Week 207: Dead Cats and Other Details
[If I don’t get back to the house early tonight, this will be a short piece. If I get back it will be longer. I’m setting it to go off at midnight.]
This week's practice covered the idea of assured answers in subjects. When we talk about small categories in quiz bowl that have maybe a few spots allotted to them in the standard distribution, we can usually count on some subjects to come up because they are the first thing that writers think of for the category, especially writers who are not specialists in the category. So psychology will have lots of questions relating to Sigmund Freud, American Paintings will got towards Nighthawks and Edward Hopper and the like. This is true at all levels of difficulty and answer selection, we hear Russian classical music on a television show and can expect it to be about Tchaikovskii.
When we identify a sure answer in a category, we want to know the sure answer so we can buzz in with that at the end of the question if we don't have a better guess. But we also want to be able to notice clues that contradict the sure answer being the answer in this question.
*The old term for this, at least locally, is "the dead cat of [subject]" based on the saying that "one cannot swing a dead cat through an area without hitting [something]" I don't know why someone would do that, but it was a saying. Knowing that the phrase dead cat might be offensive to some stepdaughter of mine, I refrained from using it in practice. But I know it's going to slip out at some point.
But I also wanted to demonstrate that there are cases where two such answers exist for the small category, and that this is a common enough situation that requires some work over and above the case with just one.
When there is one sure answer, you should learn it once you identify it. Learning it in this case is learning to identify several of the common clues, and placing it appropriately in geography and chronology in your mind. This allows you to:
- Have a guess in the category whenever you don't recognize any of the clues but recognize the category.
- Have an appropriate brake on your thinking when you hear a clue that contradicts what you know about the sure answer. (If you hear a question about a psychologist and the clue says German not Austrian, slow your roll and let the other team neg it.)
When there's two sure answers, a lot of the clues will eliminate both possible answers simultaneously, but that leaves a third condition that you need to cover for: distinguishing one from the other. A clue that eliminates one of the sure answers but not the other tends to indicate that the writer was trying to separate the two, and that effort is mildly indicative of the non-eliminated answer being the correct one.
So for the examples I used in this practice, I went after a category that's small but present: Architecture, and a category that isn't well defined: Public Sculpture and Monuments. Both have two prominent answers that are close to dead cats of the field: With architecture it's Frank Lloyd Wright, and I. M. Pei. With monumental sculpture: it's Auguste Bartholdi and Gutzon Borglum.
The other interesting thing about these pairs of sure answers is that they're both in kind of transitional states, albeit a transition which will run longer than most people's quiz bowl careers. Pei's death in 2019 has kind of accelerated the use of his buildings and life in questions about architecture at all levels of the circuit, and his work being more recent than Wright's means writers looking for something different from what they knew from their playing years might write that. Due to his involvement with the Confederate Stone Mountain Memorial, which is the second most notable project of his career, it is less problematic to use Gutzon Borglum as a clue for Mount Rushmore than an answer on his own. I think that's actually pushing him out of canon, and the analogous person associated with the major American landmark, Bartholdi, is taking up a similar niche in the canon.
The remainder of the slide show was just listing each of the major works of Pei and Wright, and noting Bartholdi's connection to Gustav Eiffel. The other thing I did here, breaking with my tradition in these presentations was to give them a small assignment to look up the buildings listed on Google Image Search. I had been hesitant to give them images of architecture in preparation for the TV show because general world landmarks seemed like better low-hanging fruit. As we're going into playoffs, I figure that at least one mention of the designer of the Louvre or Guggenheim (which had their pictures used in this season's episodes) will come up as the answer.
OTW
# Poem OTW: Jabberwocky
https://poets.org/poem/jabberwocky
# Poet OTW: Lewis Carroll
https://poets.org/poet/lewis-carroll
# YouTube Terminology Video OTW
# Art Movement OTW: Fauvism
https://artsandculture.google.com/entity/fauvism/m04lx1?categoryId=art-movement
# Painting OTW: Madame Matisse with a Green Stripe
https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/portrait-of-madame-matisse-the-green-line-henri-matisse/pQER-gMjYy2etA
# Mythological Figure OTW: Iris
https://pantheon.org/articles/i/iris.html
# Bridge OTW: Pont Neuf
https://parisjetaime.com/eng/transport/pont-neuf-p1877
# Mineral OTW: pyrite
https://mineralseducationcoalition.org/minerals-database/pyrite/
# Vasari's Life of the Artist OTW: Titian https://archive.org/details/livesofmostemine09vasauoft/page/n251/mode/2up
# National Park OTW: Big Bend
https://www.nps.gov/bibe/index.htm
# Periodic Table OTW: The colors of elements
http://www.compoundchem.com/2019advent/day18/
# Presidential Election OTW: 1960
https://www.270towin.com/1960_Election/
# Battle OTW: Yorktown
https://www.battlefields.org/learn/revolutionary-war/battles/yorktown
# Star OTW: Aldebaran
https://earthsky.org/brightest-stars/aldebaran-is-taurus-bloodshot-eye/
# Constellation Mythology OTW: Cetus
http://comfychair.org/~cmbell/myth/cetus.html
# Chemistry History OTW: The Hall Heroult Process https://www.acs.org/education/whatischemistry/landmarks/aluminumprocess.html
# History Podcast OTW: A tour of the colonies before the American Revolution.
http://revolutionspodcast.libsyn.com/017-the-new-world
# Roman Emperor OTW: Vespasian
https://www.pbs.org/empires/romans/empire/vespasian.html
# In Our Time OTW: Marcus Aurelius
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000sjxt
# You Gotta Know OTW: Architects
https://www.naqt.com/you-gotta-know/architects.html
# Team History OTW: The Sacramento Kings
https://www.nba.com/kings/history-franchise-timeline
# Opera Synopsis OTW: Madame Butterfly
https://www.metopera.org/discover/synopses/madama-butterfly/