Game Week 2 Review: Animals, Assassination Attemps and Einsteins's Annus Mirabilus
All the themes we covered in last week's question set, and our musketeers!
Hello peeps
It's Friday and as usual, we're extremely late with the Game Week 2 Analysis, so no time for chit-chat, let's dive in.
Game Week 2 was intended to be a slight step up in difficulty from Week 1, and I think that's what's happened. The draws were a little less random, which meant more competitive games.
Enjoy.
1. Animals in Psychology
In true B612 style, let's start off with a misstep. This quad was all over the place in terms of difficulty.
Pigeons was intended to be the L1 question of this set, but Pavlov played easier (answered in every single quiz) and in hindsight we should've been able to predict that.
We have a tendency of assuming that complicated last names are automatic L4s, but this quad broke that rule too, since a lot more people knew about the first female Lib Nobel winner Selma Lagerlof than were able to guess that bee dances might be called dialects.
2. Bazaars of India
Another non-smooth gradient was caused here by Meena Bazaar playing harder than expected. Laad Bazaar got some nice reactions, in spite of being a difficult question, since many had heard the term.
The L3 is a quality question IMO, so I'm re-sharing it here:
_____ (5) Bazaar located near the Parrys Corner in Chennai is a market notoriously known for its sale of counterfeit goods. What is the name of this Bazaar, run by refugees from a country that once went by that name? These refugees, mostly comprised of the Chin ethnic group, arrived in India after the 1962 coup d'etat in their nation.
The question simplifies to "Neighbour of India with an 5-letter former name", which plenty of people were able to pin to Burma.
In every game I read, we also got a chuckle for this question:
____ (4) Bazaar is one of the largest flea markets in India and one of Mumbai's many tourist attractions. It specializes in second hand and vintage goods though according to popular legend, if you lose anything in Mumbai you can buy it back from here. All this probably explains how the bazaar got its unflatterring name. Which bazaar?
This is one etymology, but another popular one is that the market was initially called 'Shor Bazaar' because of the noise there, which the British mangled to 'Chor Bazaar'. If that gets you a point in your next quiz, let me know.
3. K-Beauty
Finally, a quad that went right.
Korean naturally played the easiest, and Konjac was the single hardest question in the whole quiz, being answered by just 2 people. Aditya Sankaran and Anuradha, take a bow!
I was pleasantly surprised by the number of correct answers we got for Hyaluronic Acid, with a couple of people crediting their points to targeted ads on their Instagram feed 😂
The L2 was, in my opinion, the best-framed question in the whole set. Here it is in full:
SCA, or cryptomphalus aspersa secretion, is used in K-Beauty as a collagen-boosting, hydrating, and healing ingredient. Also known as _____ mucin, it is secreted by which animal when under stress? Some cruelty-free companies produce it by letting the animals crawl on a mesh net in the dark which they do at their own pace.
'At their own pace', ahahaha, lovely.
4. Schiaparelli’s Artist Collabs
Back to slightly broken quads, Picasso was nowhere near as easy as we hoped it might be. The image used in the question was not really indicative and a lot of the correct answers I saw were complete potshots. Magritte would've made a better L1 for this quad, with the question practically quoting his work!
"Snuff" is a perfume bottle designed and launched by Elsa Schiaparelli that was inspired by a 1929 painting about the treachery of images with the words "This is not a pipe" on it. Which surrealist artist is the inspiration for this design, aptly a bottle of perfume rather than a pipe?
🎯 Aditya Sankaran and Venky Srinivasan scored a musket each in this quad, with a perfect 4/4 score.
5. Works of Iain M Banks
A relatively straight-shooting lit quad, with the most interesting takeaway also being the most memorable: Author Iain Banks publishes his works under two names. Iain Banks for mainstream fiction, and Iain M. Banks for sci-fi.
Apparently, this came about because when Banks was publishing his very first work, he was told that a middle initial would seem 'fussy', and also that people might confuse him for Rosie M. Banks, a fictional novelist who appears in the works of PG Wodehouse! Another potential point for your future quizzes.
🎯 MMD probably knew that too, he picked up 4/4 in this quad and scored a musket!
6. Non-Islamic Religions in Iran
A fascinating culture quad, with a very unfortunate levelling problem. Lightning Strike was very much intended to be an L1, with a plethora of hints in the question, but a last-second reordering pushed it under Armenians and Baha'i, both of which played harder.
Yet another quad where the hardest question was also my favourite in terms of framing, here it is in full:
The Hindu Vishnu Temple at ______ _____ (6,5) in Iran was built in the 1890s by the Indian merchant community to signify close relations between India and Iran. It features murals of Krishna and an unusually shaped dome. In which port city, named after one of Iran's most famous shahs, can this temple be found?
Bandar simply means port and Abbas is a reference to Abbas the Great.
7. A Laugh with British Dishes
A thoroughly enjoyable food quad, with reasonable ordering too.
Bubble & Squeak and Toad in the Hole were expectedly hard for everyone who isn't British, and most people Spotted Dick coming from a mile away.
We accepted both "Pigs in a blanket" as well as "pigs in blankets", since there's barely any difference between the two phrases, but apparently there is a distinction between the American and British dishes. The former is a sausage wrapped in a pastry while the latter is a sausage wrapped in bacon. Enjoy the mental image of multiple pigs wrapped up in a single blanket.
8. Assassination Attempts in Films
The difficulty gradient couldn't be smoother. This is a perfect movie quad. If I had to make a change, I'd add another clue for the L4, but that's only because one feels bad when a funda this good isn't cracked in every game.
Which 1976 film by John Sturges is about a fictional attempt by the Nazis to kidnap Winston Churchill? Michael Caine’s character, however, decides to take matters into his own hands and attempts to assassinate him instead. The film takes its name from the success of an American mission in the previous decade.
