At the end of Week 1, I was telling people that Nagendra had a bit of a lead on me in terms of games read, but I would catch up with him before the season was over. As it stands, this is looking less and less likely, since the man is comfortably ahead of twice my score.
Meanwhile, I need to worry about being overtaken by Kiran Kalyan, who isn't even an exclusive reader, since he's both playing and reading, and bringing in reviews like this:
Ranks 4 through 9 are all held by exclusive readers, and Vamshi tops the B612 players in the not-Kiran category.
Recorded Game and Retro
The second week of the season sees a recorded game featuring Pat Gibson, Sania Narulkar, Subrat M and Abdul Vahid, which went down to a very exciting conclusion!
We also did a Retro for the whole quiz, which you can watch here
(Retros happen every Monday at 10pm IST. Join us for the next one!)
Don’t worry if you missed it though, here’s a summary of everything we covered this week.
You folks have no way of noticing when this happens of course, but it's actually really common for a quad to be written months before it ends up in an actual question set. This one was written by Udupa when we were first putting together the semifinal set for Season 4, but at the time it just didn't feel right. This time it fit right in. I have no idea what determines these things, but I'm convinced it's not nothing.
HOG and BID played to about the same difficulty, but META was much much easier. I think we went a little overboard with the "name that represents the new long-term vision" clue.
LNKD works reasonably well as an L4 since it requires 2 jumps: guess a company Microsoft acquired (Skype was the most popular wrong guess), then make a 4-letter symbol for it (LINK is nice too).
2. 73 Questions With Vogue
It has been pointed out to us that Lady Gaga seems to be the answer to a question roughly every 2 weeks in the B612 Quiz League. I assure you this is not intentional, nobody in the setters team is THAT obsessed with Mother Monster. She just seems to fit into quite a lot of different quad ideas.
Phoebe Waller-Bridge is a somewhat easy L4, but I did come across several players who could name both Fleabag and Killing Eve and still couldn't name the woman who created them.
3. Waving
This one's a topic you wouldn't expect to produce 4 distinct questions, but that sentence could just as well describe most of Nidheesh's quads.
I was pleased with the difficulty levelling here, cos the L1 vs L2 debate was a bit of a risk. Harley-Davidson is the more clearly easy question, but Waving can really go in any direction. A single word change here or there might've caused the correct % to plummet.
If you accidentally insult someone while trying to high-five them the next time you're in Greece, please let us know.
4. First Indian female player of a musical instrument
N. Kesi, Carnatic Flautist, 1918-2015
Quite a lot of drama in this quad. Let's get the two uncontroversial ones out of the way first.
Sarod played well as an L3, and Mridangam was probably too easy for an L2.
Flute ended up pretty difficult, largely because it's not an instrument you expect to see in a quad like this. People who knew about Pilibhit's flutes benefited the most.
This question also named Jayaprada Ramamurthy as "India's first female player" of the flute, which is actually way off. We were corrected regarding this fact in the best possible way though. Anupama Srirangan, a player in our league, told us about N Kesi, a widely reputed professional Indian flute player who travelled with and played alongside the legendary T. R. Mahalingam aka Flute Mali in venues across Europe.
She's not the only one either. There's also the Sikkil sisters, who have been performing together since the 60s and have even received Padma Shri awards for it.
And now for the hard part.
Here's the question that stood at L1 for this quad:
Anuradha Pal, a multi-percussionist and music composer from Mumbai, is listed in the Encyclopedia Britannica and the Limca Book of Records as the first professional female player of which musical instrument, also an essential instrument in the devotional traditions of Sikhism during kirtan?
Answer: Tabla
A disturbing number of people have called out the 'essential in Sikhism' clue as being "misleading" (sic). This was confusing to me because I didn't see how a statement that is objectively true can draw you away from the real answer.
This is my theory: A lot of people who knew the answer was tabla consider it a relatable, familiar instrument. When they read the word "Sikhism" however, it makes them think the answer needs to be a bit more exotic than that. So they drop the tabla track and go for something else. That new answer is wrong, which is alright, but the correct answer is tabla, which they knew, and now they're pissed.
Consistently, quizzers everywhere will get angry when they are robbed of points that they felt they deserved. Here's an example: If a question asks for the name of a book and gives a bunch of clues you don't recognize, then the quizzer's reaction to the answer reveal depends entirely on how they feel about the book in question.
