Re: ICT comments

Adam Kemezis <*kemezis_at_kemezis.yahoo.invalid*> · Thu, 10 Apr 2003 03:19:06 -0000

I think I'm sort of agreeing with Nathan on this one, but I think 
there's a couple of situations we have to distinguish, and they're 
really pretty different.

One is:
"...set in Bath..."

This is simply not an exclusive clue, there's no good reason it should 
show up more often for "Northanger Abbey" than for "Persuasion" or 
"Pickwick Papers," and there's presumably any number of alternatives I 
haven't thought of off the top of my head. I don't actually know the 
plot of "Northanger Abbey" and it's quite possible that more of it 
takes place in Bath than the other two, but you can see what sort of 
clue I'm getting at. There are some things where the quiz bowl canon 
somehow takes certain bits of information as exclusive when in the rest 
of the world they aren't. Of course people then start buzzing on these 
clues, and the thing then becomes self-perpetuating. Such questions are 
legitimate but poorly written.

Another is:

"This Finnish composer..."

Now if the answer isn't "Sibelius," the question is simply a hose. The 
same is true for any toss-up that makes clear that it is talking about 
a Finnish composer, even without saying so explicitly. I assume that in 
fact many other Finns have at some point composed music, probably 
perfectly good music, but they don't happen to be anywhere near as 
famous as Sibelius, and since in the grand scheme of things Sibelius 
isn't actually that godawfully famous, they probably shouldn't be 
coming up in quiz bowl. Such questions are simply not legitimate, and 
90 percent of the time the only reason anyone ever wrote them is 
because they said "there must be some other Finnish composer worth 
writing about..." when in fact there isn't. That's an extreme example, 
but it becomes more significant when questions on, say, Seneca the 
Elder come up just because people saw that his more famous son was 
referred to as "Seneca the Younger" and assumed that the elder must be 
worth writing about too, when in fact by any objective scale he's 
pretty darn obscure. Same goes for things like prompting on 
"Mithridates," when the truth is that even if the famous one was 
technically Mithridates VI, Mithradateses I through V were persons of 
profound insignificance to history who have no more right to come up in 
quiz bowl than Julius Caesar's great aunt's second cousin.

Obviously, these two categories shade into each other depending on how 
much one knows about the subject, but I think they represent two quite 
different aspects in which the quiz bowl canon differs rather 
annoyingly from actual general knowledge. 

Cheers,
Kemezis

--- In quizbowl_at_yahoogroups.com, Doug O'Neal <tychobrahe_at_a...> wrote:
> 
> > Fair enough, but there are simple rules to follow which generally 
> > help; like never putting the main characters of a novel in the first 
> > line...or the first event of the novel...in years past I got 
> > Northanger Abbey at least 3 times in the first line without having 
> > read the book just because people kept opening with "on a vacation in 
> > Bath"...don't do that, ever.
> 
> Well, that's why you use that phrase to begin a question on Joseph Haydn! -- since he went there for vacation during one of his England trips.  Sort of like "This Danish astronomer ..." and the answer is Ejnar Hertzsprung. 
> 
>    Doug