Hi, everyone. On behalf of the team, thank you from the Grande Belgian Wombats to everyone who played our contest. (Which turned out to be an enormous number of people!)
In particular, Laurie, Zach, Rachel, Kyle, Katie, Brian, and I would like to thank the Vortexers who finished a point behind us last contest and offered to help our understaffed crew make the contest run, namely Ben, John, and Daniel during the writing and also Abigail for the night of the contest. Thanks also to Daniel Klein who joined us late to run tech.
Thanks, too, to the folks on campus--in particular, Taylor, Darla, and friends--who proselytized, apparently quite effectively. Among the 37 teams Tom mentioned, I see at least 13 who were on campus, 11l of whom got at least 90 points, which means the people who played were playing seriously. For posterity, I'm attaching the posters Rachel made for campus, which selected some highlight submissions in my request for Trivia memories in the past month.
And last, congratulations to Beautiful Human Submarines, our new champions! I'm glad to see that, after two alum teams running, the contest is going to return to campus. Des typically does an extended retroactive breakdown on this stuff (to which I look forward), but this one, though not as tight as the one-point squeaker last contest, went to the wire, and Submarines only jumped ahead at the end. In fact, I think it's safe to say that their win over second-place Obergefell (who had been leading for a while) came down largely to dominating Super 2. Submarines (who also got top score on the first Super) scored something like 125/160 raw on the bonus, without Google, leading to 31 points. Obergefell, meanwhile, noted on their answers that it might have behooved them to Google: they got only 5 points. That 26-point gap turned a 15-point lead for Obergefell into the winning 11-point margin for Submarines.
Good luck Submarines! We look forward to playing your contest.
Of course, because we had an unexpectedly large number of teams, we had an unexpectedly large number of tech problems. The hardest thing about testing tech is that you really can't prepare for having a hundred people stream your broadcast ahead of time. Our circumstances dictated, unfortunately, that we had to have Daniel running tech in CA while Laurie broadcast from the stream he'd set up in MO, while most of the rest of us moderated in NY. When we'd tested, this all worked smoothly. With the added strain on the stream, though, the feed from Laurie kept skipping, and Dan had too many other things to do for most of the contest to also take over DJing. We're glad the feed was better in the middle of the contest.
Thanks for having patience with us--for you did! We had 18 submissions for Hour 8! That's more than we've had for plenty of Hour 1s when we've run in May. We got THIRTY-SIX Super 1 submissions. Even at the end of the night, our moderators were all fielding multiple quite-active teams. We apologize for the degree to which this slowed down scoring--with only 12 people running at the start of the night (and only 9 later on), it's hard enough just to field teams on the on-airs. But we've got it all together now, I think.
A reminder, always, for the future--the tech is always glitchier, and takes longer to manage, than you expect.
I've done some fiddling with the scores, to take into account some stuff that got mailed to us when there were glitches and the fact that some teams forgot to formally submit bonii they'd worked on. This particularly affected Heidigger, whose Hour 4 was oddly blank in the scoring page but was clearly submitted elsewhere with nearly every answer correct. They've now leapt in 7th place. Let me know if there's anything missing, and we'll attend it.
Dave
The trivia posters attached to this message were excellent, but the Horrible Song Quartet was not invented in 2002. The entirely disputable honor of having been the one to start this tradition belongs to Gary Selinger, and if it was not in the Rule 6 contest in 1984, it was presumably in one of the several Python team contests which followed immediately thereafter.
The dates on the Wombat Tarts posters refer to the anecdotes being recounted. It was 2002 when a team (Neutered Vampires) gave Williams Trivia the gift of the Chipettes' gloriously god-awful version of "Colors of the Wind," from "Pocahontas."
Gary Selinger and myself were teammates many times. It is fair and accurate to say that both of us take a perverse pleasure in finding, hearing and sharing horrible songs.
