It's important to establish routine in this time, if for only because you can attach days of the week to your routine. The essential problem I had in remembering January of last year (when I had just come home from the hospital) was that nothing really had an order or rhythm to it. If you don't have a daily or weekly thing to put order back in your life, you zone out and don't really make anything happen. Once I got into a three-day a week rehab (stationary bike and treadmill), I was able to put some sequence and order into my daily routine, because I had an anchor for my Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and from there I could put my weekly routine together from those reference points.
Young Miss Catie is dealing with this sort of disruption to her schedule, the block of school days, her dance lessons. It’s very hard to suddenly impose summertime hours and then immediately work distance learning into it, where you have to log in between 7:45 and 8am and then nothing else is standard from day to day, but it’s starting to come together. Her dance lesson was by Zoom today, but now we have something back on schedule for Tuesdays.
If you want to establish a routine for yourself through writing questions, know that this will come out on Wednesdays for now, and you can write alongside what I'm doing to prep for Wednesday.
Stuff to Hear
Normally a new song by Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan, his longest released song, would have been the most significant new thing for quiz bowl this week, but these are not normal weeks. For a question context Murder Most Foul resembles Don McLean’s American Pie, but without the layer of allusions of the latter. Just find three references to connect to and you’ve created a bonus.
Stuff to Look At
Today would have been the 100th birthday of actor Toshiro Mifune. TCM is doing a run of his films with director Akira Kurosawa. And this article covers his non-samurai roles. Unfortunately this isn’t releasing before they air High and Low, otherwise I’d recommend watching.
A map of America’s folk heroes
Stuff to Read
This BBC News article on the history of moving London Bridge to Arizona hit me at the right moment, about nine months after I was in Lake Havasu City on vacation standing under the bridge. Of course at that time, all I could think about was the David Hasselhoff made-for-TV magnum opus, Bridge Across Time, where Hasselhoff’s character has to stop the murderous spirit of Jack the Ripper, carried in the stones of London Bridge.
One of my favorite type of dumb current events hooks to write an art question from is an art theft. The article this week about a stolen Van Gogh got me to go down a rabbit hole into art theft blogs. 1 2 The theft from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum happened just over thirty years ago, and it’s been a steady font of questions for me for years.
The Articles I Learned from This Week
An expansive study of the most popular high school musicals. I love articles like these which give me guidance of what is reasonable to ask about, and then explain through their data how I can trust that their prediction is valid. Counting old questions and their conversion gives you data about what would be valid to ask of people in previous years, but this allows you to predict difficulty forward.
A history of coffee development.
An article about the presence of volcanoes and cryovolcanoes in the solar system.
The Articles You Could Learn from This Week
50 famous Curves and Polar Curves
The origins of Kevlar
Didn’t You Learn Anything From the Last Time?
1
In an essay on his craft, this author created the fictional detective story Death Wears Yellow Garters to mock what others called its Golden Age. For 10 points each--
A. Name this author who laid out his theories in The Simple Art of Murder, and followed those theories in his works featuring Philip Marlowe.
answer: Raymond Chandler
B. In The Simple Art of Murder, Chandler criticizes this author's The Red House Mystery for its convolutions of plot. He is better known for his children's stories featuring the toys of his son Christopher Robin.
answer: A. A. Milne
C. Chandler also takes to task this Agatha Christie creation for his talking in a "literal translation of school-boy French" and his solution to the Murder on the Orient Express.
answer: Hercule Poirot
2
Following the execution of Charles I, he became the Secretary for Foreign Tongues for the new republic.
A. Name this author whose time in service to the Commonwealth as a diplomat ended as he became completely blind.
answer: John Milton
B. This man's death occurred shortly before Milton began Paradise Lost. Poet John Dryden attempted to associate this Lord Protector with Milton's characterization of Satan.
answer: Oliver Cromwell
C. Following the collapse of the Commonwealth and restoration of the monarchy, Milton was imprisoned and avoided execution only thanks to the intervention of this Cavalier poet of "To His Coy Mistress"
answer: Andrew Marvell
3
Samples from the mine outside this village were supposed to yield tungsten, but instead prompted the isolation of ten new elements. For 10 points each--
A. Name this village on an island outside of Stockholm.
answer: Ytterby
B. Ytterby Mine was originally built to mine feldspar, useful in creating the Chinese version of this ceramic.
answer: porcelain
C. Of the elements discovered in Ytterby, three lie in group 3 and the remainder are the seven heaviest members of this group of elements.
answer: lanthanides
4
The second of its four ottava rima begins "An aged man is but a paltry thing,"
A. Name this meditiation on aging which begins "This is no country for old men."
answer: Sailing to Byzantium
B. This author of The Second Coming wrote Sailing to Byzantium.
answer: William Butler Yeats
C. In Sailing to Byzantium, Yeats uses this four-letter word to refer to a spinning wheel. In his The Second Coming, the falcon turns in a widening one of these circling paths.
answer: gyre
5
Despite being the host country of the Berlin Conference, Germany only secured a few colonies in the final agreements. For 10 points each--
A. One of those secured areas German South West Africa was taken over by South Africa in World War I, and became this nation which became independent only in 1990.
answer: Namibia
B. Another goal of the conference was to facilitate trade on this river. Though intended to be neutral territory it became the brutally controlled personal territory of Belgium's Leopold II.
answer: Congo River
C. This country's ambition of uniting its territories Mozambique and Angola was supported by most attending powers but not Britain, who saw that as thwarting their Cape-to-Cairo ambitions.
answer: Kingdom of Portugal