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SwanShadow Gives Thanks, Volume 18: Emerging From the Silo Edition

November 26, 2021

So, yeah… this pandemic has been, and continues to be, a thing.

But here we are. A year ago, we were all pretty much locked down, shut in, and wondering if or when we would ever be able to resume some semblance of normal life. Today, we’re several months into having effective anti-COVID vaccines available — many of us have already received both initial doses, plus a booster — which have facilitated at least some measure of mobility.

At our house, having everyone vaccinated meant enjoying the in-person Thanksgiving dinner with close family that would have been unthinkable last year. The Pirate Queen and I were able to take the Hawaiian vacation we’d had to postpone for a year and a half. And I got to see the two most recent Marvel Cinematic Universe films — Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings and Eternals — in an actual movie theater. I would not have believed how much I would treasure such experiences, until they were snatched away.

None of that erases the fact that more Americans died from COVID-19 this calendar year than last, or that millions of people both here and abroad continue to suffer from the consequences of this plague.

But I’m thankful for the progress that we’ve made.

As always, my Thanksgiving list of gratitude is topped by loved ones — the Pirate Queen, The Daughter, and The Daughter’s family, which expanded by one in April. The Little Dude is a genuine delight, and is as adorable as it’s possible for an infant human to be. I wish I had a better world to welcome him into. But it is what it is.

Without further folderol, then, here’s this year’s A-Z sampling of people and things for which I’m grateful this Thanksgiving season. As is our tradition in this space, this list is not intended to be comprehensive, but rather a kind of synecdoche (look it up) standing in for the countless reasons I have to give thanks.

Thus, in November 2021, I’m thankful for:

Adobe Audition. I’ve toyed for years with the notion of upgrading my digital audio workstation (a technical term for “recording software”) from freeware to something more professional. Even though I’ve had extensive experience engineering with Audition in a studio setting, I hesitated to replace the familiar and comfortable Audacity (which I was using long before I got into pro voiceover work) in my home environment. This year, I pushed myself to make the switch. My only regret is that I didn’t do it ages ago.

Brandon, Buster, and Belt. My beloved San Francisco Giants returned to playoff form with a 107-victory season in 2021, with the Three-B Triumvirate of veterans leading the way. Shortstop Brandon Crawford not only earned his fourth Gold Glove, but also finished fourth in the National League MVP voting with a career-best offensive campaign. First baseman Brandon Belt blasted 29 home runs despite a couple of significant injury absences. Catcher Buster Posey capped a stellar career — he announced his retirement at season’s end — by winning the NL Comeback Player of the Year Award.

The Chase. What I was NDA-bound not to reveal in last Thanksgiving’s list became clear in January, when I added a few seconds to my 15 minutes of TV quiz show fame (I say, “fame,” as though I were actually famous) with a successful appearance on ABC’s revival of The Chase. My teammate Daniel and I managed to outrace Jeopardy! superstar James Holzhauer to split a bankroll of $325K. Although it aired this year, our episode actually taped in November 2020 under strict COVID protocols.

Dr. Strange. He’s guest-starring in the third MCU Spider-Man film next month. He entered my statue gallery earlier this year. I’m wearing his T-shirt as I type this post.

Everything bagels. Not literally “everything,” but still, a savory flavor combination that’s hard to resist. So popular that you can now get “everything” seasoning on dozens of other foods, or even just by itself you that you can apply it to your own creations. There’s a bottle in my spice rack.

Fandango. It was pleasant to return to the cinema after nearly two years, with the ubiquitous movie-ticket app making the admission process contact-free. Also pleasant: being able to see how many other tickets had been sold in advance for each performance, to have a sense of how crowded (or not) the theater might be.

The Gospel According to Luke. I’ve read a fair number of rock star bios and memoirs in recent years, but none I’ve enjoyed more than this one by longtime Toto guitarist Steve Lukather. In addition to his decades-spanning Toto run, Luke has played hundreds of sessions behind other music legends — everyone from Michael Jackson (that’s Luke playing the non-Eddie Van Halen guitar parts on “Beat It”) to Elton John, from Aretha Franklin to Boz Scaggs, from Stevie Nicks to Chaka Khan. But I was surprised to learn just how deep his backing credits run. That’s Luke on Lionel Richie’s “Say You, Say Me”? On “Talk to Ya Later” by the Tubes? On Spinal Tap’s “Break Like the Wind”? Who knew?

Haiku. A mere three brief lines. Just seventeen syllables. Poetic word art.

Insecure. Issa Rae’s groundbreaking HBO series about a young African-American woman navigating life with her circle of friends and lovers is currently in its final season. It’s impossible to overstate the power of seeing Black people on television leading authentic lives and dealing with everyday relationship complexities that always feel real. I’ll miss Issa, Molly (played by the sublime Yvonne Orji), and their crew, and I’ll look forward to seeing what Ms. Rae brings to the table next.

Jodie Whittaker. Speaking of TV departures, I’m also going to miss the Thirteenth Doctor when she departs Doctor Who at the end of this series. It took Jodie’s quirky, impetuous Time Lord (and her glorious Yorkshire dialect) to get me back on board with a show I hadn’t cared about since halfway through David Tennant’s run as the Tenth Doctor. I can only hope that whoever the Fourteenth Doctor might be (the role has yet to be cast), they’ll bring as much joy to the character as did Whittaker.

Kailua. One of the highlights of our Oahu trip this year was touring this delightful town on the Windward Coast. Between its world-class beaches, walkable central district, and relaxed, congenial vibe, Kailua’s an easy place to love. (The other Kailua, on the Kona Coast of the Big Island, is pretty awesome too.)

Little Dude. Did I mention that he’s adorable? Yes, I believe I did.

Magenta. It’s been a long while since I added a new entry to my catalog of all-time favorite bands. These Welsh progressive rockers cracked the code this year. A three-person core — multi-instrumentalist Robert Reed, guitarist Chris Fry, and vocalist Christina Booth, plus Reed’s brother Steven who contributes lyrics — supported by a changing cast of supporting players, Magenta takes cues from such earlier prog acts as Yes, Genesis, and Renaissance, but ends up sounding very much like its own thing. What separates Magenta from its prog predecessors for me is Rob Reed’s insistence upon “giving priority to melody rather than technical showmanship.” Magenta’s music focuses on evocative songs rather than endless instrumental noodling; songs sumptuously conveyed by Booth’s alternately delicate yet powerful voice. Magenta also takes the well-worn trope of “concept album” in interesting new directions. Their most recent effort, 2020’s Masters of Illusion, dedicates its tracks to once-prominent horror film actors, including Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee, and Ingrid Pitt. Previous albums have employed such themes as the seven deadly sins (Seven) and rock stars who died young (The Twenty-Seven Club).

Nachos Bell Grande. You know that craving you have every now and again for something that’s barely food, but that satisfies that craving like nothing else can? Of course you do.

One hundred eighty. My Common Elements comic art commission theme reached this milestone number in 2021. (A couple of entries are still in the hands of their creators.) Seventeen years ago, when I first got the idea to commission an original artwork featuring otherwise unrelated comic book heroes who shared some feature in common, I would never have predicted that I’d eventually own 180 of them. And yet, here we are. Which of the 180 Common Elements drawings is my favorite? The next one.

Packing cubes. They seem like a gimmick at first, but these magic pouches have become an indispensable part of traveling. I have always struggled to fit everything for a trip into a single suitcase. Packing cubes transform my checked bag into a TARDIS — bigger on the inside.

Queen of Swords. I was reminded recently of this short-lived period series from the early 2000s, in which Tessie Santiago starred as a kind of female Zorro. You can find a handful of episodes on YouTube, which only make me wish some streaming service would collect the entire run. Also: the title of one of my favorite songs by Idina Menzel.

The Real Housewives of Henry VIII, my Online Quiz League team. The name derived from the fact that the team originally had six members. When two of our players moved on after the first season, we kept the name. Since I usually occupy the fourth position in our playing rotation, I hold the Anne of Cleves seat. (From a historical perspective, Anne did alright for herself — she got a rich settlement, was beloved by everyone including her servants, and never had to be intimate with Henry, whom she outlived. None of which can be said for Anne Boleyn or Catherine Howard.)

Smart Resume. Why doesn’t every channel offer this feature on every DVR recording? Because they want us to watch the commercials, obviously. But I employ Smart Resume every chance I get.

TD Ameritrade, the nice folks who provide the tools to manage my investment portfolio. For the record, today (Friday, November 26, 2021) was not a good day for the market. But I can’t blame TD Ameritrade for that.

“Unpretty.” Still my favorite TLC jam, with an ever-relevant message — especially for young women — about not allowing other people to define you.

Vaccines. As I noted in the introduction to this post, vaccines have helped ease us back onto the path toward a semblance of normal life. We’d be even further along that path were it not for an active misinformation campaign sponsored by villains about whom, quite frankly, I don’t have much positive to say. Vaccines helped rid the world of smallpox and, for the most part, of polio. Vaccines reduced the threat of measles, a disease that used to kill millions of children, and of other scourges such as typhoid, cholera, tetanus, and diphtheria. Just get your shots, people.