Some research from the online and audio archives reveals the following about the various 1980s host teams that had one or both of us on the roster:
May 1983: Smedley Terrace (??) Listed for completeness; I'm not sure whether Gary Selinger was on this team But there were no horrible song stretches.
May 1984: Rule Six (Selinger) This contest contained a stretch of three consecutive spoken word songs that inexplicably became charting hits: "The Americans" (a stirring "Screw the whole world for daring to criticize the USA" spiel), "An Open Letter to My Teenage Son" (a father intoning his mixed views about long hair, and how a burned draft card means "I have no son") and "Once You Understand" by Think, which is a series of angry vignettes between two children and their parents who are desperately unable to bridge the generation gap, punctuated by a mind-numbing hippie chorus, with the shock ending: a deadpan phone call to the dad saying "Your son is dead. He died of an overdose." Only then did he think, and understand... AT THE MORGUE. (Because of the 1960s, or something.)
The first two were actually Top Ten national hits. "Once You Understand" only made it to #23, but it comes *highly* recommended to connoisseurs of sincere but cretinous aural absurdity. These three spoken word songs were preceded by a fourth lame-o NON-spoken word single: "Run Joey Run," a notably cheesy death song of the mid-70s.
After Rule Six broadcast "The Americans," the DJ declared it "one of the weirdest songs played in the contest." Following "An Open Letter..." the DJ said, "Gary Selinger is a sick, sick man," and gave out his mailbox number for complaints. But that was it, as far as the discussion went.
May 1985: Nasty Big Pointed Teeth (Selinger, Des Devlin) No horrible song stretches.
December 1986: The Giant Pygmies of Beckles (Selinger) No horrible song stretches.
May 1987: We Begin Bombing in Five Minutes (Devlin) No horrible song stretches.
December 1989: Harry "Snapper" Organs (Selinger, Devlin) Ta-DA! The first contest to feature official, branded "Horrible Song Quartets." (Though actually, it was a pair of "Horrible Song Quintets.") Harry Organs debuted the "Run while you can, suckers, here comes the garbage" pre-announcement ominousness. I came up with the name (wow,"horrible song quartets," HOW do I do it?) and the ten songs played in this contest were ones from my mottled collection. Looking back, the second set of Horrible Songs were mostly just simpering soft rock hits, but the first quintet included good ol' William Shatner, the execrable charting single "Blind Man in the Bleachers," the violent novelty song "Transfusion," the irritating "Norman" which nevertheless hit #3, and the Brady Bunch's cover of "American Pie."
Somehow we also played the OTHER, lower-charting single of "The Americans" in this contest (oh yes, there were actually COMPETING versions of this petulant diatribe), as well as Classy Freddie Blassie's "Pencil Neck Geek," "Kookie, Kookie, Lend me Your Comb," and George Harrison's inane "Ding Dong, Ding Dong" without officially designating them as horrible. The occasional horrible song also pops up in most contests of the 1980s.
Despite the lack of salesmamship, I have no problem saluting the spoken word trio from 1984 as the retroactive ur-Horrible Quartet. But the feature didn't really plant its flag until 1989. After that, the next Horrible Song Quartets came in 1991 (me and Gary), 1992 (me), 1994 (me), and 1996 (me). I feel like they got established when other teams picked up the mangy gauntlet and started doing their own. That started with Gentle Tongue-Tongue in 1997.
Gary and I once drove up together for a Williams Trivia contest. And for the record, we listened to stuff like a Small Faces compilation. We did NOT listen to horrible songs. We may be monstrous, but we're not into self-harm.
How dare you challenge David Geddes with your primitive skills?
And "Blind Man in the Bleachers" is the BEST karaoke song ever, btw.
Des's memory is, as usual, excellent. I was crediting Gary with the tradition because I remember the agony of "The Americans" - and Gary's justification that "it made top 40" applied to the spoken word series.
