The May, 2012 contest was won by Jack is Da Bomb, who turned out to be one man, Jack Tagye, of Tacoma Washington. He bravely promised to write the On-Air questions for the January contest, but was unable to finish.
Fortunately, Tom Gardner of BOMO was on top of the situation. He solicited help from long-time players, and found a taker in Steve Homer and Must Capture Moose and Squirrel, who had finished second in May 2012, and previously run the contest in May 2011 as The Ohio Players. They agreed to run the January 2013 contest through WMKV in Cincinnati.
As a consequence of using a commercial station and a professional DJ, the contest set a high standard for technical proficiency. The internet stream was strong all night, and there were a minimum of blown cues and other snafus. There were a lot of station promos and PSAs, but Trivia players got used to them by the end.
Must Capture Moose and Squirrel were:
with assistance from the following:
Post-contest discussion on the Trivia mailing list was generally quite positive. Here are some samples:
Joe Francis '87 writes:
My wife Maggie Heaman ('88) and I played as "worker and parasite" and enjoyed the contest.
We both thought the maps hour bonus was brilliant. When I looked at {New York, Paris, London, Munich} I immediately started talking 'bout pop music. Made me forget about the rat race.
I did keep looking over and over again for "Heart of Rock-n-Roll". Missed opportunity?
Maggie did a lot of the boni solo while I spent most of my time with the on-airs. She managed to get the 4th highest score on the the Comic Strip Super. We were also in the top 5 on the audio bonus. But it looks like Eric Lindholm managed to come in 2nd overall as a one man team, so wtf, we clearly have work to do.
A thank you to Jack Tagye for being there for us on IM. And a big wet kiss to Desmond for playing "Watching Scotty Grow". I did indeed rock out.
Steve Homer Responds:
Actually, Desmond had nothing to do with us playing "Watching Scotty Grow". Des only contributed one question (the baby who has seen 2 perfect games) and one song match ("Victoria" for the Lingerie Football League ref). We didn't lean on Des much so he could get to play in this one. In fact, we actually had a team member (Rick) who brought in "Watching Scotty Grow" on LP!
We are glad you had a good time. And, indeed, much of the contest came from outside our team (the maps hour bonus was supplied by Eric Lindholm, for example).
A special shout-out MUST go to George, who played DJ all night AND assembled the opening/closing clips from "Rocky & Bullwinkle" episodes. Without him, this contest would not have been possible.
Eric Lindholm writes:
First, a confession: my second-place finish was helped in part by the fact that I wrote the Pathetic Peripatetics bonus. I should have recused myself but couldn't resist a perfect score (in penance, I skipped four other hourlies.) Still my score was high because I think I got the most points with on-air questions. Because they were excellent, fun, and engaging questions, they were like Lay's potato chips and I couldn't stop. There were only a few "News of the Weird" questions (as I call them) and some real good history Qs.
The "Art History" audio was great and - oooh - I was so stuck on "woman" (Aretha Franklin, of course!) I also enjoyed the simplicity of "The BLANK of BLANK" and the ad slogans. When you're a one-man team, it's good to have boni you can knock off 1-2-3. The only discordant issue of the night was "Election 2012" which should have been called "Let's Bash Republicans." Thus we had a full section of questions dedicated to the gaffes of fringe candidates but not a word about Obama "forgetting" the national debt on Letterman or Joe Biden telling a mostly-black audience "they're gonna put you back in chains." It was more agitprop than trivia.
That said, Moose & Squirrel did an excellent job pulling together this contest under unusual and hurried circumstances. Thanks for a fun night!
Eric
P.S. - In my answer key to the Maps bonus, I put "South by Southwest" instead of "North by Northwest." Duh. Ah, you know what I meant.
Tom Gardner writes:
Once again I offer huge kudos to Moose and Squirrel for their precedent-smashing agreement to take on this contest. Gusto defined! And to put on such a smooth, professional and entertaining contest to boot is an amazing treat. Well done and a grateful Williams Trivia nation bows in your general direction. (And give Jack credit, he had the good sense to admit he simply could not pull off the contest by himself, and as I understand it he contributed a ton of the questions and handled IM duties. Though I still can't figure out how he won our contest by himself!)
A brief word on BOMO: there were eight of us at various times, with no thoughts of victory on our minds. Wendy and I ('79) were in our home in New York, Allie ('10) and Brandon L. at the U of Illinois, Kristy at Carnegie-Mellon and Brandon F in LA , and we were joined by Penn friend Colin and his brother Hunter, as well as a delightful two hour pop-in from my long-time BOMO buddy Werts ('77). Kristy, Brandon F. and I lasted all night.