Warriors. The Dubs are back in full force, after a few seasons on struggle street. Steph Curry has redefined basketball — bold words, I know, but I can’t think of a more accurate way to put it. And Steph once again has a supporting cast around him that’s capable of a deep playoff run. Just wait until the other Splash Brother, Klay Thompson, returns to the floor next month.

Xiao long bao. I don’t know who invented soup dumplings, but whoever you are, bless you.

Yu Oughta Know. Lynn Q. Yu’s daily current events email/quiz helps keep me up to date on what’s fresh and exciting in the world, as well as information that just might turn up in competitive trivia sometime in the near future. I’d need more fingers than I have to count the number of times recently that something I only knew because of Lynn’s newsletter fell into my lap during a quiz. Every point matters.

Zot! Cartoonist Scott McCloud might be better known these days for his Eisner Award-winning Understanding Comics and its sequels, but long before those seminal masterworks, he was known for Zot!, a superhero pastiche about a relentlessly positive do-gooder from a utopian parallel Earth. We could all use a bit of Zot’s cheerful optimism these days.

As I express every year, I am thankful for you, friend reader. I hope you’ll use this opportunity to reflect on the people and things for which you’re grateful. May we all survive another circuit around the sun, so that we’ll have even more to celebrate in a year’s time.

Categories: Aimless Riffing, Cinemania, Comic Art Friday, Hawaii, I'm a Warriors Worrier, Jeopardy!, Listology, Soundtrack of My Life, SwanStuff, Teleholics Anonymous, Thanksgiving, That's Cool!, Trivial Pursuits

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SwanShadow Gives Thanks, Volume 17: Global Pandemic Edition

November 27, 2020

Who knew, right?

Anyone who says that they accurately predicted at last Thanksgiving the worldwide horror the calendar would call 2020 CE is peddling a falsehood. None of us saw this coming. Many understood that a global pandemic like the one that swept the planet exactly a century ago could happen at some time, but no one knew that 2020 would be our COVID-19 annus horribilus.

Too much sickness. Too much death. Too much sheltering in place. And way too much conflict over what to do or not do about it. (Seriously, people: Put a mask on. Don’t crowd up. Stay home as much as possible. It sucks. But sickness and death suck more.)

In times like these, though, it’s even more vital to focus on the people and things we are grateful for — and, in fact, to be grateful in general. It’s easy to let so much darkness obscure what light there is, but when we don’t appreciate the light, however small it seems, darkness wins.

Therefore, as is our long-standing (17 years and counting!) tradition in this tiny corner of the Internet, we present our annual outpouring of thanks on this Thanksgiving weekend. Given that I always have far too much in my life to be grateful for, each year I choose 26 items — one for each letter of the alphabet — to stand in for everyone and everything for which I’m offering thanks this year. It keeps the list to a manageable size, and makes certain that the list actually gets done.

I found it tempting, in the face of all that 2020 has thrown at us, to modify the tone or style of this year’s post. I decided that would defeat its purpose. So, even though there will be some direct allusions to the dreadful realities we’ve dealt with this year, much of the list is as it always is: Random, slightly tongue-in-cheek at times, and with an understanding that the seemingly insignificant items on the list underscore a broader perspective that embraces gratitude as an attitude, for the monumental blessings in life as well as for the minuscule.

With that said, at Thanksgiving time in 2020, I’m thankful for:

Aging rockers. Three of my all-time favorite bands seized the year to deliver brand-new studio albums that compare favorably with the best work from their classic periods: Kansas (The Absence of Presence); Blue Öyster Cult (The Symbol Remains); and most recently, AC/DC (Power Up; or, if you want to get strictly typographical about it, PWR/UP). For BÖC, it was their first album in 19 years; for Kansas, their second with current lead vocalist Ronnie Platt (the previous Platt-era effort, 2016’s The Prelude Implicit, is also quite good); for AC/DC, their first since the passing of co-founder Malcolm Young, and a reunion with members Brian Johnson, Cliff Williams, and Phil Rudd, all of whom had departed for various reasons in recent years. To hear these bands, who all began their recording careers in the 1970s (albeit with markedly different lineups), once again producing outstanding music makes my heart sing, and offers me hope in my own down-slope years that greatness remains possible.

Biden/Harris. I don’t typically do politics in public fora, but I can’t express how thrilled I am that the nightmare of Agent Orange is nearly ended, and that actual human beings will be in charge of the country again. I am particularly ecstatic for all of the barriers that Kamala Harris (on whose Senate campaign I was privileged to voice a few ads) will break when she takes office as Vice President.

Chadwick Boseman. 2020 robbed us all of far too much, including the life of this brilliantly talented actor whose charisma lit up the screen like few others. To think that he gave us not only the personification of T’Challa, the Black Panther, in four Marvel Cinematic Universe films, but also stellar performances in Marshall, 21 Bridges, Da 5 Bloods, and the upcoming Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom without the world — or even most of his colleagues — knowing that he was dying of cancer is nothing short of incredible. Rest in power, King.

Dr. Fauci. A national hero, trying to help Americans wrestle with a terrifying unknown while the Clown-In-Chief keeps tying his arms behind his back and spitting in his face. And he never quit.

Español. One of the projects I’ve used in an attempt to maintain sanity during lockdown has been developing my facility in Spanish using the Duolingo app. At this writing, I’ve managed 177 consecutive days of lessons. I’m not fooling myself into thinking I’ll ever be functionally bilingual, but I’ve pretty much resurrected (and likely exceeded) my two years of high school Spanish, and feel certain that I could ask directions to a bus stop or buy a green suitcase in a Spanish-speaking country if the situation arose.

Frontline workers. I can’t say enough how deeply I appreciate the efforts of everyone who’s kept our society running in the face of the pandemic, and especially those whose work presents them with constant exposure risk. That includes the doctors, nurses, and other healthcare staff caring for the infected (more about them later), but also mail carriers, delivery drivers, restaurant cooks and servers, retail clerks, and everyone else for whom showing up and facing the outbreak every day means the rest of us get the things we need to carry on. Thank you all, and God bless you.

Great British Bake-Off. Or Great British Baking Show, as Netflix calls it here in the States to avoid legal action by the Pillsbury people. It’s a joy to tune in each week to watch Paul Hollywood and Prue Leith put a gaggle of flour-dusted Britons through their paces. I still miss former hosts Mel Giedroyc and Sue Perkins — and more recently, the delightfully droll Sandi Toksvig — but the thematic elements remain the same, and the contestants always seem pleasant and just thrilled to take part. (At this typing, I haven’t yet watched this season’s finale. Don’t spoil it for me.)

Hawkgirl. A fantastic representation of Shiera Hall (or Shayera Hol, if you prefer it in Thanagarian) by Sideshow Collectibles entered my statue collection this year. My rules for adding a new statue: 1. The character has to already be represented multiple times in my art collection. 2. I have to love the piece the first time I see it. (If I don’t love it immediately, it’s not worth buying.) 3. I have to have room in my office/studio for it. Shiera, despite her considerable wingspan, made the cut.

Inspiron. The Pirate Queen recently allowed me to replace my old, agonizingly slow, keyboard-challenged (the O key kept popping off, and the space occasionally has a mind of its own) studio laptop computer with a new desktop model, accompanied by a gorgeous 27″ monitor. I now hunch and squint far less.

Jim Edgar. I am blessed to name as friends a startling array of wonderful people — possibly including you, if you’re reading this. My buddy Jim stands out for his unfailingly kind, generous, and helpful spirit. Jim has made himself a valued and trusted resource within the voiceover industry through his technical expertise, in addition to his phenomenal talents as an actor. I am constantly impressed with the manner in which Jim goes out of his way to advise, inform, and assist his colleagues (who are often potential competitors as well — it’s a tough business) by openly sharing his insights and experience, and his efforts to build a more harmonious community within the profession. I know numerous fellow actors who inspire me to want to be a better actor. Jim inspires me, whenever I observe or interact with him, to want to be a better person. And I’m not alone in that.

Kids, and Kisses. The K’s represent the people who, beyond all else, make my life worth carrying on. The Kids — The Daughter and The Son-In-Law — uplift my heart every day, just by living their lives and being quality people. I couldn’t ask for better. And, here’s the big news: The Kids are expecting their own kid — the first GrandKid — in the coming year. (It’s rumored to be a boy.) They’re also shopping for their first house. “Kisses” represents the Pirate Queen, who always signs her notes to me in that fashion. She uplifts my heart every day, too.

LionSteel. If you asked me at this very moment, “What’s in your pocket?” the answer would be a blue titanium slipjoint knife from LionSteel in Maniago, Italy. There’s another LionSteel slipjoint on my desk, with olivewood scales. They make some really nice knives in Italy.

