> I, too, experienced some very interesting academic team(or "Scholar's Bowl" as we called it)rituals and tendencies. When I was an alternate(read: Before my brother graduated and they let another member of my family actually hold a buzzer), they had already developed some traditions such as answering "nebula" for all answers they didn't know and carrying with them a stuffed "Curious George" style monkey as a mascot. My junior year was the last year with the guy who owned the monkey and I was up for presidency my senior year. A new mascot had to be found. My solution? Sprites. Not those Coca-Cola products which have the Lemon-lime flavor. No sir! We used the little dolls from Rainbow Brite. Everyone on first team had a different color sprite. The alternates were mad because they didn't get mascots.

Hah! We did one game, on a televised academic team competition, in which each member of our team (teams consisted of four people on the show) brought a Ninja Turtle action figure and sat it on their lectern. (When we introduced ourselves, we also introduced our respective Turtles.) For another episode, we brought along kitchen utensils and did the same thing.

-- codeman"I got Michelangelo and a whisk, if I recall"38