Bootleg returns
Mar. 20th, 2004 05:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sniffnoyGah. Millburn was so utterly bootleg[0].
First of all the format was bootleg. Really. In the main rounds it was Columbia-like - Jeopardy board, no buzzers, questions bounce back to other team. But unlike at Columbia, the same 6 categories were used for all 4 rounds: Social Studies, Science/Math, Music/Art, Sports/Entertainment, General Knowledge/Current Events, and Language/Literature. Also no lightning rounds. Totally bootleg. Also for whatever reason the point values were 20*{1,2,3,4,5} instead of 10*{1,2,3,4,5}.
In the playoffs the format changed. Buzzers, this time, but like it was at Bloomfield. Ie, a quarter of 5 or 10 point tossups with no boni, then a round of 10 point tossups with boni - which I'll get to in a second - then lightning rounds, where 2 go unread, as at Bloomfield - then finally 15 or 20 point tossups with no boni. No power, no negs. Also, the boni were really bootleg. They were all 50 points, in 4 parts, worth 5, 10, 15, and 20 points in order - but if you missed one, you didn't get to try the rest. Also, there were only 5 boni, and if all 5 got read, the remaining tossups would be skipped.
Also, rankings were determined solely by points. (Though you would get 50 points for winning - 25 each if the game ended in a tie.)
So how did we do, anyway? Out in quarterfinals, against High Tech A. Apparently these are the people that win the KMO every year, yet I've never seen them in any tournaments. Until now. I mean, normally we don't want to play Pingry, but we would much rather have played Pingry than these people. They totally slaughtered everyone else in the main rounds, and well, I'll get to our battle against them later.
I did write down a bunch of quotes, but, unfortunately, I lost the paper. Not having many, though, I think I remember them:
[I've just been explaining the Roman system of naming - praenomen, nomen, cognomen - to Mr. Sayres.]
Mr. Sayres: So if you forgot your name, would you be incognomen?
Me: So Julius Caesar's full latin name was Gaius Iulius Caesar [pronounced correctly :D ]
Mr. Sayres: Not Uliusjay Aesarcay?
[Hyungmin has just noted that Muneem is not eating his rice plain]
Muneem: You can't bash me for not being Asian, because, well, I'm not Asian.
Hyungmin: And whose fault is that? [silence] That's what I thought!
You know, someday, I really want to see a list of all the Pingry shirts.
Anyway...
Our teams were:
A: Me, Czolacz, Stefan (captain), and Shu
B: Joe Gregg, Emi Ling, Muneem (sorry - "X"), and Hyungmin
C: Mitchell, Caroline, Molly, and Andrew and James
So first round was against... uh... I forget. I don't have the records. Honestly I really don't remember most of what happened. We did win the first round, though. In fact we got the highest score of anyone in the first round, with 990 points (including the bonus for winning, obviously).
That was soon to change. We didn't get totally killed in the second round, but we did pretty badly. And then, even worse, the protests.
It's ridiculous. It seems like they accepted every single protest that was sent to them.
There were 2 protests that round. One was by us. The question was, in the Apollo 11 photographs, why does the flag appear to be waving?
Stefan deferred to me, and I said it was for 2 reasons: Firstly that they had just put it down, were wiggling around it around in the dirt - inertia, essentially. Secondly that there was a bar across the top of the flag just so that it would stretch out despite the lack of a breeze. Well apparently they only wanted the second, but we challenged it, and they, of course, gave it to us.
Haha. The other team's captain out-dorks me:
"Actually on Apollo 11 the bar malfunctioned."
But this was ridiculous - they, of course, also accepted the other team's protest - the question asked about a function, being the sum of sinh and cosh, being the solution to f'(x)=f(x), and some stuff about where it turns up. They said "exponential growth". And they *accepted* it. That is *way* too general an answer when they specifically ask for that function which is the sum of sinh and cosh. (And even for f'(x)=f(x) - it's not like they said f'(x)=cf(x)...)
And since we picked that one up on the bounce, we lost 60 points from that protest as well. So, after the 2nd round, we were no longer in the top 8.
We were back in it after the 3rd round, though, where we once again scored high, though not as high as in the 1st. And after the 4th... well, we wait in the cafeteria, and finally they bring in the sheets showing who's going to be playing whom, and I go up, and I see our names on it - in 8th place! - and we all start cheering, and then they tell us, "No, the sheet is wrong." But apparently only regarding who's going to be playing whom - all the teams are right, we're in!
...against High Tech A.
These were the people who repeatedly got quadruple-digit scores in the main rounds.
As soon as we sat down, we told them, "Congratulations on making it to the semifinals."
