> Crap, there was an Elective Affinities tossup....damn, damn, > damn....I actually wrote a tossup on that a couple years ago... On this note, I enjoyed the tossups on fructose, Christopher Dodd, the Lumiere brothers, "Anna Christie", and "next to of course god america i" at QOTC XI, all things I'd never heard tossups on before. The highlight of the tournament was seeing someone actually correctly answer my tossup on "Barefoot In The Park", which I was afraid nobody had ever heard of. (I saw it this summer on AMC, and thought "well, I've never heard of this movie, but it was written by Neil Simon and it has Robert Redford and Jane Fonda in it, so it must be well- known. and now that I think about it I can't name a single Neil Simon play anyway, except the ones about superannuated vaudevillians.") The playoff packets, though, were insanely and pointlessly hard. At one point there was a bonus asking for titles of novels by an South American author none of the eleven people in my room, nor any of the nine people in our B team's room, had ever heard of. Talking about not throwing people a bone. In two of the playoff rounds, Pitt B lost 50-25 and won 35-0. In the first playoff round Pitt A got 8 tossups and ended up with 105 points. In the second playoff round we got 4 tossups and ended up with 55 points. In the third playoff round we got 7 tossups, ended up with 115 points, and won. I don't think I've ever been on a team that got zero on a 30-20-10-5 bonus (about Sir Richard Burton). Total bonus conversion in playoffs (factoring in negs): (100 points / 19 boni) = 5.26, for a team that earlier in the day beat South Carolina with 275 and Princeton A with 265, and was about as balanced a team as you can get with four undergraduate science majors. I'm not blaming the Swarthmore people, and I'm grateful for people who write freelance packets, but it just doesn't please anyone but the question-writer when he writes the bulk of the packet based on the "I'm tired of nobody ever asking about any Aphra Behn works except <i>The Rover</i> and <i>Oroonoco</i>, and I'm going to do something about it" principle. Good job, Swarthmore, with the tournament running smoothly and the plenty of moderators and the pizza included in the bill and everything. The questions were creatively written and original, and the trash was above average. And I'm very happy with the prize I got; it's almost like you have ESP. I was going to buy a book of Rilke poems with facing German text anyway.
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