Des clearly deserves a share of the blame for the phenomenon, and specific credit for coming up with the name . . .
We welcome any and all comments on the contest, regarding things you liked and not, etc. We worked hard on the content and would be happy to vicariously experience your encounters with it.
We'll get the list the answer keys gradually over the next few days. Here's the first few, with my thoughts on how everyone did--
"I Want You, I Need You, I Love You," was put together primarily by me, albeit with contributions from most of the team. Area 52 got the high score here, with a pretty uniform score distribution otherwise. I won't go through with full-on Des-style stats, but I think three songs blanked everyone: "I Want You" by Satan & Adam, on which many people guessed "I Put a Spell on You" (which it does sound like, except with harmonica afterward--little did you know we had some Screamin' Jay Hawkins in store for you later!), "I Want You, but I Don't Need You" by Amanda Palmer (which was, indeed, very hard); and, somewhat more surprising for me, the Ramones' "I Want You Around." I'm not sure anyone recognized the precise song on Patsy's Cline's "I Love You So Much It Hurts Me" or Bing Crosby's version of "Danny Boy," but you recognized the voices. Lots of folks mistook N*Sync for the Backstreet Boys and picked other country stars who sang "How Do I Live," so I guess 1997 is mad at you all. Still, the late Leonard Cohen's glad that as many of you got "Take this Waltz" as you did.
Put together mostly by me and Katie Bram, though, again, with assists from across the team. Mud/Blood/Beer had the most impressive performance here, highlighted by correctly IDing the source for every single spaceship we posted (though they only got half-credit on a few) and getting rather more specific on some particular ship class IDs than we'd needed. With the possible exception of one of the knots, I don't think any questions stumped everyone, although many of you miss-IDed the Ro-Ro as a standard ferry (note all the cars getting loaded on), the punt as a gondola (note the flat shape), and the trireme as a bireme (though we grant it's hard to see that third row of oars). We did insist on "sunfish" for the sailboat, since it's right there on the sail. Lots of folks tried to get credit for some variant of the "SS Jaws" for Quint's vessel, but no, it's the Orca, and we insisted on Captain Fred for the Yellow Submarine rather than just Ringo. Many folks understandably mistook the Independence Day attacker ships for Stargate ships. Last--there's a bunch of you who may not know much about ships, but boy, you're into 'shipping: more than one team got a solid plurality of its points on the five fanfiction questions.
Put together mostly by me. As I mentioned in my last email, the contest turned on this one, as Submarines crushed it while Obergefell faltered. In particular, Submarines completely ran the table on the first section, using something pretty close to the "optimal run" I put in the answer key. (Except they didn't even need to use Chevy Chase!) They also got all of the spinoff movies in correct order of horribleness. Anyway, impressively, I think only 2.5 of the 160 questions in here went completely unanswered by anyone, namely Havnagootim Vishnueer from the 1983-1984 season (which is very, very forgivable) and Maya Rudolph doing Donatella Versace's "Get out!" (which makes me feel old, except that the old people didn't get it either?), plus no one remembering the time when Tom Hanks did a Dennis Miller impersonation. I was sad, too, that only one team remembered Mr. Bill--but, then, that's par for the course with Mr. Bill, isn't it?
Anyway, we made a few mistakes in juggling all the 140-odd cast members--I neglected Tony Rosato and Robin Duke for "SCTV," forgot that Taran Killam had also been on "MADTv," and cheated a little regarding Chris Rock's official status on "In Living Color." Anyway, I was impressed that several of you made good strategic use of Brian Doyle-Murray in the first part, even though you often tried some wishful thinking in hoping Samuel L. Jackson had once been on SNL for the Snake on a Plane question. (Lots of wrong Steve Martins and Melissa McCarthy guesses, too, in terms of trying to sneak in common hosts) The most common wrong answer was probably Roseanne Roseannadanna for Emily Litella.
