Last year for Elvis, we tried allowing current events within the
regular distribution. Because it was a house-written tournament, we
didn't have people just using a newspaper to finish their
distribution quickly - in fact, much pressure had to be applied to
get people to look up current events in their field. I should also
state that this was done to provide flexibility within 20/20 packets
and not for any ideological reasons.
Personally, I feel it worked well. Traditional election-and-war type
events tended to eat up the miscellaneous category a bit. We had
something about a recent papal decision for religion, Lindgren's
death and a (too hard) toss-up on a controversial poet for
literature, some space exploration stuff and I think stem cells for
science, and I forget what else. No one seemed to feel their
categories were short-changed as a result of this, and I feel that
people who think there's more of importance to the modern world than
the traditional politics questions got to see what could be done.
I think the packets are on the qbtrade site for inspection.
Brian