Sorry to wait so long before replying, but I just crept back on to the list. Dave Goodman asks: << Has anyone ever done a study of how the "Lame" rule gets used at TRASH/trash events. As it was intially conceived, was the lame rule designed so that people could avoid questions they didn't care about or just to dodge a 0-bonus?>> Both, I think; naturally, in most cases if you don't care about something you're less likely to have point-gettin' knowledge of it. Is Fred Bush or someone from that particular Swarthmore era around to elaborate? Fred was partial to a SF-heavy strain of trash, and I wonder if his teammates insisted on the lame as a check on this. Heh. No, as far as I can remember, the lame was entirely my idea. Mostly because trash used to suck like CBI sucked. "Professionalism" and "standards" had yet to seep in and some of the questions were bloomin' awful. And trash was about having fun. There used to be lots of crappy bonuses that weren't fun even to listen to. Can you have fun answering an awful question, awful-as-in-boring? (Like, I dunno, "name these Japanese prime ministers" [remember when politics was trash?] or "name these terms from bricklaying"...) Originally, it was an aesthetic judgment, a team throwing out a question because it didn't belong at a trash tournament, because it was, in a word, lame. Much though it pains my heart to see beautiful gossamer SF questions get tossed out, I understand that it's a necessary evil so that those few truly bad boni still perish in the righteous fires of lameness! --Fred
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