Medical personnel. We all owe our gratitude to the medical experts who daily labor in the midst of a worldwide health crisis. This includes not only the physicians, nurses, technicians, caregivers, and others who provide direct treatment to those afflicted by COVID-19, but also all those folks behind the scenes in testing labs, and in research facilities working toward safe and effective vaccines against the disease, and better treatments for dealing with it. Pray that their labors prove fruitful.

Nova lox. I don’t know who the person was who first had the idea to smoke a salmon, but that person deserved a hearty handshake. Probably not from the salmon, though.

Online quiz leagues. If there could be said to be an actual upside from the pandemic, it has been the development of a number of online quiz leagues, at first intended as a stopgap in the absence of in-person pub quizzing, but now taking on a life and purpose of their own. I currently participate in two: Quizzing World Cup, based in the UK and comprising teams and players around the globe, and Online Quiz League USA, an offshoot of the original British OQL with material keyed to a North American audience.

Pentatonix. There is no more expressive musical instrument than the human voice, and not many folks demonstrate that more profoundly than the five members of America’s favorite a cappella quintet. When I feel an anxiety attack coming on, one of my most effective therapies is a Pentatonix playlist in my Sennheiser headphones.

Queen’s Gambit. If you haven’t yet binged this charming Netflix limited series starring Anya Taylor-Joy as a brilliant but troubled young chess wizard in the 1960s, do yourself a favor and check it out. I know what you’re thinking: A TV series about chess has to be about as interesting as watching paint dry. Just remember these wise words of the late Roger Ebert: It’s not what the show is about that matters, but how it is about it.

Rocketbook. What seemed at first like a cool novelty item has become an indispensable part of my daily routine. Rocketbook makes an ever-growing variety of products designed around a common theme: Reusable notes. Instead of an endless stack of paper notepads or Post-Its generating scattered castoffs everywhere (if only you’d seen my desk…), Rocketbook notebooks offer a system of reusable pages that can be written on, scanned and stored (if you’re so inclined), then wiped clean and reused again and again. My favorite Rocketbook model is the Flip, which is designed like a steno pad. I keep one next to me at all times for scribbling down quick ideas, or for recording lists of facts I want to reinforce for quizzing. The equally handy Fusion contains templates for calendar and schedule planning. Writing on the Rocketbook’s plastic pages with erasable ink (the system requires Frixion pens and markers, made by Pilot and readily available everywhere) takes a little getting used to, but I’ve found it worth the effort.

Safeway. In these times when spending time indoors in a crowded store presents a considerable health risk, we’ve come to rely on the online order and pickup service provided by the supermarket giant. It took a bit of trial and error to get the system down smoothly, but now after several months, the store we use does a pretty decent job of filling our orders in a timely fashion. It’s made grocery shopping about as safe as it can be during a pandemic, and reasonably efficient.

Trebek. The last 32 years of my life have been indelibly transformed by my experiences on Jeopardy! My two favorite Alex Trebek memories: 1. Alex confused my name with that of another contestant when I won my quarterfinal match in the 1988 Tournament of Champions. It was nice to see that our unflappable host was fallible and human after all. 2. When I won the 1998 Battle of the Bay Area Brains, Alex went out of his way to spend a few minutes at the afterparty chatting with The Daughter, who was nine years old and had never met a celebrity in person. She still treasures the T-shirt Alex signed for her. Rest in peace, Uncle Alex.

Unemployment benefits. Like millions of Americans, the Pirate Queen was — thankfully, very briefly — out of work for a portion of 2020. She had never before in her working life collected unemployment. Having those benefits did not mean the difference between sustenance and survival for us, but they alleviated the burden of worry for the Pirate Queen as she pursued other options. We are acutely aware that many of our fellow citizens are not so fortunate to have the assets we have. It was an important reminder not to take our means for granted — and to have greater compassion for those who are struggling. And here’s another thing: In a society as wealthy as ours, no one should be in danger of going without food or healthcare or losing their home due to circumstances beyond their control, and no one should have to worry that their unemployment checks will stop coming because the government can’t get its collective act together. We have to do better, America.

Vibranium. I hear there’s a mountain of it in Wakanda. but don’t tell anyone I told you.

Wheat Thins. Delicious with any topping, or with none. Do I even need to explain? I didn’t think so.

Xoloitzcuintli. Pronounce it “show-low-eats-QUEENT-lee,” or simply call it a “Show-Low” for short, as most people who own one do. It’s a (mostly) hairless breed of dog, originally from Mexico. Studio Assistant Tazz looks a little bit like a Show-Low, albeit with a full coat of hair. Then again, he’s 50% Chihuahua, so there might be some common ancestry there somewhere.

YouTubers. Keeping me entertained throughout the long days and nights of COVID sequestering has been a smorgasbord of videos on YouTube, both from content creators (including Pete Pardo, host of Sea of Tranquility and Comic Book Geezers, and Dr. Kat Marchant of Reading the Past, among many others I could name) and from those who post content that would otherwise be unavailable. In the latter category, I’m especially grateful for those who diligently upload daily episodes of quiz shows from the UK and Australia. Viewing and playing along with those programs was critical in my preparation for my online quiz leagues, and for… other things that I can add to my Thanksgiving list next year.

Zoom. The video conferencing service has been a genuine boon in keeping us all connected to the people — whether family and friends, or work collaborators — from whom we are physically distanced by the present distress. It’s not the same as being together, but it’s decidedly better than not seeing others at all.

As always, friend reader, I’m thankful for you, and for your continued visits to this blog. I sincerely hope that you and those you love stay safe and well during this crisis, and that we all have a return to some semblance of normal life — whatever that means — to be grateful for at this time next year.

Categories: Aimless Riffing, Jeopardy!, Listology, Reminiscing, SwanStuff, Thanksgiving, That's Cool!

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Comic Art Friday: Let’s make some REAL news

August 11, 2017

I’m just back from my annual junket to the Trivia Championships of North America (TCONA) in Las Vegas, and man, is my brain fried.

I’ve attended every TCONA since the first one in 2011, and it seems as though it’s even more of a blast each successive year. It’s my one opportunity every summer to interface in person with fellow quizzers (including many other former — and some yet future — Jeopardy! champions) from all over the continent (and in a few cases, from other continents), amid the diz-busting, face-melting heat of Vegas in August.

Once again, I managed to keep my six-year medal-winning streak alive, with a bronze in the Team Trivia Championship (shared with five of the nicest and smartest people you’d meet anywhere). When you can’t be the brightest bulb in the room, it’s good to be one of the luckiest.

Best of all, the Pirate Queen joined me as usual at the end of the convention for a few days of Vegas-style R&R, as we are wont to enjoy.

But you’re here for the comic art, aren’t you?

All righty then.

Starman and The Creeper, pencils and inks by Tom Derenick

Today’s featured artwork is this tremendous effort by Tom Derenick, a leading contender in the Why Isn’t This Artist More Famous? sweepstakes. Our latest dip in the Common Elements theme pool matches The Creeper, one of Steve Ditko’s less prominent creations, with the Golden Age hero Starman. What in the wide world of DC Comics might these two have in common, you ask? Perhaps more than you’d think.

When we first encounter the man who would become The Creeper in Showcase #73 (March 1968), he’s Jack Ryder, an obnoxious blowhard TV personality. Starman in civilian life is Ted Knight, who shares his name with an actor (sadly, no longer with us) best known for playing… wait for it… an obnoxious blowhard TV personality. There’s your first common element.

I say “first” because sometimes when I devise a new Common Elements concept, I’m so focused on the idea I have for the project that I miss entirely plausible alternate connections between the characters involved. My good friend and colleague, the legendary commission collector Damon Owens, was quick to point out one here that I didn’t even think about.

The alter egos of these two characters go together to form “Knight Ryder,” a title differing only in spelling from that of a popular action-adventure program from the 1980s. That series, coincidentally, starred David Hasselhoff, a man who also fits the description of… wait for it… an obnoxious blowhard TV personality.

(Incidentally, any additional connection, real or imagined, to an obnoxious blowhard TV personality currently in national public office is 100% serendipitous. *cough*)

So, there’s another common element — one you’d suppose that a self-professed trivia maven such as your Uncle Swan would have picked up on from Jump Street.

Alas, no. Therefore, my thanks to Damon for sweeping the glass and snatching the uncontested rebound.

Back to our spotlight heroes for a moment. As noted previously, The Creeper sprang from the fevered imagination of Steve Ditko — probably best known as the artist co-creator of Marvel’s Spider-Man and Doctor Strange, but also the source of such characters as The Question, Hawk and Dove, and Shade the Changing Man.

In his debut adventure, Jack Ryder becomes The Creeper through the most unlikely of circumstances. In his capacity as a security expert for the television network that recently fired him from his talk-show-hosting duties, Ryder hunts down the subversive agents who kidnapped a famous scientist. While tracking the kidnappers, Ryder crashes a high-society masquerade ball wearing a costume he threw together from random items — the costume that later becomes The Creeper’s signature look. When Ryder finds the missing scientist, the man gives him a serum that speeds healing from injury, along with a device that enables Ryder to transform his apparel from his everyday clothes to his Creeper garb in the blink of an eye. The scientist is soon murdered, leading Ryder to devote himself to battling evildoers.

