Abe Froman, Sausage King of Chicago, like U.S. vs. Good Time in Vegas two contests earlier, was fronted by Ben Kitchen and his sister Madison ("MadKitch"), who served as DJ all night long. The contest remained in Williamstown and on WCFM for the 3rd semester in a row.

Most felt that this was a well-run contest, despite the fact that the Sausage Kings had only 6 scorers all night long. They only scored on-airs during the contest, and left all the boni until the end. Scoring finished at 9:15, 3 hours after the contest ended.

Ben Kitchen of Abe Froman, Sausage King of Chicago writes:

Ben here from Abe Froman, the Sausage King of Chicago. Scoring should now be finalized!

I just looked over the contest, and here's a postmortem email.

On Airs

The vast majority of the credit for the on air portion of the contest has to go to Steve Homer. He found most of the facts, turned them into questions, and came up with some truly incredible song matches. This competition would not have been possible without him.

Ultra Bonus

This was all Steve. I don't really have much to say about this, except that the ultimate connection, which I forgot to mention on the air, was that they're all mentioned in "It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)" by R.E.M. I was supposed to broadcast the explanation of the ultra to all of the chatrooms at 5:30, but I forgot. It'll be in the archive, though! Additionally, I'd like to shout out team Band Geeks, who submitted 223 of the 429 ultra bonus submissions. While all of them were incorrect, there were some truly marvelous submissions, including the final 30(!), which were all links to memes about the ultra bonus.

Hour 1: Pokémon

There was really only one way to go with this bonus. Since there are eighteen types and I could only come up with seventeen prompts for Part 2 (thanks, Tangela Smith!), writing this bonus came down to how many references to the franchise I could find in real life, which quickly devolved into frantically searching for people talking about Pikachu. I believe there was only one question that no teams got on this bonus, which was question 28. The correct answer was Slaking, though two teams (Historically Women's Colleges and James Garfield's Day Off) got very close with slake.

Hour 2: A Text-Based Bonus

As I was falling asleep a few weeks ago, a thought popped into my mind: "What if the opening line of Pride and Prejudice was worded like a text-based adventure?" I'm not sure why, but that's where the idea for this bonus came from. I don't think it was the greatest idea to have question one be a quote from an actual text-based adventure game (it was from Zork), as that might have drawn attention to the fact that I'm not nearly as good at writing text-based adventure games as people who do it professionally. This bonus was broken into six main categories: games, movies/television, literature, reality/history, music, and art. There were seven questions from each category. The only two questions that no teams got were question 6 (the attempted assassination of Andrew Jackson) and question 30 ("I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream").

Hour 3: The Most Ambitious Crossover Event in History

This bonus was an attempt to make up for the exceptionally short clips in the Mutants bonus last year. (I checked, and according to last year's postmortem, there were 15 points in that bonus nobody got, and in this one, there were only 4.5 unclaimed points, but I'll get to those in a moment.) This was one of the first boni I started working on, and it was originally much different—it was called Listomania, and the intro was a clip from Shawn Colvin's "Sunny Came Home." It eventually turned into what it is today, though researching for this bonus eventually became listening to music and hoping the singer said two objects back to back. The only 4.5 points missed were "Losing My Edge," LCD Soundsystem, "We Care A Lot," "My Console," "Don't Call Us, We'll Call You," Sugarloaf, "Jimmy Olsen's Blues," "The Na-Na Song," Sheryl Crow, and The Nails. (As a side note, I realized after the contest that not only were there two Eiffel 65 questions, but they were in back to back boni!)

Hour 4: Synthetic Supergroups

My biggest worry regarding this bonus is that the rules wouldn't be clear enough. Initially, there were several parts of this bonus that were exceptionally difficult (like questions based on St. Kitts and Nevis or the McCain-Feingold Act), but I realized there were several easier groupings that I'd forgotten existed (how did I forget about Tom and Jerry?), so those ended up on the cutting room floor. There were four points that went unclaimed: Romy Schneider and Lea Michele's High School Reunion; Mary Mallon and Max Rockatansky; Sam Snead & Max Headroom; and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ricki Lake and Robert Palmer (though I may not have made it clear for the second point that "Typhoid Mary and Mad Max" wasn't acceptable).

Hour 5: Hooray! It's a Whole Bonus on North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Nebraska, and West Virginia!

This bonus effectively started as a gag. After realizing that there were no Williams students this year from those states, I thought it'd be kind of funny to have a whole bonus all about them. By far, the hardest part was keeping the bonus cohesive. (That's why the miscellaneous section was so short. It was almost only two questions, since question 3 was a last-minute addition.) At one point, I had one fact about each state introducing a section tangentially related to that fact, but it didn't work well. For example, the fact that South Dakota doesn't share any letters with Pierre was going to lead into a question about the countries that don't share any letters with their capitals (by my count. there are seven). There were only 1.5 points nobody got: the fact that Pierre, South Dakota, is named after Pierre Chocteau Jr. and that Shailene Woodley was arrested in Saint Anthony, North Dakota.

Hour 6: World Capital Pictograms

Don't ask me why, but the idea for this bonus came during a community theater production of Mary Poppins. There's not really much to say about this one. There were a few that were cut (such as a picture of the play Oslo), but that's about it. And across all teams, no points were missed!

Hour 7: Cream

This was the first bonus I started, though one of the later ones to be finished. There's also not much to say about this one. (Sorry so many of the sports-related defeats were based on American football!) As for universally missed points, this bonus had the most of any hour bonus with 5.5: Fieldbrook Farms, Marble Slab, John Bardeen, George Bernard Shaw, Nashville, the Los Angeles Rams, and Magnolia. (Also, as a brief side note, I find it somewhat interesting that the two teams facing off in this year's Super Bowl are the two teams that won 59-0 in the regular season.)

