Learned Lag: Recent Episodes
George Stankow
We play Learned League, the greatest trivia competition in all the land. Each day, we run through the questions and how we arrived at the answers (or at least, how we arrived at our answers).
George legit forgot about the new season until like 9AM, which is possibly the latest he's ever opened the questions.
Coincidentally, Punchboard published a guide to trick-takers today. https://punchboard.co.uk/guide-to-trick-taking-games/
Just ignore all that stuff at the end where George is totally wrong about the schedule.
Lot of background noises possible today (he said, glaring around the room at various living things).
Once you realized which side the "heroes" of that "Western in space" show had been on, the allegory got real rancid.
We don't know what weirdo downloaded every episode yesterday, but it got us over 275,000 total downloads, for which we thank you all.
George probably should have known he was on a couple of wrong tracks when four of his answers started with D.
Those books are "This Way Up: When Maps Go Wrong (And Why It Matters)" by Mark Cooper-Jones and Jay Foreman, and "A History of the World in 47 Borders: The Stories Behind the Lines on Our Maps" by Jonn Elledge.
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Google would tell you that football (soccer) is the king of sports, but does football have it on their logo? They. Do. Not.
Content Warning: Medical Issues, Pet Loss
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Fun fact about Bill & Ted: Rufus never tells them his name. They tell themselves his name.
On the plus side, "Demi Adejuyigbe Is Going to Do One (1) Backflip" on Dropout is aMAZing.
Hope you weekend went well, and also that part of your Monday that you devote to beating Thorsten.
Look, some days you're just not going to know about... lots of stuff. But keep pushing.
George doesn't know "threnody" because he's classy, but because it was the name of an X-Men character.
Jitney, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Fences, Joe Turner's Come and Gone, The Piano Lesson, Two Trains Running, Seven Guitars, King Hedley II, Gem of the Ocean, and Radio Golf.
Always remember, "That's a weird way of saying that..." is usually the biggest clue Thorsten drops.
The rest of the week is dependent on Amanda's voice holding out and George not sinking into trivia-induced melancholy.
Yeah, we missed a day. But did you have a party with a bounce house? I didn't think so.
Coolidge was kind of an unfair pin, because he was a "former vice president" in the sense that he was the actual president in 1924 because Harding died.
They probably "only" made like $300 million, but then the other teams bought them out for maybe half a billion in 2014.
You know how they determined the geographic center of the United States? They cut a big piece of cardboard and moved it around on a pin until it balanced.
Seriously, why were there so many sitcoms that looked like documentaries with no explanations?
George categorically refuses to learn French things, Vietnamese things, or female artists.
See if you can tell where we had to pause because George always forgets not to drink milk before recording.
Amanda inverts her categories, and a layup for the Australians in one of George's worst areas doesn't help.
Nice to see you. You look good. Have you been walking more? Drinking water? Whatever you're doing, it's working.
There are too many Hawaiian islands these days. Please eliminate three. P.S. I am not a crackpot.
Apparently, the main defense against theft is bolting a plate to the bottom of your car.
Also, that painting is probably in that museum but it's been stolen so many times that who really knows for sure?
David Pilkey goes by "Dav" but pronounces it "Dave" because it's a joke about a nametag maker that broke when he worked at Pizza Hut.
The song was on a Wham! album but the single is credited to George Michael. Sure, that makes sense.
The Ayatollah regime actually adopted the crescent, but reserves the right to use the lion.
We genuinely do not edit out the vast majority of the nonsense. Y'all get all of it. Like it or not.
Let it be known that we don't actually mind concepts coming up again several years later. It's nice to know that we're kind of learning stuff, though.
Sometimes you have to go with the first thing you think of because your brain is smarter than you are.
We're back on track as far as time, at least. This season's been weird, y'all. Election stuff is in the air making everything bad.
George did not have COVID, and in fact whatever it was hit him worse than that time he did have COVID.
We did manage to take a walk today, but breathing at each other over the microphone is still too much of a risk. Mask up, folks.
She's feeling better but still hasn't tested negative, so we're being careful...ish. Have a good weekend, and don't sell your labor cheap.
...except the several times George had to restart the whole thing, and the several other times he had to restart various questions.
Is this one quiet? The peaks seemed lower than usual on the screen. George probably boned something up yesterday when trying to figure out what wasn't working. Please advise.
Oh, also, we just forgot to do the private rundles this season. It's been a long month that went by real fast, you know?
...and also late. But it was The Church. Who knows how much longer they're going to be touring? Totally worth it.