I'll try to be brief: I loved this game. The on-air questions were a good mix of history, culture, etc. - not too much "News of the Weird." The song matches were also a fine blend of easy and hard. My son played with me and he had a blast doing the "One Letter Away" super while helping me on songs that came out after 2000. He also had great praise for Ships and Fantastic Beasts while I handed the audio boni. If this hasn't been done before, let me say that using the video to prompt for clips makes it SO much easier to enter answers. I also thought Villany was great but I can't say much more since, as a two-man team, we had to abandon the other boni. I plowed through the SNL super just to get some points on the board. So, all-in-all, Wombat Tarts did an excellent, engaging, awesome job on the MATERIAL for this contest; it was altogether obvious that you put in a great deal of time and that makes for a fun game.
And now the Barry Bonds asterisk* - on-air audio was frustrating with dialogue looped back on itself. I had to keep resetting the player to find out what song was playing. The only way to get the question was through the chat room and for a 3-question stretch there were no hosts in the room. I understand there were a lot of teams in this contest fighting for the same bandwidth, but there's got to be some kind of workaround to this perennial problem. Let's make Trivia Great Again! (TM)
Seriously though, a great contest. Kudos to Wombat Tarts!
First off, I want to thank all of you again for playing and for putting up with the seemingly inevitable Trivia tech issues. I hope my repeated "Can you hear me now? Testing...testing...I'm waiting for my teammates to tell me they can hear me again...sigh..." moments on the stream weren't too annoying - especially on top of the bizarre looping issues that apparently happen when a whole bunch of people tune in at once. I wholeheartedly recommend to all future Trivia running teams that you try really hard to find a way to test the tech in advance with a LARGE number of test "players" - recruit every friend you have and your entire extended family or something, because unfortunately, determining that the system works well when fifteen people are trying to use it does not actually guarantee that the system will continue to work well when a hundred people are trying to use it. (Incidentally, for those of you who caught the sneak preview of the Hodor song my computer decided to offer you, you might be amused to know that part of the particular way the tech broke down on my end was that the Trivia app really, really wanted to play that particular song, over and over, for no discernible reason. I think that was the tenth time it tried to make you all listen to Hodor - I caught it in time on all of its previous attempts, but I guess I couldn't [SPOILER ALERT] hold that door closed forever.)
And speaking of future Trivia running teams, I want to congratulate the Beautiful Human Submarines - you guys did a great job, and I'm really happy both that an on-campus team won and that you turned out to be an on-campus team that had been trying to win for years. You absolutely earned this victory, and I can't wait to play in your contest in a few months. Please do feel free to consider this listserv (and me personally, if I can be of any use) as a resource when it comes to any contest-related stuff for which you need advice or assistance!
Like Dave, I'd be eager to hear any Trivia post-mortem-ing anyone would like to offer. (And thank you, Eric, for providing the first one - I'm super happy to hear that you and your son had fun on the parts of our contest that weren't getting too messed up by technical malfunctions!) I am especially interested in hearing feedback since, unlike most of my teammates, I only spent a relatively small part of the contest in direct contact with any team, so I don't have much in the way of firsthand knowledge of, say, how much that goat song made you want to claw your own ears off. (You're all welcome for that one, by the way - when we found out we'd accidentally won the last contest, pretty much my first thought after "Oh crap oh crap oh crap" was "...on the bright side, at least now I can definitely inflict the screaming goats on people!" If, by chance, the audio glitches made you miss the goats, please go here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1h2jmNU_6UI I insist that all of you experience this song in all its glory.) :-p
And finally, the main purpose of this email: my notes on (and answer keys for) three more of our boni:
