The week before taping was Easter, and because there was no school after Easter, I had 14 days between practices. That gave me time to fill in more things into flashcards and quizzes. I reopened the old questions from the first match on Kahoot, and offered them up to the team. Except for one, the subjects hadn't been exhausted in this year's event, so they all had a chance of being valuable. (The exception, State Quarters, was in games 5 and 22, and had been one I had expected in April 2023 Week 162 https://dekidder.substack.com/p/week-162-edge-work?utm_source=publication-search, as a target for edge work for the writer.) So by Easter Monday, I had loaded the team up with about 300 clues. I started working on extending out the simulated game for practice on the 9th, with taping on the 10th.
I redid 20 of the original 48 paintings I started the year with, turning their slideshow in to flashcards. I knew that the artists I pulled out had been repeatedly used for questions, so I wanted to give them one more pass over them.
I did a quick set of flashcards with pictures of types of clouds, mostly because I hadn't seen any of them asked so far. On one hand, it was getting to the point where those particular pictures were noticeably absent from the show, and I had to think they'd be coming soon. On the other hand, the host is a meteorologist, and I could almost see him rejecting the question if given to him as too easy for the room, or not specific enough for the room. Better safe than sorry.
If things went as expected, we'd be playing the teams that won games 10 and 11, which meant South Side, and Ligonier Valley and we'd be playing them in Game 31, which would air on Mother's Day Weekend. I had discussed that with South Side's coach during our one meeting in between our matches. South Side came to the CMU tournament in February, and I moderated one room during it. If it hadn't been for the flu going around the school, I'd have brought the team to fill the field.
The email I got on Monday told me that was a poor expectation. We would actually be playing in game 30, and our opponents would be South Side, and Pine-Richland. This was a significant reshuffling, as it would be the teams that won 6, 10, and 12 in the slots for 7, 8, and 9. It was also ironic as the match where we discussed our upcoming match at CMU was between South Side and Pine-Richland. So now we had two teams with more experience than us playing us in the match. Not good.
Tuesday the 9th practice was a little disjointed, due to musical practice, I put the team together, and suddenly realized we had too many people. I had planned to go with a different lineup for the match than the first round, because one of the players had been doing swimming practice during the matches, and one of the players I mentioned last week had filled in ably in practice. So I was going with that lineup, until she showed up on Tuesday.
There is no substitution rule for the show, I guess if someone got visibly sick during taping they'd allow a swap, but that's it. So I had to sit with my original plan, and let her appear as an alternate at the beginning of the game.
I did an extended Simulated Game, the scores are as if I took the first round of each phase, and scored it.
Category rounds to choose from: Presidential nicknames, People from West Virginia, Sounds like a card, Mythology, Rivers named for states, Mathematical Shapes and Mathematical Definitions (+25 correct/-0 incorrect)
Presidential Nicknames was a behavioral trap subject. I wanted to see how the new player responded to the rules of the format. I knew from AGLOA's Presidents category, that he knew the category well, liked the category, and has been very vocal towards liking the category, but the format of KD Quiz is that all answers should go through the captain. You need to see that the players can follow the rules during taping.
People from West Virginia was just a bet I wanted to cover. A few episodes back the writer had done a category round on Maryland, and one on Virginia. If the writer was selling to multiple markets, they would have tried to sell to not only Pittsburgh, but also to other It's Academic stations. That would mean Maryland and Virginia, but also the tri-state area, so Ohio (where a Cleveland Station would also have needed questions) and Pennsylvania could also have been sample category rounds that were made up to sell the producers on their product. But you couldn't use Pennsylvania as a category round on a Pittsburgh show, but you could use places close to Pennsylvania. So I gave the team questions on Stonewall Jackson (born in the WV part of 19th c. Virginia), Booker T. Washington (same) Chuck Yeager, Robert Byrd, and Katherine Johnson, asking for NASA.
Sounds like a card was just that: answers were Monterey Jack, flying Ace, the band Queen, Deuce in tennis, and King County, Washington. The exercise here, given the category, what could be answers?
I doubled down on Mathematics because that was where the pre-mortem said we'd die, both this time and last. For mathematical definitions, I gave them terms that had two different meanings in math and gave them both. Normal/Degree/Frequency/Absolute Value/Even For Mathematical Shapes, I gave them ones that were probably too hard, but could plausibly come up in multiple contexts. Torus/Kite/Helix/Tetrahedron/Hyperbola
Rivers named for States is purely the problem of last clues. I asked them to think about the possible answers and they nailed four of the five.
Mythology was something they were familiar with, and something I knew they'd do well on, so it was practice sorbet to get their palates clean before 60 seconds.
Picture Round: 5 different picture based questions. (+20/-20)
Standard fare here: Painting of Rembrandt, a picture of the GW bridge asking what river passes under it, types of clouds, a board game (go), and a picture of a British monarch, Elizabeth I.
