[This may end up in the book, but maybe without the quotes.] Last week I mentioned this article, which in two paragraphs of his interview in TheRinger.com, Aaron Rodgers managed to get me to yell at my computer screen.
That's a good thing because it was me modifying the quote from the movie Patton. "Rodgers, you magnificent bastard, you read my book!" (I'm certain he didn't, but go with me on this.)
The first response of note was this:
Based on your research, did you find that the difficulty of the celebrity edition is different than regular Jeopardy! games?
It was not as difficult, that’s for sure. I was teasing with Billy [Wisse], one of the head writers, about literature. They always try to keep some sort of literature category, whether it’s world literature or English literature or just literature, in every single game. Whether it’s in the Jeopardy! round or the Double Jeopardy! round or the Final Jeopardy! category, they’re going to get some literature in there. There’s no literature in Celebrity Jeopardy! [Laughs.] Unless it’s super, super contemporary.
There’s not going to be a lot of operatic categories either. There’s a certain niche of people who love the opera and, I mean, we all kind of appreciate the opera. But anybody who knows composers and conductors of certain operas, especially when you’re going back centuries ago? There weren’t any of those categories.
In this, Rodgers hits upon one of the key ideas of my first book "The 99 Critical Shots of Quiz Bowl", which I'm including in the second: If something cannot be included in the questions of a particular format, then that material is not worth studying for that format.
This applies to:
Concepts which are too long to phrase as a clue.
Concepts which are not part of the curriculum at this level.
Concepts which don't fit the categories that are usually represented by the distribution.
In his response he nails items two and three. I’ll accept that he couldn’t have nailed the first item from only watching one style of questions.
The second response shows the preparation he used and how he approached it:
Moving back in time a little—did you do any prep ahead of your Celebrity Jeopardy! game against Kevin O’Leary and Mark Kelly?
I did. There’s a website called J! Archive that I went on. They archive games. I went back and looked at the celebrity games to get a feel for it. I wasn’t necessarily thinking they would repeat questions, but I wanted to see what the level of difficulty seemed to be compared to a normal Jeopardy! game. It’s interactive where you can read a clue and click on it to get the answer. So I went back and played online a number of these celebrity games to try and just acquaint myself with new knowledge and understand the difficulty level that I should be expecting. So by the time I got to the game, I was prepared on what I thought the difficulty level would be.
Jeopardy has the J!Archive, and you can see in these two passages that Aaron Rodgers used it perfectly to train for Celebrity Jeopardy! He targeted the difficulty he expected, and dissected what would be there in future, based on what had happened in the past. Magnificent.
If we’re going to train your students for facing a televised match in a week, we must have something to train them on. We need an archive, and we need a way to reduce down what we give them as training material from within that archive. Collection must be swift, and curation must be simple for us to do.
In addition to J!Archive, there are several public archives of circuit quiz bowl questions, and those get used in practices at schools, and within flashcard and training applications. The problem you are going to face in this situation is that there is no such thing as a public archive of televised quiz bowl questions.
This is probably because each show has its own format, used questions purchased by the station, and there is no incentive to assemble an archive of ALL stations. The labor costs and value of the archive has to be justified by a sufficient number of users. Unfortunately, by being different formats and competitions which do not interact with each other, there's no impetus to create an archive of televised questions. There's also the problem that a public archive means questions could be pulled from it and used by another station without credit, payment, or question security. That in itself shuts down the idea of a public archive.
This limits our options to:
Private archives, where one coach has catalogued collections of the questions of their local show. (These won't be available to you until you actually meet another coach.)
Video recordings on the internet. (These will take too long to transcribe)
Archives/question banks for purchase from television providers. (These will take too long to reach you and to be frank, I'd rather not spend the money if the free solution is sufficient to task.)
Archives of questions in other formats which are close enough to purpose. (OK this is possible, free, and available in the timeframe.)
Of these archives we want something that has some degree of search capability, and some degree of tagging where you can look for a lot of questions which group a category together. That really leaves only two options: either some sort of flashcard program loaded with circuit questions, or the J!Archive. I think the flashcard option is actually less compatible for television because it's not really designed for the search we need to pull here, while the J!Archive search is precisely designed for this. [Those of you reading this now, remember I’m not touching the concept of packet distribution because it’s not necessarily applicable to their program, so while it would be simpler to explain the above decision to a circuit audience, I can’t introduce that here.]
If you want practice material for subjects that are what we listed as essential categories, the J! archive's search bar (which is not visible on the top level of the site, but is visible at the top of each season page) gives that to you quickly and correctly. Pick a common category to cram ("State capitals", “president", “elements”, etc.), and you'll have 5-600 in front of you in seconds. The questions are hidden until one mouses over the dollar amount, meaning a student can cram this on their own, or you can read them questions in practice.
A reason this will work is that most shows do have some degree of repeat restriction. They will not use the same clues within a timeframe. But such a repeat check does not exist among all shows. Read through enough of an archive separate from your game, but with similar difficulty and subject selection, and something will repeat in your game.