If the answer is some obscure book they've never heard of then they might be annoyed by a bad question, but usually, they'll just shrug and move on.
If the answer is their favourite book though, then they will be ANGRY. Even though it's the same question as before, just as opaque as the first case. Because the answer is a book they actually like, suddenly they deserve those points and this question just went from bit-of-trivia to a personal affront. They'll say you things like "I've read this book like 14 times and I still didn't get this answer" as if a statement like that should carry any weight whatsoever.
I have had to listen to some frankly horrifying complaints from quizzers about this question. They have ranged from slightly amusing assurances of cultural sensitivity ("I have listened to a lot of your vahe guru bhajans okay") to fairly brazen displays of ignorance ("I knew Anuradha Pal plays the tabla but for this question, I said dhol because they use dhol in bhangra, and bhangra and kirtan same-same right?"). Some have straight up asked why Sikhism was mentioned at all if the answer was "just a tabla", so here's the straight answer:
Modern Sikh kirtan uses precisely two instruments: harmonium and tabla. Anuradha Pal is a percussionist, therefore she plays the tabla. That is all that was to be read in that clue. If you read anything else, well, call it a TIL.
🎯 Suvajit Chakraborty’s TILs were long ago, he scored a perfect 4/4 on this quad for his first musket of the season!
5. Exoplanets
Goldilocks was usually answered just a few words into the question.
Exoplanets played harder than the L4, tidal locking, and this I believe is a bigger lapse of judgement by us setters than it initially seems. When you're reading deeply into a new subject, it's easy to forget how completely alien the topic itself was to you just a few hours earlier, and IMO a bit of perspective should've caused us to correct the difficulty levelling here.
🎯 John van Maris and Kiran Kalyan both had perfect scores in this quad, scoring a perfect musket!
6. Hogarth Shakespeare Series
🎯Those two red cells must seem puzzling to Shankha Ghosh Dastidar, who got a point for every one of these and picked up a musket!
7. UN Flag Family
8. Films where one Shah Rukh Khan dies
This fabulously silly quad was added not for its merits as a quiz question, but more for the sake of just sharing that something this ridiculous happened 4 distinct times.
Correction: It actually happened 5 times. In which 1998 film does a Shah Rukh Khan get killed by his lover immediately after winning a tug-of-war game against his doppelganger?
Answer: Duplicate
🎯 A musket in this quad, for Nishant!
9. The Butler Did It
10. Cocktail ingredients
11. Glossary of Theatre and Quizzing
Pre-Mimir Prompting
This quad has been pretty widely called out as a favourite and Dhruv Mookerji has received his usual praises. But now that the week's behind us, it might be a good idea to use this post as a platform to air some alternate views.
While the theatre questions were still answerable by themselves, the quizzing-focused clues were really not quite as accessible as they could've been. For example, "blocking" a hint seems to be mostly an Indian quizzing term, and "run through" might've played fairly difficult for all audiences that haven’t had a chance to attend live quizzes in India.
But most of all, and this is the argument I found most convincing, this quad is simply easier if you've been doing Mimir quizzes before. In Sai Prashant's words, "Philosophically, quizzing should not reward people for having quizzed previously".
Any topic will necessarily reward those who are familiar with it, but it's worth remembering that every time we do one of these, it makes the whole quizzing world seem that much more inaccessible and inside-jokey to newbies.
So a fun topic overall, but let's wait a bit before we try something like this again.
12. Symbols of Ancient Egypt
13. Pepsi's Change the Game Shots
Apologies for cutting down these ads any shorter than they absolutely needed to be. We wanted a snappy quiz and the 25-second clips were already killing us. Here are all the ads in all their glory.
🎯 Two muskets in a nostalgia quad, which are always the hardest to get, for Komban Subhas Christopher and Santonab!
14. Modern Dating Terminology
15. Argots
Seat Averages
X’s, or direct questions missed by all 4 seats. Seat 1: 4.98 Seat 2: 5.04 Seat 3: 5.37 Seat 4: 4.35
Owns, or direct questions answered by each seat. Seat 1: 4.35 Seat 2: 5.13 Seat 3: 5.48 Seat 4: 5.85
