Week 183: A flight to flightless
And I am surprised by something before Catie's birthday and after mine
After reading this article, I got it into my head to write a short study guide for the team on the subject of flightless birds.
I settled upon flightless birds as a study sheet because it hits the interface of several separate causes for questions to be written or not written. On the surface, there isn't a strong reason for there to be questions specifically about flightless birds in quiz bowl over other types of birds. But flightless birds questions do outpace other types of bird questions, and really even outpace lots of other types of zoological questions.
In practice, questions about animals have slowly been weeded out of circuit quiz bowl. Taxonomy has been subject to changes for decades as more information is propagated. This is an avoidable problem. If your response is going to change to a question abut taxonomy based on when you learned the answer, and from whom, that introduces an ambiguity in the answer that nobody wants to adjudicate.
There's also the sort of geographic clue that they provide, the ratites neatly divide the world into a call and response structure, give me the region and I know the bird, give me the bird and I know the region. That sort of structure to the answer, divorced from the field of study is also frowned upon.
But with those strikes against it why do the questions keep coming up?
I suppose the first reason is that flightless birds run counter to expectation, and so the reason they can't fly is part of the reason they are interesting enough to ask about. Then that reason itself becomes fodder for the question, and there's less to prevent a question from forming. It's of interest to the general public, and can be asked about in that context.
Birding as an activity has a following among some section of quiz bowl players and writers. Writers tend to write about things they are familiar with, and things they like, and they tend to do that more often than wade into categories they only have to write about because of packet requirements. So writers are more likely to fill a category with something that obliquely refers to something they like or more blatantly covers a category. This doesn’t need to be much of a tendency, if it occurs in a general desertion of a large category, even staying at the same frequency is observable.
Flightless birds also have another constituency in quiz bowl fighting for their inclusion, the wordplay enthusiast. How does the average person find out about more obscure flightless birds? Likely it’s because “flightless South American bird” was the clue to 10 Across in some crossword. We shouldn’t want to get rid of that sort of on-ramp to knowledge, and it’s going to be the reason someone knows anything about flightless birds.
The remaining other reason that questions about flightless birds keep getting made is likely that there’s several distinct examples of flightless birds which became notable by becoming extinct. If you read the article about the Inaccessible Island rail above, you know the passage about why birds become flightless. If you don’t have an absolute need to fly, you don’t use the skill and consume the energy needed to fly. You lose that ability and muscle definition, but can put that energy to other uses. That works great for you, until you encounter predators. And in the case of the extinct flightless birds, mostly that predator was human.
If the writer believes biodiversity is very very important, or that extinctions have a lesson to humans, writing about it becomes important enough to influence their question and answer selection. And that is a particular pattern we should observe and learn from: If a writer believes they have an important reason to flout the conventions of the circuit, those conventions will be flouted. Further, if a large section of answers or clues are deemed off limits by the writers, the space taken up by those questions won’t entirely be moved over to other subjects, some portion of the packets taken up by those off limits subjects will remain, and be dominated by the small section of those clues that writers deem worth violating the convention. Those items then become slightly overrepresented compared to their prior status.
Finally one other mechanism which permits this sort of (pardon the pun) flight to this subject is the theme packet. A writer who publishes their theme packet on a subject sees their well-researched and imaginative clues received well by the public, and their best clues will get propagated into other tournaments. There have been bird themed vanity packets offered up for casual play, and those have modified the expected difficulty and acceptability of those clues so that when they are seen again, those clues are not seen as impossible, or seen as beyond the pale.
So let’s summarize and then generalize the thought, because this is a pattern you can exploit if you are aware of the preferences of writers:
Clues about flightless birds are somewhat useful on circuit questions, despite the general climate against zoology questions, taxonomy questions, and non-anatomic animal questions. This has led to a situation where knowing about flightless birds has become more valuable, as some questions about them can be tied to their anatomy, birders who write enjoy incorporating their hobby into questions, and thus propagate their research into the general population of players.
Generally: even when there is pressure against writing a particular type of question, there will be specific sections of the subject of those questions which people like to write about. This leads to those subjects being more represented than before, as they take the lions share of the questions which were being pushed against. If you can figure out what writers like to do or write about within that discouraged area, you can gain an advantage by studying that subcategory.
[It may seem a lark, but I've been debating the merits of discussing a particular type of question in a quiz bowl practice context. This is more a question of whether I can justify it to myself to include in the book.]