And for the first time EVER, we actually made a conscious decision to "slow down" to eliminate all doubts about winning, foregoing the 7th and 8th hour bonuses, the second Super, and putting in a rather relaxed effort on the last 20 questions or so. I doubt we would have caught WEPO anyway, and we ended up 10th in a tightly packed field.
The contest itself: what a blast.
There were an awful lot of great questions, particularly in the first half of the contest. My favorites were Bode Dockel's perfect games, the Tang secret, Oberlin football's claim to fame, the Dream Team's "play on" approach, Cosby's and Newhart's vanity, Ed Asner's hard-to-match Emmy history, the Gators' croc, 50 First Dates' Beach Boys homage, James Earl Jones' unfortunate plaque, the Lingerie League ref and Glen Glenn Sound's path to sitcom monopoly.
The songs were extremely well thought out and covered the decades nicely, if a bit shy on exceptionally great "party songs." I did enjoy a few that happen to be on my own Ipod, "Trouble," "Who Knew," "Swing Swing," and "Take the Long Way Home" among them. I love "Everybody's Working For the Weekend" though that wasn't Loverboy. A few odes to the '60s, but fewer classics than of late... maybe that's a good thing?
There were several "on airs" that in my mind were near perfect, that is, a great question, a great song, and a great match. The first was Gilligan's Island Ginger Grant question, with great megatons of nostalgia, matched with "Ship of Fools" which is a terrific song and a wonderful match. The second was Carlos May's birthday uniform, matched with Neil Sedaka's "Calendar Girl" (not a fantastic song but certainly a good bop-along wee hours welcome). And the Sergeant Bilko/Dalai Lama confusion matched with "Hello Dolly." And throw in Marcel Marceau and "Sounds of Silence" for that matter. And "Dancing on the Ceiling" with "Fiddler on the Roof"!
I typically don't spend much time on the bonuses, but I did enjoy chipping in on the slogans and taking our team's lead on the audio.
I contributed one question (Five O'Clock Shadow/"Five O'clock World", at 5 AM of course) and one bonus, the Campaign 2012 one. My apologies to my Republican friends out there... despite my 37-year 100% Democratic voting record, I would have been happy to offer equal opportunity lampooning of fringe Democratic candidates as well, had there been a Democratic primary! (I would have had a field day in 1988, with Gary "Monkey Business" Hart and Joe "Neil Kinnock" Biden in the field). Perhaps I can prove that in 2016! (Although I confess I loved the question aboutRush Limbaugh thinking Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown was an African-American woman!)
By the way I did NOT show my bonus to our team in advance, and Allie and Brandon L did virtually all of it without the Internet. (I do confess to getting two points for my own question and then rocking out to "Five O'Clock World.")
Other things worth noting as the evening progressed... the twin opening questions were very cute, and I loved the song match for Jack (although maybe "Message in a Bottle" would have been a good one for question 2!). Lorne Green certainly made his presence felt... who knew what a treasure trove for trivia old Ben Cartwright would turn out to be? Always nice to welcome Vinko Bogataj back to the contest. While we liked Ginger Grant, we could've done without Jim Backus! And who cares how you pronounce Aqaba anyway?
Many thanks to Tiff, Steve and especially Cassie for putting up with me on the IM'ing (and my endless "Mel Torme" guesses as the artist). It was fun to check in with the leaders via email at about 3 AM to ensure they were serious about running the next contest—or not! Mitch Katz of Geezers, another old BOMO buddy and classmate, kept assuring me the Geezers were packing it in, and they finally did at 4:30 AM or so.
We had some excellent student/on campus participation...What a Bad Idea, Holy Cow and Aristocows joined WEPO as student Top 11 finishers! (Maybe those 50 posters I put up on campus helped!) I've added their email addresses to this list in case they have not yet joined the listserv...I hope you do! And I hope all playing teams will tell their story and offer their post-mortems.
And last, congrats to WEPO, the Williams' student team (yea!) now at Oxford who won and who want to run the next contest (well, most of them, anyway). Our first contest to be run from outside the USA!!!! We'll see what hurdles that will engender, but I know we all stand ready to help!
See you in May!
Best, Tom from BOMO
Dave Letzler writes:
Hey all. This is Dave from Batwalrus (which also included Laurie Brink, Karl Hein, Lee Glasser, and Brian Hirshman).
One quick note first--I accidentally forget to check the "no Internet" box for Super 1. Minor point, but I want to make sure Karl gets rewarded for all his D&D and Gamera knowledge.
