I originally was planning on doing Henri Pescarolo on Friday but didn’t get around to publishing anything for five days, in part because I was struggling with my paid work, in part because I was entering a lot of data for my master driver list, and in part because I was preparing for Mom’s return by setting up her bed and a number of other things, and I didn’t quite finish this until she came home today. I started this column on Monday. At that point, I decided to do my originally-scheduled driver for September 28, which was Bob Carey, but then I looked him up and apparently his listed birthdate switched from September 28, 1904 to September 24 and I hadn’t even noticed, so I decided to pivot to Fellows.
As I expected, I’d never heard of the first answer and I put Pilates. I didn’t really know what language that came from but I knew it probably wasn’t Sanskrit. My knowledge of American political history is pretty good, so I knew about Pound’s fascism more than his actual writing. I remember briefly watching part of the ‘80s Shōgun miniseries in one of my history courses and come to think of it, I did hear about the new show once or twice, but I didn’t think of it and put The Pitt, which was a series I’d never even heard of until the last LearnedLeague season, although I knew they probably wouldn't reuse an answer that quickly. I was half right on Question 5 but I said Poland instead of Hungary. For question 6, I put bowing. This one seemed more difficult than most.
I could have pulled a tie here if I’d rated Question 6 at 2 and Question 1 at 0, but Schumann was the highest-rated answer and the one by far the fewest people got, while Key West was the easiest by both metrics so that’s not really a mistake even though my opponent happened to get Schumann and didn’t get Key West. Mendelssohn made me think of Elgar and “Pomp and Circumstance” but I knew that he wasn’t a woman and I misspelled his name Algar anyway. I hadn’t haerd of Schumann. Nor had I heard of Pinewood. I obviously knew that it had to be reminiscent of Hollywood and I ended up saying Boxwood. Although I do vaguely remember the Edict of Nantes from some of my world history courses in either high school or college, I put Avignon, which wasn’t a bad guess since I knew there were a string of antipopes there. I’m not sure I knew what qubit was, but I knew it was a word from Scrabble tournaments and I probably would have correctly guessed that it stood for quantum bit. The other two were obvious, but I was briefly worried I got Question 5 wrong.
Maybe it was surprising that I’d heard of Isabel Allende, but I’ve heard of a lot of the children of politicians who became successful authors: I know Elliott Roosevelt and Margaret Truman were mystery writers too. My literature knowledge is always stronger than I expect, just like my geography knowledge is always weaker than I expect. I’ve heard of the Royal Rumble but everything I’ve heard about it made it sound totally sleazy, so I guessed South Africa. I put action figure for Question #3, which I think was a great guess, but what should have clued me in that that wasn’t it was the “on an everyday item” part. I think lunch boxes were already beginning to go out of fashion when I was in elementary school. I know I had one for a while, but I think most people even by then just used bags. Even though I’ve missed a lot of the sports questions, Question #4 was far easier than most and I’m kind of surprised my opponent thought I wouldn’t get sack. I did love maps as a boy, but I guess maybe I knew more about maps as an object than the contents they contained. and then I guessed the National Science Foundation for Question #6, which wasn’t far off, but even though I’ve seen NASA’s logo, I just can’t picture it as either a meatball or a worm.
I knw there was no chance I was getting Question #1; I put protoplasm and nucleoplasm. After all the really hard math questions, this was actually an easy one that you don’t need to have taken theoretical grad school mathematics to get! I’d never heard of the beehive and I put Afro, but I didn’t really think that hairstyle was invented by anyone nor would it have been invented by someone named Margaret Vinci Heidt, which is obviously a very white name. I was certain Berkshire Hathaway was correct and I was right, but I wouldn’t have been surprised to be wrong about that since the question didn’t mention Warren Buffett. I’ve never paid that much attention to pool balls so I had to guess and said white. I probably rated the Grant question too high, but it was the question that the second-most people got wrong.
After this penultimate game, I had crawled out of the relegation zone after four of five straight wins (including Zimmerman who finished in the top five in our group), so I was pumped and expected to not get relegated:
The only way I could not have advanced based on these scores is 1) I lost, 2) all three of Brinton, Kelly, and Haddad had to win or at least tie their opponents; even if Kelly and/or Haddad tied their opponents, I’d probably still come out ahead of them since the tiebreaker is the match point difference between you and your opponents, and I was at -10 to Kelly’s -14 and Haddad’s -16. I knew I was likely to lose the final game since RoeschK ended up finishing fourth in the group, but Brinton, Kelly, and Haddad all won, and I improbably got relegated despite being #1 after the first week. I didn’t realize the person I was ending up competing with for the last spot was Jones.
