Week 201: First findings from the Post Mortem

On Presidents, trying too hard, and Klimt

Jan 18, 2024

I made some progress over the three-day weekend on the book. I managed to move some pieces that were too detailed for the first section of the book over to the second section, and replaced them with more compact paragraphs. I have to trim the first section to make it flow more quickly, and that will need to be done repeatedly in the next few weeks.

Another part of the book has become a post-mortem of the team’s performance, even though they won their match. There was a certain amount of luck in getting them there and I’ve been trying to shore up some of the lucky breaks to make sure they stay lucky, while also figuring out what other lessons we can glean. These are two of the findings.

I spent the weekend examining a potential source of edgework: presidential biographies. This seemed like a reasonable approach since several notable writers have tried their hand at that particular field, and it always leads into mid-level clues of the author and the title of the project, and then you can include some events of the presidency downstream.

The problem I found with the field is that there’s not quite enough meat on the bones in that specific area to be worthwhile for television, and the more general case, biographies, authors and their subjects, was far too broad to be useful for televised competition or even circuit questions for high school.

Essentially I had a late third-year lesson for a early-second and first-year team. I could teach them this in a study guide, but what would be better prerequisite knowledge they could use? Well, biographies would be books and authors, so we could tackle that as part of the overall project of getting those in front of the team. But presidents are something I’d shied away from as the new writer had not used presidents as frequently, especially not with the standard last clue of past It’s Academic writers, “name this nth president.”

I looked back at my charts of previous games, and with 15 rounds of data, I could see that while it’s not nearly as present in new rounds as in past seasons, presidents are appearing as answers consistently this year. And they are appearing consistently in picture rounds. So I realized that I should target something that I intended to do last year, but I was trying to cover more ground quickly.

I found the royalty-free picture gallery from the White House site, and I’ll be putting it into the presentations for next week.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/about-the-white-house/presidents/

Looking this over, I feel I was trying too hard to be clever with what we were teaching them, covering too much in one lesson when a simpler lesson would had done the job better.. Once I realized that the presidential clues were gone but the pictures of presidents were remaining, I should have just gone where the clues led me. It didn’t burn us in our first episode, but it could have. Part of this training does have to be back to basics, and sometimes me figuring out what the team needs should be back to basics..

In looking at what I put into this weeks’ OTW, I discovered a slight problem with my logic about what can and cannot be presented in televised competition. And that problem started with my choice to revisit some things that were missed on the show, so we could avoid missing on them again. As disheartening as it is to lose on a question, missing the question in subsequent matches feels worse, like you’ve reopened the wound. So part of the items below the fold have been to cleanse the wounds inflicted by what the team missed. That’s how the artist OTW ended up being Gustav Klimt.

When I looked up pictures by Klimt I realized the painting that had been given to the team to identify the artist was Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I. It was right at that point when I realized I had been played.

In the old format I would have discounted the possibility that the show would ever use that particular image, in favor of The Kiss, because it was reversible, Klimt could be used as the clue or the answer with that. And if there was a second Klimt work, even in circuit competition, it would be the Beethoven Frieze. My reasoning for that was that TV goes for last clues in works, but it also goes for short titles as clues. It’s also true that ambiguity is shunned, and the fact that there’s two notable portraits of Adele Bloch-Bauer, which are only differentiated by trailing Roman numerals makes it an unlikely clue to be used.

While this may have been true prior to the change in writers, the emphasis on clue in the image that the new writer expounds makes these rules no longer applicable. Simply displaying the painting without giving its title, as we encountered, bypasses the objections I raised, and keeps the question short enough to still be used for television.

Paintings that are more obscure, but still representative of the artist’s style are in play in this format, but also paintings whose longer and more complex titles that may not be trusted to be read by the host normally, could be entered purely as images.

Couple of additions to the list this week, since I had planned to build this up over time, and there will be more next week as I finish populating items ten weeks in advance. I would note I’m not above cannibalizing my coworkers for this, in pointing out that old You Gotta Knows are still worth learning from, even if they’re old. Also note that for some of these, I’m going in sequence because they’re worth going in sequence. As noted in Quizbowl for Dum Dums, having an order through things on a long project ensures nothing is abandoned or repeated.