Archive for April, 2008

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“Furious Worms”

Sunday, April 27th, 2008

There was probably not a faster blogging mathlete in the state this time yesterday. I posted the last post “Schooling” from an ice cream van blazing down I-57 at an startlingly, um, “legal” velocity. We initially ran into some problems with the router and squid. But thanks to a Dell, an Acer and two HP laptops, we now have tunes, Youtube, and Counterstrike.

We were heading towards Danville, near the Indiana border. We tried to get a hotel nearer U of I but the Science Olympiad state competition crowded us out of town. Damn those Science Olympians! At least our digs are nice. It’s got an indoor pool and is gas station adjacent.

Now it just so happens that the day of Regionals is Junyong’s birthday. So we had a little surprise planned for him. To be ordered in advance and picked up at a local super market.

nerdy cake

That wasn’t the only present JY got that night. One even inspired envy from the usually nihilistic Walthers, who requests a mint-flavored variant for his birthday.

After that, we took the traditional dip in the pool. We were supposed to play our favorite pool games: Leonhard Euler (our version of Marco Polo), Corpse Rope and Archimedes’ Principle among others. But Walthers wasn’t willing so we instead allied with the juniors in creating a maelstrom by running laps in the water. We then played Pirates of the Caribbean.

JY brought his Wii. Also, Zombies!, Apples to Apples and other board games. For most of the rest of the night, I was training myself to live up to my “Asian heritage”, as Matt Yang put it, by practicing Super Smash Bros. on JY’s Wii. We were innocuously hitting each other with hammers and loud drumming. The juniors were a few rooms down playing Call of Duty on a PS3, violently shooting each other with USPs and M203s. Oh the difference a year makes.

We decided to go to bed hours earlier than anybody else for two reasons.

1. We’re old.

2. Since this is our last year at state, we thought we should be at the top of our game for the competition.

So we went to bed at an insanely early. Mere minutes later, at midnight, we got a call and a question. Then another and another. The freshman girls kept calling our room and asking to talk with JY and Walthers and Schmitz (but not me for some reason). Schmitz refused to talk to them, as expected, so they talked to Walthers instead. They asked him things like whose the hottest guy on math team, boxers or “skintight briefs”, or what toothpaste he prefers to use.

Girls are weird.

Bright and early, we got up for the competition. I was shocked to discover that our window had completely fogged up during the night, prompting me to exclaim, “Wow! You guys are …moist!”

fogged up window

*Boring stuff: eating breakfast, driving to U of I while watching South Park, taking calculator test…*

We stuck around for a presentation about the TV show NUMB3RS, which apparently none of us watched except Schmitz. The presentation was pretty much “If you look carefully in this clip, you’ll see a really nerdy [book/shirt/model] that we gave the producers.” After Jay and Mike woke up, we left, skipping out on the awards.

I learned how to play Apples to Apples on the bus ride home. It’s a game where given a adjective, you must play one of the seven noun cards you were dealt. The person whose turn it is picks the most accurate or most ironic or, hell, the one they like best. The person’s nouns which are picked most often wins. It’s not as simple as it sounds. Though it is funnier than it sounds. Tactics must be adapted when playing with four teenage boys. “Postal Workers” wins “Sexy”. “Worms” wins “Furious”. “My Mind” wins “Dirty”. And “Girl Scouts”? I’ll spare your innocent minds.

Posted in Day-to-Day, Math Team | 4 Comments »

Schooling

Friday, April 25th, 2008

The Psych Bowl is basically Scholastic Bowl for AP Psych students. We’re even borrowing Borgy’s buzzer system. I miss a whole day of school, including one Physics test, so I can be driven down to College of Dupage in an ice cream van with Mrs. A and an 85% female team.

We only had two quickie practices so most of the team was relatively green. I was voted (against my wishes) to captain the first shift, five of the ten contestants, because of my aggressive performance at another informal practice.

The tenets of strategy I was working off of, I learned from Schol Bowl.

1. Stay physically aroused. The pounding heart and stress-induced adrenaline make me more impulsive. I am more likely to ring in with the first bullcrap response that may or may not be right.

2. The brain prefers glucose to fat reserves. A sugar binge immediately before a match floods my bloodstream with C2H3O2 and focuses my thoughts. For a while. Until the hydrocarbon concentration is depleted. Then, I’m a dead buzzer.

The first round was a marker, a whiteboard and a judge. The ten of us each had fifteen seconds to write the answer to the spoken question for five points. I missed 2 out of 3 on the whiteboard round. This has a bonus of me never forgetting the terms: “mental set” and “latent learning”. Still we came out on top with 80 points, tying with Stevenson. The buzzer round was a sweep. We dominated the first round against Niles West (265/100?)

But after the break, we faced Homewood-Flossmoor (I think that was their name.) and were blindsided by them for nearly all of the first round’s questions. The explanation, as we later found out, was that the questions were from a different textbook, which explains our performance in the first round what with the questions using vocab from our book. Thus the first shift of players lost hope (learned helplessness). But the second shift came back, saved by Nicole’s knowledge of the sexual response cycle (and the other team’s relative prudishness) and Alicia’s Stress and Health knowledge.

After pigging out on veggie pizza (in the same room we have math team regionals awards in) we were told that we were in second place 445 to Stevenson’s 650. We were to have one last showdown in that very room. I again captained the first shift and commanded them to “be reckless”. With Stevenson, we had no other strategy.

We were a little lost for the first four questions. And then I became too reckless, and dumb. Screwing up a baby sleep question. I was in a glucose trough due to the fatty pizza sans soda and my lack of review became apparent.

The next shift in picked it up proving that aggression does not a good player make bad grammar mistakes. The final score was …bad. But not a massacre. Certainly something better than our first round.

We rode home singing “We are the Champions” with Michelle waving our second-place trophy around her head and all of us singing our hearts out. Then we got Slushies when Mrs. A stopped for gas and that was the best psych bowl ever. We may have gotten schooled by Stevenson, but at least Nicole, Brad and I weren’t schooled by physics.

Posted in Day-to-Day | 1 Comment »

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