Put together mostly by me, but with significant contributions from several other team members. This was a relatively tough one, with the lowest top score of any bonus all night. Given how many different sources the villains (or, sometimes, "villains," as many of you who got answers like "Willy Wonka" correct figured out) pulled from and the tricky nature of many of the villainous-plot descriptions, I expected this to be one that it'd be hard to get a very high score on, especially for relatively small teams, as indeed it was. On the other hand, I think there were only two questions on there that nobody got the right answer to - #20 (which I fully expected to be the hardest question in the bonus, since the villain in question comes from a roughly ten-year-old cult-favorite video game, which is definitely a more obscure source than most of those in this bonus, but he had such a good villainous plot that I couldn't resist throwing him in there) and #33, where I think I got a little too clever for my own good by describing the protagonist from the perspective of the antagonist rather than vice versa. I had written it both ways, and quite literally the last content-based decision I made with regard to this contest was whether to play that one straight or go for the trickier version. It would appear that I made the wrong choice. Oh, well. (That said, I am in the rather delightful position of having so many Hour 5 submissions that it's entirely possible that I overlooked one where someone did figure one or both of those out, too!) Incidentally, I was amused by just how many teams not only correctly identified Jerry Seinfeld as Villain #31, but also noted the precise variety of bread he mugged the old lady for, the title of the episode in question, and even the exact episode number. I had actually worried that question might be a bit too difficult, but I clearly massively underestimated Trivia aficionados' Seinfeld knowledge.
Some of my favorite incorrect or just entertaining guesses:
- EdmondDantes suggested that the entities who break out of captivity and try to take over the world every night were "literally any villain from Batman," which is not entirely inaccurate!
- Occam's Toothbrush said that the villain behind the plot "Go hunting, shoot a doe" was Dick Cheney.
- Polar Vortex's answer to the same question was, I quote, "THAT FUCKING ASSHOLE WHO SHOT BAMBI'S MOM," and Mud and the Blood and the Beer wished it to be noted that that villain's crimes also included "killing our childhood."
- Queer Giraffes (who earned the highest score on the bonus) identified President McKinley's assassin as "Leon Czgolzzgzlzgxxgz (Jr.)", claimed that the villain of "Gone Girl" was named "Agnes Petunia Gonegirl," and suggested that the villain who killed his or her father, gave everyone amnesia, and moved to Maine was Stephen King.
- But my personal favorite answer definitely came from Waxed Mustache Rides, who attributed the villainous plot to "mail my annoying acquaintance to the capital of the United Arab Emirates" to "The American Public" from the work "Sex and the City 2." That delighted me enough that I went ahead and counted it as correct, so Waxed Mustaches, you've moved up 1 point and are now tied for 28th. Congrats on being funny enough to warrant a bonus point!
Assembled by me, but with several excellent suggestions from teammates that made it into the final bonus. Hour 6 was clearly significantly easier for most of you than Hour 5, with a couple of teams getting nearly perfect scores on it. Jack is da Bomb absolutely crushed this one, misidentifying only one song; Heidegger's Experiments was close behind with only four songs they couldn't figure out. You guys know your songs with weird descriptions of sex acts or violin/fiddle parts well! Incidentally, I got to feel vindicated, since while I was assembling this bonus, a family member complained to me that the clips for "Eleanor Rigby" and "Toxic" were too short and no one would be able to recognize them. They were, to my total lack of surprise, the two most recognized clips in the bonus, closely followed by "Sledgehammer," "Come On Eileen," and "Yeah!" Several teams very understandably couldn't remember which of the two late-90s one-hit-wonder bands with "Verve" in their name was responsible for "Bitter Sweet Symphony" (it's the Verve, not the Verve Pipe). One team guessed "My Humps" by the Black-Eyed Peas three separate times, presumably on the (entirely correct) theory that the "sexy" lyrics of that song are so utterly stupid that they were bound to show up in the bonus somewhere.
Brown v. Bored of Education definitely had the most entertaining answers on this one, suggesting that the artist for Cotton-Eye Joe was "i always kinda assumed it just came into being" and that the artist responsible for the weird-sounding col legno strings in Radiohead's "Burn the Witch" was "me when i first learned how to strum a guitar."