Starman’s history dates back to Adventure Comics #61 (April 1941), wherein astronomer Ted Knight invents a device he dubs a gravity rod. This handheld implement allows Knight to fly and to fire blasts of energy at his opponents. Almost a year later, in All-Star Comics #8 (January 1942 — the same issue in which Wonder Woman makes her debut appearance, although in a separate story), Starman and blind crimefighter Doctor Mid-Nite join the Justice Society of America, the original superhero team.

Starman faded from the scene (like most Golden Age superheroes) in the late 1940s. In the intervening decades, several other DC characters have used the Starman identity — some connected by legacy to the original Ted Knight version, others completely unrelated. A cynic might opine that DC keeps creating new Starman types merely to keep its trademark alive… but we’re not cynics here, are we?

Returning to our artwork: Not only does Tom Derenick draw with classic style and razor-sharp precision, but he also employs a brilliant twist of perspective here. If you look closely at the background, you’ll notice that the “bottom” of the scene from a real-world point of view is actually the right-hand side of the frame (in other words, that’s where the “ground” is). Thus, in portrait orientation — which is clearly how Derenick expects the viewer to see the image — it appears that The Creeper is jumping down onto an upwardly rising Starman, in attack mode. But when we adjust the angle, and put the bottom of the frame where it would actually be, we observe that it is in fact Starman who has the upper hand, and The Creeper is leaping (or falling) backward, away from his opponent. (See the rotated image below.)

Starman and The Creeper, pencils and inks by Tom Derenick

It’s a masterful shot, perfectly designed and executed. When Tom sent me his preliminary sketch early on in the project, the background was merely suggested by a handful of lines. Only when I saw the finished piece fully rendered could I understand and appreciate what the artist envisioned. I was completely blown away. You might be too.

As with so many things in this life, it’s all in how you look at it.

And that’s your Comic Art Friday.

Categories: Comic Art Friday, Hero of the Day, Jeopardy!, SwanStuff, That's Cool!, Trivial Pursuits, Vegas, Baby, Where in the World is Uncle Swan?

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Go Central, young man! (Rundle A Central, that is.)

March 27, 2014

LearnedLeague season 60 (hereafter, LL60) has concluded, with a grand time had by all 1824 trivia mavens who participated.

For the benefit of those new to the conversation, the greater League is divided into eight (soon to be nine) smaller leagues (formerly known as subregions). Within each league is a tiered system of player groups called Rundles, consisting of between 22 and 32 players. (The ideal Rundle size is 26, which allows for each player to face every other player in the Rundle exactly once during the 25-game season.)

The eight A Rundles — one in each league — form the top level of competition. Before LL60, only four A Rundles existed, with the most lethal being A West — nicknamed “A Murder” for the frighteningly high skill level among its members, many of whom were Jeopardy! all-stars, crossword puzzle superstars, and world-class quiz champions. For the season just concluded, in an effort to spread the best players around a bit more, each of the previous A Rundles was split into two. The former A West morphed into A Central — my new home for LL60 — and A Pacific.

I finished 7th in the newly established Rundle A Central, with a record of 13-4-8. That’s a significantly improved showing over my last season in the late, unlamented A Murder, when I ended up 26th of 30 players, with a record of 3-9-13. (Two of those three wins came on the last two Match Days of the season. It could, therefore, have been even uglier than it was.)

Or is it?

As interesting as it is to follow the head-to-head match totals that determine one’s standing within the Rundle, as a trivia purist I’m far more interested in that most basic of statistics: How many questions did I answer correctly? In this case, the answer is not as many as last season. In LL60, I scored 124 (of a possible 150) correct responses, for a batting average of .827. That’s not at all shabby. But in LL59 — the last season of A West — I notched 133 correct, a percentage of .887. This means that, with nine fewer correct answers this season over the previous, I gained 19 places in the standings.

It’s worth noting that I had the same correct answer total this season as I did in my first season in A West (LL57). That season, I finished in 8th place. In each of the next two seasons, my level of accuracy went up slightly — I had 125 correct (.833) in LL58, then the previously mentioned 133 (.887) in LL59 — even as I plummeted in the Rundle rankings: 17th in LL58, 26th in LL59. You can see the reason for this by looking at the ever-growing number of correct answers given by my opponents: 115 in LL57, jumping up to 122 in LL58, then a stratospheric 135 in LL59. Over the three seasons, even while my accuracy was getting marginally better, my competitors were consistently getting even better still.

Now you see just how freaking difficult it was to play among the monsters in A Murder.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m not complaining. A Central is plenty tough just as it is. But I’m under no illusion that my season-to-season record improved in LL60 because I suddenly got a lot smarter. I have the newly diluted competitive environment to thank.

It’s certainly not my defense. My defensive efficiency dropped this season to .671, from .692 in LL59. (We’ve already seen how well that latter number worked out for me. Which is to say, not much at all.) I’ve resigned myself to the fact that I will probably always be a mediocre defensive player, given that I have little desire to spend hours poring over my respective opponents’ question histories in an effort to more effectively divine what they may or may not know.

Anyway, the bottom line is that I managed to avoid relegation to the B level for yet another season, granting myself at least one more go at the A level.

LL61 begins on May 12.

Categories: Jeopardy!, LearnedLeague, SwanStuff, That's Cool!, Trivial Pursuits

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Michael Rankins. Jeopardy! 1980s Fan Favorite. Vote. Yadda, yadda.

September 30, 2013

Choose Michael Rankins as your Jeopardy! 1980s Fan Favorite!

So, here’s the deal.

I’m Michael Rankins — you knew that, right? nobody’s real name is SwanShadow, for crying out loud — and way back in 1988, I was a five-time undefeated champion on Jeopardy!, America’s favorite quiz show. You can see how young and serious I was then, in the graphic above. (You’d think they’d have found a pic of me smiling, wouldn’t you?) I was also a semifinalist in the 1988 Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions; a participant in the first prime-time Jeopardy! tournament, Super Jeopardy! in 1990; the winner of the Jeopardy! Battle of the Bay Area Brains in 1998; and a Round One winner in the Jeopardy! Ultimate Tournament of Champions in 2005.

Okay, résumé over.

Now, I’m competing for the chance to go head-to-head against other 1980s Jeopardy! champions in the show’s 30th Anniversary Season Battle of the Decades! The Battle of the Decades is bringing back former Jeopardy! champions from the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s to compete in a multi-level tournament, that will begin airing in February 2014. The show’s producers have already selected 14 champions from each decade, but the 15th and final spot in each tournament is up to Jeopardy! fans — this means YOU — via an online voting campaign. I’ve been selected as one of five candidates for the 1980s Fan Favorite slot in this mega-event.

To get there, I need your help!

Here’s how you can throw me your support starting today, and continuing daily until 6:59 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time on Monday, October 7.

  • If you’re on Facebook, you can go to the Jeopardy! Facebook page (a.k.a. Facebook.com/Jeopardy) and use the Battle of the Decades voting tab. Just like on the Jeopardy! site, you can choose me as your Fan Favorite, and click “Vote Now!”
  • If you’re a Twitter user, you can vote for me by tweeting: Michael #JeopardyVote. (Be sure to include both my first name and the hashtag.) One such tweet per day counts as a vote for me.

It’s that easy! You can vote for me once each day in each format — that’s one vote on Jeopardy.com, one vote on the Jeopardy! Facebook page, and one vote via Twitter using my first name and the special hashtag: Michael #JeopardyVote. Again, voting starts today, and continues until next Monday morning, October 7, at 7 a.m. PDT.

I’m not the sort to ask folks for much — if you know me, you know that. But if you would take a moment each day this week to vote for me — once per day in all three locations, if you have Facebook and/or Twitter accounts — I would be eternally grateful. (Well, for this lifetime, anyway.) And I’d especially consider it an honor and favor if you’d invite your friends, family members, and other contacts to vote for me too.

By the way, each of the other four nominees is a worthy champion also. Some of them I’ve come to know at least a little over the years, and they’re all cool people. Any of us would do you proud in representing our Decade of the 1980s as your Fan Favorite. But if you’re inclined to give me your votes, please know that I treasure your generous support. (And please, vote fairly. No spambots. I want your help, but not that kind.)

Thanks for your time, friend reader.

Now, please… go vote for me as your Jeopardy! 1980s Fan Favorite!

Categories: Jeopardy!, Reminiscing, Ripped From the Headlines, SwanStuff, Teleholics Anonymous, That's Cool!, Trivial Pursuits

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A LearnedLeague update: LL58 postmortem

September 25, 2013

LearnedLeague Season 58 concluded this week, and in the immortal words of Gloria Gaynor, “I will survive.”

