Looks like we have a deadline. I got the call from the station this week, it looks like we're taping the playoff match in April. This makes this week's preparation key, as we don't have practice due to school being out on Tuesday.
As we're now sitting with 22 rounds of data and there are only five first round matches to be charted, I'm starting to examine what's been missing, in hopes that I'm able to see where the writer may be heading in the remaining matches.
The things I've added to the list of possible things the writer will cover are:
Presidential History, and generally American History which can be told through pictures.
Earth and Space Science
Sculpture (addressed last week)
National Parks
Of these, I've lightly covered Presidential history, but I may be able to rely on one of the new player's experience with Academic Games. My diving in the third tub found an astronomy text and and earth science text which I can exploit along with what I've added to OTW for Minerals. National parks is something I can write theme rounds about so that's a solution I can implement this week.
I could also target a deeper dive into the art of the artists which have been cited multiple times, as they seem to be frequently targeted by the writer. I can't quite do the same thing for classical music, but I've noticed a frequent targeting of musical instruments in picture rounds. And I can revisit landmarks slideshows I've already produced. These seem like likely paths for the writer to return to, and I wouldn't like to leave things unguarded.
I'm also wondering if there will be an observable kick up in difficulty in the questions when the playoffs begin. In order to figure that out, I have to separate our the normal difficulty creep that occurs as questions simply become harder to write without repeating ideas.
A couple weeks back I mentioned that I had rescued some treasures from the third tub of books in the garage. I'm working my way through the stack this week, and landed upon the Handbook of Kings and Queens. I hadn't leafed through this in a couple decades, but I decided I would swing through it. While we haven't really had any questions about monarchs or European history in the TV show, I figured they have to be coming at some point, and this was at least something that could spark my imagination towards something that could be used.
The first pass through the book was a stab at random, which put me in the chapter on the dynasties of the Iberian Peninsula. I knew that to be a rich section of inspiration for questions, but I was trying to find pieces that would work for television questions. So proper nouns that floated past my eyes like Avis and Murcia were sparking connections for me, but there was nothing I could jump into that would fit the audience I was trying to present to.
When searching for inspiration like this, I usually carry a piece of paper about the size of a bookmark and a pencil, and I keep it closeby to make notes. Mostly these notes are just one or two words for ideas to flesh out later. Most times, the words are the spark for me, not the sentence which forms the right clue to be used later. An actual clue that sparks an idea for a question prompts me to find another piece of paper or my laptop, and the slip of paper is jammed into the book at the right spot, to wait for me to assemble the equipment.
I was really looking for any of Ferdinand and Isabella, Henry the Navigator, or Philip II, and each of these were ill-suited to be found in the structure of this book's lists. Ferdinand and Isabella, though considered de facto monarchs of Spain, were not de jure, and so they appear in truncated lists for Castile and Aragon. Henry is hidden in the Avis dynasty, and so I knew that, similarity to a car rental company aside, there was no clue I could extract from the page appropriate for the show. And Philip II just shows up as an entry in the list, separate from all the Spanish Armada clues that would be useful.
It's not that I'm completely unable to use a book like a normal human being. It's that I'm unable to easily switch between modes. As a result a fiction book that I've been meaning to read for six months has sat on my nightstand, waiting for me to not impulsively open it in the middle. I recognized this fact after setting the Handbook of Kings and Queens on top of it the other night.
Conscious of this tendency, when I returned to the handbook the next day, I decided to attack it in the same way I'd attack a book I'd never intend to open again, that i planned to extract all the knowledge from and discard. I opened to page 1, which is something I've never done with this particular volume. I opened to the list of the first dynasties of Egypt, and let my eyes drift down the list, not really focusing on anything, just letting the words I recognized and the words I recognized the context come to me. I picked up Menes, the first pharaoh, and Djoser the earliest known step-pyramid builder, and Snefru, the first ruler of the Fourth Dynasty. None of these are really answers or clues for anything that could be asked on television, but I made note of them on my list. Even there I was doubtful of Snefru being worth anything for noting, since I only knew the name from a very hard part of a bonus when I was playing. What I failed to note was the second column of the list which gave common translations, had Cheops listed in the Fourth Dynasty. My eye failed to jump over to that side, and paid no attention to their choice of Khufwy for the transliteration of the cartouche. If I had seen Khufu, I would have noticed it.
So what is my eye seeing?
The question I put to myself after these exercises was "What sort of information is my eye drawn to?" I wanted to answer that because it’s reasonable to assume I have some of the same tendencies as other writers, and if I can figure out how others work, I’d be able to show the team what’s important in any text.
