"Music in trashy tournaments is almost threatening to develop into a canon as immutable as the ACF or NAQT canons, which, while ironic, is pretty depressing." I've never been to a trash (or TRASH) tournament, so I know nothing about what does or doesn't get asked about there, but the tangential comment above brought me up short. Also leaving aside ACF, which I am less involved with, as an NAQT editor I am at a loss to understand what anyone can mean by "as immutable as the NAQT canon." Huh? Outside of the blatantly offensive, there is no question topic whatever that would be inherently out of bounds for NAQT. And there is little that is more prized in NAQT's internal evaluation of questions than asking about things that have seldom or never been asked about before (if they are answerable), or coming up with a new spin on, or interesting new clues about, traditional topics. We have by my count 58 different writers submitting questions for NAQT use--a group varying by more than 20 years in age, living in all corners of the U.S. plus a couple outside of it, and having hugely varying personal interests, though nearly all have had extensive quizbowl experience as players--and our "canon" such as it is is the sum of their collective independent work, with every one of them straining to think of good new things to write about. There is a certain "immutability" to the percentage of our questions that fall within broad subject categories like "Pop Culture," but everything that can possibly be written about has a place (with the catch-all "General Knowledge" there for anything not falling obviously elsewhere), and we will sooner or later use every last question that our writers submit, if the question is any good, or can be edited into being any good, is not in outrageously bad taste, and falls somewhere between the minimum and maximum levels of difficulty we write for. A de facto "canon" of things that will predictably be written about again and again emerges of course, but nothing about the process is prescribed, proscribed, or immutable.
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