Stephen, >From your message, it isn't clear whether you are referring to collegiate or high school tournaments. Most college and many high school tournaments follow distributions which include a certain quota of trash (just as they include quotas for the various academic subjects). Your argument implies that all trash, not only cartoons, should be stricken from all tournaments. While the belief in a emphatically academic tournament is reasonable (cf. ACF), most invitational tournament hosts would not be prone to eliminate trash completely from their tournaments because most players enjoy a certain amount of non-academia in their trivia competitions. Please note that even ACF allows for a trash question or two each round. In the event that I am misconstruing your argument and you are specifically denouncing cartoon questions as opposed to all trash questions in general, then this is a more serious situation. At present in collegiate quiz bowl, there tends to be a bias against geek trash (even in trash tournaments), a category into which cartoons are usually lumped. If your intent is to purge one of the more accessible areas of geek trash, then your statement comes across as if you are an anti-geek bigot. I sincerely hope that this is not the case. In either case, the onus of not having to play on questions that you already know that you detest is on you, not on every tournament host. If you despise trash so much, then don't go to tournaments which don't appeal to you (i.e. have trash as part of their subject distributions). BTW, this maxim is valid on both the college and the high school level. If this means there are no tournaments you want to attend, either don't go to any or suck it up and bite your tongue. Please use your energy to run a tournament that is up to your particular standards rather than for calling a jihad on Bugs Bunny's ass. Dom "A Connecticut Yankee in the Central Time Zone"
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