Also, an important note here - when I was going through the answer sheets the other day in order to produce this write-up, I noticed that somehow when everyone was hurriedly scoring boni at the end of the contest, Mud and the Blood and the Beer's score got entered as a 1 rather than the 7 they actually got. So, Muddy Bloody people, you actually tied Area 52 for 4th place in the contest rather than coming in 5th. Our apologies for the error, and congrats on your new slightly higher spot on the podium! If you or any other team notice what seems to be a scoring discrepancy like that, please do feel free to contact me about it, and I'll be happy to review your bonus and see if a similar mistake slipped through the cracks.
One final thing about Hour 6 - twenty-four teams submitted it. Twenty-four teams. On Hour 6. That is CRAZY, you guys, and I couldn't be more thrilled with how many people not only played in this contest but played seriously and for most or all of the night.
(Oh, and one final final thing - I sincerely hope I've now either ruined or improved "Shake, Rattle and Roll" for everyone who'd never really thought about what "a one-eyed cat peepin' in a seafood store" actually meant before.) ;-)
Last but certainly not least as far as I'm concerned, there was Super 1, which was really my personal labor of love this time around. I don't know how much fun it was to play, but it was pretty entertaining to write. (As you might guess from the email address from which I'm sending this, I was always particularly amused by the utterly stupid jokes in there; turning a serious and depressing Best Picture winner into the story of an animatronic hooker cow had me giggling out loud when I came up with it.)
Dave actually miscounted when he mentioned that thirty-six teams submitted this bonus; in fact, the real number was thirty-eight, which is downright flabbergasting. I'm not sure that I've ever seen a bonus get thirty-eight submissions before, so I feel pretty honored to have mine achieve that level of participation. And out of the 125 questions on the bonus, only one stymied all thirty-eight of you - #8, the novel in which "seven generations of tragically insane kings found and inhabit a city of mirrors." (And at least one team figured out the original novel there, but couldn't come up with the letter to switch.) Furthermore, I don't think there were more than one or two questions that only one team got; even the toughest ones were usually picked up by three or four teams.
There weren't a ton of silly guesses here, but I did enjoy Holy Cow's guess that the TV show in which a virus made people really lovable was "The Wanking Dead," EdmondDantes's guess that the play about the nicknamed, homicidally insane 34th President of the United States was "Damilton (D. Eisenhower. Like Dahm-ulton. It's all in the attitude)", and Brown v. Bored's editorial comments on the musical described in #99 - "Bats (this would be so much better than the original omg) (i fuckin hate Cats)" and on my mock-Middle English in #6 - "idk but i hope to god i never have to read it."
Dave is right to say that Super 2 sealed the deal for Beautiful Human Submarines, but Super 1 came very close to doing so as well, since they not only had the highest score on it but also beat eventual runners-up Obergefell v. Doges by 11 points on the way to what turned out to be a 12-point victory. (In particular, their strength on the poetry section - getting 9 out of 15 in an area where a lot of teams particularly struggled - really helped them out. English majors/poetry nerds on the Submarine team, give yourselves a high-five!) I think it is safe to say that the Submarines really won this contest on the strength of their Super Bonus performances, which were pretty spectacular in both cases.
A couple of scoring notes here, too - Snip and Alice's submission showed up in our system as blank, but they had, in fact, put four correct answers on it, so they've gained a point, and BOMO put a "wrong" answer on one question that, while not the answer I'd intended, actually still completely worked, so I gave them credit for it. As it happened, that extra one correct answer was enough to bump them up one point, too. So, Snip and Alice, you're now tied for 42nd instead of being 43rd, and BOMO, you're now...well, you're still 21st, but now you're only 1 point out of the top 20 instead of 2 points!
I think that's all from me for now! I have some more thoughts that may find their way into an email soon, but right now, all I want to add is my thanks again for playing in our silly contest, and congrats again to the Submarines!
