Re: Very brief D2K1 comments

Jerry the Grape Smoker said:

I speak here
as someone who over the course of the last year has
had to sit through many a question on NHL, NBA, MLB,
and all those other pillars of the American sports
stage. I don't know anything about these organizations,
nor do I care to. I, for one, like the idea of
expanding the canon, both in academic and in trash terms.
Perhaps I'm bitter because my kind of knowledge is not
generally rewarded by trash questions (sci-fi, Monty
Python, soccer, Dungeons and Dragons) but I think trash
being what it is, any question that has anything to do
with sports should have the right to be a sports
question. This isn't a strict academic distribution we're
talking about. Anything in trash is fair game; I think
it's good for all the sports fanatics to get a taste
of their own medicine once in a
while.

Jerry
Who wishes that the USA would play real football like
the rest of the world

[end quoted
comment]

That's why trash is known as "Popular Culture". Hard
core sci-fi is not "Popular Culture". Dungeons and
Dragons is not "Popular Culture". Mainstream sports are
"Popular Culture". The idea of a tournament, whether
academic or Popular Culture, is to expect the player to
answer a reasonable amount of questions about a subject.
A tournament is not a punishment or a lesson in
what the writer of a packet thinks other people should
know.

Obviously, some elements of pop culture are emphasized more
because of geography, such as hockey over the NBA or rock
over country. Some are dephasized because of the age
bracket, such college radio over boy bands and cable TV
over CBS. 

The poster above concerns me. I
don't want to play in a tournament where I am demeaned
for my perceived lack of knowledge on what somebody
else believes is higher culture. I want to play in a
tournament where the distribution is known and the questions
are reasonably accessible. For a new version of what
Michigan-run trash tournaments expect, check out
<a href=http://www.mikeburger.com/popcultreqs.html target=new>http://www.mikeburger.com/popcultreqs.html</a>


--Mike Burger

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