Well we were leading them by 20 points after the 1st quarter - though at first the scorer got us mixed up and we thought it was the other way around - but we scored but 15 points in the 2nd, leaving us behind 70. Well, we figured we could pick it up in the lightning rounds. The categories were "Language", "Just Desserts", "Andrew Jackson", and "???". We (being behind and thus picking first) picked "???" - *exactly* the wrong one. Looking at the packets afterward, I knew a bunch of the languages, Just Desserts was, in fact, about desserts, and the other team members knew those, and Czolacz knew all about Andrew Jackson. And yet we picked ???. The questions had seemingly no relation to each other - but the final question was, of course, what do all the other *answers* have to do with each other? Not that we got to the final question. We got 5, they got 4 on bounceback. Then they picked "Andrew Jackson", got 8, and we picked up the remaining 2.
Well now we were behind by 130 points - hm, that's not consistent with what I said above. Maybe we only picked up 1 of theirs. Anyway, this was, theoretically, still doable. But we didn't do it. There was, as Mike put it, a definite paucity of science questions that round. Enough said. We lose - what was it, 350-190, I think? And that's that. We take our trophy and go home.
Ah yes. And towards the end of the quarterfinals, Shu actually began to take his pants off. I am so glad I wasn't looking. I just hope this doesn't prevent us from entering next year or anything... :-/
(17:59:46) fergie142857: And I think I have found an acceptable response to "Does this make my butt look big?"
(17:59:51) Sniffnoy: amazing
(18:00:01) fergie142857: "No. Your butt makes your butt look big."
(18:00:05) Sniffnoy: hehe
(18:00:20) fergie142857: Even though it appears suicidal,
(18:00:43) fergie142857: the girl usually thanks your originality and gets the idea.
(18:00:47) Sniffnoy: :P
(18:01:00) fergie142857: In fact, that happened 3 out of 4 times.
(18:01:09) Sniffnoy: and the 4th time?
(18:01:10) fergie142857: Lets not go into the 4th time.
Oh, and my new battlecry: "Emperor Norton lives!" No, I don't know what it's supposed to mean either. Just that, um, Joshua Norton is alive, I suppose. No matter how completely irrelevant that might be to anything, even if it were true. He'd be... 193 now, if he were. Yah. Not that I need a battlecry for anything.
-Sniffnoy
...OK. WTF. The spellchecker accepts "cognomen" and yet not "nomen" or "praenomen". Unless the word has some other meaning I'm not aware of, that is just totally ridiculous.
[0]See http://www.livejournal.com/users/sniffnoy/36608.html if you don't remember about this usage of the word "bootleg".
--
"He may look like an idiot, and he may sound like an idiot, but don't
let him fool you. He really is an idiot."
-Groucho Marx
First of all the format was bootleg. Really. In the main rounds it was Columbia-like - Jeopardy board, no buzzers, questions bounce back to other team. But unlike at Columbia, the same 6 categories were used for all 4 rounds: Social Studies, Science/Math, Music/Art, Sports/Entertainment, General Knowledge/Current Events, and Language/Literature. Also no lightning rounds. Totally bootleg. Also for whatever reason the point values were 20*{1,2,3,4,5} instead of 10*{1,2,3,4,5}.
In the playoffs the format changed. Buzzers, this time, but like it was at Bloomfield. Ie, a quarter of 5 or 10 point tossups with no boni, then a round of 10 point tossups with boni - which I'll get to in a second - then lightning rounds, where 2 go unread, as at Bloomfield - then finally 15 or 20 point tossups with no boni. No power, no negs. Also, the boni were really bootleg. They were all 50 points, in 4 parts, worth 5, 10, 15, and 20 points in order - but if you missed one, you didn't get to try the rest. Also, there were only 5 boni, and if all 5 got read, the remaining tossups would be skipped.
Also, rankings were determined solely by points. (Though you would get 50 points for winning - 25 each if the game ended in a tie.)
So how did we do, anyway? Out in quarterfinals, against High Tech A. Apparently these are the people that win the KMO every year, yet I've never seen them in any tournaments. Until now. I mean, normally we don't want to play Pingry, but we would much rather have played Pingry than these people. They totally slaughtered everyone else in the main rounds, and well, I'll get to our battle against them later.
I did write down a bunch of quotes, but, unfortunately, I lost the paper. Not having many, though, I think I remember them:
[I've just been explaining the Roman system of naming - praenomen, nomen, cognomen - to Mr. Sayres.]
Mr. Sayres: So if you forgot your name, would you be incognomen?
Me: So Julius Caesar's full latin name was Gaius Iulius Caesar [pronounced correctly :D ]
Mr. Sayres: Not Uliusjay Aesarcay?
[Hyungmin has just noted that Muneem is not eating his rice plain]
Muneem: You can't bash me for not being Asian, because, well, I'm not Asian.
Hyungmin: And whose fault is that? [silence] That's what I thought!
You know, someday, I really want to see a list of all the Pingry shirts.
Anyway...
