Best Quizbowl Question of 2016

[wd4gdz]

In the spirit of lists, discuss the best quizbowl question you saw/heard in the past year. There will be a bracket after nominations are posted in this thread.

Do not post or talk about questions that are not cleared. This means Delta Burke 2016 is not eligible, unfortunately.

The questions should be from a tournament that was first played in 2016.

Feel free to provide a short explanation of why you think it's the best quizbowl question of 2016.

[Kouign Amann]

my favorite question was the one that made me feel really good about myself because i got it super early off a clue i was enthusiastic about

alright, good thread everyone, see you next year

[Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone]

my favorite question was the one that made me feel really good about myself because i got it super early off a clue i was enthusiastic about

alright, good thread everyone, see you next year

Just to be a contrarian, the best question I heard all year was the one from Listory on Argos that I negged first line.

[Cheynem]

Is CO Trash clear?

[Bosa of York]

I liked the questions at NSC about coffins in Moby-Dick and infinity in the works of Borges.

Which is to say,

my favorite question was the one that made me feel really good about myself because i got it super early off a clue i was enthusiastic about

[ProfessorIanDuncan]

Tossup on the Jews secretly controlling Israel from REDACTED.

[CPiGuy]

I quite liked the tossup on Bohemian Rhapsody at Penn Bowl that was written like a classical music tossup -- complete with score clues!

[bretthogan43]

The tossup on Harambe from West Point High School's SMART II was PRICELESS

[Wynaut]

11. During the premiere of this musical, its writer Franz Liebkind ran onstage to confront the audience but was accidentally knocked out despite his Wehrmacht helmet. For 10 points each:
[10] Name this musical within The Producers, an homage to the Nazi party which becomes a success despite the efforts of its producers, Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom, who intended it to flop as part of a scam.
ANSWER: Springtime for Hitler [do not accept The Producers]
[10] The real Hitler’s last spring was far from enjoyable. After this Waffen SS general refused to attack the 1st Belorussian Front, Hitler went on a tirade on April 22 where he declared that all was lost, as depicted in Downfall..
ANSWER: Felix Steiner
[10] In The Hitler Spring, this Italian poet described “an eternal angel passed in flight” and engulfed by “an eerie emptiness lit and festooned with swastikas.” He also wrote the collection Cuttlefish Bones.
ANSWER: Eugenio Montale

[Auks Ran Ova]

Is CO Trash clear?

yes

[SpanishSpy]

Is the UVA Novice tournament clear? If so I have one from that.

[Bosa of York]

The novice tournament at UVA was on an NAQT Collegiate Novice set, which is not clear.

[Mike Bentley]

I don't have a good enough memory to remember the best quizbowl questions I played, but the favorite clue I wrote myself is the leadin to this John Carmack question:

13. As a kid, this person's plan to steal Apple IIs ("twos") by melting school windows with homemade thermite was foiled when a chubby friend got stuck. An algorithm invented by Sim Dietrich but popularized by this man increments and decrements the depth fail to more realistically render shadows in realtime and is known as his namesake "Reverse". A team led by this man developed a streaming algorithm to load 32k by 32k graphics into only 8 MB of memory. Video has recently surfaced of this (*) MegaTexture developer's PC port of Mario 3, which used a character from Dangerous Dave. This man's current company was sued by ZeniMax on the basis that Palmer Luckey's pretty-crappy prototype sucked until this man, still a ZeniMax employee at the time, fixed it. This Ferrari enthusiast worked at Softdisk with John Romero and is now CTO for the Oculus Rift. For 10 points, name this legendary Id Software programmer who helped make Doom.
ANSWER: John Carmack <2>

[Auroni]

Matt Bollinger's CO tossup on Layla and Majnun, a topic of tremendous importance to the Islamic artistic world. Dude's still got it.

19. This legend was first translated into English by Isaac D’Israeli, father of Benjamin Disraeli. One character in this legend gashes his blanched arm in several spots to extract one drop of blood because a fat man ate his lunch every day for months. Another character in this legend dies the instant she realizes her half-dead acquaintance has fused with a Saharan tree. The male lead in this legend rests his head on an ass and his feet on a gazelle, while living naked in a cave. In this legend, the basis for the third poem of the Khamsa, a man retreats to the wilderness in his ecstatic love for a woman whose name means (*) “Night,” whom he never manages to touch until after death. After reading a translation of Nizami’s treatment of this legend, Lord Byron dubbed it the “Romeo and Juliet of the East.” For 10 points, name this Persian legend about Qays ibn al-Mulawwah, who goes mad over his love for his cousin.
ANSWER: Layla and Majnun [or Majnun Layla]

[Tejas]

Culture of Improvement had many great questions, but this one stood out for me.

