Pandemic Journal, Day 617

This morning, I awoke to the happy news that I’d been victorious in yesterday’s Learned League match, despite my best efforts to the contrary.

I knew three of the questions immediately (answers at the end of this post):

Q3: The “city” of Nuuk (technically an illoqarfik and formerly known as Godthåb) is the most populous city on what island?

Q4: Belfast-born physicist and mathematician William Thomson, who is widely credited with clarifying the thermodynamic concept of absolute zero and determining its correct value, was elevated to the peerage in 1892, becoming 1st Baron what?

Q5: What was the last name of the patriarch and self-made millionaire who was the first chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1934, chair of the powerful US Maritime Commission in 1937, and the US Ambassador to the United Kingdom in 1938?

The other three were less obvious to me.

Q1: H.R.3684, a $1 trillion bill that was passed by the 117th Congress after a bipartisan vote in the US House of Representatives on November 5, 2021, is officially known as the [REDACTED] Investment and Jobs Act. What word has been redacted?

My thought process here was straightforward: that’s the infrastructure bill; it’s part of the recovery effort, so, of course, it’s going to be named the American Investment and Jobs Act, to match the American Rescue Plan Act.

Q2: One of 20th-century author Mohammad-Ali Jamalzadeh’s first successful short stories””a genre in which he is regarded as a master””was titled “Farsi shakar ast”, which translates to English as “_____ is Sugar” (fill in the blank).

I had no idea on this one at first; I knew “Farsi” was the language spoken in Iran (Persia), but that seemed too obvious. Then I noticed “regarded as a master” and used that as a springboard to my answer: Chess.

The last question puzzled me at first until the pattern jumped out at me:

Q6: Rebecca Rabbit, Suzy Sheep, and Danny Dog are among the close friends of what cheeky animated British ungulate? (Full name required.)

I was surprised that my opponent missed that one, since he lives in England. I’ve never seen the show in question, but I’d seen it mentioned online, and that was enough to give me the answer and the match. I’ve been near the bottom of my Rundle all season, flirting with the relegation line, so every victory is crucial. Thanks, Peppa Pig (and thanks to ChrisTheDude at English Wikipedia for the photo)!

Answers:

Q1: Infrastructure (duh!)
Q2: Persian (duh!)
Q3: Greenland
Q4: Kelvin
Q5: Kennedy (asked on November 22!)
Q6: Peppa Pig

Pandemic Journal, Day 616

I spent most of the day editing videos for the speech I gave tonight at the Silicon Valley Storytellers – I used excerpts from Galaxy Quest as the basis for a “humorous keynote speech” talking about some lessons on behavior one could learn from the movie.

The meeting started at 7, and I was still futzing with videos at 6 – I wanted to show multiple clips with just a few seconds of black screen between, but when I used QuickTime Player to put them together, I found that the audio vanished after the first inserted black segment. I didn’t have time to debug the problem; instead, I decided to go in and out of screen share mode in Zoom between clips – this was distracting to the audience, and made me spend far too much time looking down at the keyboard instead of at the camera.

My timing was off, too (partially because the transitions between segments and speaking took longer than I’d expected, but mostly because I hadn’t completely written the speech), so I didn’t have time to provide a proper summary at the end.

Despite all that, the speech got a pretty good reception – I was the only speaker, so everyone had a chance to give me a verbal evaluation, unlike the usual Toastmasters pattern of one verbal evaluator per speech.

Lessons learned: don’t let the tech take over; pay more attention to the actual speech objectives; never give up, never surrender!