Also, I contributed the Art History Audio--do hope that people enjoyed that. For my own interest, I would be interested in something of a breakdown on which answers people did and did not tend to get, as it looked like the 20(!) teams awake for it did
Anyway, much thanks to the various folks running--this was a really, really good contest, one of the best recent ones, which got me off my recent schneid of not finishing. There were a bunch of really good bonuses--the Maps one really hooked our team (a couple of the music ones were more obscure than other possibilities, but it was fun to see people struggle with and finally get Kill Bill, Private Ryan, Spinal Tap, N by NW, etc.), the Blank of Blank was a pretty strong all-purpose high concept (felt good getting the King of Kong and the Duck of Death, and the Monsters were wide-ranging and lots of fun (incidentally, I totally knew the Wolf Man verse, like, fifteen years ago--didn't realize that'd be something worth remembering over time...), and the Slogans had lots of good half-memorable ones that we were really debating over (who promises to get it there tomorrow, what beast is being unleashed, etc.)--and nothing that really bombed. We did just have a dog bonus a few contests back, but then everybody loves puppies and cats; similarly, the comics question skewed a bit old, but at least it was fun trying to remember back in the 90s when people still actually read paper comics sections of newspapers.
The Ultra was a good choice in retrospect--I'm glad that you leniently let us get it even on comic characters, rather than Avengers, since several of the gettable early ones are more associated with other groups--though the early links were somewhat tenuous, like that Samantha is a Scarlet Witch, Jim West is a US Agent, Marko Ramius is a Sub-Mariner, etc. It seemed like there was a good range of when people got it, so that says something.
The on-air and song matches were very good, as I expected with this group, and frequently had us laughing--"Victoria," "Proof," "You Talk Too Much," the Cake song for Portal, and so on. I did think that there was a little much random weird stuff that no one was really likely to know in the questions--but, then, I suppose the rest of my team got a lot of them, so it seems to matter to someone. (I was happy to remember the Lingerie Football League one and the Colbert-based questions). I'm not sure we needed to have quite so many Lorne Green questions, and a few questions seemed like Trivia chestnuts that come up too many times over the past however many decades--the Vaughn Meader Kennedy album, Ed Asner, the Great Chicago Fire not being the biggest fire on its own day. The song quality was fine in terms of not being too repetitive and being generally listenable, though Laurie requests, and I agree, that "Delicious" be sent back to its Trivia dormancy.
Anyway, all in all a really, really good set, and I'm glad that so many teams played so long. We look forward to the contest being run from Oxford in May.
Dave
PS--Bill Cosby actually bests Newhart: you forgot to count both Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids and The Cosby Mysteries.
Arielle Kagan Masters '92 wrote:
In all, an enjoyable contest. Many thanks to Moose & Squirrel for de-bombing Jack. Jack, I am thoroughly, utterly impressed and would like to see a head-to-head, three-way special contest: Jack vs. Dom vs. Des.
There were some very amusing Qs & As and it was mostly really good music, although there were a lot of very obscure answers and artists and too much Lorne Greene for my taste. Was nice to have minimal audio and video boni - as much as they're fun to watch and listen to, they're very hard to submit answers for with the current setup. Miss one sound or clip and all of your answers are off and you might not notice until it's too late. Liked the Brent Spiner PSAs. Didn't notice anything with Tom Garrity; was hoping to hear one. Missed all of the usual on-air banter about funny (but wrong) answers - that's a lot of the flavor that makes this such a special contest and was hoping to hear more of that. Oh, and I agree with a previous commenter: I will be happy if I NEVER hear "Delicious" by Jim Backus (and friend) again.
Most of the issues I had with it were at my end, although there were submission problems with the boni that became very time-consuming - the server would only accept the first set of answers I typed in. If I went back to the answer sheet to type more, then hit Submit, only that first set were kept. Ended up having to retype the first couple of boni into e-mail and sending them in that way; later, I had to wait to submit each bonus until the end of the hour, risking losing it all - and we DID lose all of one when I submitted an Ultra guess from another tab (it overwrote the tab in which I'd been typing bonus answers :-< ).
One thing I especially did NOT like about this contest was what seemed like an inordinate amount of time on air used for advertising and for going on about this being a national trivia contest. While I did tell lots of people that they could play, from anywhere, even if they weren't really affiliated with Williams, that's not quite the same as calling it a "national" contest. I'm not comfortable with the commercial feel at all. Actually, I think it should be a requirement that any winning/running team have at least one Williams person on it - current student, alumnus, staff, whatever. That would keep it a Williams contest. Additional request: please black out the scores, at least those of the top 10 teams, for the last half-hour of the contest - especially when it's this close.
Selfish suggestion for future contests that would make these far-flung teams work better and much more easily, and probably wouldn't be bad for on-campus teams either: ditch the current bonus submission process for Google docs or a similar format in which several people can update the same page. Then we won't lose answers when a tab reloads, and we can all enter our guesses as we go rather than e-mailing back and forth.
