Obligatory navel-gazing
Am I really getting old?

Saturday, we hosted a quiz bowl tournament for high schoolers. Since Berkeley QB doesn't believe in paying for questions of this sort, we had to write our own questions (grumble, grumble). I found writing high school questions to be surprisingly challenging; it really is harder to write easy questions than hard ones, and I was hampered by the fact that I had forgotten all the stuff I had learned in high school which I haven't used since then (for example, biology).

Anyway, to fulfill my "popular music" allotment, I decided to write a question on Depeche Mode. I figured that this would be eminently gettable, and fretted that maybe I was even making it too easy. But the question in question comes up, and in our room, it goes dead. No one touches the buzzer until the end of the question, and then we get one wild guess, and that's it.

Juliana points out that '80s music is probably too old for these kids. And I suppose she has a point -- I don't know anything about '70s music, nor do I have any particular desire to, so is it really fair to ask '80s music of kids who were born in, what, 1984-5?

But still, Depeche Mode? Yipes.