Week 260: This was supposed to be Horses for Courses
And then it turned into something else
[What I was going to write this week expanded during construction to be a full week's writing. And I didn't want it to do that. I wanted to put three pieces together, and this piece on the phrase "Horses for Courses" just kept becoming a time sink and a long way from complete. So I stopped with it at 5pm, and resolved to work on it next week.
And yes I noticed what the number in the headlind divides into. I’m not going to worry about it.]
In practice last week, I ran into an odd experience. We talked about a bonus which began with someone who was an ambulance driver in World War I. I immediately jumped to point out: That in itself is not uniquely identifying, don't make that association. And there's lots of people to make that association.
From Week 91
In the facebook page for The 99 Critical Shots of Quiz Bowl, I went over “The Case of the Second Swiss Sanitarium”, which is when a player transitions over a level of difficulty to find that a clue that was once a direct reaction play (mention of a Swiss sanitarium provokes a buzz about Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain) now has a second example, which is not as well known but equally valid. (There's a Swiss sanitarium in The Idiot, by Fyodor Doestoevsky.) and though the other clues didn't really fit, the reaction play is so strong, the player thinks the other clues aren't direct warnings, but rather details they didn't know about The Magic Mountain.
To a certain degree, "World War I ambulance driver" is the ultimate Second Swiss Sanitarium. It's a list that you think you know one, and then unless you're immediately corrected, you make that association, and then you neg the question on John Dos Passos with Ernest Hemingway, and then you neg the question on Dashiell Hammett, and the one on Gertrude Stein, and so on until you finally get sick of it and look it up. But that wasn't my odd experience.
What made it an odd experience was that Mrs. Parker's first thought was Walt Disney, which for the life of me, I had never known to be a fact in existence. And while it's technically incorrect** (due to the armistice beating Walt Disney to France) he's included in the common lists. And I stood there for a couple seconds shocked not by the existence of the fact, but by the fact it hadn't been present in quiz bowl questions that I had seen.
**the most irritating kind of incorrect for both player and moderator.
The explanation I can come up with in my mind is that: Walt Disney just usually isn't the answer to the quiz bowl question. For the same reason that quiz bowl has historically migrated from biography of science to science, and from biography of author to works, we don't ask about the personal history of the businessman, or animator. Additionally, the time spent as an ambulance driver in peacetime wasn't significant to his later creative process or to his relationship with other famous people, so we can't tie it into a question easily. Essentially there's no hook to this other than he was on the list of World War I ambulance drivers, and he's seen as a little middlebrow compared to others you could choose on the list. So if you wanted to tie together artists who drove ambulances in WWI, you'd have options before you got to Disney, and your expectation that the category is "Fine Arts" would lead you off of that choice.
This does also lead me to an interesting point which needs to make it in the book: If you are dealing with a distribution that needs to be filled broadly and over a larger number of packets, the editor and writer tend to stretch the definition of categories and subcategories. I had a related conversation at the beginning of NAQT with a new writer. I was going over the full tournament distribution and we had a subcategory for Broadway under Pop Culture which I edited, a Drama subcategory in Literature, and a Fine Arts subcategory for Theater, which I didn't. The writer asked me: "Where do you draw the line between those?" Without consulting the Fine Arts or Literature editors, I defined it as broadly as I could, giving signposts of Neil Simon and Arthur Miller as being within the possibilities. And when the writer expressed surprise, I said I wanted to give question writers the freedom to come up with whatever they could, because we were going to need to fill hundreds of questions in that subcategory, and I didn't want them all to be musicals.
If you're a writer submitting questions for a tournament, you tend to aim your ideas squarely at the center of each question's subdistribution. If you're editing a small number of questions for a single event, you tend to focus on the center of the distribution. And when people all aim at the bullseye, you tend to get more than one question in the bullseye. Not ideal, but repeats happen. But if you're submitting questions for a number of tournaments, and you keep hitting the bullseye, you end up with many more repeats. While those repeats can flow to the next tournament, as an editor it would be nice to not see them do so. And so you start to see the value in the wider interpretation of the subcategory, letting the writer be creative if they're tired of hitting the middle.
As a player or coach this is something you can follow, if the set is a one-off for this year, something that seems canonically in the center of a specified subcategory is highly likely to show up. If Italian history is a subject, the Risorgimento ends up there. The definition of Physics mentions Optics as a subcategory? Snell's Law will be cruising by here any minute.
A note on a paragraph found in this Oscar review, which surprisingly enough ties in with our previous theme:
…But with five wins, including Best Picture, Anora didn’t just have a big night: Sean Baker made history along the way. With wins in Best Editing, Best Original Screenplay, Best Director, and Best Picture, Baker became the first person to win four Oscars for the same film. (A couple of clarifications: Walt Disney did win four Oscars in 1953, but they were for different movies; Bong Joon-ho, meanwhile, did win four Oscars for Parasite in 2020, but Best International Feature is credited to the country it was made in. A stupid technicality but a real one nevertheless.)
The paragraph reflects a degree of precision not inherent in most writing, but very much inherent in writing from someone who has recently been burnt on an Oscars question in their local pub quiz. I would also note that the paragraph with parenthesized explanation reflects some of the most refined raw material for questions I've ever encountered. If this doesn’t appear in some bonus question in the next six months, it’s not for lack of effort on the author’s part.
I am actively wondering if some of this precision in the form of inline correction is intentional. In a recent BBC story on the new CBS soap opera Beyond the Gates, they make an ambiguously false to false statement in an early paragraph, and then reverse it with a much later statement:
NBC soap opera Generations made history in 1989 when it became the first to feature a black family from the beginning, but this will be the first soap to make a black family the star of the central plot.
I have to think this is intentional, only the most tuned in to the details (or quizbowl-adjacent) reader would recognize the problem in the earlier paragraph, and getting them angry about that fact is one way to get them to read the whole article. While it works in this case, manufacturing angry pedantry in your readership seems fraught as a media strategy.
Final note: my proposed You Gotta Know these World War I ambulance drivers.
Walt Disney (explicitly for angry pedantry clicks)
Ernest Hemingway
Maurice Ravel
e.e. cummings
John Dos Passos
Dashiell Hammett
Jean Cocteau
W. Somerset Maugham
Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas
Pyotr Kapitsa (Just to slide out a different field of Nobel Prize winner, nationality, and war front.)
If we go on from 10: Robert Service, Archibald MacLeish, John Masefield, Jerome K. Jerome.