King of the Hill and Quiz Bowl
King of the Hill and Quiz Bowl
I watched the 7:30 (6:30, Central) King of the Hill last night, where Hank makes Bobby join an extracurricular activity, and he chooses Quiz Bowl. And I laughed, and laughed. I connected with Bobby.
I was a Quiz Bowler.
As a quizbowler in high school, I had to laugh at what Bobby jumped into. Because a lot of schools did things like make their teams study.
Our quiz bowl team was led by Ms. Hall, a British Lit teacher, who was really kind of a nice lady but was from the old school where students who don't mind her get beatings.
Ms. Hall wanted our team to study. She tried threats, and she tried not letting us play in competition. But the layabout personalities of the two Bills (one of them here), and myself were often too hard to overcome.
Which is not to say we were a bad team. We were actually quite good. Bill, Bill and I all had a pretty well-rounded knowledge base, since we'd all done little things like "read books." And each year we had somebody who specialized in history. Just because they were history geeks. But they never studied lists for the express purpose of winning a quiz bowl match. They just liked history.
(Yeah. I'm a big dork).
Like I said, we were pretty good. And we actually won a few tournaments. But we were about as good as you could get without doing anything additional to supplement what we already learning in our regular studies. So anytime we ran up against a team that actually did stuff like study birthdate lists or lists of works, we usually didn't come out on top. (But we really enjoyed it those times we did).
Probably the most fun we had was playing Scholar's Bowl, on Knoxville's PBS station. We had a good run. We made it to the semifinals, which was good, since a lot of the teams were the types who did things like drills and study sessions and what not. We just showed up on taping days without uniforms or team colors or anything. We just got up, and rode in with Ms. Hall, probably driving her crazy with our constant babbles about Monty Python, baseball, TV, basketball and oboes.
Yeah. Scholar's Bowl was good. I got a little crap about mispronouncing the dog breed "Shih Tzu" in the worst possible way for broadcast television. I did it on purpose, because we were so far ahead, and I think it was the last question of the day....I think the answer they were going for was dachsund). The vice principal of our school told me that was a horrible way to represent our school.
Also: In quiz bowl, you got a lot of questions like this:
Name the large mammal from the marsupial family that is made out of the same material we get Nerf from.
And it was a running gag in our team at practice where if we didn't know the answer to the question, we'd give a name. When asked to name an animal, we'd say Fred. Or Steve.
The question we got asked in scholar's bowl was something along the lines of:
Name this Asian animal related to the pig (there were more clues, but I don't remember).
And when nobody rang in for a long time, I ran in and answered "Bob." I'm proud of managing to keep a straight face through it. I'm especially proud of the bewildered pause the reader has when she realizes what I've said.
Even playing, we liked trying to be funny. We stare into the camera, angrily. While the credits roll for one episode, Bill Ryan starts spinning on the platform. And at the end of another episode, he starts a shoulder-blocking competition.
But the last game at Scholar's Bowl, I screwed us over. See, the Scholar's Bowl set was made up of one team of four players on a bottom row, and a second team of four players on a top row, set up on a platform, so that both teams were facing the camera and were on screen at the same time.
And every win up to that point, we'd been on the top row. In fact, we'd been steamrolling the competition from the top row.
Problem was, so had the team we were facing in the semi-final round. We did a coin toss. As team captain, I had to call it in the air, and I chose heads.
Stupid quarters. Never coming up right.
We lost that game by a couple of questions. We got behind early, thrown by not getting our top row. But we came back, and were making a run in the last couple of minutes. But it ended up being too little, too late.
It's funny to watch the tape. The reader is reading a question with about 90 seconds left in the game, and just pauses mid-question, stumbling over the wording, I guess. And she doesn't say anything for 5 or 6 seconds. The clock is counting, and you can see all four team members getting wide-eyed in frustration at the pause, and we each start twirling our fingers trying to get her To Ask The EVER SHITTING QUESTION!!!!!!!!.
Still, even in a loss, we were about the comedy. At the end of the game, one of the team members on the top row reaches down to shake our hands, and Bill Ryan (who as a senior in high school was 6'5", bearded, with long red hair down the middle of his back) is too busy staring angrily into the TV camera to notice.
But anyway. I liked Bobby's adventures. Because as things came around, the year or two I played in college proved that I, too, was the pop culture guy. Screw Millard Fillmore and that history crap. Buckminsterfullerine? pfah. Give me six hours of pro wrasslin' a week and all the re-runs of A Team I can take, and I was a happy man.
