I don't blame Charlie for these packets, he had arranged to use them before seeing them, but wow. If you want to talk about interesting stat lines--look at Seth Kendall's 7 negs in 9 rounds, that's like me getting 200. I think those can be attributed to hoses. Oh, btw, who is Ivan Albright. The strangest art tossup I've ever heard and it ended with the line, "FTP, name this painter of the Picture of Dorian Grey." Well, he's most definitely from the novel and I've never heard of a real artist by this name, who is this person? As for the Berkeley packets used in the later rounds, they were definitely much better if still raw. At least they were academic and the difference could be seen in our team's result--I believe we only had the one playoff loss once those packets were introduced. The answers were still quite easy and accessible but there were still some sigificant problems. It's much more difficult to write a good easy tossup than a hard one. For example, the Ganesh tossup was really poor. The problem is it starts out, "he was the god of this and that" which is almost meaningless in Hindu mythology because, who was god of something varied regionally and with time, and then says "son of Shiva" at which point an opponent buzzed with "Ganesh." I congratulated him on his acumen in quickly realizing that this tournament was aimed at a lower difficulty level and thus the answer could not be Skanda, a calculation which I did not perform as quickly. He then said that he had never heard of Skanda but knew that son of Shiva meant Ganesh.
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