I chanced into a Proustian sense memory this week when I picked up a World Almanac 2021 and opened it, and got that spicy dusty scent of wood pulp paper after it's been cut into pages, which I remembered from Christmas mornings in the 1980’s. I've been working through the importance of almanacs in the history of quizzing, their subsequent decline, and their specific role in televised quiz bowl in the book to be, so this is a first draft of what is to come. For where it will be used, it needs to be reworked to eliminate the circuit observations, and focus on the role of old sources in influencing program content and question subjects.
Before they became the least futuristic part of Back to the Future Part II, Almanacs were designed originally to be guides to yearly phenomena, but emerged to become single-volume all-subject reference works that had an annual update to some fraction of their content. They were seen as must-have tools for writers, journalists, and anyone who worked with some set of facts, but needed to interact occasionally with information outside their field. They were routinely sponsored by media, many newspapers gave them as gifts for subscribers (which is how my family got one.) They also began to take a role in quiz shows. Not only were almanacs useful for question writers, they also became useful study guides for potential competitors. This became such common knowledge that there was an almanac produced by the staff of the show "Information Please" which lasted as physical book into the 1990's. Quiz show questions writers actually seemed to have differentiated difficulty by a subject's presence or absence in the almanacs of the day.
The interesting thing about almanacs is their decline exactly mirrors the dawn of the internet. Prior to the internet's rise, the almanac was the most compact collection of information available and the most quickly updated for new information. Both of those features were superseded by the internet at the immediate cost of some reliability, which improved in the years since.
For our purposes, what's interesting is that televised quiz bowl, being acclimated to an era where almanacs and encyclopedias were the gold standard of research sources, has maintained a structure that reflects using those works as primary sources. You can tie most answers on shows to lists that appeared in the almanac. Everything that wasn’t a numerical statistic seems to have been fair game. Presence in a general source like an almanac was almost a litmus test for fairness. Difficult questions may not have been difficult to the teams, but were classified as difficult as they were difficult for the writer to research because those categories weren't present in their preferred sources.
This could also be seen to develop the idea of general knowledge for quiz bowl, as things that were important enough to be included in the almanac made it into 80’s and early 90’s quiz bowl questions, but some of those items could not be associated with an academic subject. “General Knowledge” became a catch-all for these types of questions. The development of the concept of subject distribution preceded the internet, but only by a generation of writers. Since then the GK slot has become most filled by interdisciplinary questions.
For our study of televised quiz bowl, the idea of core subjects is fraught with peril because the idea of categories as the circuit sees it is artifact that post-dates the established practices of televised quiz bowl. If we're going to get to the idea of what will show up in televised quiz bowl, we need to look at what was and what wasn’t in sources like almanacs.
This week marks the second anniversary of my hospitalization, meaning that I've now been stuck at home for every day of the year either in 2019 or 2020. In theory, I should be prepped to deal with this every day, but I certainly don't feel like I am.
The one thing that's become clear in this, is unlike getting sick and nearly dying, this is going to be a permanent change, at least for my day job. My work from home has been successful for the company, and I'm not alone in being able to get things done. We've had one of our best years ever, and it's hard to see where we would have reason to bring large numbers of people back into the office even once some things return to normal.
I actually got my first chance to return to the office this week, despite being on vacation. As I was unable to get a loaner laptop from work in March, I have been running work tasks through a ten-year-old laptop running Win7, and this week they finally were able to get a laptop before the VPN and remoting software dropped Win7 support. Not wanting to miss an opportunity for some contact and conversation, I went in. The entire experience was underwhelming. I never left the lobby of the headquarters, the laptop was laid on a table away from me, I logged in and checked that everything was all right, and I was sent out. I didn't visit my desk or even the building my desk is in. I suspect there will be one last visit to clean out the desk sometime this coming year, and then we'll leave that building when our lease on that floor expires.
I guess I'm down about this not only because we lost one of my work-from-home coworkers (RIP Miss Poppins the cat), but the realization that I've no idea how any of my everyday coworkers outside of my group are doing. I had felt somewhat isolated after convalescing last year, but now I've missed 15 months of incidental contacts and conversations, and I've been reminded of the value of background noise.
I had thought when I would return to the office would be a point of returning to normal and that would be a sign I could stop this. If that was true at the beginning, it’s not true now.
Next week, I’ll run through another section of the material from the book, tied to a more upbeat theme. It’s a metaphor for clue construction and usage in questions, and I think it will explain the difference between television and circuit in a way that will be acceptable to both sides, as long as they can handle a sports metaphor.