After a grueling 25-day campaign, I managed to finish 17th in Rundle A West — without dispute, the league’s most talent-loaded bracket. By placing above the bottom 10 in our 32-player Rundle, I avoided relegation (the LL euphemism for “demotion”) to a lower bracket for next season. Not escaping that fate were several esteemed competitors whom I consider superstars in the trivia world.

Sometimes, it is indeed better to be lucky than good.

It’s worth noting that my placement in A West plummeted nine slots between last season (when I finished 8th) and this, even though my statistical performance in both seasons was similar. (My head-to-head matchplay record in LL57 was 11-9-5; this season, LL58, I went 10-9-6.) The primary contributing factor here was the disbanding after LL57 of the League’s previous top level, Rundle Championship, and the redistribution of its participants into the four A-level Rundles. A West inherited several former R-Champ members, raising the difficulty factor of our bracket exponentially. (Not that it needed to get more difficult. Rundle A West has long borne the nickname “A Murder” with good reason.) I would have to check name by name to be certain, but I’m pretty sure that every A West member who was in R-Champ in LL57 finished above me in LL58. So, there you go.

Now that I’ve completed three full LL seasons, the last two in A West, it’s a good time to analyze my overall performance in the League to date.

My win-loss-tie record stands at 42-21-12. That’s significantly skewed by my rookie season, in which I went 21-3-1 against other rookies and won my Rundle. None of my fellow R Central competitors had yet advanced to A-level as of LL58 (I believe one or two just earned promotion to A for next season), so it’s fair to say that I compiled that gaudy rookie record against less-stiff competition than what I’ve faced in A West the past two seasons. So, let’s call that first season’s 21 wins an outlier. In A-level competition, I’m a just–over-.500 hitter.

It’s also important to understand wins, losses, and ties in the context of LearnedLeague’s unique method of match play. In LL, defense — that is, the point values assigned to each day’s questions by each player, based on his or her estimation of that day’s opponent’s likelihood of answering each question correctly — plays a critical role. Quite frequently, a player wins or ties a match in which his or her opponent offers more correct answers — simply by virtue of more effective defense. Here’s an example: Player A gets four of the match’s six questions correct; Player B assigned those four questions values of 3, 2, 2, and 1. (Player A therefore missed two questions, valued at 1 and 0.) Player B gets five out of six, earning the following points: 0, 1, 1, 2, 2. (Player B missed the sixth question, valued by Player B at 3.) Player A’s score is 8(4) — that is, 8 points on 4 correct responses. Player B’s score is 6(5) — 6 points on 5 correct responses. Since only the match points, and not the number of correct answers, determines the outcome of the match, Player A wins, despite getting one less question right than Player B.

As a hardcore trivia guy, I sometimes find that system less than satisfying. Ideally, every trivia matchup would be decided purely on the basis of “who knows more stuff.” But the fact is, even Jeopardy!, the venue from which whatever minuscule trivia street cred I possess is derived, works the same way. I’ve certainly won games in my Jeopardy! career where one of my opponents answered more questions correctly, but I happened to get more of the high-dollar-value questions, or a Daily Double or two, correct. It’s how game creators make games competitive and exciting. I get that, and I’m cool with it.

I do, however, like to keep track of my own performance based strictly on my percentage of correct answers. When it comes to LearnedLeague, I’m pleased that I’ve continued to improve in this regard. In my rookie season, I notched 118 correct responses for a .787 batting average. In LL57, my first season in A West, I got 124 answers right, upping my average to .827. In the season just concluded, I scored 125 correct answers (.833). Some of that is pure luck, of course — you happen to get asked things that you know, or can figure out — but I’ve also been working on upping my game by reviewing material in categories where I could use a boost. I also spend at least a bit of time each evening playing quizzes on Sporcle. You just never know when knowing, say, the capital of Burkina Faso will come in handy. (It’s Ouagadougou, in case you were curious.)

Speaking of categories where I could use a boost…

To help facilitate defense, LearnedLeague publishes extensive statistical background on each player’s performance. At a glance, you can survey an opponent’s track record in every category, and see where his or her weaknesses lie. (You can — if you’re really into it — review every question your opponent has ever played, and discover which specific items he or she got right or wrong. I’m not quite that anal-retentive.)

Were you to review my statistical profile, you’d find few surprises if you know me well at all. After three seasons, my highest correct percentages are in Current Events (100%), Television (96.9%), Film (96.7%), Theatre (92.9%), Lifestyle (a catch-all category that encompasses such diverse areas as religion and fashion — 91.7%), and Games and Sports (90%). You’d have predicted that, yes?

Conversely, my nemeses are Art (60%), Classical Music (58.8%), and of course, Math (16.7%). Again, if you know me, you know that my ineptitude in mathematics rivals only my distaste for country music. In fact, I believe that Hell is an eternal algebra class with country music playing at ear-splitting volume over the loudspeakers.

I’ve been doing some brush-up reading on art, and trying to memorize some basic facts about the most notable classical composers. I think it’s helping. Nothing will help me get better at math. If you find yourself facing me in a future LearnedLeague match, and there’s a math question in the day’s sextet, you might as well slap a big fat 3 on that one. (Then again, I do pull one out of thin air 16.7% of the time. So, you never can be too certain.)

For what it’s worth, I’ve also attempted to work on my defense. I’m consistently a subpar — although not altogether horrible — defender, which means I do a mediocre job at assigning points based on my opponent’s perceived strengths and weaknesses. I could probably win an extra couple of games each season just through better defense, so I’m trying to take more time with that portion of each day’s quiz. My defensive efficiency rating improved to .672 this season, from the previous season’s .651, so I suppose I’m doing something right. Or at least, less wrong.

LearnedLeague 59 begins November 11. I’m looking forward to the next challenge.

Categories: Jeopardy!, LearnedLeague, SwanStuff, Trivial Pursuits, Uncategorized

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TCONA 3: Most of my pursuits are trivial

August 16, 2013

I just flew in from Las Vegas, and boy, is my brain tired.

Actually, the Pirate Queen and I flew back from Bright Light City two days ago, and I’m mostly not tired any more. I’d headed to Vegas last weekend for the third annual Trivia Championships of North America — henceforth, TCONA, or I’ll be typing all day. The Pirate Queen joined me on Sunday following the festivities, and we spent a blissful three days checking out the sights and sounds of one of my favorite vacation destinations.

But let’s talk TCONA.

What began two summers ago as a largely informal gathering of game show champions, Quiz Bowl veterans, and pub quiz mavens has ballooned in this third installment into a real live media event. Not only were crews from two nationally televised game shows — NBC’s Million Second Quiz, and The Chase, GSN’s new Stateside version of the UK hit — on site to conduct in-person auditions, but the stars of both the US and UK editions of The Chase also participated in several of the weekend’s competitions. The Experts, easily the best weekly quiz program on YouTube, taped four episodes before a live audience. And of course, there was in attendance the usual assortment of trivia geeks from all over the continent, and beyond. (I met at least one fellow who’d come all the way from Sweden. Or maybe Norway. Somewhere in Scandinavia, anyway.)

A summary of one attendee’s highlights follows.

The weekend commenced on Friday morning with a multi-part written quiz. This opening salvo serves not only to start the neurons firing, but also to provide an initial gauge of one’s level among the competitors. My first thought after completing the test was that I should have ingested more coffee before we began. I was relatively pleased, once the scores were published later that day, to discover that I hadn’t fared as poorly as I feared, and in fact, I’d outpointed several folks whose names are far better known in the trivia world than my own. With another triple latte in my system, I might have performed even better.

One of TCONA’s primary individual events is 5×5, a buzzer battle whose gameplay bears distant similarity to a certain television quiz program with which I am intimately acquainted. Despite the aforementioned acquaintance, I never seem to do very well at 5×5, and this year’s contest was no exception. I lost my first match thanks to a foolishly aggressive final wager — I was leading up to that point — on a question about Celebrity Apprentice, a program with which I am clearly not as intimately acquainted as I thought. I was never a factor in my second game, and thus lost any hope of advancing to further rounds.

I had high expectations for myself in another individual event, LearnedLeague Live. At TCONA 1, I won my first round against seven other competitors, despite never having played the game before. Last year, I held my own at an eight-player table that included several seasoned LearnedLeague veterans; I didn’t win the table, but I felt that I acquitted myself decently. This year, I made the critical error of playing at a table featuring two of the greatest (and two of my favorite) players in Jeopardy! history, Jerome Vered and Dan Melia. Note to self: Next year, instead of sitting with people you like, sit with people you might stand a chance of beating. Assuming there are any.