I watched the 7:30 (6:30, Central) King of the Hill last night, where Hank makes Bobby join an extracurricular activity, and he chooses Quiz Bowl. And I laughed, and laughed. I connected with Bobby.
I was a Quiz Bowler.
As a quizbowler in high school, I had to laugh at what Bobby jumped into. Because a lot of schools did things like make their teams study.
Our quiz bowl team was led by Ms. Hall, a British Lit teacher, who was really kind of a nice lady but was from the old school where students who don't mind her get beatings.
Ms. Hall wanted our team to study. She tried threats, and she tried not letting us play in competition. But the layabout personalities of the two Bills (one of them here), and myself were often too hard to overcome.
Which is not to say we were a bad team. We were actually quite good. Bill, Bill and I all had a pretty well-rounded knowledge base, since we'd all done little things like "read books." And each year we had somebody who specialized in history. Just because they were history geeks. But they never studied lists for the express purpose of winning a quiz bowl match. They just liked history.
(Yeah. I'm a big dork).
Like I said, we were pretty good. And we actually won a few tournaments. But we were about as good as you could get without doing anything additional to supplement what we already learning in our regular studies. So anytime we ran up against a team that actually did stuff like study birthdate lists or lists of works, we usually didn't come out on top. (But we really enjoyed it those times we did).
Probably the most fun we had was playing Scholar's Bowl, on Knoxville's PBS station. We had a good run. We made it to the semifinals, which was good, since a lot of the teams were the types who did things like drills and study sessions and what not. We just showed up on taping days without uniforms or team colors or anything. We just got up, and rode in with Ms. Hall, probably driving her crazy with our constant babbles about Monty Python, baseball, TV, basketball and oboes.
Yeah. Scholar's Bowl was good. I got a little crap about mispronouncing the dog breed "Shih Tzu" in the worst possible way for broadcast television. I did it on purpose, because we were so far ahead, and I think it was the last question of the day....I think the answer they were going for was dachsund). The vice principal of our school told me that was a horrible way to represent our school.
Also: In quiz bowl, you got a lot of questions like this:
Name the large mammal from the marsupial family that is made out of the same material we get Nerf from.
And it was a running gag in our team at practice where if we didn't know the answer to the question, we'd give a name. When asked to name an animal, we'd say Fred. Or Steve.
The question we got asked in scholar's bowl was something along the lines of:
Name this Asian animal related to the pig (there were more clues, but I don't remember).
And when nobody rang in for a long time, I ran in and answered "Bob." I'm proud of managing to keep a straight face through it. I'm especially proud of the bewildered pause the reader has when she realizes what I've said.
Even playing, we liked trying to be funny. We stare into the camera, angrily. While the credits roll for one episode, Bill Ryan starts spinning on the platform. And at the end of another episode, he starts a shoulder-blocking competition.
But the last game at Scholar's Bowl, I screwed us over. See, the Scholar's Bowl set was made up of one team of four players on a bottom row, and a second team of four players on a top row, set up on a platform, so that both teams were facing the camera and were on screen at the same time.
And every win up to that point, we'd been on the top row. In fact, we'd been steamrolling the competition from the top row.
Problem was, so had the team we were facing in the semi-final round. We did a coin toss. As team captain, I had to call it in the air, and I chose heads.
Stupid quarters. Never coming up right.
We lost that game by a couple of questions. We got behind early, thrown by not getting our top row. But we came back, and were making a run in the last couple of minutes. But it ended up being too little, too late.
It's funny to watch the tape. The reader is reading a question with about 90 seconds left in the game, and just pauses mid-question, stumbling over the wording, I guess. And she doesn't say anything for 5 or 6 seconds. The clock is counting, and you can see all four team members getting wide-eyed in frustration at the pause, and we each start twirling our fingers trying to get her To Ask The EVER SHITTING QUESTION!!!!!!!!.
Still, even in a loss, we were about the comedy. At the end of the game, one of the team members on the top row reaches down to shake our hands, and Bill Ryan (who as a senior in high school was 6'5", bearded, with long red hair down the middle of his back) is too busy staring angrily into the TV camera to notice.
But anyway. I liked Bobby's adventures. Because as things came around, the year or two I played in college proved that I, too, was the pop culture guy. Screw Millard Fillmore and that history crap. Buckminsterfullerine? pfah. Give me six hours of pro wrasslin' a week and all the re-runs of A Team I can take, and I was a happy man.
posted by Tommy at
05:20
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