20. This man operated Mississippi's first luxury motel, where guests could pay to have a crow named Jim Crow pick the coin from their cuff. On May 7th, 1931 this man was driving a car from Hell's Half-Acre which got into a gunfight with Matt Stewart, who was painting over a rival's service-station ad. While this man was on an unsuccessful trip to Australia to cure his swearing habit, Pete Harman reverse-engineered his best-known product. This man got screwed when his business was bought by Smirnoff distributors Heublein Inc. After handshake deals, (*) restaurant owners would receive packets of a key component of his product. This man supposedly cursed the Hanshin Tigers and was a mentor of a young Dave Thomas. In recognition of this man's charity work in Corbin, Governor Ruby Laffoon awarded this man an honorific title. Recently, this man has been played by Norm McDonald and Jim Gaffigan. For 10 points, name this founder and mascot of KFC.
ANSWER: Colonel Sanders [or Harland David Sanders; prompt on The Colonel] <1>

[The Ununtiable Twine]

Is CO Trash clear?

yes

Your bonus on Roland Garros was priceless.

[Fado Alexandrino]

- Stuff from [REDACTED] that were so extreme they were redacted before posting
- A Culture of Improvement was great and I am looking forward to the next set. The Colonel Sanders and Startup L. Jackson tossups stood out the most.

[fett0001]

I quite liked the tossup on Bohemian Rhapsody at Penn Bowl that was written like a classical music tossup -- complete with score clues!

I hadn't seen this, till now. I thought this tossup was pretty cool, however, I'm wondering where the Cavalleria Rusticana clue came from. I can't seem to find anything other than a single paragraph on Wikipedia(cited as Original research?), and I'd like to find more on it.

[RexSueciae]

It's a real shame that both EFT and Terrapin aren't eligible for discussion in this thread since both, to the best of my knowledge, are not yet clear. (Side note: come on, lads, it's an early fall tournament and we're now in early winter, d'you see?) They had some good questions. Then there's questions that, while likely clear, haven't been officially posted online (e.g. Listory, 2016 Festivus). I don't care about formally nominating things in the manner of the other threads, but if we're doing that, I suggest holding off until the summer, either before or after the planned summer open (MCAT, this year) depending on what your definition of (academic) "year" would be.

But I'm not planning on taking this thread all that seriously. Squeaking in just a day before the year's out, here's a yarn about this one question that made me feel really good about myself because I got it super early. I actually did some calculations just now to figure out how many questions I've played since entering college. Six thousand questions swallowed by the hound. Sayonara questions! Okay here comes my story now.

--

It was in the spring of 2016 in the scenic town of College Park and MYSTERIUM was in full swing. Now, most tournaments that I've played, I would be hard-pressed to tell you specific things about unless I were consulting my own notes, or maybe looking over a copy of the questions, because I'm actually pretty bad at most kinds of information retrieval. However, MYSTERIUM was at least somewhat special, because that semester the Virginia A team had not really gotten the chance to play many things together. (We'd staffed Regs, played DII SCT, aaand that was pretty much it due to a whole bunch of schedule things going on.) Essentially, this was the one opportunity we had to play together at regular difficulty before nationals. It was like the West High Knights not being able to practice before their big game against the Wildcats in High School Musical 3, but without the singing and the basketball.

Many people don't care that much about their stats. The low-scoring players are enjoying their niche subjects and humming loudly trying to take their minds off the fact that they're barely on the board, while the aging superstar dinosaurs generally have better things to worry about, like arguing on the forums about changes to the distribution or putting together enough credits to graduate within the next decade. Anyways, I'm pretty sure I was clinging to that first thing because for some reason MYSTERIUM just really wasn't my day. My occasional habit of falling asleep during games probably did not help. (I am much better now and have no idea why I felt drowsy in the past. I blame a combination of unknown undiagnosed illness and me staying up late reading things and listening to music that does not come up in quizbowl.) Heading into Round 9, my dear friend and teammate Eric Xu intimated to me that this round, I had better power something. Or maybe it was Jack who said that. Come to think of it, it was both who were pelting me with friendly verbal barbs, both then and for the past nine rounds.

And then the first tossup is a "Mythology/Other" tossup on Crusader Kings.

