Iowa State Fall Tournament, 11/8/03

Results: Northwestern A (Glow-in-the-Dark Abs)
(Colby Burnett, Robert Flaxman, Kate Rigot)

    Have I mentioned that I don't really like ACF?   Even mACF.  It may have come up once or twice.  I could look it up.   Anyway, this tournament wasn't so bad save for the ridiculous preponderance of classics questions (where's Thatcher when you need him?) and incredibly long tossups (we're talking like, seven lines on average).  All that and I still turned in one of my better mACF performances (second only to 2002 MLK, though I was the best player on that team, and not being shadowed will boost anyone's score; there was also last year's Deep Bench, but I'm not sure whether that was more mACF or, like, hNAQT).
    We had a somewhat disappointing round robin - despite playing in what looks on paper like a slightly easier division, we went just 3-4, with the main problem being the quasi-upset loss to Carleton C.  We then, as we are wont to do, ended up in the "Kerrek" bracket, which was the lower of the two.  We played the #5-#8 teams in the other division in cross-divisional play (having already beaten the #6-#8 teams in our own division) and beat them all, which was nice.  This meant we finished 7-4.  By straight record alone, this actually ties us for fourth (though we would end up #6 with tiebreakers), but I think it would make more sense to say we finished ninth - i.e. the best team of the bottom eight.
    Favorite Tossup: New Caledonia was fun, and I liked hope ("It's the last word in the Stephen King novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption"), but I gotta go with Magical Mystery Tour.  Didn't get it right away (since I don't know it as a double album), but right after they said Flying I was ready to go in.
    Favorite Bonus: The one about Sight and Sound's top movies, because it was big-time "interrupt the moderator" bonus action.   "This Jean Renoir film-"  Rules of the Game.  "This musical starring Gene Kelly-"  Singin' in the Rain.  "This Alfred Hitchcock film starring Jimmy Stewart as Scotty Ferguson-"  Vertigo.
    Worst Neg: Farthest off would be Ann Landers for Nellie Bly (I heard 1954 instead of 1854, or something like that).  Most annoying would probably be any of the three where I knew the right answer a second later - thymine for cytosine, Mystic River for In Cold Blood, and CERN for Bell Labs (dumbest of those three).
    Most Annoying Moment: Our two worst defeats, 335-120 to Carleton A and 450-110 to the Hentzel-led masters team, both came in a room that featured the absolute worst moderator you've ever seen.  Read too slowly, too quietly, allowed thirty seconds per bonus part (that's after reading it), and just generally sucked.  Didn't seem to hurt our opponents, of course, and I'm not saying we would have beaten them in another room - because we wouldn't have - but this was just the worst moderator I've ever had.
    Ah, Recent Class: I got a question on OPEC off of "Its headquarters are now in Vienna," which just came up somewhere else - I can't remember exactly where now, but I think it was International Relations (which would make sense).

Rhinoceros Division - Round Robin

Round One: Carleton A 335, Northwestern A 120
Round Two: Carleton C 175, Northwestern A 140
Round Three: Northwestern A 225, Iowa C 10
Round Four: Bonus Army (Hentzel et al) 450, Northwestern A 110
Round Five: Northwestern A 480, Drake B 40
Round Six: Iowa A 290, Northwestern A 105
Round Seven: Northwestern A 155, Grinnell B 75

Playoffs - Kerrek Bracket (cross-divisional play)

Round One: #R5 Northwestern A 135, #B8 Northwestern B 75
Round Two: #R5 Northwestern A 170, #B7 Drake A 65
Round Three: #R5 Northwestern A 310, #B6 Iowa B 25
Round Four: #R5 Northwestern A 205, #B5 Grinnell A 90

Final Record: 7-4 (6th, or more realistically 9th, out of 16 teams)

Personal Stats: Questions Answered

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

Round One
Torus
New Caledonia
Carter

Round Two
Ann Landers (really Nellie Bly)
Bay of Fundy

Round Three
Battle of Lepanto
Limpopo River
Werewolves
Casey Affleck
Porgy and Bess
Van der Graaf generator (really Leyden jar)

Round Four
Platyhelminthes

Round Five
Philip Roth
CERN (really Bell Labs)
Ashcan School
OPEC
Seneca Falls Convention
The Red and The Black

Round Six
Arkansas River
Agar
Raskolnikov

Round Seven
Orange River
Cardinal Richelieu

Prelims PPG: 26.43

Playoff Round One
Wind shear
Thymine (really cytosine)

Playoff Round Two
The Louvre
Tasmanian wolf
Umberto Eco
Socrates
Magical Mystery Tour
Hope

Playoff Round Three
Chichen Itza
Mystic River (really In Cold Blood)
Blaise Pascal

Playoff Round Four
Nikos Kazantzakis
Paraguay

Playoff PPG: 25.00

Overall PPG: 25.91