Week 194: The Start of the End Of History
And if you look out the right side you'll see a bottle episode.
I started writing a bottle episode Sunday morning because I realized that whatever outcome the team generated on Wednesday on taping (and yes, this was TAPING DAY), I would be in no position to write anything afterward. Either I'd need to be prepping them for the next taping, or I'd be needing to recover energy or far more likely, both. Today, I'll just run through a few notes that I did in the run-up, now that the final details have been relayed and get to the bottle. By the time you read this I'll probably have gone to bed.
Between the previous practice and this one, we were informed of our opponents and our position in the show's rotation. We're going to play third of the three teams in each round. While that means we lose the agency of the choice, we gain the time between the second team's choice of subject and the time we are asked our first question to come up with possible answers. Essentially that's as much as a minute of think time to come up with things that match the category. Is that better than getting your choice of category? No, but it's makes the difference much smaller, IF you know to take advantage.
Is that third position better valuable in the other rounds? Maybe. When I ran them through a simulated round in their final practice, I asked them to pretend they had just watched the other team's second round, and had seen the pictures for the other teams' five questions be: a body of water, a landmark, a painting, a map, and a portrait of a Russian monarch. Could they come up with guesses as to what sort of answers they might need? That's actually a small advantage over coming in cold.
Sunday morning I filled in a bunch of short quizzes into Kahoot! which I set to expire Thursday. With no classes on Monday, I wanted to give them the opportunity to run a bunch of questions similar to the things they could encounter, with a picture conveying all the clues. I think this is the only way I can really create short run quizzes which pair images and allow access to the team through school accounts, and get data back on what were the challenging parts. So I’m temporarily tied to Kahoot’s free version until I find a more efficient way.
On the drive down to Maryland this weekend after Thanksgiving, I worked through some of the podcasts I hadn't touched in a month. I went through the back issues of Revisionist History, and played the episode "This is Your Captain Speaking," where they observed the uniformity of airline pilot voice, and explored its significance. I immediately saw an analogue in the type of voice I use in reading packets.
The pilot wants to project a certain set of perceptions about the flight and the pilot in communicating to the passengers. As a hedge against anything going wrong, the pilot has to communicate in such a way that the passengers are conditioned not to panic in the rare case of something going seriously wrong, and in the much more common case of something out of the ordinary but not wrong. Since the only tool available to the pilot to control the mood of the passenger is their voice, they use their voice to convey a sense of normal operation, priming the passengers from the beginning of the flight. That voice also has to convey the sense that "Yes, something could go wrong, and I will be reacting to it," and "I am monitoring all situations around me," and "I am prepared to handle anything that comes up," and "I am trustworthy that I will tell you what you need to know at all times." The pilot's voice has to convey qualities of the pilot being observant, constantly monitoring, unrattled by what they monitor, honest with the passenger, and confident in their abilities.
Is any of this something you don't want in your moderator for a match? I didn't think so.
When I'm reading packets in practice or in competition, I'm trying to do a lot of things. First, I'm trying to get the information to the competing teams, and I'm trying to do that as quickly and cleanly as possible. But I'm also trying to prevent problems by knowing the rules and anticipating trouble and cutting it off before it happens. I'm checking the answer line for traps, and the pronunciation guides for things I don't know cold. I'm conveying scoring information to the scorekeeper and teams so everyone knows the situation. All of those are best achieved with an intonation similar to pilot voice. And where pilot voice and moderator voice come together most of all, I'm trying to make sure that protest you were thinking about launching is at least considered before we see it launched.
One other similarity I found through this was the use of “Folks” in the pilot’s address of the plane. A long time ago when I was first sending out cold emails to large numbers of people for NAQT, I struggled for the right opening for the letters, and eventually settled on “Folks,” as not overly haughty, collective while friendly, and just right for my voice. While I’m not quite as “poker-hollow” as Tom Wolfe called Chuck Yeager’s drawl, it does fit well coming from a place where Monday after Thanksgiving is a holiday as First Day of Deer Season.
"Be very, very quiet
Clock everything you see
Little things might matter later
At the start of the end of history"
I've had this lyric from Steely Dan's Shaft meets American Gods song Godwhacker in my head for years, as it has become the four-line summary of my theory of quiz bowl and competition in general.
Be very, very quiet-- still the mind and clean out the distractions, and because it's coming from a statement from Elmer Fudd, be aware that what is about to come isn't necessarily going to be sensible or serious.
Clock everything you see-- slang clock meaning to log or observe.
Little things might matter later-- quiz bowl is all about the details, and the smallest distinct details end up first in the questions, so little things are the ones that actually matter later. And if everything repeats, everything could matter at some point.
At the start of the end of history-- The moment you enter into competition, your history ends. That is: the log of all you have learned up to that point is what you will be quizzed on. For a sufficiently critical competition, one that you have a limited number of opportunities to compete in, beginning that is an end to preparation.
The song Godwhacker is about an noirish mystical quest, to defeat the gods of whatever realm Donald Fagen has imagined, beings that deserve to be challenged in their own domain. In my interpretation of the lyric, what makes the gods deserve to be challenged is exactly that they provide so limited a number of opportunities. You are not defeating your opponents when you go godwhacking, you’re knocking over the whole system that pitted you against them. The insistent preparation of that chorus is what is necessary to defeat them, but it is not sufficient and grants no guarantee of success.
The team sees The Start of the End of History today at 2:50 Eastern. We've gone through 12 months of the little things that might matter later, and seven weeks of clocking everything we see. I'll carry a towel with me so I can be very, very quiet. We’ll see if they can whack some gods.