This week I started the pivot. We're expecting that we're in episode 31 of the TV show, and that should be taping some time in March. That moves the TV show to the next event on our calendar, and I think that focusing on the next event on your schedule and its format is important. So since I've been working my way through various art forms that come up with some degree of certainty in the past few practices (architecture, opera, monuments), it was time to cover sculpture.
Now we've covered parts of sculpture in the past with the team. Last year, I covered the Ninja Turtles of the Italian Renaissance, so there was overlap there, and last week covered monuments. So four of the ten listed in NAQT's You Gotta Know These Sculptors were covered. I had considered Daniel Chester French for inclusion in the week before, but figured he's still much rarer a choice. [I would immediately regret that thought, when he showed up as a bonus subject in the round I read immediately after the presentation.] And I had dismissed Bernini and Ghiberti as topics that could wait. So the first focus of my slideshow were the sculptors Rodin and Brancusi.
I chose Rodin because past evidence indicates that he will come up. Everything that has appeared twice in art in this season of episodes, has come around to appear three times. Picasso, Frida Kahlo, Van Gogh, and Dali. The only exception to this rule was the second appearance, in episode 21, of Auguste Rodin. With 8 episodes left to air before our expected show, it's not unreasonable to think we might be visited again.
Brancusi is my guess for what could come up again based on the fact that they've dug a little deeper in their selections this year, they have not mentioned him, but there's enough of a chestnut surrounding Bird in Space, that I felt I had to make the team aware of it so they'd smash it when (not if) it came. [I did not give them the infamous meta-quizbowl chestnut, that due to two files getting merged improperly a question in the 90's claimed that the holder of the Oregon high school record for the half-mile was Bird in Space. It’s a lovely image that I’ve had in my head for 25 years, happy to share.]
Once we got to this point in the presentation, I had to start making the turn away from circuit-useful knowledge and towards television-useful knowledge. In one slide I covered the Greek sculptors, Phidias, Myron, and Praxiteles. I gave them short shrift intentionally because of the way clues are presented in this particular show. I know the writer is not likely to choose them because almost all of their work is lost to history, and all we have is reproductions. So any picture clue given about these artists' works will be vague, and you'd have to rely on the titles. Because the questions are so heavily weighted to having a visual component, and the visual clues you can give for these sculptors is vague, they're unlikely to be used as answers by the writer.
Following this insight to its opposite point, I then decided to include two sculptors not on the list who could be used because their style is so distinctive that knowing the title would be a superfluous clue. The last two slides were pictures of the sculptures of Henry Moore, and the mobiles and stabiles of Alexander Calder. I chose these not only for their distinct style, but because they both have public installations local to us, which members of the team had seen. Moore's Reclining Figure is in front of a building at Carnegie Mellon, and a Calder mobile hangs from the ceiling of the Pittsburgh International Airport. If the writer is currying favor with the producers of the show, these are both a likely answer and a local customization to the questions.
When I sat down tonight, I thought about what I could have missed in this, and I came up with two possibilities, only one of which I regretted. Claes Oldenburg's sculptures are instantly recognizable as his, and because he died in 2022, it's possible the writer could have remembered him in the time creating this year's sets. I considered that Jeff Koons' Balloon Dog might be similarly memorable, but I didn't feel the same degree of regret. Mostly because his work is more recent, and the writer has eschewed the very modern in his questions, but also because the way I would expect a player today to know Koons' work is in the parody Yellow Dog with Cone in the Grand Theft Auto games. One category that has not come up at all in this year's episodes is computer games, so the likely path to getting points for this knowledge is kind of blocked. If my theory of the writer is correct, they may be slightly too old to have taken in as many computer games as might be good for cluing questions.
For Oldenburg, I may add pictures of works to the slideshow to demonstrate soft sculpture and giant everyday objects, Koons is getting nothing more than "if you see a balloon doggie, the artist is Jeff Koons."
With the team on the glidepath to taping again, I've been trying to get back into building simulated games for the team to model what they'll see on screen and possibly get ahead of the writer by hitting common clues before they're used in this year's sets. During the writing, I started to come up with a version of a common clue structure in circuit quiz bowl, that isn't necessarily used in television, because it's wordy, but could help the team to differentiate answers. I'm talking about the construction "It's not X, but..." This construction is a way to create a middle clue that specifically differentiates one thing from another while still drawing attention to the fact that the two answers are similar or learned at the same time.
I ended up with enough material for a lightning round, and probably more, spread across mythology, geography, science, and fine arts. After I run it in practice in a simulated game, I'll run it here.
OTW
# Poem OTW: Hope is the thing with feathers
https://poets.org/poem/hope-thing-feathers-254
# Poet OTW: Emily Dickinson
https://poets.org/poet/emily-dickinson
# YouTube Terminology Video OTW: Words from Nahuatl h
ttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fZ32nSScfQ
# Art Movement OTW: De Stijl
https://artsandculture.google.com/entity/de-stijl/m01g_xm
# Painting OTW: Broadway Boogie Woogie
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/78682
# Mythological Figure OTW: Ariadne
https://pantheon.org/articles/a/ariadne.html
# Bridge OTW: Lake Ponchatrain Causeway
https://thecauseway.us/about-the-bridge/
# Mineral OTW: Mica
https://mineralseducationcoalition.org/minerals-database/mica/
# Vasari's Life of the Artist OTW: Michelangelo
https://archive.org/details/livesofmostemine09vasauoft/page/n15/mode/2up
# National Park OTW: Great Smoky Mountains
https://www.nps.gov/grsm/index.htm
# Periodic Table OTW: Elements in the Earth's Crust
http://www.compoundchem.com/2019advent/day13/?fbclid=PAAaY7Zsb98TBLI8mQvlg2qJdp8Gf4cRj7ceUArwwvxuv7Pb4VZDqcHARYihQ
# Presidential Election OTW: 1968
https://www.270towin.com/1968_Election/
# Battle OTW: Midway
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/battle-midway
# Star OTW: Stars in Orion
https://www.space.com/16659-constellation-orion.html
# Constellation Mythology OTW: Corona Borealis
http://comfychair.org/~cmbell/myth/corona_borealis.html
# Chemistry History OTW: George Washington Carver
https://www.acs.org/education/whatischemistry/landmarks/carver.html
# History Podcast OTW: The Fall of the Bastille
http://traffic.libsyn.com/revolutionspodcast/3.11-_The_Fall_of_the_Bastille.mp3
# Roman Emperor OTW: Titus & Domitian
https://www.pbs.org/empires/romans/empire/titus_domitian.html
# In Our Time OTW: The Great Gatsby
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000r4tq
# You Gotta Know OTW: Sculptors
https://www.naqt.com/you-gotta-know/sculptors.html
# Team History OTW: The A's
https://www.mlb.com/athletics/history/timeline-1900s
# Opera Synopsis OTW: The Barber of Seville
https://www.metopera.org/discover/synopses/il-barbiere-di-siviglia/