Our teams were:
A: Me, Czolacz, Stefan (captain), and Shu
B: Joe Gregg, Emi Ling, Muneem (sorry - "X"), and Hyungmin
C: Mitchell, Caroline, Molly, and Andrew and James
So first round was against... uh... I forget. I don't have the records. Honestly I really don't remember most of what happened. We did win the first round, though. In fact we got the highest score of anyone in the first round, with 990 points (including the bonus for winning, obviously).
That was soon to change. We didn't get totally killed in the second round, but we did pretty badly. And then, even worse, the protests.
It's ridiculous. It seems like they accepted every single protest that was sent to them.
There were 2 protests that round. One was by us. The question was, in the Apollo 11 photographs, why does the flag appear to be waving?
Stefan deferred to me, and I said it was for 2 reasons: Firstly that they had just put it down, were wiggling around it around in the dirt - inertia, essentially. Secondly that there was a bar across the top of the flag just so that it would stretch out despite the lack of a breeze. Well apparently they only wanted the second, but we challenged it, and they, of course, gave it to us.
Haha. The other team's captain out-dorks me:
"Actually on Apollo 11 the bar malfunctioned."
But this was ridiculous - they, of course, also accepted the other team's protest - the question asked about a function, being the sum of sinh and cosh, being the solution to f'(x)=f(x), and some stuff about where it turns up. They said "exponential growth". And they *accepted* it. That is *way* too general an answer when they specifically ask for that function which is the sum of sinh and cosh. (And even for f'(x)=f(x) - it's not like they said f'(x)=cf(x)...)
And since we picked that one up on the bounce, we lost 60 points from that protest as well. So, after the 2nd round, we were no longer in the top 8.
We were back in it after the 3rd round, though, where we once again scored high, though not as high as in the 1st. And after the 4th... well, we wait in the cafeteria, and finally they bring in the sheets showing who's going to be playing whom, and I go up, and I see our names on it - in 8th place! - and we all start cheering, and then they tell us, "No, the sheet is wrong." But apparently only regarding who's going to be playing whom - all the teams are right, we're in!
...against High Tech A.
These were the people who repeatedly got quadruple-digit scores in the main rounds.
As soon as we sat down, we told them, "Congratulations on making it to the semifinals."
Well we were leading them by 20 points after the 1st quarter - though at first the scorer got us mixed up and we thought it was the other way around - but we scored but 15 points in the 2nd, leaving us behind 70. Well, we figured we could pick it up in the lightning rounds. The categories were "Language", "Just Desserts", "Andrew Jackson", and "???". We (being behind and thus picking first) picked "???" - *exactly* the wrong one. Looking at the packets afterward, I knew a bunch of the languages, Just Desserts was, in fact, about desserts, and the other team members knew those, and Czolacz knew all about Andrew Jackson. And yet we picked ???. The questions had seemingly no relation to each other - but the final question was, of course, what do all the other *answers* have to do with each other? Not that we got to the final question. We got 5, they got 4 on bounceback. Then they picked "Andrew Jackson", got 8, and we picked up the remaining 2.
Well now we were behind by 130 points - hm, that's not consistent with what I said above. Maybe we only picked up 1 of theirs. Anyway, this was, theoretically, still doable. But we didn't do it. There was, as Mike put it, a definite paucity of science questions that round. Enough said. We lose - what was it, 350-190, I think? And that's that. We take our trophy and go home.
Ah yes. And towards the end of the quarterfinals, Shu actually began to take his pants off. I am so glad I wasn't looking. I just hope this doesn't prevent us from entering next year or anything... :-/
(17:59:46) fergie142857: And I think I have found an acceptable response to "Does this make my butt look big?"
(17:59:51) Sniffnoy: amazing
(18:00:01) fergie142857: "No. Your butt makes your butt look big."
(18:00:05) Sniffnoy: hehe
(18:00:20) fergie142857: Even though it appears suicidal,
(18:00:43) fergie142857: the girl usually thanks your originality and gets the idea.
(18:00:47) Sniffnoy: :P
(18:01:00) fergie142857: In fact, that happened 3 out of 4 times.
(18:01:09) Sniffnoy: and the 4th time?
(18:01:10) fergie142857: Lets not go into the 4th time.
Oh, and my new battlecry: "Emperor Norton lives!" No, I don't know what it's supposed to mean either. Just that, um, Joshua Norton is alive, I suppose. No matter how completely irrelevant that might be to anything, even if it were true. He'd be... 193 now, if he were. Yah. Not that I need a battlecry for anything.
-Sniffnoy
...OK. WTF. The spellchecker accepts "cognomen" and yet not "nomen" or "praenomen". Unless the word has some other meaning I'm not aware of, that is just totally ridiculous.
[0]See http://www.livejournal.com/users/sniffnoy/36608.html if you don't remember about this usage of the word "bootleg".
--
"He may look like an idiot, and he may sound like an idiot, but don't
let him fool you. He really is an idiot."
-Groucho Marx
no subject
Date: 2004-03-21 07:06 pm (UTC)