Conjunction or “Before and After” questions were once a prevalent type of question in quiz bowl. This is one of the few question types which migrated from television programs to circuit quiz bowl. “Before and After” questions were modeled on the category of that name on Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune, where a shared word formed a phrase or title with the words before it and after it. An example is “Upton Sinclair Lewis.” Such questions have a value in that they allow you to cover a lot of territory in a single question as the only necessary connection between the two parts is the coincidence of a shared word.
If miscellaneous questions exist you need to prepare your team for them. And “Before and After” manages to prepare for one of the most common miscellaneous questions those that shift between disciplines quickly.
It is a question that allows you to test multiple disciplines at the same time. As a bonus, it is one of the few types of questions which forces teamwork within a single bonus part. Frequently a team member will pull one part of a “Before and After” and that word on one end helps unravel the other part which a different player supplies.
And it is one of the formats which can be produced cheaply and quickly for practice. If you have a list of answers, you could use a scripting language to write a script which pattern matches the first and last words of all entries on the list, and compile a list of suggested answers, then write the pieces using simple uniquely identifying clues.
The downsides:
Each individual part is given a shorter clue than it would need to be answered if it were not in this format. Because you have to convey enough clues to two answers in a single bonus part, both parts are under tight length constraints, and difficulty constraints.
It has to be a bonus question as the clues are impossible to interpret serially. Yzou have to let the “Before and After” theme be known to the players, and if you tried to fit that into a tossup format, you’d waste space with the format announcement, and wast time with the part of the question discussing the first part of the clue, because the whole answer can’t be given until clues for both sides are given
It is lacking the theme that other bonus questions have, or rather its theme is announced and then is only useful in reminding the team that their answer must be two parts. You can say that the theme of a “Before and After” bonus is to be amusing to the team, but that only goes so far. Some teams don’t want amusement to get in the way of their team answering the question.
On Sunday, my wife managed to pull a double surprise party for Catie and myself, my big scary round number being equidistant from Catie’s 16th birthday. And by skillfully playing me against her (telling each of us the plan was for the other’s surprise party), she managed to get both of us to complicity in keeping the secrets.
At the beginning of the summer we went to a graduation party for a friend fo Catie’s from the dance team, we ended up competing in a pub quiz based on her life experiences. Catie wanted something like that for her birthday, and sort of got it. Dana commissioned Bill’s DJ and trivia company with writing a quiz for both of our birthdays.
Now while Bill was able to wrangle details out of Catie’s life to personalize part of the quiz for her, I really posed a problem. Because I’ve been a writer for so long, and because I know how much an advantage is given by knowing what a writer likes, I tend to be very guarded about what I post about myself on social media. If there’s something I like but could be something I would write about in a question, I don’t mention in publicly. And since I’ve always been aware how the data collection of the internet works, I’m often feeding the system contradictory signals designed to give it the wrong impression and render the algorithm useless. I’d wager, even if you’ve known me for decades, you probably can’t go ten deep on things I am deeply that could come up in a question.
This even extended into Bill’s effort to play music for me, as he struggled, and when he mentioned it, I was about to offer the playlist off my phone, when I realized nothing there was appropriate for a birthday party. So he resorted to the classics, and with what his daughter pulled out of Catie, nobody noticed. The subjects of the quiz were “50th things” “Sweet Sixteens,” and the like. He did manage to stump me with the classic “what was number one on your birthday?” question because I’ve always seen through that on social media as a way to socially engineer possible password data out of the population, and never bothered to check outside of that situation. But the thing is, by not having my specialty categories present, that quiz was probably much more enjoyable for everyone else.
The assembled folks had agreed on one rule beforehand: Nobody help Dwight. It’s a solid strategy in these situations. So it was me against the room. The assembled forces were surprised to see themselves ahead after round three. I wasn’t surprised, round three was a music round and though I once made the finals of K-Tel Hell at Trashmasters, it’s never been my best subject. When playing at our usual Italian place, I let Catie lead those rounds, since she’s heard everybody’s music at her dance competitions and has the titles down. But if you give me forty non-music questions, I’ll make up missing six during the music round, and while doing it make you look up an alternate answer that was correct.
I hadn’t played all summer, just never was free to get out and do that, so this was a good opportunity to get back into the swing before school practice starts again.