Carleton Undergraduate Tournament, 3.6.04

Results: Northwestern A
(Robert Flaxman, Justin Moles)

    Carleton's format was changed a bit this year.  Due to a 27-team field, the teams were split into three divisions.  Those divisions would play round robins on packets of an abbreviated 15 tossups.  Then records would determine teams' placement in the Gold, Silver, or Bronze flight, in which teams would play a round robin on full 20-tossup packets to determine final placement.  This makes "points per game" a bit of an inaccurate stat, but I suppose not much more so than at a timed tournament like NAQT Sectionals where the number of tossups heard depends on the reader and the quality of teams playing, and Carleton doesn't keep stats anyway.  I do, of course, but that's another story.  Justin and I did pretty well - not as well as Jan and I had the last two years, of course, but I think respectably enough.
    Favorite Tossup: It would have to be Canary Islands.  "One of its islands, La Gomera, is known for-" *BUZZ*.  I wrote a tossup for Trash Masters on whistling based on an article on CNN I read about languages based on whistling, one of which is Silbo Gomero, which according to Colby is what completed the sentence that I interrupted to start the question.  Needless to say, I got a lot of stares, which is always fun in geography.
    Favorite Bonus: The one I wrote down was on Crayola, the answers being Crayola, Binney and Smith, and Captain Kangaroo - I noted it because I was proud of myself for being able to remember Binney and Smith as the company that makes Crayola.  The most fun was probably the "given the country and date of change, give both its former and current capital for five points each."  Brazil - Rio/Brasilia; Nigeria - Lagos/Abuja; Kazakhstan - Alma-Ata/Astana.  Cake.
    Worst Neg: Saying "sister cities" was kind of silly, but "second most populous cities in their countries" ranks on a par with "four home runs in four consecutive at-bats" as "things so unutterably marginal as to make writing questions on them totally stupid," so I don't feel that bad.  I was annoyed at myself for saying Apollo for Helios, especially since I reaction-buzzed on the fact that he rode a chariot and then for some reason thought it made sense to say Apollo.
    Most Disappointing Moment: We lost to St. Olaf B on the last question, and were within a tossup/bonus sequence of Carleton Groucho going into the last question, which he got (it was also supremely frustrating that he and I were basically in a buzzer race on three questions, two of which were powers, and all of which he beat me to by the slimmest of margins).  More disappointing than either of these, however, was a loss to Carleton/Morris on the last tossup in the last round - which meant that for the second year in a row we were cost a better spot (we would have finished first in the Silver Flight with a win) by losing narrowly to a team we had pounded in a previous match.
    Worst Question Ever: The reason we lost was the 20th tossup began like so: "Ones that begin with 192.168-," at which point Keith buzzed in, said "IP addresses," and got power for it.  Can you imagine a worse lead-in for that answer?  Mike Falk, moderating in that room, read us the rest of the question, which, pyramidality-violatingly enough, contained precisely no information that would help you to answer the question if you didn't know it after the first five words.  And we had a CS major on our team, which means that we probably would have had it had the question featured actual structure.  There's no way to justify starting a question like that, as anyone who has ever seen a computer and can reaction buzz worth a damn will have a shot at it.  I'll admit that Keith's speed beat us to it fair and square, but a question like that should never be allowed to decide a game.
    Now You're Driving For Real: I had 16 powers over the course of the day, a record for me at a single tournament (and not one I'm likely to break).  A couple featured structuring almost equal to the IP addresses question in their lameness: the San Francisco one that gave Gavin Newsom's name in the first line and then mentioned a quote about him thinking he was above the law, and, far more egregiously, the Joseph McCarthy tossup that mentioned his infamous list of Communists in the first line.  There were still others gotten against us that were stupid, like the Balboa tossup that mentioned Panama, 1513, and discovering the Pacific within the first two lines, and the "Jerk" tossup that reversed its clues in order of difficulty, for some reason starting with the Steve Martin movie and ending with the physics term.  NAQT needs to take a look at the way they put clues into questions.
    Not This Again: We held a 130-85 lead on Colby at the half, only to see just about everything in the second half go his way; he outscored us 195-45 over the second ten tossups, and a full third of our points came on my only tossup of the second half, the Sherlock Holmes power.  In three matches against Colby this year, Justin and I went 1-2, with each game seeing the margin shift more toward Colby (we won by 50 and then lost by 60 in our two matches against him at DUNCE).
    Look Ma, I'm Keeping Score: I actually kept score for the second half of the Grinnell Dangeresque game and for all of the second Carleton/Morris game, because scorekeepers can be unreliable and no one else was checking.  Both were pretty good games, though the second one in not so good a way for us.  Against Grinnell we led 130-125 at the half, then trailed by as much as 75 before tying it on the last tossup when I got Amahl and the Night Visitors, and then scraping out ten on the bonus to win.  We had 20 points under protest from a previous bonus, but I was glad we didn't have to resort to that to win.  Against Carleton/Morris we roared to a 195-35 halftime lead, only to see it evaporate by tossup 15 as we put up -10 while Keith went on a rampage.  Trailing 220-180 on tossup 19, I got Passepartout and we 30d the bonus to tie the score, leading to the IP addresses question.  When you're outscored 200-25 in the second half, you almost deserve to lose.

