Sunrises vs. Sunsets

So I thought of one other story about bad poetry that I thought I'd include in a separate post:

My high school had a yearly "knowledge bowl" competition, which I entered all three years that I was there. My first year, this was as a sophomore, I was on a team with Ross W. Warren (the W. stands for William - he wasn't too fond of that name and probably wouldn't want me to include it here) and Catherine Green and Sherry Cope. There was a rule that each team had to have two guys and two girls, which was instituted after my older brother's all-male team blew the competition (much of it co-ed) out of the water. The way they explained the new rule when it was announced was that it was intended to "give the girls a chance," so my sister refused to ever participate while she was there, even though Johnny Frandsen (?) practically begged her to join his team. Anyway, Ross and I were by no means sexist (though Ross might have been a little sexist at that point - I can't say for sure) but we weren't around when they made their outrageous statements justifying the co-ed teams, so we didn't feel like a boycott was necessary. Our problem was that we didn't have many female friends, so Ross basically walked up to a group of girls who were in some of our classes, and asked if there were two who wanted to join our team, and Catherine and Sherry volunteered. That's only sort of my memory - I think I've mostly invented it, but I have no other memory of how the team was assembled.

On the first day of Knowledge Bowl competition, I went to meet my team outside of the auditorium about 15 minutes before our first round was supposed to start, as we'd arranged. However, no one was there. I waited a while, wondering why nobody was showing up, until a minute or two before we were supposed to be competing, the three of them showed up together. Apparently, someone had reported to the principal that Ross had made the girls on our team sign a contract saying that they'd never answer any questions or participate in any way - just sit there to fulfill gender requirements. This was in no way true (though it wouldn't have been entirely unbelievable from Ross), so the principal, after Catherine and Sherry assured him that they'd never signed any such contract or made any agreement like that in any way, decided not to disqualify us. We went on to win that first round handily. The girls didn't say much, but I think eventually both of them answered multiple questions. A lot of that related to their being less aggressive in buzzing in to answer than Ross and I were. But after buzzing in, we'd have a few seconds to discuss things if we wanted, and even if they hadn't buzzed and didn't give the answer, they would give their opinions in these situations.

Later, while we were waiting for another round, we were sitting in the auditorium watching two other teams compete. We also happened to be sitting right behind the team against which we were about to compete. We would, as a team, whisper answers to questions as this round progressed. Mr. Mike Olsen was reading questions, and he got to one which he began by giving a category - "The category for this next question is: Bad Poetry." So I immediately whispered, "Charge of the Light Brigade." Ross laughed, and Mr. Olsen read the question - "What poem contains the following line: Into the valley of death rode the six hundred?" My jaw dropped and I turned and looked at Ross, who was also in shock, because I'd been right. When neither of the teams competing at the time got it, Mr. Olsen read the answer, and immediately all four members of the team in front of us turned around and stared at me with these kind of "What kind of a sicko are you?" looks - apparently they could hear our whispering. I just kind of smiled back with a "You've got no idea" smile, which must have been enough to intimidate them because we beat them pretty easily as well.

We went on to make it to the finals that year, and were competing against two teams of seniors. Justin Thorpe and Matt Edwards were on one of the teams, PJ Bingham, that cocky son-of-a-gun, was on the other. There were other people, but I personally knew Justin, Matt beat out my sister for Valedictorian, and PJ was a cocky son-of-a-gun, so I remember them. The whole school came to watch the finals in an assembly, but those competing got out of class a few minutes early to do... whatever, so I left class at the appointed hour only to find PJ Bingham exiting the classroom next to mine. We had no choice but to walk to the auditorium together, and he took advantage of that opportunity to do some trash talking. He said something about how it was pretty good for a team of sophomores to make it to the finals, but everybody knew this was going to come down to a competition between the two teams of seniors. I nodded politely and smiled, and said he was probably right, but I'd have two more years to keep trying to win.

So the competition began, and after maybe half an hour, all the prepared questions had been given. The score stood at 21 for the Thorpe/Edwards team, 21 for my team, and -1 for the PJ Bingham (that cocky son-of-a-gun) team. In the match, there were several music questions for which they would play a clip of a (classical) piece of music and we had to identify either the name of the song or the composer. There were also similar art questions for which they'd project a painting onto a screen and we had to name the title or the artist. Justin Thorpe got at least 9 out of 10 music questions, and I got about the same percentage of art questions, which had helped to keep our scores pretty even throughout the match. I only remember PJ Bingham answering one question, and that was one when I thought I'd been the only person to buzz in and gave the answer - Deleware - when he'd actually beat me to the buzzing but couldn't think of the answer until I said it. Justin Thorpe got one art question - and I shook my head in protest because he said The Screamer instead of The Scream for the title of that Munch painting. Mr. Mike Olsen hesitated when he said that, but decided to give it to him.

So when we got to the end in a tie, they were trying to decide how to break it. I thought they should take away the point from that close but incorrect answer and call us the winners, but instead they decided they had a lot more clips of music on their CD that they hadn't used yet, so they'd give us five more music questions for the tie breaker. Ross guessed "Carmen" for an operatic piece - I, though I didn't recognize the opera, thought we should go with Verdi for the composer just because it seemed like Verdi wrote 5 out of 6 operas. It wasn't Carmen. It was by Verdi. And we lost.