Re: Very brief D2K1 comments

grapesmoker · Thu, 26 Apr 2001 09:01:07 -0700

Mike Burger said:

"Popular Culture".
Mainstream sports are "Popular Culture". The idea of a
tournament, whether academic or Popular Culture, is to expect
the player to answer a reasonable amount of questions
about a subject. A tournament is not a punishment or a
lesson in what the writer of a packet thinks other
people should know.

Obviously, some elements of
pop culture are emphasized more because of geography,
such as hockey over the NBA or rock over country. Some
are dephasized because of the age bracket, such
college radio over boy bands and cable TV over CBS.

The poster above concerns me. I don't want to play in
a tournament where I am demeaned for my perceived
lack of knowledge on what somebody else believes is
higher culture. I want to play in a tournament where the
distribution is known and the questions are reasonably
accessible.

[end of quote]

Perhaps I came out sounding more
bitter than I had intended. I'll clarify:

I've
sure heard a lot of esoteric things in trash packets.
Lots of these things could hardly be considered
"Popular" culture. Game show hosts of the 60s, for example.
What person that was not alive then, other than a
die-hard trash player, would know this? The fact that many
of them do hardly makes it popular culture
everywhere.

I am not proposing at all that anyone ought to be
demeaned for their knowledge, nor am I trying to pass of
my knowledge as "higher" knowledge. It doesn't have
any special intrinsic superiority over anything else,
it's just the sort of thing that I know. And by no
means do I want to inflict any sort of punishment on
anyone or force my knowledge on them. I do agree that a
packet should have a known distribution, but I think
that some clever variation inside that distribution
are a good idea and should be welcomed. After all,
what's the point of asking things that people already
know a lot about? Shouldn't the idea be to learn
something new from each tournament?

I think that on
the whole the questions that were posted from that
now-infamous packet were pretty interesting. I didn't know
anything about any of the subjects, but I thought the
questions were well-written and were a nice change from the
usual "He made his first appearance in (year x) for
(team y) in (position z)..." or "Name the stadium"
bonuses. Those seem to resemble the "list" bonuses of
academic competitions that so many are keen to
avoid.

Just trying to offer up a different perspective
(albeit probably a minority one). No insult meant to
anybody : )

Jerry
Who used to be able to perfom
"Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail" all by
himself