Steve Homer responds:
As many of you know, we faced challenges when putting this contest that literally no team before us had ever faced. We found out from Tom Gardner that Jack was not going to be able to put together and run the January contest way back on... October 17th. That left us 11 weeks to put together a contest.
I had joked to my team that anything we slapped together would be better than no contest. But when the time came to start writing questions, my perfectionist and anal-retentive tendencies kicked right in, and we wound up holding ourselves to the same high standards that we would have if we had started preparing a contest in May.
I was also fortunate to have teammates who were able to produce quality work on short notice. Major, major kudos should go out to Sean Cannon, who wrote both Supers, 2 hour boni (Blank of Blank, from an old list of ideas Des gave us 2 years ago; and Kevin Bacon) and the Ultra. Credit should also go to Cassie Ryle (Cats and Dogs bonus), Rick Magnus (Slogans), and Tiffany Everett (Famous Williams). We got about 30 on-airs from Jack Is Da Bomb, of which we used 22 and read 17 on air. The following boni were supplied by various elder statesmen of Williams Trivia: Peripatetics/Maps, 2012 Election, and the Art History audio. Additionally, 12 of the on-airs were supplied by various people, of which 11 were read over the air. Of note: Jack sent us a Vinko Bogataj question. So did one of the elders! Apparently we've reached the Vinko tipping point.
As to specific points and concerns that have been brought up in various postmortems:
Tom Gardner:
"we could've done without Jim Backus!"Dave Letzler:
"Laurie requests, and I agree, that 'Delicious' be sent back to its Trivia dormancy."Arielle Masters:
"I will be happy if I NEVER hear 'Delicious' by Jim Backus (and friend) again."Okay, I get the picture. I strongly considered bringing back the Horrible Song Quartets for this contest; it's a good thing I didn't, otherwise I'd need to hire a bodyguard!
There were a few complaints (and one kudo) about the run of Lorne Greene references. I'd apologize, but I really enjoyed putting that together. It was MEANT to cause a bit of wincing.
Also, Arielle said this:
"there were a lot of very obscure answers and artists"All I can say to that is - baloney! There were a few obscurities, but by and large a conscious effort was made to use well known artists whenever possible. The artists I would consider obscure were:
- The Maccabeats,
- Mary's Danish,
- Those Darn Accordions!,
- Brent Spiner (warning - if we ever run another contest, expect to hear more Brent),
- Marty Robbins,
- Jonathon Coulton (who probably is not obscure to Williams students),
- Wet Wet Wet,
- No Use For A Name (not played), and
- RuPaul (not played).
That's 7 barely known artists out of about 90. Virtually every other song played either hit the top 40, or was by a well-known band. Some people playing may put artists like A.F.I., Arcade Fire, Foster The People, Imagine Dragons, Ray LaMontagne, All-American Rejects, Flyleaf, Mumford & Sons, and Dropkick Murphys in the "who the heck was that" category, but all of those artists get plenty of play on current stations. As for the obscure answers, again an effort was made to minimize "News of the Weird" questions and play up questions that contained people you might have heard about. Honestly, I would invite anyone to compare Friday's on-airs to any other contest in the last ten years - I would be willing to bet this contest has fewer unknown musical artists AND fewer NOTW-style questions than ANY of them.
Anyway, I apologize for picking on one line out of all the postmortems so far. Despite any grumbling my teammates might have heard from me about "running another damn contest", I had fun writing for it, and I enjoyed my IM contacts with other people who love trivia.
Would I do it again? Hell no! We'll see.
Steve Homer adds, in response to Arielle's comment about commercialization:
We were using a station that donated 9 hours of their schedule to us. Quite frankly, with that level of support they could have run PSAs encouraging everyone to worship Cthulu and I would have been OK with it.
As to the "must have at least one Williams person on it", well, that would have meant that this past weekend's contest would not have happened. Such a requirement would be a quick way to kill off the contest. There's no way you can have a contest streaming over the Internet, and require a Williams connection. That genie is out of the bottle.
I agree with your request to black out the scores. Unfortunately, we had one tech guy who didn't have time to set everything up, and who also went home at 1 AM. If we had the ability to do that, we would have.
Joe Francis adds:
Delicious was fantastic. I await the Jim Backus hour bonus with anticipation.
Des Devlin contributes:
I would not want my child to grow up in a world without Jim Backus' "Delicious!"
When Jim barks, "Oh, oh, oh! Waiter! Waiter! MORE! Nyraaaaah!", inside that nyraaaaah is contained all the celestial eloquence of the universe. Jim Backus and Friend? The friend is Life Itself.