Sorry I’m good
After lots of everything going on, I guess I should finally do some looking back at last week’s Trashmasters, although I’m still waiting for Charlie to post the final numbers. I’m not surprised by my team’s 9-5 record – we lost to the top-five teams there. Those are the breaks, and it was fun if a bit stressful playing some really close games.

Oh yeah, now that K-Tel Hell has moved more into stuff I’m more familiar with, I was finally able to win the belt. I guess it was the first time that the top seed out of the written round won the audio portion. So I’m happy, although I’m surprised I ended up nearly lapping the field. I suppose one thing this proves is that I listen to a lot of “mainstream” radio, which according to many people is downright evil.

Which segues nicely into some recent posts from Victoria and Craig about the nature of trash tournaments. I got hooked into playing these tournaments after pretty much blowing through a lot of the pop culture questions at CBI and later NAQT (the latter showing that those types of questions could be written as well as the academic questions I’d played on at ACF-ish tournaments). I suppose it helps that it touched on subcategories I knew well – sports, reasonably recent pop culture (TV, movies, music). Thus when I finally got to play trash tournaments, I did very well. And since these tournaments draw the “masters” crowd, it’s a good way for me to stay connected with the circuit and have some fun.

Now it looks like with some of these discussions I feel like I should leave because I’m too successful for my own good and for the good of the growth of this circuit. I’ve even considered just being an assistant TD or writer for Trashmasters, but then I realized I’d still be writing those questions that supposedly hinder growth, so that wouldn’t do much good for some, now would it?

It looks like music is the biggest target for this talk, and it’s hard to reconcile all the different wants and needs of players since it is so broad. “Popular” doesn’t even mean the same thing to all people. If we want to go by straight numbers, we could have situations like in quizbowl where if you went by the percentages of majors, we’d have tons of business questions, which obviously isn’t the case.

For good or for bad, there are certain archetypes of personalities playing the game, and thus the questions will sorta skew that way. Hence, the reason why Weird Al is asked a bunch as well as “geek rock” (which can include Elvis Costello, TMBG, Weezer). I don’t think classic rock is asked about as much as some people think, but then again when those types of questions are asked, it’s usually about the more well-known artists (Led Zeppelin, Beatles, Rolling Stones; plus, REM and U2 are now played on classic rock stations). Rap and hip hop are definitely asked about as much as they could be, given their popularity, even among quizbowlers. I don’t know country all that well, but it’s not all that hard to write questions on that. Sometimes you have to push yourself to write questions outside your interests.

At the same time, you need to find something to hang your question on – some type of “hook” clue, whether it be a notable song (sometimes an album), a notable musician on board or some “newsy” clue. The Velvet Underground is definitely askable, if not because of the actual music they performed, but the fact that Lou Reed was part of it. Phish becomes askable because of its band members (you try to name a Phish song). Why do we ask about a one-hit wonder about Right Said Fred, for instance? Because you can dig up trailing clues on whatever but finish up with “I’m Too Sexy.” However, it takes some work to put that giveaway clue on some influential artist that doesn’t have a notable song or album. Remember, it’s not just the “popular” or “mainstream” artists that pass this test. Even Wesley Willis, not the most mainstream artist out there, has a giveaway song or two (at least to the quizbowl community) that makes him at least reasonably gettable. I’m sorry if you hate hooks, but that’s what draws people to things, good or bad.

There is definitely a whole universe of answers/topics that have yet to be covered in trash tournaments, and we should try to open ourselves to write questions covering them (as opposed to some of our pet topics, which some of the more prolific writers definitely have). That type of stuff makes more people interested in what we do. Just remember that there’s a certain point at which questions stop becoming canon-expanding and become chump stumping. In fact, Charlie’s bragging rights, especially at larger tournaments, actually has the secondary purpose of pointing out which questions were probably too hard.