I'm Justin, a current senior and one of the ringleaders of Beautiful Human Submarines, your reigning victors and upcoming hosts. Some background - we are 4 Williams seniors who have been vying to win since our freshman year as entrymates along with 3 of my non-Williams childhood friends who have been suffering though trivia along with me over that time.
I wanted to thank the Wombat Tarts for yet another fun and challenging batch of trivia. We were riveted and puzzled for a full 8 hours (well, three of us lasted the whole night...) Also, thanks to David and Laurie specifically for reaching out and offering to be resources to us as we prepare for May.
I will turn to the Wombat Tarts as my first line of questioning, but if any trivia veterans have advice for an on-campus team of seniors, we would appreciate it all greatly. We hope we can bring you yet another strong trivia night this spring and I look forward to forcing you all to endure me on the radio all night!
Hello, trivia folks!
I'm here with another answer key, plus some ramblings from the perspective of a Polar Vortex member who was brought on board to help the Grande Belgian Wombat Tarts run the most recent contest. Feel free to skip down to the big, bold header below to jump straight into thoughts about the Reality TV hour bonus.
I guess the story starts last spring, when we very successfully implemented the strategy made famous at the conclusion of The Incredibles. Indeed, only a single point separated our teams at the end of the night. A couple days after the dust settled, the Wombat Tarts, noting the small size of their team, asked if a few of us from Polar Vortex would be willing to help them on the night of the following contest.
Aside from wanting to help out to make sure the next contest ran smoothly, I (selfishly) knew it may be a while, if ever, before I'd be on another team running a trivia contest. Therefore, I was happy to join the Wombat Tarts leading up to this winter's contest. The Wombat Tarts also generously let us in on the fun of writing content for the contest, for which Ben, Daniel, and I are extremely appreciative.
All of the Wombat Tarts were incredible to work with, and after at least four previous victories under their belt, they had the question-writing system down to a science. We divvied up the boni so that a different person took the lead on each one, yet still got contributions from many team members for each bonus. For the on-airs, rather than follow Polar Vortex's strategy of filling out an Excel sheet until we got to about 100 questions, we came up with question ideas, and then once we had a sizable amount, voted on each question individually, putting the ones with the highest approval rating in the contest, and leaving less approved questions as alternates.
This was the first contest I participated in after graduation, so it was weird not being on campus with my Polar Vortex teammates. However, I had a great time traveling down to New York, where the majority of the Wombat Tarts met up. I found that my memories of "ancient" trivia contests, when I created an AOL account to submit answers to on-airs, paled in comparison to the Wombat Tarts' stories of running to the radio station to submit boni and manning the phone lines during their first time running the contest.
As for the contest itself, we were just as frustrated by the technical difficulties, if not more so, than the teams playing in the contest, and tried everything we could to move the contest along in spite of those troubles. But what struck us as moderators was how supportive most trivia teams were despite the constantly repeating stream, and the number of teams that stayed with us through the end. To repeat the other Wombat Tarts, it's still shocking that 18 teams stayed awake late enough to submit the 7th and 8th hour boni!!! We found that those who had run contests in the past were especially sympathetic to our efforts to straighten out tech, but I also want to give a huge shout-out to those who had never played Williams trivia before that stuck it out to the end! I hope this is the first of many late nights answering (or maybe someday writing) trivia questions for Ephs and friends of Ephs young and old.
I've pondered over the last four years what obscure knowledge might come in handy for my team on an hour bonus. Besides Pixar trivia (which I learned three years ago only extends to Monsters Inc., Finding Nemo, and The Incredibles), my only substantial collection of random factoids came from reality competition shows. From watching almost every season of Survivor, Amazing Race, Dancing with the Stars, and American Idol, to having spent consecutive summers sitting through Treasure Hunters, Pirate Master, and two seasons of I Survived a Japanese Game Show, that was the one niche of knowledge I felt confident in.