For the main team event, Quiz Bowl, I reconnected with two other members of last TCONA’s silver-medal-winning squad for a run at fresh hardware. Our team captain, Dave Legler, who once bagged $1.7 million on the game show Twenty-One, recruited as our fourth player a trivia host from Chicago, Jeremy Cahnmann. Combine that with our not-so-secret weapon, Jonathan Hess, a soft-spoken grad student from South Carolina who knows more arcane information than I’ve forgotten — and I’ve forgotten a lot over the years — and little old me (you remember that I’ve won eight games on that TV quiz show with the Canadian ex-pat, right?), and we liked our chances going in. We galloped off to a tremendous start, going undefeated in our first three games and winning our four-team bracket. Then, in our first elimination match, we ran into a tough crew led by Anne Hegerty, one of the “chasers” on the original British version of The Chase. As coincidence would have it, the game commenced with a battery of Anglocentric material that Anne leaped all over like a wolf attacking a Porterhouse. Our side rallied, though, making up ground furiously as the game progressed, only to lose in the end by the value of a single question. It was a hard loss to stomach… but there’s always next year.

Luckily for me, redemption came in the other team event, the Pub Quiz Mashup. Another Jeopardy! Ultimate Tournament of Champions veteran, Dr. Shane Whitlock, invited me to team up with him and his charming bride. We added three other players to fill our roster, which Shane dubbed (in the time-honored pub quiz tradition of quirky team names) “Natalie Portmanteau.” After seven often-hilarious rounds of play, we walked away with the silver medal. Except… well… we didn’t exactly. An apparent scoring error, uncovered between the end of the event and the medal presentation the following day, resulted in our being bumped from second place to third. So we got the bronze medal instead of the silver. I don’t care — it started out silver, and I’m sticking to that. It’ll always be silver to me.

Having the two hottest new game shows in television making their first TCONA appearances generated considerable buzz. Both Mark “The Beast” Labbett, the “chaser” on the US version of The Chase, and the show’s producer came in for Q&A sessions. (Not only is Mark a smart fellow, he’s also ginormous. They don’t call him The Beast for nothing.) Quite a few folks auditioned for Million Second Quiz; it’ll be interesting to watch the show and see how many people I know who made the final cut.

Speaking of game shows, if you aren’t already watching The Experts every Monday (or whenever you choose — it’s on YouTube, so tune in when it suits you, but the new eps post on Mondays), you should be, doggone it. Produced by my Jeopardy! colleague Alan Bailey, it’s consistently as entertaining a 20 minutes as you’ll spend. Alan and his crew shot four new games on Saturday night, including an all-star slugfest between The Chase‘s Anne Hegerty (whose subject specialty was Terry Pratchett’s Discworld) and Jeopardy! superstars Brad Rutter and Roger Craig (experts on Mad Men and Prince, respectively). All four games offered action, suspense, brain-shredding trivia superiority by the contestants, and abundant joviality for all. I won’t spoil the outcomes for you — you’ll just have to hie yourself over to YouTube when the new shows post, and check them out for yourself.

There were, as usual, plenty of ancillary events in and around all of the above. Quiz hosts and trivia producers from all over North America bring their favorite material and stage impromptu games throughout the weekend, which anyone can drop into and play. TCONA is also the home of the World Championship of Kno’dgeball, an amusing yet bizarre hybrid of trivia and dodgeball. (Your Uncle Swan declines participation in the latter, preferring not to combine mental challenge with risk of bodily injury. But the Kno’dgeballers do seem to enjoy themselves.)

Of course, TCONA’s most memorable highlights are always the connections and reconnections with my fellow trivia mavens. TCONA is the one place each year where I run into some of the many amazing people I’ve met via Jeopardy! — Bob Harris, Roger Craig, Brad Rutter, Steve Chernicoff, Dan Melia, Shane Whitlock, Alan Bailey, Jerome Vered, and I’m probably forgetting others, for which I’ll apologize in advance. (Yes, all of those people are as intelligent as they appear on TV. More, even.) It’s also a chance to meet up again with my Quiz Bowl teammates Dave and Jonathan, as well as many other new acquaintances I’ve made over these past three events, including such quiz show stars as Who Wants to Be a Millionaire winners Ed Toutant and Joe Trela, whose exploits I’ve admired from the other side of the tube. It was fun to put faces to many of the names with whom I compete in LearnedLeague — I think at least half of Rundle A West, my current LL bracket, was in attendance this year, several of whom I met for the first time.

Kudos to the TCONA team for lining up an infinitely superior venue this time out. The Tropicana met the event’s needs as well as anyone could have hoped after the horrors of Circus Circus last year. The Trop’s not perfect — in particular, its dining options are limited, especially in the budget-friendly/quick-service areas (there’s neither a buffet nor a true food court). Still, it’s an easy stroll across the street to the MGM Grand, New York New York, or the tram-connected Excalibur/Luxor/Mandalay Bay trio, so ample eating choices are right nearby. On the positive side, the conference center is easily accessible, and eminently convenient if you’re staying in the Trop’s Club Tower — basically, step off the elevator and you’re there. I couldn’t have been more satisfied with my room, which was large, well-appointed, clean, and comfortable. The in-room high-speed wifi worked splendidly. (Don’t get me started about the execrable Internet access situation I encountered when I moved over to Excalibur after the convention ended.) And, if you like to while away your free time and dollars in the casino, I found the Trop’s blackjack dealers as friendly and helpful as any I’ve encountered anywhere in Vegas.

Speaking of the Trop, TCONA shared the hotel’s weekend hospitality with another niche convention: the National Pole Dancing Championships. (Yes, that’s a thing. I kid you not.) I can assure you that, for the most part, you’d have had scant difficulty determining which guests were there for the trivia, and which for the pole dancing. Let’s just say that, were you to draw a Venn diagram depicting quiz nerds and pole dancers, there would be precious little overlap between the two sets. Maybe none.

Before I departed, I registered in advance for TCONA 4. You could join me in Vegas (probably at the Trop, but that’s yet to be negotiated) next August 8-10. But I’ll warn you: You’d better bring your A game.

Categories: Aimless Riffing, Celebritiana, Jeopardy!, LearnedLeague, SwanStuff, Teleholics Anonymous, That's Cool!, Trivial Pursuits, Vegas, Baby

Comments: 3 Comments

Everybody’s got to lose sometime

March 7, 2013

It was fun while it lasted.

I made it all the way to Match Day 12 of LearnedLeague Season 56 before losing a match, exceeding my initial expectations by roughly a factor of 11. The fact that my opponent on MD12 “drank the beer” — answering all six of the day’s questions correctly — made my first loss inevitable, given that I only went four-for-six. (My opponent, a six-time Jeopardy! champion and 2010 Tournament of Champions finalist, will run the table frequently, I suspect.)

Let’s review the set of questions that wrought my first crushing defeat.

  • Question 1: The 2003 Pulitzer Prize-winning Master of the Senate, by Robert Caro, is the third volume of a mammoth biography of what American?
  • Question 2: The 32-song soundtrack to what film, released in July 1994 and filled with American artists such as Elvis Presley, Jimi Hendrix, The Mamas & the Papas, Bob Seger, and Aretha Franklin, peaked at #2 on the Billboard chart, and was ultimately certified 12x platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America?
  • Question 3: The only blemish in what thoroughbred racehorse’s 21-race career was a place at the 1919 Sanford Memorial Stakes in Saratoga Springs, New York, behind a horse named, appropriately enough, Upset?
  • Question 4: The scientific field of nuclear physics was born, one could argue, in 1896, when radioactivity was discovered by what Frenchman, for which he shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with his doctoral student Marie Sklodowska-Curie and her husband Pierre?
  • Question 5: Name the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran who was ousted in August of 1953, in a coup d’État orchestrated by intelligence agencies of the United States and United Kingdom.
  • Question 6: What is the most common term in mathematics for the type of number that is the sum of a real number and an imaginary number, typically expressed as x + iy, where i is the square root of negative 1?

Got your answers ready?

Okay then, let’s check them off.

Answer 1: A fair chunk of my pleasure reading consists of biographies. Although I’ve never read any of the books in Robert Caro’s series on President LYNDON JOHNSON, I’ve certainly heard of them. Caro is probably one of the three or four best-known biographers of this era, and he’s won pretty much every award that one can win for writing such books. Although, why anyone would want to write four thick volumes about LBJ (with a fifth and final still to be published) is beyond me.

Answer 2: I have a difficult time remembering numbers — I have to look up our home phone number every time I order a pizza — but the two categories of numbers I do well with are the sequence of U.S. Presidents and the release years for movies. The key to this question is the year the film was released — 1994. The two biggest Hollywood hits of that year were Disney’s The Lion King, whose soundtrack consists of several now-famous show tunes written by Elton John and Tim Rice, and FORREST GUMP, whose soundtrack boasts a wealth of classic rock songs. Clearly, the latter was the correct response here.

Answer 3: Here’s another of those questions for which The Daughter, a horse-racing aficionado, would never forgive me if I didn’t know the answer. It’s also a familiar etymology factoid. One of racing’s most legendary horses, MAN O’ WAR, lost his only match against a little-regarded challenger named Upset. Prior to this event, the word “upset” only meant “angry” or “irritated.” Afterward, sports fans started referring to an overwhelming favorite’s loss to an underdog as “pulling an Upset,” and the word gained a new meaning — one that’s almost as common in usage today as its original ones.

