Week 217: The Future Quizbowl Land Rush

And gardening updates.

May 09, 2024

[Very short this week, I spent so much time on preparing the team for summer, and preparing press releases, and searching for evidence of activity that I've had little time to write this. The good news is that when not doing the above, I did get a good portion of the book accomplished. I hope to have more about things next week after MSNCT and my third trip across Chicago by CTA.]

When we last discussed the subject in January, I had two examples of companies that were exiting the quiz bowl space. Since January, we've had one, and possibly two more close (depending on whether a website gets updated). And that puts a lot of places in the odd position of having to choose a new provider, and it's among a group of people who have never been in close communication with the circuit.

On one hand this is a problem for them, because most of these leagues have only had contact with a single provider for many years. And to an isolated league of teams, the situation will look pretty dire. The one outside person they’ve turned to is gone, and there’s no institutional memory to speak of other possible writers. Most of these operations are also running under a non-standard quiz bowl name, and so if they actually are searching to other organizations or other providers, they don’t even know where to search. For them, these would seem to be impossible problems. But for us, those who know that these people are out there, who kept all the articles from years back, or search all 70 or so names for quiz bowl around the world, these are hard but solvable problems. And so it’s up to us to solve these problems for them as soon as possible.

From our perspective, the next six months to a year are going to look like a land rush. There's a lot of places which have to make decisions about whether they play next year, and whose questions they are going to use. And many of them have never had to make this decision before, or even consider that they have choices. So it's up to those of us who can provide the choices to get information in front of these people.

I am writing this here well in advance so that I can point to it and say I'm sticking to my position: If you and I should bump elbows in the next six months over trying to get a deal with someone, know that I am acting this aggressively not because I have any problem with your company, but because there’s lots of ground to cover. If you beat me to the punch somewhere that's not ideal for me, but it's acceptable. What would be unacceptable is for all of these teams to fall through the cracks, and the only way to prevent that is to be aggressive, get out of the comfort zone of people you know, and present your work where ever you can.

The only other news of note is that the first wave of planting is done. The potato pit is started with red potatoes, a trial run of Jerusalem artichokes are in an otherwise abandoned pot. The asparagus from last year is shooting a few fronds up, but no spears. Lettuce, spinach and radishes are in and sprouted, and beets which take a little longer are just poking out. Over the weekend I planted tomatoes and peppers in seed pods, so they'll be ready to go in the garden after the HSNCT. And the big early effort, pea pods, have started to trellis up the wire frames. Those are the big early effort this year, and I'm hoping to have enough from those for everyone into June, when they can be cleared out and replaced with tomato or squash.

OTW

I think we're wrapping up the Bridge OTW with this one, probably dropping the Chemistry History, and I think I'm going to be modifying the Youtube video to be about something other than language, probably in the direction of math. I pulled an audible on the artwork and art movements OTW for this week after finding out about the death of Frank Stella. And please note what’s missing in the history of baseball in Washington, namely most of the history of Baseball in Washington.

# Poem OTW: Dulce et Decorum Est

https://poets.org/poem/dulce-et-decorum-est

# Poet OTW: Wilfred Owen

https://poets.org/poet/wilfred-owen

# YouTube Terminology Video OTW