To make this easier, I'd change the last line to reference "the first words uttered when...", but of course that runs the risk of having people guess "One small step for man". Levelling is hard.
9. 'Polis' Cities
Another decent difficulty gradient, with Gallipoli playing slightly easier than expected. This was surprising because the L3 question was rather direct with its hints of '3 cities', but hey that's what happens when you don't italicise the crap out of every question
Which city, formed from a group of three cities in antiquity - Oea, Sabratha, and Leptis Magna - uses the 'pol' suffix for its current name? It was disambiguated from similarly named cities in Greece and Lebanon with the subtitle '[Blank] of the West'.
Answer: Tripoli
I enjoyed all 4 of these questions, especially how different they all were in terms of framing. Persepolis had a literature hint, Tripoli was all about the hidden clue in the question, and Istanbul got you there via Constantine the Great.
The Greek word 'Polis' or 'Pol', as in Acropolis or Megapolis, is a suffix that means "city" that has been used in naming many places around the world. Which town in the Marmara province of Turkey shares its name with a town in Italy's Puglia region, with both getting its name from the Greek word 'pol' to refer to city. Specifically meaning "Beautiful city", the name is more popular as a peninsula that witnessed a lot of bloodshed in the early 20th century.
Answer: Gallipoli
This question expects you to remember war trivia, but there was another way too. The question said the name literally means 'beautiful city'. The Greek word for beauty is 'kallos' and it also appears in the English word for ‘beautiful writing’: calligraphy.
10. Superfans!
A straight quad, with 'rhyming' being enough of a hint to get people to answer Barmy Army and with Tour De France being well-indicated by the image in the question.
Nav Bhatia's story is a personal favourite. He emigrated to Canada in the midst of the 1984 Sikh massacre in India, built his fortune and became the single most visible fan of the Toronto Raptors. In 2019, he became the first-ever fan to receive an NBA Championship Ring when his team won the league. It was hard to find an image of him that didn’t contain the Raptors logo!
I was confused about how Portsmouth FC's home ground can possibly not be in mainland Great Britain, but apparently that's because Portsea is considered an island. You have to zoom in a fair bit to see Portbridge Creek on Google Maps though.
🎯 Rahul Buddhavarapu gets his second musket in two weeks, this time for Superfans!
11. Placeholder Names
Another fascinating funda and a great topic for a mimir quad. Sukarno seemed to be on the tip of many tongues, but saving a Bonus Attempt proved more important. Jane Roe played the easiest and would've been easier still if it was less ambiguously framed. We improved it a bit mid-week so as not to mislead people.
In the US and UK, John Doe is used as a placeholder name for unknown or concealed masculine identities, while a different name is used for feminine identities. In legal contexts, variants of both names are widely used to conceal the names of plaintiffs. Which variant of the feminine name is famously seen in the title of a landmark 1973 case in the USA?
Falana, as is the Hindi phrase 'falana dhikana' meaning 'so and so', is probably the single coolest funda in this week's set, but I think we probably could've done more with it. The same word is used in a LOT of different cultures and it's a incredible connection between all of them.
But my favourite question of this quad is still 'the mathematical simplicity' of the L3:
In French, Pierre-Paul-Jacques or Pierre-Jean-Jacques are placeholder names for unknown or concealed identities or used to designate anyone informally. However, in a more formal or legal context, the French seem to prefer the mathematical simplicity of [Blank]. Fill in the blank with a term that also appears in the title of a 19th century painting, whose original title was "Portrait de Madame [BLANK]".
Answer: X
(The painting is Madame X by John Singer Sargent]
12. Froebel Gifts
Buckminster Fuller, who appears in a quiz roughly every 45 minutes, played the easiest in this quad, although I'm sure if you count the number of people who felt they should've cracked the lovely Kindergarten etymology then that number would be higher still.
Lincoln Logs was tough but guessable, unless you go down the false road of Lincoln Lumber, which is a very valid guess as well.
13. Foods of Cartoon Characters
You can tell we're in non-ascending territory now, cos the questions are suddenly so much easier. Every one of these questions was cracked in every single quiz, which I'm going to go ahead and call a league-wide musket. Well done all of you!
14. Einstein's Annus Mirabilis 1905
Einstein's work over a period of just 8 months in 1905 is astonishing no matter how many times you read about it.
To quote Bill Bryson:
His name was Albert Einstein, and in that one eventful year he submitted to Annalen der Physik five papers, of which three, according to C. P. Snow, "were among the greatest in the history of physics" — one examining the photoelectric effect by means of Planck's new quantum theory, one on the behavior of small particles in suspension (what is known as Brownian motion), and one outlining a special theory of relativity.
The first won its author a Nobel Prize and explained the nature of light. The second provided proof that atoms do indeed exist — a fact that had, surprisingly, been in some dispute. The third merely changed the world.
(the entire chapter from Short History of Nearly Everything is really very good)
Einstein published 5 papers that year, but Mimir quizzers only care about 4 things, so we had to omit one.
Luminiferous Ether proved the only slightly tougher question of this quad, being a harder term to remember than the others, while Photoelectric Effect went unanswered in exactly one game (you know who you are).
🎯 It can't have been in Divij Santosh's game, he was too busy scoring 4/4 and scoring his very first musket!
15. Indian Music Directors and their Bands
Finally, one non-ascending quad that wasn't intended to be extremely easy. Near perfect levelling here.
🎯 This quad also gave us quite a lot of musketeers. Jayesha, Appu S and Anand Shivashankhar all had perfect scores!
And here’s a quick look at the seat distribution.
And that’s all we’re doing in this week’s round-up. See you next week!
thanks a lot for this last table. average owns per seat is a great metric to show ease of each seat