Quiz Bowl Update

My Quiz Bowl team competed at an all-day tournament at Madison Central High School on Saturday. (Madison gives me the creeps, by the way. It's a disgustingly wealthy town, which may be fine in some ways, but its residents pretend like it would exist on its own independent of the troubled history of Jackson and somehow escapes its somewhat rightful stigma of being home to the rich, white flight Rankin County enjoys, simply because it's a new development. Maybe these residents aren't fleeing Jackson, per se, but they certainly are benefiting from its proximity and resources and avoiding its black and urban poor population at all costs. It's one thing to trade some stocks or go to law school or whatever it is people do to join the ranks of the Nouvou Riche - yeah I haven't a clue how to spell it - but it's another thing to be completely naive and callous about the predetermined circumstances that allowed it to happen and ignore the 99% of the rest of the world. But I digress.) We won second place. The team from Clinton - coached by Mr. Barfield, the old Quiz Bowl coach and Latin teacher at Murrah who was forced out of his job after 40 some odd years a few years ago and replaced by me at the behest of some concerned parents, and no I'm not touching that one with a 30 foot pole thank you - was in the same round-robin elimination pool as we and defeated us, though we were clearly among the best teams of the tournament. We slipped into the championship bracket by accumulating the highest point total of all the second place teams in each pool, and in the semi-finals avenged our loss by defeating Clinton. There was no way, I think, that anybody was going to even come close to beating East Rankin for the Championship, so I was quite proud that our guys proved to be the second best of a field of twenty mostly suburban schools. (Murrah and Forrest Hill were the lone representatives of JPS, the field largely filled by the academies and Rankin County schools.) Low-quality pictures taken by a low-quality picture taker on a low-quality cell phone camera can be found on Facebook: http://nd.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2065902&l=1f12e&id=5601686