SwanShadow Thinks Out Loud

The 65th season of LearnedLeague — the Internet’s most auspicious ongoing quiz competition — has concluded. More to the point, LL65 marked my 10th season in the league. So, it’s a good milestone to look backward from, and consider how I did.

In LL65, I placed eighth (of 26) in Rundle A Frontier, my home for the past five seasons. This is my highest finish since I placed seventh in A Central back in LL60, and ties for my third-best standing historically. (I finished first in my rookie Rundle during LL56, and was also eighth in A West in LL57.)

In statistical terms, this felt like a return to form after my disappointing LL64. Although my match play record sagged a bit (10-8-7, after a 13-12-0 LL64), my correct answer percentage rose from a worst-ever .767 to .820, which is on par with my 10-season average of .814. Best of all, I posted my best-ever defensive efficiency score with a .721. I used to play dreadful defense — I had three consecutive seasons of sub-.600 defensive efficiency between LL61 and LL63 — but I decided two seasons ago that I was going to spend more time each match day on my defensive strategy, and the extra thought seems to be paying off.

I thought the questions this season seemed a little bit easier than the last several seasons. This reflected not only in my overall batting average, but in the fact that I scored eight perfect match days this season after only two in LL64. My opponents apparently found the material easier also, as the total number of correct answers posted against me was the highest since LL61.

It’s worth noting, however, that on Match Day 24, the penultimate day of the season, I had my all-time worst single-day regular-season performance with only two questions correct. Let’s take a look at that set of six, and examine why I found them so inscrutable.

Q1. The aggressive, condescending, and arrogant Yankees are the victors at the end of what rowdy and vulgar 1976 film comedy? Okay, that’s not so hard. Add up “rowdy and vulgar,” “1976 film comedy,” and baseball (suggested by the team name Yankees), and there’s only one possible answer: The Bad News Bears, starring Walter Matthau, the insufferable Tatum O’Neal, and future character standout Jackie Earle Haley.

Q2: The jihadist group in northeastern Nigeria known officially as Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’Awati Wal-Jihad (People Committed to the Propagation of the Prophet’s Teachings and Jihad) is better known internationally by what name, which translates loosely into English as “Western education is forbidden”? This one’s a process of quick elimination born of ignorance. I can only name one jihadist group from Nigeria, and even though I have no idea what Boko Haram means, or what the group’s full official handle might be, I’m going with that.

So far, so good. But here’s where things went downhill.

Q3: El Grito de Dolores, the anniversary of which is celebrated as Mexican Independence Day, was a famous speech calling on the Mexican people to rebel against peninsulares and the Spanish colonial government. Name the Roman Catholic priest and revolutionary who gave this speech on September 16, 1810. Although I know when Mexican Independence Day is (and no, my fellow yanquis, it’s not Cinco de Mayo), I’m not familiar with this speech nor with the priest who uttered it. I put down Junipero Serra, who’s pretty much the only famous Mexican priest I can name, even though I know he had nothing to do with Mexican independence, and I’m reasonably certain that he was dead well before 1810. (A post-quiz check of Wikipedia confirms that Serra died in 1784.) The correct answer is Don Miguel Hidalgo, whose surname is familiar to me only as (a) the fictional Latin American country whose gold mines finance Doc Savage’s exploits, and (b) Viggo Mortensen’s horse in the film of the same name.

Q4: According to the lyrics of Billboard magazine’s No. 1 country song for 2013, “In this brand new Chevy with a lift kit, would look a hell of a lot better with you up in it, so baby you a song, you make me wanna roll my windows down and…” what? By this late stage, my antipathy for all things country is firmly established. It will therefore come as no surprise to you, friend reader, that I’ve never heard this song. The correct conclusion to the lyric in question is “cruise,” which I could never have guessed given a thousand tries, as it doesn’t rhyme with anything in the stanza provided. My answer was “kill myself, because I’m in a country song.” That had not a prayer of being right, but at least accurately represents my feelings.

Q5: The MacArthur, Julia Tuttle, John F. Kennedy, Broad, and Rickenbacker Causeways all span what bay? This was a complete stumper, as none of the names appeared to have any connection to the others, nor any common connection to any body of water that came readily to mind. MacArthur took me immediately to Manila Bay — naturally, since I lived in the Philippines for two years in the mid-1970s, and am familiar with the general’s historic significance in that part of the world. I didn’t remember a MacArthur Causeway in Manila Bay, nor did any of the other names make particular sense in that context (one might think that if Manila Bay was crisscrossed by multiple causeways, at least some of the names would be in Tagalog, or those of Filipino dignitaries), but with no other guess coming to mind, I made Manila Bay my answer. Alas, the correct answer is Biscayne Bay, as any Floridians in the room probably know. Coincidentally, the Pirate Queen had been in Miami just the previous week. Had I only looked at a map of the city while she was there, I might have gotten this one.

Q6: Jack Sock, Sam Querrey, Donald Young, Steve Johnson, and Tim Smyczek are among the highest-ranked Americans internationally in what sport? Sports buff though I am, not one of these names rang a bell. I therefore reasoned that the sport in question had to be an obscure one, as well as some individual competition in which Americans might not be the most famous participants. Confident that I would have heard of these gentlemen if they were golfers or figure skaters, I entertained such options as badminton and archery before deciding to go with chess. The correct answer is tennis, which just goes to show you the miserable state of disrepair into which American men’s tennis has fallen over the past few decades.

Good thing that Match Day wasn’t indicative of my entire season. Hopefully, I will get my kicks in LL66 in August.