You can find the question set here, both in the order they were asked as well as in the order they’ll be covered here: Question Set
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1. Hiro Murai Music Videos
Having realized that we can do video questions last week, this week we decided to go all in and just showcase some of the best music videos in a single quad.
Although this is not a universally held opinion.
Hiro Murai's body of work is surprisingly diverse and lets us include a bunch of different contemporary artist names. From the beginning, this was going to be a difficult quad for estimating difficulty. I think this is expected for contemporary music since we're all listening to very different things, and other people's music always seems a bit alien.
My original thinking was this: This is America was huge when it came out, so it should definitely be L1; Usher is a big deal, but the song's a bit old, and Chet Faker comes under 'new and cool' at least in my mind, so they're L2 and L3; finally, St Vincent is an artist I was, in a stupid way, quite proud of having "discovered" by looking up the soundtrack behind some Bojack episodes, so I assumed she was obscure AF.
At the last second, we swapped out Usher and Childish Gambino, simply because the Usher clip actually has the song name in it. Big mistake. Huge. Turns out most people listening to that clip will conclude that there's no way we'd actually let you hear the name of the song and then ask for it, so they left that guess out completely and went for other phrases. Usher ended up with just 16% answer rate, terrible for an L1.
Meanwhile, as Udupa had warned us before the week began, Chet Faker turned out to be pretty obscure amongst our audience as well, and St Vincent was surprisingly well known. They evened out and both ended up with 14 correct answers.
Moral of the story: When doing a quad on contemporary music, stick to non-ascending quads. Guessing other people's music tastes is HARD.
Wordle Variants
That's right, we waited just long enough that people forgot about Wordle and then promptly made a quad on it. Difficulty levels were okay, with the only misjudgement being that Heardle was fairly well known, even without any clues in the question.
I have been playing Globle all week thanks to this quad, and it turns out I'm not the only one.
Now folks, I would never want you to lose out on productive hours or anything, but on an unrelated note here are the links to the 4 games we mentioned:
Sometimes you make a quad at the last second, and it just shows, you know? The B612 team has been struggling a little to get creative with its literary quads (hence the puns and all), and Detective Sidekicks is exactly the kind of topic you come up with when you need to make 4 questions in about 30 minutes.
Arthur Hastings may have been sidekick to the second-greatest literary detective of all time, but his name was probably not memorable enough for an L2. Topshe had comparable difficulty, but that may have been because of the convoluted phrasing of the question, which prompted some people to simply guess "Feluda". Finally, I thought I was being very clever with Dog, but 19 correct answers isn't low at all, so not enough people seem to have fallen for it.
Here's an extra for you, which frankly I consider a missed opportunity:
This detective sidekick is actually known to have visited from a distant planet, but decided to stay due to the excellent cuisine options available on Earth. The connection with his home planet isn't completely lost though, since he is still able to cause volcanic activity back home simply by becoming angry here on Earth. He primarily acts as the muscle in this detective duo, adusting his size according to the task at hand. Who?
🎯 Arun Hiregange would probably have cracked this one easily too, since he got 4/4 in all the others, scoring a complete musket!
Deceptively Named Food
I'll let you in a fun part of the question-setting process. Occasionally one of us will announce that we're making a quad on a topic, say "deceptively named food" and that it'll be ready in a few hours. Instinctively, the rest of us will then attempt to guess the answers to the quad without actually having seen the questions. For example, one might shout in response: "Bombay duck not a duck Jerusalem artichoke not from Jerusalem and also not an artichoke uh uh French fries not French?"
But we'd be wrong of course, because Vikas had set out to ignore the usual old chestnuts (which really are nuts) and give us 4 entirely new deceptive foods. The result was a fun set that admittedly should've been non-ascending.
Okay now what's this about Bull's Testicles and Bull's Penis being the same thing?
Sigh. Yes, that happened. In one quiz, the reader accidentally gave points for a participant who guessed "bull's penis", even though the answer PDF demands the word "testicles" or some equivalent (which a penis is not). Mistakes happen though, and in this situation the reader should ideally just replace the question with one of the spares from the set…
...except that the B612 team has, for the past 3 weeks now, not been making any spares at all. We haven't needed them for almost 2 seasons, so we got lazy and were instantly rewarded with 3 quizzes in 2 weeks where they would've been useful. We're sorry.
In the absence of spares, we stick to the usual rules that go into the smooth execution of any quiz, the most vital one being that the QM (or reader) can never be wrong. We owe readers for the existence of this entire league, and so we're going to back them up no matter what they do. So as unfortunate as it sounds, we did ask the reader to give points for that answer, disregarding the difference between testicles and penises and just being happy that the animal who owned said appendages was correct.
Lesson learned: Make spares.
Indian Austen
A fun quad, with the only misjudgement being in how much more memorable a name Bride and Prejudice is compared to the bland Aisha.
Also well done to everyone who managed to remember the name Kumkum Bhagya when they needed it!
Books That Changed The World
To give you another example of how bad we are coming up with literature quad topics, this list and the questions around it were initially created to be a lit quad. When play testing it, we realized that while it made for a very accessible literature set, this was probably because it was actually a social science quad wearing a literature trenchcoat.
It sounded important, and so we went for it, but what a meh list this is no?
Artists Illustrating Classics
Now there's something that makes for a more interesting topic: Legendary artists briefly acting as illustrators for literary classics. A literature quad in an art trenchcoat.
