of the day: Noam, to Andrew: "I could make out with you." (He was actually referring to their relative heights.)
Also, I left out the quarks. For a bit we were trying to decide what names we should use should we end up playing Pingry in the buzzer rounds[3][4]. We eventually decided on quarks: Andrew is up, James is down, I'm strange, Noam is charm, Chris is bottom, and Mr. Gupta[0] is top. Of course we never ended up getting to the buzzer rounds, so...
For quite a while there was the suggestion of being the 5 elements as presented by Captain Planet, but Noam refused to be Heart. I said if we were going to be 5 elements we should at least really use Ether instead of Heart, and then of course Chris insisted on calling it Quintessence. Later I suggested using the Chinese 5 elements, but by that time we had already settled on quarks. Other suggestions were 5 different Jedi (Obi-Wan, Luke, Yoda, Qui-Gonn Jinn, and Mace Windu... I forget who was supposed to be who) and, my own suggestion that nobody else liked, the 6 original Mega Man bosses (again assigning one to Mr. Gupta). On the bus back I thought of using the 5 Discordian seasons. Not that any of this matters. My original point, I think, was that it's harder to think of good 5-things than it is 4-things.
Annoying question of the day: "Name one natural transuranium element." But... there aren't any! Um... plutonium? "No. There aren't any." What?! You can't do that!
-Sniffnoy
[0]Mr. Sayres isn't coming to the tournaments anymore; I think I mentioned this before.
[3]Should that be round, singular? I forget.
[4]If you don't understand why we're doing this, see Bloomfield, last year.
--
"Anyone who goes to a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined."
-Samuel Goldwyn