I ran across an unusual incident this week, and it overlapped with my plans for the second book. The local televised quiz program usually runs with three competing teams. However this week's episode a team was apparently missing, and so the game was played with just two teams. I should have expected something like this to come up with a later taping date for these episodes, since the final rounds were cancelled, and they have nine honored teams this year. But such a rare event was worth watching, if part of the book’s goal is to decipher all televised competition, because it is more revealing of the structure of the competition because the camera cannot hide what's happening. The analagous situation is when a moderator makes a mistake in a round, it is the easiest way to tell their command of the rules, seeing a normal competition conducted in unusual conditions allows you to see the issues that can be exploited.
There weren't any structural changes to the competition, so their directed rounds to each team went on, but didn't have a third directed section. This put a stress on the production. The one hard limit on television production is having to broadcast the full 22 minutes. Cutting one-third out of two directed rounds, the introduction of the teams, and the introduction of the coaches means they've lost a lot of footage that needs to be replaced. And when you do that teams look a lot worse for wear.
"Portions of the program not affecting the outcome of the game have been edited."
That's a phrase we don't consider for televised competition but we should. In this episode's case, there wasn't footage to edit out. So as the audience, we saw the interviews add an extra question. We saw the footage of the question of the day supplemented by an image of the question being asked again in studio. And we saw the full response of teams, and agonized through watching them not have any idea of the answer. And you actually notice the padding in phrasing of questions like "...no moons exist for this planet, the planet closest to the Sun."
How would these be handled if they had 22 minutes of good footage? Well, those dead questions where no one buzzed in the final round might not have made the final cut. The camera cut from the moderator reading to the team conferring after they buzzed might have been trimmed a second, so the team looks like it knew the answer a little faster. A brave editor might even have the camera cut away from the moderator and snip "the planet" from the audio in the scenario mentioned above. These little tricks allow for the production to make the end product more exciting, while not affecting the outcome.
It's remarkable how through years of independent development, circuit quiz bowl manages to produce exciting results that don't need camera editing. But I also wonder how we'd function with that particular length constraint being dominant.
Stuff to Listen To
I listened in to this podcast from The History of Literature about Boris Pasternak. I had known about some of this from other articles 12.
Stuff to Watch
For Canada Day: A video explaining Canadian political parties from the 2019 election.
It’s rare I run across something that is not a parody over a decade after the parody was made, but here we go. This current video on the font Cooper Black echoes a parody of VH1’s long-running Behind the Music. (And when I saw the passing of composer Johnny Mandel, the first thing I thought of was his name in the credits of M*A*S*H in a stencil-modified Cooper Black.)
The Articles I Learned from This Week
One of last week’s articles brought up time zones, and knowing my affinity for Newfoundland, I set out to answer for myself the question “Why is Newfoundland on the half-hour?” This article answered that and many more things for me.
I got into reading this article because of the Thomas Midgley reference, and I stayed for the rest of the story.
The history of Otis Redding’s Sitting on the Dock of the Bay, which until know I didn’t know referred to a section of section of Richardson Bay near Sausalito.
The Articles You Could Learn from This Week
The Death of Marat: The politics, history and art of history’s greatest bathtub kill.
For July 4th: A website listing of all the US Capitols
Continuing my stealth effort to make this an art crimes newsletter: The story of a Van Gogh painting stolen during the COVID outbreak manages to turn into “weird flex but ok”
Llívia a region of Spain inside France can be your gateway into the trivia-powerful study of enclaves and exclaves (especially since another such region is mentioned in the time zones article.)
Didn’t You Learn Anything from Last Time?
1
Answer the following about the breakup of Yugoslavia.
A. The end of the Socialist Federalist Republic of Yugoslavia began when Slovenia and this nation which borders it declared independence.
answer: Croatia
B. By 1993, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia consisted only of Serbia and this state which split from the union in 2006.
answer: Montenegro
C. Two years later this republic split from Serbia and declared independence from its capital of Pristina.
answer: Kosovo
2
A collections of the murals from this site are preserved at a museum named for art historian Beatriz de la Fuente.
A. Name this Mesoamerican site known for its preserved Pyramids of the Moon and Sun.
answer: Teotihuacan
B. The red coloring of much of the Teotihuacan murals is due to this presence of this mineral form of iron(III) oxide.
answer: hematite
C. Both malachite and azurite which were used at the murals for green and blue coloring are mineral ores of this transition metal.
answer: copper
3
In the field of Canadian aircraft manufacturing, "Black Friday" applies to the 1959 cancellation of this project.
A. Name this supersonic jet manufactured by Avro.
answer: Avro Arrow
B. The cancellation of the project was ordered by this recently elected Conservative Prime Minister. His government's plans for a center to coordinate Canadian govenrnment after a nuclear exhacnge was termed his "bunker."
answer: John Diefenbaker
C. Because Canada lacked wind tunnels sufficient to test the Arrow, many engineers on the project were familiar to this organization, who hired them after the Arrow's cancellation, and put them to work on the Gemini and Apollo programs.
answer: National Aeronautics and Space Administration or NASA or National Advisory Council for Aeronautics or NACA
4
After resolving to write no more prose, he traveled to Jerusalem, and then wrote an 18,000-line poem of his account, Clarel [KLAR-el]
A. Name this author who turned to poetry in Clarel, having previously written prose like Typee, Omoo, and Moby-Dick.
answer: Herman Melville
B. Prior to his travels to the Holy Land, he stayed with this writer in Liverpool where he was serving as a diplomatic consul. He was adapted by Melville into the character of Vine in Clarel.
answer: Nathaniel Hawthorne
C. While with Hawthorne, he gave him a copy of this book, his final published work in prose. This story of a trickster aboard a Mississippi River steamboat was set and published on April Fool’s Day.
answer: The Confidence-Man
5
The Meridian Conference of 1881 placed the line upon which zero degrees longitude was to be measured.
A. The winning site was this London observatory.
answer: Greenwich Observatory
B. Greenwich's only serious competition was the observatory in this city, where Francois Arago used measurements between the Shetland and Balearic Islands to calculate its meridian.
answer: Paris
C. One of the chief reasons Greenwich was selected was it had been standardized throughout the British Empire, thanks to the work of Stanford Fleming, an engineer for the railway in this Commonwealth nation.
answer: Canada