60 second round: 10 questions one category (+10/0)
I stuffed this with chestnuts, feeling that I could maybe get a psychological force out of this and nail something that a writer might like to include.
After the round, I gave them lightning rounds on Constitutional Amendments, history in 1924, and US Wars The first and last were hedges against a trend I had begun to see in the writing. It was starting to resemble the types of questions we saw in previous years, and relying less on the image to provide the bulk of the clues. These were bedrock categories of the previous writing regime, and so if the new writers were coming down the homestretch of writing exhausted and looking to the past for inspiration, I'd give the team the tools to catch them.
Math Time 2 questions (+20/-20)
Having done the definitions earlier this was time for computation. I gave them six computation problems, in a variety of styles that covered things that bit us in the butt previously. So logarithms, doubling length changes area, square roots, Roman Numerals, averages on dice made an appaearance.
More or Less (depending on number of clues used: +30 to +10/-30 to -10)
The thing I didn't do with these 30-20-10 questions is tell them where they were relative to other teams in the simulation. This was probably a mistake, because that's everything regarding your risk assessment in this round. What I was surprised in this was that they actually were more risk averse not knowing their position than they had been in previous rounds. They had decent ideas in both cases, but they rode the questions on columns which spotted them architectural feature down to 20, and rode F. Scott Fitzgerald down to 10. If they were playing from behind and knew it, they'd have forced a guess at 30 in both cases and been right.
I wanted to see how they would do with the new lineup, and that I saw over the last two practices. I wanted to see whether the pre-mortem was right, and what I could do to reverse it. I felt we were a little better, our score would have been 220 this time, but with pressure we could have done 250. but whether that would be enough... I wasn't sure. I was feeling generally out of sorts, seeing we might need to adjust the lineup, seeing the opponent was not who I expected, and just generally feeling underexperienced, but not outworked. Or maybe this was just the nervousness I had before, come back to push me.
So this placed us at 23 hours to go, and all we could do is ride into battle.
The reason we’ll be late tonight is here. This is the week of the musical at school and Catie’s been working her best to have her parts ready. This led to long evenings for me in the parking lot as they went way past the expected end of the dress rehearsal all three nights this week. This also led to me discharging my laptop and leaving my high and dry tonight, while I was trying to assemble the last few pieces. Tomorrow’s the premier of their production of The Wizard of Oz, and I’ll be watching before taking the morning flight to the SSNCT.
The same procedure as last time: I’ll be posting the coaches room commentary of the match so it will be visible at noon Eastern Saturday. Hopefully about that time, you’ll be able to see it on the KD Quiz website. I’ll be reading at that point, so I won’t take part in immediate reactions to it.
OTW
# Poem OTW: Kubla Khan
https://poets.org/poem/kubla-khan
# Poet OTW: Samuel Taylor Coleridge
https://poets.org/poet/samuel-taylor-coleridge
# YouTube Terminology Video OTW
# Art Movement OTW: Ukiyo-e
https://artsandculture.google.com/entity/ukiyo-e/m0bwbv
# Painting OTW: The Great Wave of Kanagawa
https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/thirty-six-views-of-mount-fuji-the-great-wave-off-the-coast-of-kanagawa-katsushika-hokusai/3gF011oIXv3kcQ
# Mythological Figure OTW: Janus
https://pantheon.org/articles/j/janus.html
# Bridge OTW: Ponte Milvio or Milvian Bridge
https://www.througheternity.com/en/blog/history/ponte-milvio-romes-bridge-of-love-and-war.html
# Mineral OTW: Basalt
https://mineralseducationcoalition.org/minerals-database/basalt/
# National Park OTW: Zion
https://www.nps.gov/zion/
# Presidential Election OTW: 1812
https://www.270towin.com/1812_Election/
# Battle OTW: Bosworth Field
https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryMagazine/DestinationsUK/The-Battle-of-Bosworth-Field/
# Star OTW: Proxima Centauri
https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/proxima-centauri-our-suns-nearest-neighbor/
# Constellation Mythology OTW: Leo
http://comfychair.org/~cmbell/myth/leo.html
# Chemistry History OTW: Transuranic Elements
https://www.acs.org/education/whatischemistry/landmarks/transuranium-elements-at-berkeley-lab.html
# History Podcast OTW: The Trial of Louis XVI
http://traffic.libsyn.com/revolutionspodcast/3.26-_The_Trial_of_Louis_XVI.mp3
# In Our Time OTW: A Midsummer Night’s Dream
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00046rp
# You Gotta Know OTW: American Plays
https://www.naqt.com/you-gotta-know/american-plays.html
# Team History OTW: Boston Red Sox
https://www.mlb.com/redsox/history/timeline/1900s
# Opera Synopsis OTW: The Elixir of Love
https://www.metopera.org/discover/synopses/lelisir-damore/
# Art Controversy OTW: The Armory Show
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/cultureshock/flashpoints/visualarts/armory.html