Hour 8: Richard Nixon

This bonus started as something completely different. Part 2 (Fake Dick) was originally a segment of a larger bonus I was working on called "The Great President Shuffle," wherein there was a list of quotes. They were all from real US presidents, but some of them were real quotes, while others were from works of fiction. In retrospect, that bonus was exceptionally difficult, but I realized that a lot of the fake quotes I had found were from representations of Richard Nixon, which is where the idea for this bonus came from. I would additionally like to apologize for question 39 in this bonus, which is flat out incorrect. Through some oversight in my research, I thought that Lyndon Baines Johnson and Richard Milhous Nixon were the only presidents with middle names that ended with S, but some of your answer sheets pointed out to me that this is also true for Hiram Ulysses Grant and Harry S Truman. Sorry about that. There were only three universally missed points: Nixon in China, Call of Duty: Black Ops, and Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Super 1: Show-Stopping Musical Number

This bonus was a lot of research at first. I didn't want to rely on musicals too heavily to fill up the clips, which led to me reading plenty of lists about the "best musical moments in non-musical movies" or being really excited when a movie with a musical moment would pop into my head. I think I considered doing this bonus for the US vs. Good Time in Vegas contest, but we only had a few days left, so it ended up slipping through the cracks. I'm glad I could construct it for this contest! On the video side of things, the movies everyone missed were Ghost World; Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains; Holy Motors; Duets; Southland Tales; and Jem and the Holograms. As for audio, the only movies missed were Crazy Heart and Nashville.

Super 2: William(s)iana

First off, I'd like to apologize to Must Capture Moose and Squirrel, who did a fairly similar bonus with their "Famous Williams" six years ago. I didn't realize until two days before the contest that that bonus existed. Sorry about that. As for the actual bonus, this one was a lot of fun to put together. I did my best to make sure that the quotes might not have been quotes you've heard before but still could've led you to the correct individual. I also had a significant internal debate over whether or not to include Billy Paul, the singer of "Me and Mrs. Jones," as his given name is Paul Williams, so he'd fall into the second section, but his stage name suggests that his given name is William, which would make him feel out of place there. (I ended up not including him.) There were only three Williams and three Williamses that nobody got: William James, William Penn, William Lloyd Garrison, Gary Anthony Williams, Montel Williams, and Michelle Williams (the Destiny's Child member, not the actress).

Congratulations to Four Oreos Away from Paradise! I can't wait to see your contest in May!

Dave Letzler says:

This is somewhat belated, but I figured I'd give other people time to speak their piece first, since I can get somewhat long-winded .

Anyway, this was well done all around--especially for having basically been written by 2 people! I've written probably as much as 35-40% of a given contest, and I've found even that much enormously taxing, so this is impressive work from Ben and Steve. (It's definitely enough to make me care less about some minor quibbles below.)

The on-airs were solid all the way around. The E.T./Boba Fett question was a tricky, and I was glad to hear about what the guy who played Barney has been up to lately. There were excellent question/match pairs, as with the delightful P.F. Chang's screw-up being paired with the terrible "Friday" sequel (that producer's still rapping for teenaged girls!) and "Where in North Dakota Is Carmen San Diego?" being paired with Biz Markie. (Fun fact: for those of us enrolled in the trivia website Learned League, there was a recent Carmen San Diego quiz that asked for that state, so Trivia got us a leg up on the competition.) Ben's sister, for that matter, is a really excellent DJ: you got us through all those technical delays and ads for whatever application thing that was without anyone getting too frustrated! I'll also say that, though I have no idea who Ninja Sex Party are, I'm glad you brought back the Guest Reader tradition from the days of yore--that's one of the fun things from the past that I'm sad hasn't been done lately.

The first Super was really quality--the music/video from different sources has been done before, but not singing occurring in the videos. This was very creative, and the pairs all matched up really nicely. Good work. As you mentioned, the Williams super has been done before and was a little by-the-numbers (although six years is past the statue of Trivia limitations), but the individual questions were fine: it was fun that William Carlos Williams and Billy Dee Williams both got two questions.

Of the hours, we (obviously) found the text-based one delightful (more Zork is always better), and I think the Pokemon one did a really good job of mixing the theme (which, I suppose, most current college-age students probably all grew up with in a way I didn't) with stuff that was still gettable for those of us who can't name all the types of Pokemon off the top of our heads. The world capital rebuses I also thought were really clever: we spent a lot of time puzzling through that one. The Supergroups was interesting in conception, and the best answers (Bob Barker & Carol Danvers & Ted Kaczyinski & Alice Sebold!) made it worth it, although most of the others just ended up being two names mashed together. The audio was solid, although I don't think the theme really stood out strongly. The other three were a bit grab-bag-ish, and some of them (especially on the five low-density states) got pretty obscure, but they weren't impossible or off-putting. If nothing's enough of a clunker to send me to bed early, I think that's a good night.

The ultra was tough for me, but that's because I don't have "It's the End of the World As We Know It" committed to memory. Laurie definitely was kicking herself for not seeing it sooner. It seems that more teams were in my boat, though, given the low get-rate. Ultras are always tough, though, to make gettable but not TOO gettable. This did about as well as the average, I think.

As always, it's fun to watch some of the other teams' actions, though we didn't do many. The egg one was probably the cleverest for the current zeitgeist; the winner for that was quite deserving.

Congrats to the Michigan crew for winning (and saving us a scare)--we always look forward to your contests!

Dave, Psychic Network of Testicles