Overall, I hoped this section would give fans of these shows enough to work from (which is why I made the Survivor section so hard), while still leaving things for people that have never seen an episode of these shows to get (countries from the Amazing Race, song identification). My biggest regret in developing this section was our collective lack of knowledge of documentary-style shows like Jersey Shore, Duck Dynasty, and Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, but we tried our best to pull material from a decent range of shows.
In retrospect, it seems like teams that weren't afraid to use the Internet did pretty well, though struggled most with the descriptions of dramatic TV moments. As it turns out, it's fairly tough even with the Internet to identify specific instances of arguing over wedding dresses, getting into fights, or defecating on floors. However, the catch-phrases, artist/show identification, and TV show descriptions were made much easier with the Internet.
A special shout-out goes to Heidegger's Experiments, who had an extremely impressive submission without using the Internet. They aced the Survivor section, nailed all the singers and nine out of ten shows, and got all but one answer on any challenge requiring the name of a reality program. The Ultra Beasts and Scrotey McScroteFace also deserve credit for strong Internet-free performances, as well as Area 52, whose limited answers in the singing section hurt their score.
Some notes on the attached answer key:
And lastly, some other highlighted answers, of varying magnitudes of correctness:
And one more closing thought on the question about a contestant getting a tattoo to impress Williamstown native Ali Fedotowsky after his helicopter love song goes wrong- no, it's not from Ink Master (Fredrickrickrickerson). Instead, EdmondDantes got it right- "Bachelorette? Idk, sounds like something someone would do on that show....." You are correct.
John Bihn '16 Moderator for the Grande Belgian Wombat Tarts
Continuing with the slow release of answer keys, I bring you some musings on Hour 4: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them!
First off, an apology to Heidegger's Experiments whose hour 4 has once again mysteriously disappeared. While they were by a 9 point margin the highest scoring team, I can no longer find their submitted answer sheet, and so the following comments do not take into account their responses. On a more positive note: every single creature was successfully named by at least one team, and every creature except the Saiga Antelope was correctly located by at least one team!
This bonus started out as an all matching bonus, but we ultimately decided to have teams name the creatures as what I figured would be an overall more difficult task. Turns out I was wrong. While matching tests may have been easy in middle school, teams overwhelmingly did better on the naming than the matching. There were a handful of cases where the location was easier to get than the name (Fambaa from Naboo for one), but for most of the beasts, you really wouldn't be able to figure out the location without first identifying the creature (i.e Komodo Dragon, Tasmanian Devil, Galapagos Tortoise, American Alligator etc).
A shout out is deserved for Jack Is da Bomb, for being the only person/team to fill in the entire matching section (granted several of them were wrong, but most were correct). I was honestly expecting more teams to attempt more guessing or deductive reasoning to fill in the matching locations, but that is a lot more time consuming and takes time and resources away from the all the other trivia happenings.
One of the challenges in making this bonus was ensuring a proper balance of sources/geographic locations and not just spamming with animals from Madagascar, New Zealand, and Australia. Particularly for video games and movies, we were rather limited to choosing beasts that corresponded to a very particular location. I think in the end the balance was pretty good, with perhaps a bit too much emphasis on early video games (Pokemon, Metroid, Zelda, Zork).
Finally, a few comments on specific creatures as well as some amusing answers:
Overall I had a very fun time helping to write and run the contest, and I hope you all had fun playing! A big thank you to all the Wombat Tarts for their hard work and letting us willing Polar Vortexers join the fun, and congratulations to Beautiful Human Submarines for a spectacular win!
Ben Kaufman '16
Sorry for the delay--here are the keys for Hours 1 and 8.
That should be it, then. So let me say once more that we hoped you enjoyed the contest--we enjoyed running it, and we continue to enjoy look back at your action submissions, which I enjoy you all to go to the archive and pore over for your enjoyment.
Dave