Now, there's been better-written questions that I've played, or more interesting. There's questions that I've sat and listened to, and thought "huh, that's cool, I should go home and learn this." But nothing will ever top that glorious moment when, literally seconds after being chastised for not scoring enough, I discovered that I had with me the devil's own luck.



edit, several days later: apparently my memory is worse than I thought -- our MYSTERIUM team wasn't the current A team because Lawrence wasn't there, I stand corrected, but that's a minor detail in this story

[1.82]

I was delighted by this question from the Oklahoma/Brown packet at this year's Regionals:

A thinker who is most famously associated with this practice held a widely attended and acclaimed Prayer for Interfaith Peace, which he then followed up with a somewhat less-acclaimed prayer to terminate the Jews before they could destroy al-Aqsa. Among the tricky parts of this practice is encountering problematic noons, which can be merged or converted. This action is termed khatm when it concludes with “al-Nas” or “the People.” The rules for performing this action are known as tajweed, and those who could perform it in its entirety were known by the title hafiz. “Al-Fatiha” is the most commonly used text for this action, as it is recited in every salaah. For 10 points, identify this action in which a Muslim speaks aloud from the Islamic holy text.
ANSWER: reciting the Qur’an [accept reading the Qur’an]

Having spent much of my life dealing with the rules of tajweed, hearing about problematic noons was wonderful. I also thought the clue about khatm was interesting since it was designed to be useful for people who know that Nas is the last chapter of the Qur'an. Tossups should continue to be written like this to reward my flawlessly real Islam knowledge.

[bluejay123]

"putting together enough credits to graduate within the next decade."

"My occasional habit of falling asleep during games probably did not help."

Haha, thanks for making my day.

[wcheng]

I was delighted by this question from the Oklahoma/Brown packet at this year's Regionals:

A thinker who is most famously associated with this practice held a widely attended and acclaimed Prayer for Interfaith Peace, which he then followed up with a somewhat less-acclaimed prayer to terminate the Jews before they could destroy al-Aqsa. Among the tricky parts of this practice is encountering problematic noons, which can be merged or converted. This action is termed khatm when it concludes with “al-Nas” or “the People.” The rules for performing this action are known as tajweed, and those who could perform it in its entirety were known by the title hafiz. “Al-Fatiha” is the most commonly used text for this action, as it is recited in every salaah. For 10 points, identify this action in which a Muslim speaks aloud from the Islamic holy text.
ANSWER: reciting the Qur’an [accept reading the Qur’an]

Having spent much of my life dealing with the rules of tajweed, hearing about problematic noons was wonderful. I also thought the clue about khatm was interesting since it was designed to be useful for people who know that Nas is the last chapter of the Qur'an. Tossups should continue to be written like this to reward my flawlessly real Islam knowledge.

That being said, this tossup's leadin seemed extremely flawed to me, mechanically speaking, when I came across it again while studying. (The rest of the tossup seems pretty good, though.) If I'm understanding the leadin correctly, it refers to this guy, and a quick skim of his Wikipedia article reveals several issues:

1. The prayer about "[terminating] the Jews" didn't follow the Prayer for Interfaith Peace; it actually came before it chronologically. It just so happens to be that it follows the prayer for interfaith peace in his Wikipedia article. Not only is this factually wrong, but this seems like a pretty "fake" clue to me.
2. What does "most famously associated with this practice" even mean? Sure, he's a famous reciter of the Qur'an, but that can't possibly be the only thing he's "associated" with. (I'm ignoring the "most famously" since that's an entirely arbitrary distinction.)
3. The leadin as a whole seems unnecessarily difficult. You have to know detailed information about a relatively obscure religious figure who isn't even named, and then connect him to reciting the Qur'an. I think that this tossup could have been better served (and would have been no less real) if the leadin was just something straightforward about his recitations.

[The Stately Rhododendron]

I liked the question about my dad

[Auks Ran Ova]

I liked the question about my dad

how'd that one play out for you

[Good Goblin Housekeeping]

I liked the question about my dad

how'd that one play out for you

is your dad a cloud

[SpanishSpy]

One I did like that I know is clear - the bonus on Williamsburg from ACF Fall that mentioned my College. My team looked each other in great satisfaction as it was read to us.

[browen]

As a former extremely enthusiastic professional cycling fan, I enjoyed reminiscing my former fandom via the common link question from CO Trash on Alexandre Vinokourov and Jerry Vinokurov. This was despite the fact that I negged Vinokourov with Andy Schleck, the winner of Liege-Bastogne-Liege the year prior to Vino's victory.

[Sima Guang Hater]

As a former extremely enthusiastic professional cycling fan, I enjoyed reminiscing my former fandom via the common link question from CO Trash on Alexandre Vinokourov and Jerry Vinokurov. This was despite the fact that I negged Vinokourov with Andy Schleck, the winner of Liege-Bastogne-Liege the year prior to Vino's victory.

Yeah I want to nominate this one.

I was actually reading this question to Jerry's team, and I hadn't read the answerline before I started reading the question (my document was scrolled such that only the first 3/4 of the tossup was visible). About halfway through I thought to myself "hey that sounds like something Jerry would write on the internet." Then I scrolled down and struggled mightily to keep it together while reading the rest of the tossup, which got all the way past the FTP before Jerry beat Greg Peterson to a buzzer race and just pointed to himself.