I went to Penn Bowl 2015 at Carleton just to hang out. It turned out they didn't need me for staff so I watched the games and wrote "coverage," which is notes that I then forgot for two years. Here are highlights from these notes.
questions
stats
R2 -- Toronto vs. Ottawa
(Toronto is Rein and Jeffrey. Ottawa is Dennis, Shelby, Ian, and Vinh.)
- Ottawa has a moose.
- Dennis hates Amnesty International.
- Dennis loves America (
Palmer Raids).
- Rein tries to neg Ian but Ian is correct. (This was for a question on
linear run-time that also accepted the answers
O(n) or just
n.)
- No one gets
Bar at the Folies Bergeres.
- Dennis struggles and pulls
al-Abadi.
- Rein negs a lot and is sad.
Ottawa 300 - Toronto 65
(tossups 11-5 for Ottawa)
R3 -- Carleton vs Carleton
(Players are Cameron, Ted, Andrej, Janusz, Aaron, Heather, Max, Michael. I think all the competitive players were stacked on one team.)
- Cameron knows
Operation Anvil.
- Clue about daughter named Sorrow -- poor Aaron!*
- Moderator pronounces "Ashkenazi" the Hitler way.
- Aaron wins race on
sublime and they get fun coffee bonus for 30.
- Everyone races to the violinist abortion clue.
- Ted probably got all four lit TUs at the end.
- Max knows Arkansas on
National Guard clue.
The "Sorrow" clue is Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and it's a weird clue. The book hinges on an incident about a quarter of the way through, where Tess is raped and becomes pregnant. The child doesn't live long, and Tess manages to move on and get a new job and new boyfriend. The question is then lingering over the rest of the book, whether anyone will find out that Tess is a "fallen woman" and how much that revelation might hurt her.
Hardy fought a lot with the publishers and serializers about what could be included in the book. Different editions have different bits missing or cleaned up. I remember Jordan Palmer insisting that Tess never had a child, he was certain because he had just bought the book and read it. So the existence of the child Sorrow is missing from some reader's experience.
In the final posted version of Penn Bowl 2015, the wording is changed to say there's a "son named Sorrow," and there's an answerline note saying that the "s" in "D'Urbervilles" is supposed to be silent.
The coffee bonus was mostly names of places around the world where coffee is grown, but it had a third part asking for the "unusual process" that Kopi Luwak beans go through before they're roasted.
R4 -- Toronto vs. Carleton
(Toronto was Rein and Jeffrey. This Carleton was Heather, Max, Alex, and Stuart.)
- Rein has opinions on
nozzle / Bernoulli's Law bonus.
- Max gets Rand Paul from insane chainsaw clue.
- Alex gets weird music -- "dodecaphonic."
- Carleton laughs at easy
Hockey Sweater bonus part. (A certain Quebec native on the Penn team may have written that one.)
- Rein enjoys missing
Mayerling Incident.
- Rein gets
Themistocles -- everyone starts listening at "oracle."
Toronto 300 -- Carleton 90
(tossups 13-4 Toronto)
R5 -- Waterloo vs. Carleton
(Waterloo is just Aayush. This Carleton is Cameron, Ted, Andrej, and Janusz. Yana from Carleton also watched this game and refused to sub in or keep score.)
- Aayush sucks at Australia bonus.
- Aayush early on Panipat (
child king who beheads people).
- Aayush: "Is Yana just here to drag her teammates?"
- Cameron is early on Fourth Crusade (with Simon de Montfort's dad).
- Aayush 0s a chem bonus and claps for himself.
- Everyone is confused by a stats tossup which turns out to be on residuals. Yana makes it clear that she could have answered that.
- Ted early on
Decameron (buried head in Basel).
- Only Janusz knows baseball. Aayush negs on purpose.
- Andrej 30s Dostoyevsky ("White Nights").
- Andrej early on Sanskrit linguistics -- everyone laughs.
Carleton 260 -- Waterloo 120
(tossups 10-7 for Carleton)
R6 -- Carleton vs McGill
(Carleton is Aaron, Michael, Max, and Stuart. McGill is Derek, Joe, Hugh, and Austen.)
- Max knows Iran nuclear deal (30-day swapbacks).
- Joe 30s a lactose bonus.
- Derek 30s every lit: Auden bonus, La Malinche bonus, French poetry bonus with
A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance.
- Hugh knows "broken windows" early.
- Stuart powers nuclear tests on a
Genghis Khan clue.
- Derek gets Noriega from the
bands they blasted at him.
- McGill 30s a natural gas bonus including Turkmenistan.
McGill 465 -- Carleton 65
(tossups 16-3)
There were four more rounds after this, but I did not do coverage for those rounds. I think I got invited to actually staff those rounds. McGill went 10-0 and finished 100 PPG ahead of the second-place team (Ottawa). Aayush and Rein each got more negs than the winning McGill team.