The Raven had no business being on L2, especially with that image, but Ulysses also played out pretty easy. I can make no sense of the L3 vs L4 split though, so if anyone reading this is unsurprised by how ancient Greek drama Lysistrata can be more popular than Oscar Wilde's Salome, please explain that to me.
Endlings
This is one of those topics that's so Greek to me, I wouldn't be able to add anything interesting to the analysis if I tried. All 4 were personal TILs, but it seemed like Quagga was easier than we expected, easier than both Lonesome George and the Northern White Rhino.
Big mistake here in the answer sets, we were accepting only Tasmanian Tiger and Thylacine when of course we should've been accepting Tasmanian Wolf too. At least 3 quizzes were affected by this before it could be fixed, sorry about that!
We saw two muskets where I really didn't expect them, but then again I suppose that's what it takes for a musket. A really hard topic, and one person in a group who's read a little bit about it.
🎯 Congrats to Santosh Swaminathan and Navin Rajaram for their first muskets!
Unhappily Ever After
This is pretty much my ideal "fun" arts quad, although it does seem to require knowledge of movies above all else. It's still nice getting to faeture artwork in a quiz that isn't at least 50 years old.
Pocahontas probably had a hint too many.
Dark Events in Lyrics
Another quad that looks like it's intended to be non-ascending, but wasn't. Enola Gay played tougher than we expected, while Cortez seemed fairly popular, or at least the song was.
Londonderry feels like it's been asked at least 4 times in this year of quiz leagues, but there's still a solid chance I'll miss it the next time it comes up.
🎯 Akshay Gurumoorthi scored a musket on this, in addition to 2 miss-kets, on the way to 21 points in a truly dominant performance.
Back from Retirement
A rarity in this week's set, a perfectly ascending quad! Hingis, Lauda and Foreman were all just the right difficulty, and Mario Lemieux was just obscure enough to stump most (but not all) of our participants.
🎯 Arun Hiregange wasn't stumped at all, scoring his second musket in the same week!
Dr Who Actors
Another nice difficulty gradient, but not much else to say. Someone described this as the most "typical quizzy" of our topics this week, and I have to agree. Dr Who is a regular feature in quizzes, but a lot of us can't really understand why. I've tried watching, but it hasn't clicked and I now restrict myself to watching Youtube clips every time one Doctor "dies" and another one regenerates. If you want to do this too, well, the next "Regeneration" episode is over a year away, but you can catch all the previous ones!
🎯 Sukalyan Sen will not be clicking on that link, he's quite familiar with Dr Who actors as evidenced by his 4/4 performance last week and his first musket of the season!
Cocktails from Tequila Mockingbird
As hopeless as the difficulty level was for this quad, I'm still quite happy with this as a topic. Tequila Mockingbird shows up once in a while in quizzes, usually in rounds fully of punny books (we did a quad on this in our semifinals last season), but I read somewhere recently that the recipes mentioned in the book are ALSO pretty great puns. You can see a bunch of them described in the Goodreads description.
Some advice for future question setters: Puns ALWAYS make for hard questions. But, unlike most hard questions, people always feel like they should be able to crack puns, cos they seem so "gettable". In other words, puns are a cheatcode for lots of questions that seem a lot better than they actually are. (Hence the cocktails and the Wordle variants).
If you're feeling bad about missing any of these, console yourselves by remembering that Ajit Nayak and Utkarsh Rastogi play in an AQL team called Tequila Mockingbird, and could still only manage 1/4 in this quad :)
Big kudos to everyone who was able to crack Pitcher of Dorian Grey Goose, A Rum of One's Own, Love in the Time of Kahlua, and finally, the stretchiest one of them all, Vermouth the Bell Tolls.
🎯 Heartiest congratulations to Seoan Webb, who didn't stumble once and scored his first musket in this topic.
Quick extra for you:
From the literary cookbook Tequila Mockingbird, what is the name of the cocktail that combines the title of a 1970 young adult novel about a sixth grade girl who grows up without a religious affiliation, with the name of a cocktail consisting of tequila, orange liqueur, and lime juice?
As I've often mentioned before, I enjoy how non-ascending quads give us the ability to experiment with new quad ideas. And although to me this meant coming up with questions that were equally difficult, it can also be interpreted as coming up with questions that are equally easy. Basically, give everyone a free point, why not?
That's what we were going for anyway, but a few differences in phrasing meant that Snapchat ended up a little harder (or we're all just too old), and Facebook ended up easiest of all (we're definitely too old).
🎯 Sandeep Hari spans generations though, getting 4/4 in a quad that you'd really expect would be impossible to musket. Congratulations!
BV Doshi's IIM campuses
Another not-perfect attempt at a non-ascending quad and a nice TIL for those who aren't familiar with BV Doshi's achievements. The quad played as well as can be expected, except that all of us forgot that Udaipur is the "City of Lakes".
🎯 Ramesh Natarajan, however, did not forget, racking up yet another musket for the season!
Special Mentions
🎉 Arun Hiregange got 2 distinct muskets this week!
🎯 Seoan Webb and Akshay Gurumoorthi both managed to get a musket, in addition to 2 miss-kets!
🚀 Debasmita Bhowmik joined the league just this week, and we clearly did a poor job of selecting the right group for her, cos she ended up with 3 distinct miss-kets in her very first week.
Seat Averages
X’s, or direct questions missed by all 4 seats. Seat 1: 4.30 Seat 2: 4.05 Seat 3: 3.30 Seat 4: 4.10
Owns, or direct questions answered by each seat. Seat 1: 4.85 Seat 2: 6.40 Seat 3: 7.08 Seat 4: 7.17
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Good luck for Week 6!
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