Game Week 3 Review: Plates, Peace and Operation Paperclip

And yes, you can sign up to read quizzes!

Readers

Someone asked me this week whether players are allowed to read games in this league. I laughed, cos that is a wonderful problem to have.

Like most quiz leagues, B612 also relies on players and volunteers to conduct its quizzes. Most of the heavy lifting is done by our team of 'exclusive' readers, led by Nagendra Kumar Jamadagni. But we'd still be running short if it weren't for a couple of league players signing up to read games for other groups. This charge is currently led by Kiran Kalyan and includes folks like Vamshi Palreddy, Sanveer Singh Puri and Shankha Ghosh Dastidar.

Having a pool of exclusive readers makes life incredibly easy, but it does create dependencies. Meaning if one of them goes on a quick vacation, suddenly we need people to volunteer to pick up the slack.

To ease this pressure, I would urge you all to try and read at least one game during the season. It's a lot of fun! Just check out the week’s list of scheduled games, scan for a game scheduled at a convenient time (after your own quiz) and put your name in the Reader column. That's it.

There's a "Current Game Week" button on the League Home Page where you can get access to the question set. If you've never read a game before, we've published some guides. But you're also welcome to ping Bindu or me on the Whatsapp group to help you out.

Now for the review. Let's dive right in, this will be a quick one.

• Question Set: Game Week 3

• Raw Data: Game Week 3 Analysis

• Feedback is welcome here: Feeback for Season 5

1. Number Plates On Screen

We had a bit of an ordering problem in this quad. Maybe not a problem so much as an unintended aid to answering. The very question first in the set displayed the number plate "LWYRUP" which can, in the absence of any other recognizable clues, lead you to guess movies that have the word 'lawyer' in the name. This causes a lot of quizzes to start with Lincoln Lawyer being the first incorrect guess. This meant that when the Lincoln Lawyer question actually showed up (plate "NTGLTY"), the movie name was still fresh in everyone's mind, and made for a relatively easier L4.

As someone who's never watched the movie, the Shree 420 reference was intriguing and I went looking for the scene in question. Here it is, at the 6:10 mark.

🎯Daivat picked up a musket in this quad, scoring a perfect 4/4 score with these questions!

2. Explorations of Sir Walter Raleigh

🎯Akshay Gurumoorthi picked up a long overdue musket, because of course he knew about Cadiz.

3. Features of Rockstar Songs

That Rumi question went through a bunch of changes before reaching you. It wasn't part of the original quad at all, then when it was it had extra clues like a handy timeline. The final form ended up a little too complicated for an L1, evident from the answer percentage as well.

Meanwhile, we've been informed that Nizami Bandhu use the phrase ‘Nizami Brothers’ in their Facebook bio, which isn’t enough for points, but good work trying!

Here's an extra question for you.

Kaaga re, mori itni araj tose chun chun khaiyo maans’
[O crow, I have a request to you, eat all (my body's) flesh]
khaiyo na tu naina more, mohe piya ke milan ki aas
[Don't eat my eyes, as I wish to see my lover]

This hauntingly beautiful couplet in the song Nadaan Parindey from the film Rockstar was adapted by lyricist Irshad Kamil from a poem by which 13th century mystic? He is known for introducing the institution of Langar to Punjab as well as pioneering the use of Punjabi language for literary purposes, among several other things.

Answer: Fariduddin Ganjshakar (Accept: Baba Farid or Sheikh Farid)

4. Darwin's What?

🎯 Jon Violet and Jayant both scored 4/4 in this quad, earning a musket each!

Several days after this game week was concluded, we received an email from a player who said he had watched the GW3 Retro video on Youtube and learned that the L1 answer was "tortoise" and not "turtle". He remembered receiving a point for guessing turtle in his own game and asked us to decide how to handle the situation since he had ended up winning the quiz by a single point.

In a nutshell, here's what we'll be doing to fix this: Nothing. Yes, tortoise was the only acceptable answer and turtle should not have gotten points. But what the moderator does in your quiz is always final and binding, mostly because following this one rule makes quizzes a lot easier to arbitrate. If the reader screws up, well, as in most sports where a human referee can make a mistake, shit happens. After a quiz is over, we can offer apologies, but we cannot offer points. The reader in question has been made aware of her mistake, and I'm convinced that she's extremely unlikely to do it again, and that's good enough for us. Thanks for calling it out though!

5. Works of John Le Carre

Night Manager's in the news cos there's a Hindi adaptation of the book on Hotstar now, with ads running during cricket telecasts in India,

🎯 Focusing on one author can often throw up musket opportunities for fans of the series, especially if you're in the seat that got Night Manager as a direct. Hence the THREE muskets in this quad, with Alison Rose, Ajit Nayak, and Shom Biswas all scoring a perfect 4/4 score!

6. Operation Paperclip

After weeks of procrastination and missing deadlines, I am happy to share that I finally managed to squeeze in another quad of my own amongst all the others set by my excellent colleagues. It had been a while.

Operation Paperclip was an effort made by the US government to locate and hire Nazi scientists to help the war effort. It was a tremendous success, the most famous story being that of Wernher Von Braun, a Nazi rocket scientist who ended up leading the American space effort. The whole quad came about largely because we just really wanted to share this excellent quote by Mort Sahl, mocking Von Braun: "I aim at the stars, but sometimes I hit London."

7. The Peace Symbol

The peace symbol, also known as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) symbol, was designed in 1958 by British graphic designer Gerald Holtom for a march against nuclear weapons. The symbol combines the semaphore letters N and D, standing for nuclear disarmament, and has since become a globally recognized symbol of peace and nonviolence. That's right, I'm now using ChatGPT to pad up these review posts.