Devonian Division - Full Round Robin (15-tossup matches)

Round One: Northwestern A 265, Drake B 155
Round Two: Northwestern A 340, Carleton/Morris 130
Round Three: Northwestern A 180, Iowa State B 110
Round Four: St. Olaf B 220, Northwestern A 205
Round Five: Carleton Zeppo 260, Northwestern A 95
Round Six: Northwestern A 210, Grinnell Cheatcakes 135
Round Seven: Northwestern A 180, Iowa Akeem 110
Round Eight: BYE
Round Nine: Carleton Groucho 240, Northwestern A 185

Prelims Record: 5-3 (4th place, Devonian Division)

Playoffs - Silver Flight (20-tossup matches)

Round One: #D4 Northwestern A 250, #C4 Minnesota A 190
Round Two: #C6 Northwestern B 280, #D4 Northwestern A 175
Round Three: #D4 Northwestern A 335, #S5 Drake A 160
Round Four: BYE
Round Five: #D4 Northwestern A 370, #D6 Drake b 185
Round Six: #C5 Grinnell Thnikkaman 225, #D4 Northwestern A 190
Round Seven: #D4 Northwestern A 335, #S4 Minnesota B 215
Round Eight: #D4 Northwestern A 245, #S6 Grinnell Dangeresque 235
Round Nine: #D5 Carleton/Morris 235, #D4 Northwestern A 220

Final Record: 10-6; 11th place (out of 27 teams)

Personal Stats: Questions Answered

   No one's asking you to care about it.  Powers are in bold, neg-5s are in italics with the real answer following.  Anything in plain text was just ten.

Round One
The Count of Monte Cristo
Clocks/watches in Salvador Dali's The Persistence of Memory
Carolina Panthers
San Francisco
Ivan Turgenev
The Star-Spangled Banner
Azerbaijan
Pollen

Round Two
South Korea
Cry, the Beloved Country
Abraham Lincoln
Somalia
Mononucleosis
The Alchemist

Round Three
Staten Island Ferry
Coast
Area codes
The Call of the Wild
Roy Lichtenstein
John Brown

Round Four
Kidnapped
Rip van Winkle
US Virgin Islands
Platyhelminthes
Peace of Westphalia

Round Five
Green Mountains
Skull
Theme from Jeopardy!

Round Six
Pantheon
Kamchatka Peninsula
Alf
Isak Dinesen

Round Seven
Yorktown
Volga River
Apollo (really Helios)
Nepal
Chlorophyll
Mogul Empire
Norman Mailer

Round Nine
Hatfields and McCoys
Georges Bizet
Wal-Mart
Easter Island statues (moai)

Prelims PPG: 56.25

Playoffs Round One
Albany
Robert E. Lee
Statue of Liberty
Abdominal muscles
Atlas Mountains
Poland

Playoffs Round Two
Mercury
Booker T. Washington
Yugoslavia
The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
Sherlock Holmes

Playoffs Round Three
The Princess Bride
Northern Ireland
Captain Nemo
Alabama
Voyager II
Canary Islands
Patriot Act

Playoffs Round Five
Sinclair Lewis
Bolivia
Stonehenge
Charles Lindbergh
Pope
Boomerang
SOS
Secretary of the Treasury
Honshu

Playoffs Round Six
Anne Rice
Benedict Arnold
Gavrilo Princip
American flag
Geppetto
Sister cities (really second most populous cities in their countries)
Independent counsel

Playoffs Round Seven
Nicklas Lidstrom
Belize
Ethan Frome
Swiss Guard

Playoffs Round Eight
Lake Titicaca
John Adams
Keith Olbermann
Rainbows
Carnivora
Amahl and the Night Visitors

Playoffs Round Nine
Ecuador
Beauty
Joseph McCarthy
Anthony Burgess
Fungi
Calvin and Hobbes (really Peanuts)
Passepartout

Playoffs PPG: 65.63

Overall PPG: 60.94

Overall PP/20TH: 69.64