Have a good hiatus, all. Study up on that thing you're bad at. Unless it's math.
George is very much of the age where he can't do an all-nighter. At all. Not even close.
West hated the Celtics so much that he would rather die than see them win the championship again.
President-Elect Sheinbaum was previously the Head of Government of Mexico City, which is rather more proportionally important than Mayor of Washington D.C.
Whoops, forgot the "thing you might need to know". It was going to be about golf. So, study golf.
Tough day, but don't let it get you down. At least you weren't getting booed at the Libertarian National Convention.
Thorsten should make up one question per season, put a fake Wikipedia page up just for that day, and then throw out anyone who gets it right.
We took out the really egregious violations of Rule 3, but see if you can tell when the cat plopped down right in front of us and proceeded to... we'll say "clean herself vigorously".
Sadly, "Horse Feathers" is not streaming anywhere (legally), but George does in fact have it on DVD, so come on by and we'll watch it this weekend.
Sushi Go! is a great gateway game for the hobby; if you're at all interested in moving beyond the classics, give it a try.
George briefly considered answering "Moulin Rouge's Spectacular Spectacular!" but he cannot bring himself to not take at least a little chance on getting it right.
Eva Longoria and Jeff Bridges are who George was thinking of, and Bridges did not win the Oscar.
Cat sounds! Phone alarms! It must be your favorite zero-budget-and-barely-any-more-effort recap podcast!
We're watching Jeopardy again because the writers are back.
Cookies available at https://digitalcookie.girlscouts.org/scout/gloria392003
Cookies still at https://digitalcookie.girlscouts.org/scout/gloria392003 .
Only one more day left. Let the questions percolate through your brain.
This is how extemporaneous the show is -- replace all mentions of "Truman" with "LBJ". We respect you all too much to lie to you and re-record that part.
Amanda was right -- that was the Thanksgiving painting. Also, "Hop!" is Air France's regional subsidiary.
When you're in the Army, you don't sing the song that much. You also don't constantly run in formations, and there aren't tanks rumbling down normal streets all the time.
Have a happy Thanksgiving if you're American, and a happy curiously non-LL five-day period if you're not.
It's the holiday season. Take some time for yourself. Check in on your friends. Let people check in on you. You are loved, by us at least. Thank you for listening.
George will refrain from pointing out that The Sound and the Fury was Faulker, not Hemingway.
The other lands visited by Gulliver were Balnibarbi, Glubbdubdrib, Luggnagg, and... Japan.
Writing that song in 15 minutes is an achievement on par with Dolly Parton writing "Jolene" and "I Will Always Love You" on the same day.
Amanda notes that New York and Shakespeare are both referenced in the song from "The Music Man".
George was late to a class because of the filming of that damn movie, and he also didn't like the result.
Grandmaster Flash was, in fact, the DJ of the group, which makes sense, because you really just need the one.
There is no trophy. There is no scarf. There is no sash. There is only probably one really easy defense day.
Congrats to those who rose, well wishes to those who remained, consolations to those who got relegated.
Well, now George is somehow more confused at that "beating your swords" thing, because it seems awfully specific.
George was legit boggled when Amanda first told him how she figured out the radio frequency.
A frog is the part of a violin bow where you can tighten the bowstrings. And Israel is formally a State, not a Republic.
+3 Relic slots
+100% Religious Tourism from this city
+1 Food, +1 Production, and +1 Culture on all Tundra tiles for this city
The XYZ Affair was when the US almost went to war with France in the Adams administration. Hamilton skipped over it.
We're doing two Private Rundles again!
LearnedLaag (if you want to be in Amanda's rundle)
LearnedLagg (if you want to be in George's rundle)
Registration Code: Rule3ShutUpCat
George is particularly mad when he actually knows a useless thing that he shouldn't know.
The flower is also the origin of the name of the shears, because of its serrated edges.
It's an operetta, but the writers referred to their work as "comic opera" because "operettas" at the time were generally bawdy French sex farces.
"Austria Declares War On Serbia Declares War On Germany Declares War On France Declares War On Turkey Declares War On Russia Declares War On Bulgaria Declares War On Britain"
"Ottoman Empire Almost Declares War On Self"
The other thing Amanda couldn't remember was that Dennis Miller made a joke about how "Under Pressure" was a great song and someone could probably just take the hook from it and have a big hit.
Other reasons to get Peacock: "Girls5Eva", but that might be moving to Netflix, and "Killing It", but you have to like Craig Robinson.
Here's the second one, from Thursday's questions. We used the lack of cable to start up on the new "Quantum Leap". It's not bad.
