Learned League

lol I choked on the last MD of Mystery Themes and fell to third place.

Lots of us signed up for 1970s Film 2, but looks like only Leee and I are in The Microbial World, in which I am getting crushed.

Yeah I was a little burned out on LL so didn't sign up for either of those minileagues. I did do the LL championship the other day, which was fun but which I can't talk about for another month or so.

Yiddish 1DS lots of fun.

Excellent! Thanks for the tip, hadn’t noticed

Enjoyed it even though I didn’t do particularly well. I guess you did a tiny bit better

Greg did quite a bit better

I felt like a real shmendrick for missing that last one.

me too, what a shandeh

Just a bissel maybe.

I did pretty well in the Lit in Translation, even though I entered McWhorter's instead of McSweeney's.

https://a57.foxnews.com/cf-images.us-east-1.prod.boltdns.net/v1/static/694940094001/8dee6e03-a5ae-47bf-8425-0987b9bf19d1/e9ca48d8-9d61-4cb8-8d6f-3f42c92204bb/1280x720/match/931/524/image.jpg?ve=1&tl=1

Had one of those days when I forgot to submit yesterday

I wonder if the reason the Guns ODS only had 477 participants is because guns.

Microbial World my favorite minileague in a while, very good range of difficulty, creative cluing, loved the highlighting of the work of woman scientists

I didn't even do that well!

i'm middle of the pack on my 70's film league. thought i was stronger with this knowledge but that's the nature of this game for sure.

A lot of what I get out of an ML (and 1DS too) is the recap posts in which they talk about each question, but the Microbial smiths' decision to not do that turned that ML into a "Here's 5 to 6 questions that I have no idea about." I guess there's the self-education route but I think that having curated/selective info dumps are valuable to broadening my knowledge.

I got killed on that one and ended up forfeiting twice. Not on purpose but just because I would wait too long to submit and file asleep.

On one of those days I also forgot to submit on 70s film too, but I am still doing pretty well in that.

But yeah recaps are super important for ML momentum. I could really feel the energy associated it when I was writing them, even if only a dozen people if that would post in reply on a given day.

Ugh, I will have to play the leader of my group tomorrow, which I am not looking forward to.

Maybe I will get lucky but his stats are better than mine. Oh, but if I factor in the forfeit then...

I did get lucky: the other guy who was in second and third forfeited last night.

So I had a brief exchange with one guy who writes a lot about The Beatles and has an MBV-based flag who is way ahead in his group. I asked him if it could be attributed to a certain film course at our alma mater and he said basically yeah, sure, maybe, but realy Easy Riders, Raging Bulls.

Some other ILX0RS doing well but don’t want to jinx by singling them out.

Okay, seems like you two did make it to the final.

Lot of talk about diversity issues in this ML.

Are you talking about the '70s Film ML? I haven't been paying much attention to the message board lately, since I've been busy with life stuff, but it does feel like there've been a lot of Qs about white dudes, including the whole day tributes to Nicholson and Scorsese.

Yes

Don't forget to submit your 1DS proposals before month end!

I'm torn between proposing trip hop or RPDR.

doing so bad so far

I haven't checked on you, but I am not doing so great myself.

I already submitted both 1DS proposals. I compulsively do it early, otherwise I fret over it too much.

I'm doing super medium this season.

I get it. I submitted this morning to get it over with as well.

I didn’t want to worry about the description for too long.

Greg, it's OK to submit more than one proposal?

Oh duh should've read the instrux:

Proposals are limited to two per player.

This after I submitted two last year lol.

Hey, so I eked out a tie yesterday, 3(3)-3(3). Don’t know if this result has a cute nickname or not.

Quad trips

Oh!

Just looking back and I see I got an email last year from TAI on November 3rd about that round of 1DSs.

(just made that up btw)

Yeah,so I figured.

Anyone else get stuck on GAPDY yesterday?

Ha, no, but I see that was a challenging question for those unfamiliar with the nuances of Billboard charts/radio formats. (I went with Foo Fighters but considered RHCP, Chili Peppers, Green Day, and Weezer.)

(Er, strike "Chili Peppers.")

i said nickelback like a dumbass!!!

Not a huge fan of a question that amounts to 'name a rock band big in the 00s and hope you are right', though, in fairness, I was 99% sure that Linkin Park and Foo Fighters would be on the list.

Agreed it wasn't the best question.

It apparently derived from a Chris Molanphy article in Pitchfork, which referred to "a Modern Rock penthouse with a lock that, seemingly, only five American bands had the keys for: Foo Fighters, Green Day, Linkin Park, Incubus, and, yes, the Chili Peppers. During the six-year period from 2003 through 2008, this five-band oligopoly controlled the No. 1 spot 152 out of 313 weeks-- a preposterous 49% of the time."

This was later cited in the Wikipedia article on the chart.

Although the implication is that these five bands spent more time at #1 than any others, Chris doesn't state that outright. ("Seemingly" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.) Then again, why include Incubus (11 weeks at #1) instead of NIN (17 weeks) or Weezer (16 weeks)? I'm guessing it's because he goes on to talk about NIN and Weezer in the next paragraph.

i was shockingly old when i realized that ‘airegin’ was nigeria backwards

it had never occurred to me and i had to go through a list of rollins songs in my head