This is the best available solution for the timeframe we have. But if we establish a situation where time is not a constraint, other solutions become much better.
I find myself looking to reconstruct what went right and what went wrong this week. Saturday, I ended up moderating my fourth national championship match, Division II of the NAQT ICT. Sunday, I had to bow out in the middle of a round of the IPNCT because my connection collapsed to a level that could not keep a video conference in sync. It was particularly painful to have to withdraw given how much care I have taken to ensure my connection would work. I’ve worked through four tournaments, numerous team practices, and meetings, trying to ensure each link in the chain would hold under stress. I’ve even been able to correctly diagnose the roots of a failure in the network a mile away from me (because I knew where wildlife had been nesting two years ago, and might try again.) The connection has not become stronger since then, and I’ve even had trouble with my connection to my day job. I’ve got just about a week to figure this out, and I really don’t want to miss another tournament, but I’m worried I won’t have time to test a solution thoroughly by then, even if I do fix it.
Stuff to Look at
Much as last week had a periodic table focusing on the origin of the element’s name, this is a map of the US and Canada focusing on the original meaning of each region’s name. Both are worth study for most forms of quizzing.
Stuff to Read
Santa Ana is one of those figures I mentioned who ends up attached to a lot of threads of history, though in his case, it may be stuck like gum to the underside of history.
The occupation of Alcatraz is one of those Midas clues which always is an early clue for tossups on Alcatraz, so it’s probably a good thing to learn about.
The Articles that I Learned from This Week
An article on bad corporate renaming covers a litany of sins.
The Olympics are the only sporting event where the design elements become part question fodder, whether they be logos, stadia, or mascots. Even moreso when there's changes or issues of plagiarism involved, and so I include three bits which exemplify those ideas. 1 2 3
And I don't care if this is a wikipedia article on minor planets, I am fascinated by the diagram in this.
The Articles You Can Learn from This Week
Mosques considered as architecture
Women of the Revolutionary War: real and fictional
Didn’t You Learn Anything from Last Time?
1
An emission in this range appears to being reflected off the planet Uranus, with the simplest explanation being it's merely coming from the Sun.
A. Name these emissions, falling between ultraviolet and gamma rays.
answer: X-rays
B. The X-rays being reflected off Uranus were detected by this telescope designed to scan those particular wavelengths.
answer: Chandra X-ray Observatory
C. Another theory is that these magnetic disturbances are releasing x-rays into the atmosphere of Uranus. On earth in the northern latitudes, these react to produce visible light in the atmosphere.
answer: auroras
2
William Hazlitt's assault of a barmaid led to an estrangement between him and two local poets.
A. Hazlitt, pursued by the friends of the barmaid, asked this friend of his who lived nearby to hide him. Said friend had already written but not published "Kubla Khan"
answer: Samuel Taylor Coleridge
B. Coleridge sent Hazlitt to this other poet, with whom Coleridge collaborated on Lyrical Ballads. Hazlitt later gave a poor review of his The Excursion, possibly in retaliation for Hazlitt's time being sheltered by him.
answer: William Wordsworth
C. The incident took place in what region of Britain which became associated with Wordsworth and Coleridge.
answer: Lake district
3
Group 10 of the periodic table contains metals including Darmstadtium, a synthetic element named for the city where it was first made.
A. The lightest group 10 element is this transition metal, whose name originally came from it contaminating copper, leading to it being called "Devil's copper."
answer: nickel
B. This group 10 element was named at about the same time an asteroid was discovered. Both element and asteroid took their name from an epithet of Athena.
answer: palladium
C. This group 10 precious metal was discovered in pre-Columbian artifacts, and was given a name from the Spanish for "little silver."
answer: platinum
4
Helmut Ruska recorded the first pictures of this virus, which forty years earlier was the first virus to be noted by botanist Martinus Beijerinck.
A. Name this virus which affects leaves of plants in family Solanaceae, but is named for its effect on genus Nicotiana.
answer: tobacco mosaic virus or TMV
B. Tobacco mosaic virus was the first virus to be visualized using this device.
answer: electron microscope
C. In 1958, this crystallographer studied TMV and correctly predicted it had a hollow rod shape and had a single strand of RNA. She had earlier used X-rays to study the structure of DNA.
answer: Rosalind Elsie Franklin
5
September 14, 2021 marks the 700th anniversary of his death, and Italy has had a year long celebration in the run up to the anniversary.
A. Name this poet who met his beloved Beatrice in the Chiesa di Santa Margherita dei Cerchi when he was nine.
answer: Dante Aligheri (accept either)
B. Dante was exiled from this his home city after a dispute about Papal annexations in Tuscany.
answer: Florence
C. Dante was a member of the "White" sub-faction of this Papal supporting political group, which split into two following the defeat of their political rival, the Ghibellines.
answer: Guelphs