Brian and Victoria add their views on the whole future of the game thing. Note that I didn't read theirs in advance of what I wrote today, just dumb luck that.

Those of you who watched 24, two questions:

1. Do we have any idea what the heck was going on with that opening scene? Do the South Koreans have some sort of torture involving removing someone's internal fluids and replacing it with bavarian creme donut filling? 'Cause that's what it looked like to me, and really, I'm having a hard time imagining a worse way to go.

2. If I ever utter the phrase "I'm going to need a hacksaw" will you please be kind enough to get out of my way? I'll do the same for you.

Stuff from the office vending machine: They've developed the Banana Nut granola bar. Much like South Korean Bavarian Creme torture, once you get past the hideous yellow/gold color, it's not bad eating.

Accessibility, and a building.

Okay. I just want to start you off with a mental image. Imagine a skyscraper, not a really tall one, maybe 7 to 10 stories tall. Across the street there's a parking garage, with a walkway that connects over to the building on the third floor. People in this building work there all day, some of them go down to the basement where there are a couple of fast food places for lunch, then come back up on the elevator, but the majority pack their own. Some people come in off the street and eat at the food court, then go back out. Everything is nice and reasonable. One day you come to the building, having never been there before, and you try to enter on the ground floor. Only one problem, there's nohing on the ground floor there, no entrance, just windows, and you can't see anything in there, except for where the elevators would be, but they're just a column. It looks like the whole building's empty. So you go wandering around, and you find the stairs into the basement. You ask someone who just comes there to eat, and they're happy, but they don't really see what's going on upstairs, and besides, those folks keep to themselves. So you go ask someone who came down on the elevator, and they tell you they don't know how to get in the building that way, they always park at the parking garage. They've never had to think about coming in from the street.

Welcome to how I see the circuit. We tend to spend all our time going from the parking garage (HS) up to our work on the upper floors, doing our work, and not even realizing what's going on below us. (Incidentally, the upper floors are all the formats, NAQT, TRASH, ACF, some are very difficult, some are less difficult but all are up there on all of those high levels.) Down in the basement we've got CBI, which the circuit has all but separated itself from, by moving up to the higher floors. In the process we've left the lower floors empty, but with no way for anyone to take up residence. There's plenty of space down there, but since we've been conditioned to enter in a different way, it doesn't occur to us that we have this accrued experience that makes us think that there's anything down there. We advertise things as accessible, but that we don't realize that that means accessible for those people already here.

The promising sign is, for the first time this year, I've seen people make an effort to realize that these levels of quiz bowl are unoccupied, and that people might want to occupy that space. TRASH's junior bird was a major step in that direction (see my previous effusiveness for that set). NAQT's IS sets are getting there, and the only team-written set I've seen recently that could get down in there was Cornell's set from a couple years back. Merely providing the questions, however, is only half of how to make that level habitable. We need to break open the routes to allow people from the outside in. All three of those sets get dinged for being "too easy", but that's because the teams that played on it were already integrated into the circuit. Expose those to people not used to quiz bowl, and then you have something.