Sunday, November 18, 2007

Of Dire Straits and Anatomy Lessons

It's been a while since my precious writing adorned the hallowed cyberspace of this blog.

Here is a brief tale of what I did over the weekend (Maxwell, make sure you tell this to your grandkids):

Turns out, colleges do not have knowledge bowl. Instead, they prescribe to this beast called Quiz Bowl. For those of you who may know (and not know), quiz bowl is radically different from KBowl:

a) Questions are longer (sometimes painfully so)

b) Individuals elements of the team have a chance at glory with tossups (the part where people buzz in individually if they know the answer. No conferring is permitted)

c) Occasionally, (as it happened this saturday) answers like Dire Straits come up.

This Saturday, the University of California, Berkeley was hosting the WIT (Western Invitational Tournament) and UCLA was sending a team to play. Unlike some other clubs like the University of Chicago, our club lacks funds and as a result we have to drive up for about 6-7 hours wading through the notorious L.A. traffic.

The drive back is not as bad as the drive up, except that two weeks ago (when we were returning from a similar tournament at Stanford) our car was pulled over and the driver duly ticketed for speeding some 13 miles over the posted limit.

The actual tournament is quite fun, all for the following reasons:
a)It is always fascinating to meet numerous characters, some of whom have been playing collegiate level quizbowl since 1999. (or in more abstract terms, eternity)

b)This is perhaps the only place where two totally unrelated things like Dire Straits and The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp turn up at the same time.

c)Individual top scorers and winning teams get "prizes", which usually comprise of well-worn used books like "The manual on exorcism" and "Catch-22".

This description of quizbowl brings me to today's real agenda: the introduction of


the first recipient of which is going to be UC Berkeley for arrogantly calling themselves California (or the even more annoying covariant CAL). Shame on them for ignoring the presence of other entities that are also named California or have that term included as a part of their name.

Further reading for those interested in the quirky realms of quizbowl: UCLA Lexicon

3 comments:

constant_k said...

Hahahah hate on stamp.

Where did you find that/create that Tirth.

It is good to see you releasing your inner hater.

Comrade_Bazarov said...

Well, I created it in Paint, loaded published it on my webspace account provided by UCLA and linked it here

constant_k said...

It is the hate-on stamp.

You stamp it on things which you wish to hate on.

Tirth I was about to ask what a nice young man like yourself was doing up at 1:50 in the morning when I realized that for cilantro-dusting west coasters like yourself 1:50 means 11:50.