Well, here's another corner heard from about the age & trash debate: Not to get off on a libertarian rant here, but the rules for the Jersey Trash 03 event seem to confirm what I often say about politics: lots of regulation equals bad regulation. In the case of Jersey Trash, the goal was completely noble and laudible. Somebody voiced complaints, the makers of Jersey Trash attempted to create rules to address those. Unfortuntalely, in application, these rules miss the mark. Why? #1 --- To say a tournament needs 90s and 00s questions to cater to "undergraduate age players" is, well, bogus. Take my girlfriend for example. Age: 24 yrs, 1/2 mo. Accomplished trash player, and only roughly 2 years removed from her undergrad days at Villanova. She knows more about Devo, the Romantics and M People than she does Slipknot, BBMak and B2K. Now, take me. I'm 31. By the Princeton theory, I should know more about, say, Christopher Cross than The Donnas. But exactly the reverse is true. To imply that one's age necessaily controls what trash knowledge one possesses is a dangerous theory because it stereotypes people by their age. #2 The following statement: >"After all, quiz bowl is at heart a > college game," ingores the realities of the game. I'd argue that quiz bowl is EVERYONE'S game from "Jeopardy," (which was intended as an adult's game), down to elementary school kids. (For example, a TV quizbowl show in Lexington, KY as well the the Kentucky Governor's Cup quizbowl competitions have divisions for high school, middle school, and ELEMENTARY SCHOOL players.) If you break quizbowl down by the numbers, though, then quizbowl is a HIGH SCHOOL (not COLLEGE) game. For example, we got 96 teams at a high school tourney at Vanderbilt U. in the early 90s, and had to turn several other teams away. I never heard of a regional college event that has pulled in more than few dozen teams. College-level quizbowl never has produced nearly the same numbers of players as the high-school game has. So, either way you slice it, the theory that 18- 22 year-olds "own" quizbowl is fallacious. Look, if you DON'T know who Herman's Hermits, the Bay City Rollers, Tommy James & the Shondells, or Grand Funk Railroad are, the problem is NOT that you are too young, the problem is that you ARE a medicore- at-best trash player. But the same is true in reverse: if you don't know who Ja Rule, Michelle Branch, Ashanti and the White Stripes are, it's not that you're too old, its that you're just not as good at trash. I don't know what trash events Princeton's been to. Maybe they've been victimized by too much bad "obscurata" questions from before their time. But guess what? The old farts at those events probably groused about the same questions. conversely, I've sat through tournaments playing 95-75 games because all the questions were god- awful 90s/00s WCW/WWF/WWE or scifi/comic-book quesions. Everybody was frustrated, whether they were 40 or 20. Put another way: If I write a tossup asking: "In 1987-88, Belinda Carlisle released videos for 4 of the tracks off "Heaven on Earth." One of the 4 was a cover. FTP, what band originally recorded Belinda's one "Heaven on Earth" remake?", then I have an equal percentage chance of getting my a** kicked by a 42-year old as by a 31-year-old as by a 19-year-old, because that's a straight-out nasty friggin' question. If I add to that question "what band, featuring Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker, oringially recorded 'I Feel Free'?" then, I'm sorry, that's a great question, period. If you don't who was in Cream, then you're just not that good at trash, age be damned. (It's like saying that a question in an academic event about Eisenhower's cabinet is unfair because you weren't alive in the 50s.) What I'm saying is, trahs events don't need more rules. They just needs well-written, "get-able" questions, regardless of what point in history they happened. Sorry for the length, but I thought it needed to be said. ---Michael Hawkins, one of those annoying dinosaurs
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