Answer 4: This is where the first wheel fell off for me. I know about the Curies, of course — Marie Curie remains to this day the only individual to win Nobel Prizes in two different fields of science. (A frequently handy nugget of trivia, that.) But the name of her mentor? I hadn’t a clue. After assuring myself that this snippet of information wasn’t in my memory banks anywhere, I typed in the name of the only French scientist from the relevant time period that I could think of — Louis Pasteur. Yes, I know Pasteur had nothing to do with radioactivity, but at least I filled in the blank. My esteemed opponent, conversely, had no difficulty in coming up with HENRI BECQUEREL, whom I might have thought invented one of the mother sauces in French cuisine.

Answer 5: There’s only one reason I knew this. Just last weekend, the Pirate Queen and I finally got around to viewing Argo, the reigning Best Picture Oscar winner. Without that very recent hot dip into modern Iranian history, I’d have never known that the Shah’s predecessor was the duly elected MOHAMMAD MOSSADEGH. I still didn’t know how the man’s surname was spelled, but the Commissioner of LearnedLeague took pity on me and gave me credit for a correct response despite the mangling.

Answer 6: I probably shouldn’t admit this in print, but my future opponents will quickly figure it out anyway: Math is not my element. I need the calculator on my iPhone to figure out the tip on a restaurant check. Algebra and other higher mathematics? Please. When I see a question with an equation in it, like this one, my eyes glaze over. I put down one of the terms floating about randomly in my skull — irrational number — which proved to be incorrect. (I felt better after learning that my response was the most common wrong answer to this question. At least a number of other players knew as little about math as did I.) My esteemed opponent, who apparently has no gaping holes in his knowledge base, accurately identified the correct answer as COMPLEX NUMBER. Me, I only have a complex about numbers.

Having been soundly thumped for the first time in LearnedLeague, I’m off to lick my wounds. But before I dash, here’s a bit of bonus trivia for you:

What was the name of the British one-hit wonder whose song title I parodied in the heading of this post?

The first person to answer correctly in the comments wins… well… nothing material. But I’ll give you my undying admiration, which you’ll have to admit is priceless.

Categories: Jeopardy!, LearnedLeague, Listology, SwanStuff, That's Cool!, Trivial Pursuits

Comments: 1 Comment

With six, you get egg roll

February 27, 2013

Before I get into the meat of today’s post, I want to throw a word of congratulation to Colby Burnett, winner of this season’s Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions. As winner of the Teachers’ Tournament this past year, Colby becomes only the second player to graduate from winning one of the show’s special-interest tournaments (College, Teachers’, Teen, and the long-defunct Seniors) to also winning the TOC. (Back in 1989 — the year after my own TOC experience — a guy named Tom Cubbage won the College Tournament before advancing to and winning the TOC. Tom was in my taping group for the Ultimate Tournament of Champions in 2005. I’m pleased to report that he’s done quite nicely for himself, despite having become an attorney.)

Colby blazed through the field in both his tournaments, in both instances going into the last Final Jeopardy! of the two-day final round with an insurmountable lead. He displayed quick buzzer skills, a broad range of knowledge, and a quirky sense of humor throughout. Way to represent, Colby!

Speaking of knowledge and quirky humor, it’s time for an update on my rookie season in LearnedLeague. (For the backstory on this online trivia league, and my participation therein, check out this post.)

Six games into LL56, I’m astounded to find myself in first place in my bracket (or Rundle, as it’s called in LL). Match Day 6 also afforded me my first “six-pack” — that is to say, I answered all six of the day’s questions correctly. (LearnedLeague members — “LLamas” — refer to a six-for-six Match Day as “drinking the beer,” or “downing a six-pack,” which accommodates the soda-swilling teetotalers equally.) I’m not sure that says as much for my prowess as one might suppose, as MD06 appears to have been the easiest day of the season thus far, based on League-wide accuracy statistics. But it sure was nice to get that perfect-score monkey off my back at last.

My opponent for the day earned seven points for his four correct answers, against my nine points and six correct. So I needed a flawless card, or nearly that, to get the victory.

If you’re curious whether you could have “drunk the beer” on this particular round, these were the day’s questions. I’ll give you my thought process after you’ve had a chance to answer.

  • Question 1: This sturdy young woman is the work of what Dutch master? (Click here to view image.)
  • Question 2: Give the term from economics, a portmanteau coined in a 1965 speech to the British parliament, used to illustrate a scenario where prices are increasing at a high rate, economic growth slows, and unemployment remains at a steady high level.
  • Question 3: The most produced variety of sweet cherry in the United States is a cultivar which goes by what name, after the Chinese foreman who worked for the orchardist who created it in 1875?
  • Question 4: Which is the only NFL franchise to have won championships in three different cities? The first two were won in Cleveland and Los Angeles, the third in the team’s current home city, in 1999.
  • Question 5: A collection of figurines kept lovingly on the shelf of an introverted young woman named Laura Wingfield provides the title for what classic play of American theatre?
  • Question 6: A pair of wars were fought in the mid-19th c. between China and the British Empire over restrictive Chinese trade laws, and specifically the trade of what product, in very high demand in China at the time?

Done? Excellent.

The answers follow.

Answer 1: Given that he’s her favorite artist, The Daughter would never have forgiven me if I didn’t immediately recognize this as the work of JAN VERMEER. The title of the painting is The Milkmaid, and it’s probably Vermeer’s second most famous work, after Girl with a Pearl Earring. (The latter, incidentally, is currently here in San Francisco at the DeYoung Museum, as part of a rare North American tour of artworks from the Mauritshuis in the Netherlands. I’m looking forward to seeing “the Dutch Mona Lisa” in person soon.)

Answer 2: I’m far from an expert on economics (just ask the Pirate Queen, who holds both an MBA and a Master’s in Financial Engineering), and I’ve never heard of the 1965 speech mentioned in the clue. However, the conditions sound a lot like what I’ve heard described on news-talk programs as STAGFLATION, which is definitely a portmanteau (a word made by combining two or more existing words). And in fact, it’s the right one.

Answer 3: The only varieties of cherry I can name off the top of my head are Bing, Montmorency, and Maraschino. The last two don’t sound even remotely Chinese, and I’m pretty sure that Montmorency cherries are sour rather than sweet anyway. So BING it had to be.

Answer 4: This was an instaget for me. The NFL franchise now known as the ST. LOUIS RAMS began life as the Cleveland Rams before a lengthy stint in L.A. (1946-1979) and Anaheim (1980-1994) as the Los Angeles Rams. The team moved to St. Louis in 1995, following the Cardinals’ departure for Phoenix. The most common wrong answer to this question was “Oakland Raiders,” who did play in L.A. for a number of seasons in the ’80s and ’90s, but never in Cleveland.

Answer 5: Another instaget. The combination of “collection of figurines” and “classic play” could only mean Tennessee Williams’s THE GLASS MENAGERIE.

Answer 6: This was the only question on this Match Day that I struggled with even slightly. My first thoughts were “tea” and “silk,” but I couldn’t recall any wars being engaged over those commodities, at least not between the British and the Chinese. As I was mulling that over, I thought, “The only wars I can even remember those two countries ever fighting were the Opium Wars… oh, yeah… OPIUM. Duh.” Sometimes, it really is that simple.

How did you do with this set? Did you drink the beer (or soda, if you prefer), or were you a bottle or two short of a six-pack?

I’ve already submitted my answers for Match Day 7. Alas, I won’t be drinking anything but my own sorrows today.

Categories: Jeopardy!, LearnedLeague, Listology, SwanStuff, That's Cool!, Trivial Pursuits

Comments: 1 Comment

Welcome to the Rundle

February 20, 2013

I won my first match in LearnedLeague last night.

Now I have to explain to the rest of you what that means.

RankinsM LL flag

LearnedLeague is an online trivia league, populated by more than 1200 players from all over the globe. (The preponderance of the League resides in North America, but there are a surprising number of folks on other continents.) Among the membership, you’ll find college quiz bowl stars, pub quiz mavens, crossword puzzle fanatics, and — not surprisingly — quite a few of my fellow Jeopardy! champions, including the nonpareil Ken Jennings.

Admission to LearnedLeague is by invitation only, so you have to be referred by a current member in order to join. However, previously posted questions are openly accessible on the League’s website, so anyone can challenge themselves by playing along. I scoured the archives diligently for months before I scored my invitation. (Speaking of which, my sincere thanks to Paul Paquet, proprietor of the Trivia Hall of Fame, for referring me into LL.)

Players compete in one-on-one matches each weekday over a 25-game season. (The current season is the League’s 56th –LL56 in League nomenclature. Four seasons are conducted each year, roughly once per calendar quarter.) For each match, six questions spanning a broad variety of topics are posted. Each player has 24 hours to access the questions and upload answers, with a strict honor-system understanding that the player will use only the knowledge residing inside his or her noggin — no reference materials or web searching permitted. The somewhat relaxed time element can be either a blessing or a curse. You have plenty of opportunity to mull over the questions and dredge up that obscure factoid lurking in the deepest recesses of your brain. You also have ample chance to overthink, and talk yourself out of a perfectly valid response.