B612 Reader Savita Raj is visiting Madrid this week and sent us something she saw that reminded her of the week's set.

At the Royal Plaza in Madrid

🎯 J Krishnamurthi picked up his second musket of the season in this quad

8. Eponymous Food

Here's the L1 question:

An apocryphal story is that this quintessential South Indian dish comes from the name of a Maratha ruler, Shivaji's successor, who was a guest at the court of Thanjavur. However, this has been disputed by food historians claiming that references to it predated the ruler by a century. Which dish?

Answer: Sambar

In my favourite Moment this week, a player in the league, Priyamvadha Shivaji mentioned during her quiz that she's actually a descendent of Sambhaji (surname definitely checks out) and that her family is part of the Thanjavur Marathi clan, and that the sambar origin story is 100% true. This is too good a story for food historians to ruin, so I for one accept it as fact.

🎯Abdul Vahid had no trouble accepting this either, he's picked up a musket in this quad!

9. Eponymous Physical Exercises

10. First Woman in Various Mythologies

It was pointed out during one of our games this week that ‘Australian Aboriginals’ is no longer considered an appropriate term, and that we should be preferring 'Australian Indigenous peoples’ instead, but I haven't been able to find particularly reliable guides for this and both terms seem to work.

11. Caravaggio's Beheading Paintings

A little bit of extra trivia for you: Caravaggio frequently got into brawls and duels with people he had insulted, in 1606 he ended up killing a man named Tommasoni who came from a wealthy family. The family was able to put out an open bounty for Caravaggio, sentencing him to death by beheading at the hands of whoever recognized him. Our man freed Rome and moved to Italy, and his paintings at the time obsessively depicted severed heads, often his own!

That L2 signature question played much harder than we expected and that probably has something to do with the low res image we selected. In hindsight, putting something like "zooming in helps!" is not a great idea, since it forces the reader actually to do the zooming in for you and gives them too much control over whether you'll see the relevant portions of the painting.

I don't know how a name like Gentilieschi got answered more than "HIS OWN FACE", but here we are.

12. Dumb Answers from Family Feud

Someone pointed out to me today that most B612 question sets seem to have at least one quad that is "almost painfully trying to be funny", which I think is polite-speak for 'cringe'. I can understand the sentiment, we have tended towards having quads like these ('Pooja what is this behaviour' comes to mind, as does Favi-col and 'One SRK dies').

We certainly aren't targetting cringe, but quads like this do tend to come up sometimes because we encourage our setters to occasionally create content that can best be described as 'irreverent'. Pick topics that you see quizzers looking down their noses at. Pick topics that might evoke a laugh. Have fun, basically, and remind us all not to take this quiz (or this league) too seriously.

You can always tell when the setter is enjoying themselves writing the questions, and that's what we'd like some of our quads to sound like.

Here’s the whole quad again for your enjoyment:

Family Feud being a reality show thrives on its participants' real answers and some of them can be quite hilariously wrong. Sometimes, contestants follow the quizzing way - If you don't know the answer, guess away. The host asks: "Name a kind of bear." The contestant's answer gives us the largest character from Joseph Cundall's fairy tale about a blonde girl terrorizing a family of bears. What is the answer?
Answer: Papa (from Goldilocks)

Here's one stupid answer from the reality show Family Feud - The host asks: ""Name something a man might be willing to go to prison to get away from."" What does the contestant answer, something that is literally the one thing you cannot get away from when in prison, a term that will also remind you of a musical trio?
Answer: The Police!

Here's another bit of comedy gold from Family Feud. The host asks: "Name something that follows the word Pork." The contestant replies with a nonsensical word that makes the host repeat the word over and over again, much to the audience's comical delight. Which non-sensical word is this that combines the keyword to make an animal's name?
Answer: Upine

And sometimes, dumb answers in Family Feud can lose you the game, but benefit you anyway. The host asks: "Name Popeye's favorite food." The contestant confidently answers with a word that makes the host hang his head. What food was this, that a food franchise (which even has this item on the logo) awarded the contestant $10000 worth of, in return of the unintended brand promotion?
Answer: Chicken (Popeye’s Chicken)

🎯 Clare and Rahul Chauhan certainly had their share of fun with this quad, scoring a musket each! (Knowing Clare, she probably hated this quad, but hey a musket is a musket)

13. Four-Field Approach to Anthropology

So many people have asked me whether this quad was legitimate or just something we made up for another fun quad but no, "bones, tone, stones, and thrones" really is how the Four-field approach is sometimes described.

The stones question played harder because it appeared first, and we might've seen better results if we'd placed bones there instead.

14. Tiffany & Co

Anish Kapoor was the most widely ‘passed’ question in this week’s set, which may come as a bit of a surprise considering the other questions we had.

In continuation to last week’s claim that Lady Gaga might be the most frequently occurring answer in B612 question sets, we have a new contender.

I blame Vikas.

15. Exotic Bond Names

Let's not mince words, this quad required you to do some stereotyping. Look at India and China the way a Westerner would and use the most common terms you can think of. Masala, Dim Sum, Kung Fu, that kind of thing.

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Seat Averages

X’s, or direct questions missed by all 4 seats.
Seat 1: 5.09
Seat 2: 4.71
Seat 3: 5.05
Seat 4: 4.11

Owns, or direct questions answered by each seat.
Seat 1: 4.35
Seat 2: 5.16
Seat 3: 5.56
Seat 4: 5.80

See you all in the Game Week 4 Retro on Monday!