>>I have nothing against a few cartoon questions in a tournament, but when the deciding factor in a playoff game is a cartoon worksheet then it's getting ugly. << And therein lies the problem. The category, lightning, and worksheet rounds which are still used in some high school tournaments are distribution-killers. Whatever topic they cover--cartoons, the Civil War, calculus, whatever--is grossly overrepresented in that round/tournament, because it has 10 questions asked about it in one round, often with 100 or more points riding on them. As soon as these rounds go, I believe people who don't like certain parts of the distribution to appear overmuch will be satisfied. On the other hand, it is also a trend of certain high school teams (and some college teams), when writing tournaments in-house, to bend or ignore the distribution and write 3 or more trash questions per 20 tossup round...that also ought to be curtailed. Trash is fine once or perhaps even twice in a 20 tossup round, depending on your tournament's goals, but a certain self-styled "academic" high school tournament this year had 5/5 trash questions out of every 20/20. That's too much--it will almost always swing the game to a team with inferior academic knowledge but better trash knowledge. Everyone thinks they've come up with a clever thing to ask about. If it's in a tournament with 50 other trash questions, it's not going to be received well. A sudden trash question in the midst of an otherwise academic packet is much more fun. >>Trash is knowing too much about Sailer Moon. Pop culture is knowing too much about the Beatles.<< Right now, Sailor Moon's more important to Japanese culture than the Beatles are to the US or UK. The "academic study of the social impact of pop culture" distinction was never a very solid one. --M.W.
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