Modeled after international soccer leagues, LearnedLeague divides its participants into ranked brackets called Rundles. Each Rundle contains an even number of players, between 24 and 32 (most commonly, 26). The Rundles are stacked by player performance, with the League’s top 26 players assembled in the Championship Rundle. The next-best players compete in one of several A-level Rundles; there are also B, C, D, and E-level Rundles. All first-time players such as myself are assigned to R (for Rookie) Rundles. This helps ensure that participants compete against others who are at a similar skill level. (To illustrate how essential that is, consider that the most recent winner of Championship Rundle scored 98.7% correct during the season.) The ultimate goal is to win enough matches to advance to a higher level Rundle for the following season (called Promotion), or at least to avoid being demoted to a lower Rundle (called Relegation).

What differentiates LearnedLeague from any other trivia competition I’ve encountered is the element of defense. In addition to answering the day’s six questions, each player must assign point values to those questions, from which her or his opponent’s score will be calculated. You assign three points to the question you believe your opponent is least likely to answer correctly, making it the highest-valued. The two questions you think are next in descending order of difficulty, you assign two points each; the next two, one point each. The question you believe will be the easiest for your opponent gets a value of zero, meaning that even if the other player gets it right, they don’t add any points for doing so. A perfect score on all six questions is nine points (3+2+2+1+1+0).

Likewise, your opponent will assign values to the questions based on what he or she thinks will be most or least difficult for you. You have no way of knowing when you submit your answers what point values have been attached to each. That information is only revealed at the conclusion of the 24-hour match period. So, unlike Jeopardy!, where a $200 answer is always $200, and a $2000 answer always nets you $2000 (unless it’s a Daily Double), answering any of the six questions correctly in a LearnedLeague match might earn you three points, two points, or one point, or it might earn you no points at all, depending on how your opponent assessed the values.

This makes defense critically important to winning a match. It’s entirely possible — in fact, it happens frequently — that you might answer more questions correctly than your opponent does, and still lose the match. Let’s say you get four answers right. Your competitor has preassigned those four items values of 2, 1, 1, and 0 points. That makes your total score 4 — or as it’s represented in LearnedLeague standings, 4(4) with game points preceding the parentheses, and the number of correct answers within the parentheses. Suppose your opponent only answers two questions correctly, but you’ve assigned those questions values of 3 and 2. Your opponent’s score is 5(2). Because only the game points determine the winner and loser of the match, your competitor snatches the victory — even though you came up with twice as many correct responses.

As you can see, the more you know about the person you’re playing against, and the parameters of her or his knowledge base, the more effectively you can assign points on defense. To facilitate this, the LearnedLeague site compiles detailed statistics about every player, so you can see at a glance how well he or she has performed in various categories. For those of us playing in our first League season, there’s not much information yet to go on. But this profile data becomes more useful the longer a player continues in the League, as his or her strengths and weaknesses become clearer.

(Did I mention that every LLama — that’s insider-speak for a LearnedLeague member — has his or her own flag? That’s mine at the top of this post. Having my own flag is wicked cool.)

I was first introduced to LearnedLeague at the inaugural Trivia Championships of North America (TCONA) in 2011. LearnedLeague at TCONA is played in a modified live format — instead of Rundles, the field is divided into eight-player tables, and the matches are played at a rapid pace, allowing players only four minutes to record their answers and assign defense points. The first round consists of seven matches, so everyone at a given table has one match against each tablemate. The winner of each table advances to the next round of play, an elimination round in which only the winners of each individual match continue. Ultimately, the two players left standing face off for the title.

At TCONA ’11, I won my table (despite the fact that I was new to the game and didn’t understand the scoring system all that well — which is an ego-preserving way of saying that I didn’t understand it at all) and found myself in the quarterfinals alongside Jeopardy! legends Ken Jennings and Jerome Vered. I lost my first elimination match (not to either Ken or Jerome, not that that’s any consolation), but felt vindicated to be in such lofty company. This past year, I finished second at a table that included another Jeopardy! veteran and LLama, Dr. Shane Whitlock.

So what’s a LearnedLeague match like? I’m glad you asked. Here’s how my first match of LL56 went down.

Question 1: Geography — France is divided into 27 régions, which are divided into 101 départements, which are further divided into 342 districts known by what term?

I stewed over this one for a while, because I knew that I had heard this somewhere (possibly, on Jeopardy!) very recently. I couldn’t dredge it up, though. Instead, I answered “cantons,” which was the only French administrative division that popped into my head. The correct answer is ARRONDISSEMENTS. My opponent got this question right, but unfortunately for him, I’d assigned it a value of zero. Which, as it turned out, was the best move — statistically, this was the easiest question of the match (meaning that, Leaguewide, more players answered this question correctly than any other question). Just not for non-Francophile me.

Question 2: Literature — Thanks to his famous literary depiction, who is the best known king to have ruled the ancient Sumerian city of Uruk (outpacing Lugalbanda, Enmerkar, and Dumuzid, among others)?  Often on Jeopardy!, keeping the category in mind helps you focus on the correct response. The fact that this question was classified as Literature rather than History pointed me quickly to the right answer: GILGAMESH. He’s the only Sumerian king I could think of who’s also a famous literary character. (And a Marvel Comics superhero, not that that’s germane to the question.) Had this been designated a History question, I might well have struggled between Gilgamesh and Sargon (thereby exhausting the names of Sumerian kings I know). My esteemed opponent gave me two points for this correct reply; he answered incorrectly. [EDIT: As noted in the comments below by fellow LLama Bill Penrose, the categories don’t appear until the answers are revealed. I clearly sussed this out from the reference to “famous literary depiction” in the original clue. Seriously, I should not write from memory about something I did at 1 a.m. 36 hours ago. — Uncle Swan.]

Question 3: Film — The seminal 1984 comedy film Stranger Than Paradise was the first major work from what acclaimed independent filmmaker? As an actor and former film critic, I’m embarrassed to admit that I missed this. I put down “Spike Jonze” as my response; the correct answer, of course, is JIM JARMUSCH, which I remembered the instant I saw the answer key. Ah, well. My opponent earned himself two points for his accurate response.

Question 4: Games/Sport — The items in this photograph are used primarily (and quite importantly) in what sport? It pays to watch television. Just one week earlier, the Pirate Queen and I had watched a Season Three episode of Downton Abbey that depicted a CRICKET match. The second I saw this photograph, I recognized these wooden pegs as the little crosspieces that rest atop the posts of a cricket wicket. That lightning bolt of recognition garnered me three points, while my opponent guessed incorrectly. Thank you, Julian Fellowes.

Question 5: The largest vein in the human body, which returns deoxygenated blood from the lower part of the body into the heart, is known specifically as what (three words)? I’m not a doctor, but I know how to play one. I worked in the healthcare industry for nearly a dozen years, about half of which I spent in a job that required me to review copious numbers of medical records. So I actually know a considerable amount about anatomy and medical terminology. I was surprised that this question was the stumper of the match day — only 27% of the League got this one correct. I’m guessing that a lot of people put down “superior vena cava,” thinking that “superior” meant “largest.” In fact, the correct response is INFERIOR VENA CAVA — inferior because it enters the heart from the bottom, while the superior vena cava enters from the top. It’s tricky. (I’ll bet Shane Whitlock aced this one. Had I been playing him in this match, I would have valued this at zero.) I earned two points for the right answer, which my opponent did not come up with.

Question 6: Flaming Pie, Run Devil Run, Driving Rain, Chaos and Creation in the Backyard, Memory Almost Full, and Kisses on the Bottom are the six most recent rock studio albums (and, strictly speaking, numbers 10-15 overall) released by what solo artist? The only one of these album titles that rang any bells at all was Memory Almost Full, but that little tickle did not lead me to PAUL MCCARTNEY. Instead, I took a wild flailing guess and said “Captain Beefheart,” who was also fond of bizarre album titles — his discography includes such works as Bat Chain Puller, Trout Mask Replica, and Ice Cream for Crow. My esteemed opponent appears to be no more fond of Macca’s later works than am I, because he missed this one too.

If you run the numbers, my final score for this match was 7(3) — I earned seven match points (2+3+2) with my three correct responses. My opponent scored 4(3) — he also got three correct answers, but picked up only four match points for them (0+2+2). Thus, even though we each answered the same number right, I won the match on points… which illustrates why defense is so important to LearnedLeague success. (My defensive “prowess” on this initial Match Day can be chalked up to sheer beginner’s luck.)

I’ll drop in periodic updates as my LearnedLeague experience progresses. And if you’re a fellow LLama (the official nickname for League members), perhaps we’ll cross swords on some future match day. I’m in Rundle R Central, and my Player Name is RankinsM. You’ll recognize me by my flag.

Categories: Jeopardy!, LearnedLeague, SwanStuff, That's Cool!, Trivial Pursuits

Comments: 4 Comments

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