I see things that resemble things I've heard about before, either in quiz questions, or in other contexts. This makes sense, if something is important it will repeat in quiz bowl, so things that are effectively repeating on the printed page directly in front of my eye are going to draw me to them. Note that the context is unimportant, just the repetition. Avis stuck in my head as a Portuguese dynasty because it resembles the name of a rental car company, and I found that amusing. The semi-mythical Yngling dynasty of Sweden and Norway only triggers a memory for me because of the Pennsylvania brewery that's pronounced the same way.
I see things that I've written about before. From this set of notes, that would be Snefru, who I know I've used to clue Khufu in questions before. There was nothing I could use it for for the team's study, but I wrote it down anyway as a possibility.
In this we can see that "Everything Repeats" is a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. If I'm filtering in only those things that I recognize as clues acceptable at some level of quiz bowl, then filtering out by difficulty, my first filtering act is to push away everything I've not seen before. Everything I write from this sort of inspiration is destined to repeat something that I've seen before.
This is the fourth year I’ve been writing this, and this is the first time the anniversary has come without me feeling that we’ve been approaching normalcy asymptotically. I suspect I do not have a fifth year in me. That is not to say I will be abandoning this, but that I have to get to the point of completing the task that started this. The book to be is going to get done before we hit Week 260. If that requires me to put a few of these up with little but OTW, I’m going to do that. But I have to get it done. I have to document the past eighteen months, where we built from zero and turned it into something that I hope is helping the team. And with it written down, the next school to try to build from scratch will have a better go of it.
OTW
I will note for this week we've reached the end of the line for a couple of these items, I’m not quite sure where I can go further with Bridges or youtube videos on language, and vocabulary, and I've exhausted the sections of Vasari's Lives of the Painters where I feel comfortable they'll show up in television or even high school competition. So I'm stopping that one to prevent a sequel of a story I was told by Rob Hentzel. He was moderating a novice tournament in Iowa and the question asked for a Italian painter, and the other team negged. The player on the other team then waited until the end, struggled to come up with an answer, and then non-confidently offered up at their best guess "Bronzino." This was in the fourth round of the tournament, and there hadn't been time for the other more common answers to have been used in other questions, so this was playing a very long shot.
The medical maxim of "expect horses, not zebras" is surprisingly applicable to quiz bowl, if you rework it to "Don't start guessing zebras until the horses have passed." If we had gone deeper into Vasari's entries, there's a chance Bronzino would have been one of the next five or six choices, and I didn't want to accidentally let that happen. Otherwise I'd have to change that maxim to "Don't start guessing Bronzino until the Turtles have passed."
# Poem OTW: We Real Cool
https://poets.org/poem/we-real-cool
# Poet OTW: Gwendolyn Brooks
https://poets.org/poet/gwendolyn-brooks
# YouTube Terminology Video OTW
# Art Movement OTW: Surrealism
https://www.theartstory.org/movement/surrealism/
# Painting OTW: The Persistence of Memory
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79018
# Mythological Figure OTW: Midas
https://pantheon.org/articles/m/midas.html
# Bridge OTW: Rialto, Venice
https://www.introducingvenice.com/rialto-bridge
# Mineral OTW: asbestos
https://mineralseducationcoalition.org/minerals-database/asbestos/
# Vasari's Life of the Artist OTW Closed
# National Park OTW: Mesa Verde
https://www.nps.gov/meve/index.htm
# Periodic Table OTW: Elements of the Sea
http://www.compoundchem.com/2019advent/day14/
# Presidential Election OTW: 1980
https://www.270towin.com/1980_Election/
# Battle OTW: The Saintes
https://allthingsliberty.com/2020/09/battle-of-the-saintes/
# Star OTW: Algol
https://earthsky.org/brightest-stars/algol-the-demon-star/
# Constellation Mythology OTW: Cygnus
http://comfychair.org/~cmbell/myth/cygnus.html
# Chemistry History OTW: B-complex vitamins
https://www.acs.org/education/whatischemistry/landmarks/vitamin-b-complex.html
# History Podcast OTW: The Letter from Jamaica
http://traffic.libsyn.com/revolutionspodcast/5.13_The_Letter_From_Jamaica_Master.mp3
# Roman Emperor OTW: Nerva and Trajan
https://www.pbs.org/empires/romans/empire/nerva_trajan.html
# In Our Time OTW: Tutankhamun
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000cng6
# You Gotta Know OTW: Dwarf planets, comets and asteroids
https://www.naqt.com/you-gotta-know/dwarf-planets-comets-and-asteroids.html
# Team History OTW: The Phillies
https://www.mlb.com/phillies/history/timeline-1800s
# Opera Synopsis OTW: The Magic Flute
https://www.metopera.org/discover/synopses/die-zauberflote/