I did not really think unreliable narrator was going to be the most obvious answer here (I probably would’ve assumed Nero was, as my scoring proves), but those were both admittedly obvious to me and almost everybody else. I had never heard of any of those people in Question #2 but I guessed hockey, assuming that Belov was a Russian and Petrović was Czech, and that was the most common wrong answer for the same reason. My rap knowledge isn’t amazing, but I certainly know who those guys are and I didn’t think that was going to be the question that the fewest people got right. As usual with almost all the food questions, I’ve never even heard of the answer. GSUSA was a red herring for me. Obviously, I figured out that meant “Girl Scouts of the United States of America”, but I thought the fact that they abbreviated it meant that the question was asking you to figure out the abbreviation, so I put Girl Scout cookie. And although I had vaguely heard of narwhals, I embarrassingly don’t even think I knew that narwhals were animals and I put rhinoceros. I didn’t expect to win this match and I didn’t, but I also didn’t expect all three of the people behind me to get relegated to miss the cutline. Even though I tend to miss all the food and animal questions, I don’t really think any of those are unfair since I do think those are things you could pick up in everyday daily life and I just didn’t have the requisite experience. I do think the math questions are usually unfair because that seems to be the one category where you can’t usually get them without master’s level coursework.
You can tell how erratic my season was to begin with since I started out #1 with a 6-0-1 record and got relegated, but you can really see it in the data too:
By all rights, based on my response rate, I should have been relegated since my 61 correct answers (TCA) was fifth-worst in the group. However, there was one major category in my favor that was compensating for that: I tied Roesch for the most 3-point responses with 12, as I tended to do very well in answering questions that my opponents didn’t expect me to get, which meant I earned 80 match points (TMP) out of 61 correct answers, which was a much higher proportion than most. My ten wins ranked in the top 17, but the main reason I got relegated was that I only had one tie while almost everyone else had more. I boasted about my defense really early, but that also got very bad as my defensive efficiency (DE) of .663 (the ratio between the number of points you allowed and the number of points you could have allowed if you consistently rated the questions your opponent answered correctly as the easiest) was eighth from the bottom and since I only got eliminated by two match points, Jones probably only ended up beating me based on defense, even though he also knew more stuff. While my ratio of match points to correct answers of 80/61 was really high, so too was my ratio of opponent match points to opponent correct answers of 92/72. Basically, I struggled to evaluate other players (probably since I’m still relatively inexperienced here), and they also struggled to evaluate me (basically for the same reason), so it basically canceled out and came down to knowledge, which I didn’t have. But it did feel like a very funny capper that I got improbably relegated after digging out from underneath the hole the day after bombing the live trivia tournament in Syracuse. I’m still going to do LearnedLeague 111 since I already paid for it and I’ll probably post the results here, but after that, I might quit, and I doubt I’m going to do well enough to get promoted to where I was before…
Speaking of trivia, I went on the Aussie YouTuber Silentt’s next NASCAR Jeopardy! video yesterday, the night before Mom came home. He’s had a string of NASCAR Jeopardy! rounds over the past couple weeks, three where he just read off the answers and questions, and two of them live. He’s gotten some pretty well-known niche racing personalities already, including Ben Schneider, Steven Taranto, Taylor Kitchen, and a Craftsman Truck Series hauler driver. I had a feeling this could take off a bit, and I wanted to get in on the ground floor on this. I expected to do better at this than the LearnedLeague stuff since it’s safe to say my domain-specific knowledge is probably greater than my general knowledge, but I won’t spoil the results until at least after the video comes out.
After my fall while leaving my doctor’s appointment on Tuesday, I’ve had a nagging pain in one of my ribs for the past several days, but it seems to be going away now. I’ve also started taking Metamucil more consistently, and I think my bowels are doing a little better. Now I just need better sleeping hours since Mom has gone to bed far earlier than average, and I have gone to bed far later than average in recent years.
