There's not a lot of quizbowl action here in Albuquerque. Aside from the delightful (but clearly imperfect) Science Bowl competitions, there are no scholastic events that resemble qb. UNM doesn't have a team, unless they've been doing some serious hiding all these years. Bar-related activities are limited to NTN, and even that tends to be less of a hobby and more of a curiousity to the few that play it here. OTOH, Sandia isn't short on smart folks / bookish types / those that retain information. As such, for the last two months or so, I've put some decent effort into getting a qb activity held at the Labs. After two abortive attempts, this finally came to fruition this past Thursday with two hours of questions read. The numbers (seven plus me) weren't spectacular, but after two attempted meetings (with the same individual being the only attendee both times), I'll take four-on-three anytime. The talent-level was better than I'd expected; would anybody honestly expect the first two tossups to a room full of qb rookies to be powered? Four rounds were played, with the questions taken from the NAQT sample page, the most recent Penn Bowl in the archive, and a couple of rounds I'd collected over the years, likely printed once-upon-a-time from the archive as well. The next several meetings will probably use the surprisingly large quantity of free rounds from CBI. This all assumes that there will, in fact, be more meetings, but with all of them seeming to have a good time, I feel pretty good about there being qb in the coming months at SNL. I'm not certain why I felt compelled to post this to the board, but I guess I wouldn't mind hearing about similar groups around the country. Is the non-scholastic quizbowl group a relatively scarce commodity? How/where did you find your members? For those of you who do meet, what kinds of questions do you use? This crowd (and even myself, to a certain extent) wasn't very enthusiastic towards non-mainstream myth (Gk. or otherwise), most classical music, and much of non-US/colonial history that we came across. Science, American history, and general knowledge were answered very quickly. Pop culture knowledge was limited to say the least, although most of the players were 30+, while most of the trash-ish answers were 90's or later. My emphasis for the past three years has been trash, so while I'll likely not have many hard-nosed trash scrimmages with the locals, at least the sets I'll be reading (and occasionally playing on) will be of the easy/familiar variety. Yeah, this reads as blasphemy to the competitive qb-er, but the SNL clan is more in it for the fun than for the competition, which is fine with me. I'm happy to report, btw, that there was no more than one rules- related goof all practice; one answered without ringing after the other team had already negged, which isn't the first time I've ever seen that happen. Despite the buzzer system being kind of annoying (it auto-resets with an annoying noise after a few seconds), there were no bonus-buzzes, which I've also seen with some frequency among qb newbies. Ideally, btw, some of this group (along with some committed outside volunteers) will hopefully join me in putting on some sort of high school state championship here in town. SNL owns about ten buzzer systems that they use for the Science Bowl, with a local school owning several more; that's a good chunk of logistics out of the way. If there are any qb-ers in the 505 that wish to get in on this action, please let me know (zundevil at Y!) and we'll see what we can do. Otherwise, I'd like to hear any comments or suggestions, hopefully relevant to that which I talked about above. Jason (ex-ASU)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0: Sat 12 Feb 2022 12:30:47 AM EST EST