The Times - Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley

Words simply can­not express the degree to which I am bothered when the peo­ple in my life misconstrue my beloved Knowledge Bowl as a sport for those who have had the part of their brain containing the sense of humor removed in order to accommodate more quadratic functions.

English translation: They think we're cyborgs.

I don't blame them en­tirely - after all, that's sort of the way geeky types get portrayed in the me­dia. But first of all, most Knowledge Bowlers aren't geeks in the least (the rest of us own it proudly). And more importantly, very few teams in the Southeastern Washington district take KB too seriously.

Case in point: the ro­tating "default answer". When there's not much time left on the clock, a few teams will dignifiedly say "no answer" as the ringer sounds. But where's the fun in that? Here at Waits­burg, we pride ourselves on thinking up creative hail-Marys that earn us few points but tons of laughs. ( Sometimes the other teams laughs so hard they forget what the question was.) These answers, often the spawn of inside jokes, have included "galloping stallions", "Nebraska", "Chuck Norris", and "salt", which are especially funny if the question was about the third wife of King Juan II of Portugal.

Of course, answers like these don't need to be planned ahead of time, and Waitsburg doesn't have a monopoly on creative solutions. For example, the captain of a rival team, with only a few seconds left on a question concerning the term for a window that pushed outwards, hollered "Swing-a-ding-a-ding- dong!" as the clock ran out.

But perhaps even fun­nier than a horribly wrong answer is a horrible guess that turns out to be correct. My freshman year, our captain was Fletcher Baker, and a question concerning the term for someone who makes arrows came up at one meet. We were running out of time but were pretty sure that the answer ended in "-er", so our captain guessed the first such word that came to mind - his own first name.

And he was right.

Fletcher was ending his Knowledge Bowl career just as I was starting mine, which tasked him with the unfortunate burden of showing me the ropes. I was prone to bouts of overexcitement, and my "whispering" could be ear­splittingly loud. I'm sure, for example, that the word "China" is still echoing in his head - but hey, we got a point!

Ever since, though, whenever the answer to a question is "China" and I whisper it to the captain, he'll say something like "Sounds righthellip;and thanks for whispering."

And then there are the people who take Knowl­edge Bowl seriously. The people who wear business suits and silk ties to the state meet, challenge an answer if you so much as stutter when you deliver it, and give an almost imper­ceptible - and just barely sinister - laugh as they ask for the rest of a ques­tion after us mere mortals have buzzed in early and answered poorly.

Sure, they get all the trophies.

But they're missing out on all the fun, all the ca­maraderie, all the howling laughter that drowns out the beeper and elicits angry shouts from the room next door.

I pity them. I really do.

(Now will you please give us back the fourth- place plaque from 2012? We would've won it if you hadn't gotten that one point of ours cancelled. Thanks.)