Hi! Sorry we're so late. There was a blackout, and an internet outage. We'll upload one a day over the weekend probably.
Sometimes, you can't really tell what Amanda is thinking, but I assure you that in this one, you very much can.
Amanda is the better person, but George writes these descriptions and wants you to know that she thinks she's better than you too. You gonna take that from her?
George was way off on the etymology of "orange". He knows this but constantly forgets it.
The human brain processes words based on the start and the end, so "Haydn's Messiah" is, neurologically speaking, perfectly valid.
Okay, so from about 8:30 to about 14:20 is just us gushing about that show, so you can fast-forward through it. Use the time you save to watch an episode.
When you find yourself thinking "This will definitely be a question next season..." you really should remember that thing.
If you go far enough southwest, eventually you'll get to Jamaica. Just don't tarry in the Philippines.
George broke the notification system because it couldn't believe he actually won a match this season.
The podcast about the board game "Votes for Women" is Beyond Solitaire. The game will soon be available via Fort Circle Games, www.fortcircle.com.
Hello, new listeners!
Rule 1 -- Read every word in the question.
Rule 2 -- Read every word not in the question.
Rule 3 -- Shut up, cat.
Rule 4 -- Thorsten wants you to get it right.
The tune for that "Glory, glory, hallelujah" song was apparently the only one that existed in America in the 1860s.
Honestly, George gets SO MANY ANSWERS by just saying, over and over, words in the clue and "dah dah dah" after them.
Sometimes you can really tell that we never, ever rehearse, and very infrequently rewind.
George also got 5/5 on School of Trivia today. Check out School of Trivia, by Alex Jacob.
It really is a much better show than it deserves to be for a third bite of the same apple.
The Telugu film industry (or Tollywood) is actually bigger than Bollywood in India by total box office.
It's weird, right? That you could pull U.P. out of India and it would be the fifth-largest country in the world, and India would still be the second-largest country in the world by far.
George won't admit that he saw Mamma Mia! on Broadway and in the theaters on opening night.
Fun fact: Jenga blocks are engineered intentionally IM-precisely, to make the game less predictable.
Amanda looks to tie up the series, while George looks to get his phone repaired so he can play at all.
May their memories be blessings. May the sharpness and the weight of grief fade. May their murderers open their eyes. May they be the last, or at least the first of the last.
"Vitruvian Man" refers to the proportions delineated by Vitruvius, who was an architect of people too.
See whether you can identify the moment that our teenaged son lost a video game on an entirely different floor.
Congratulations to Amanda for joining the Ketteman Club, not forfeiting a single game ever in 20 seasons.
Okay, seriously, you can easily skip from 7:17 all the way to 14:55 if you don't want to hear the weirdest tangent we have ever gone on.
The Lincoln Center was named after Kennedy's secretary, and the Kennedy Center was named after Lincoln's secretary.
When we start getting questions about Aeon's End expansion sets, it's all over for you people.
It really is quite ridiculous how many Spanish language and Mexican history questions George can trace to Lucha Underground.
It's actually from the Greek-to-Latin basanites, but Pliny accidentally wrote basalten. Stupid Pliny.
The second one starred Annabella Sciorra, which makes it all the more surprising that George never saw it.
Lincoln probably did not have Marfan syndrome, but may have had a related genetic condition that does not have an interesting name.
Seriously, though, boilermakers are disgusting and pointless and you might as well just hook up an IV of alcohol while you drink something that's actually good.
Someone thought George would know Benin, but not Godzilla. And he took that personally.
Spend the time off studying up on your worst category. Except don't do that, because obviously you hate that category.
George was very, very close to answering that "commercial enterprise" question with "WAS IT ANOTHER [expletive] GOLF HOLE THORSTEN?"
Whamageddon is a competition to see who can go the longest without hearing "Last Christmas" after December 1st. George lost this year at the Walgreen's waiting for the six-year-old's second vaccination.
The stuff is named for the bug, but the bug might be named after a number, or a color, or the number might be named for the bug because it was that color... it's all a mess.
Note to self: check questions for tomorrow before uploading this one.
Also, check out bit.ly/lrndlg-avcx .
We recorded this during halftime of the Pac-12 Championship Game (Go Ducks!).
[They did not go.]
State Farm should be leaning more on its connections with Depression-era foreign policy.
And the stadium was publicly financed, because of course the Ford family couldn't come up with two nickels to rub together. The worst thing about football is everything.
I mean, come on. Gérard Depardieu as Columbus? Orlando Bloom as a crusader? Russell Crowe as Robin Hood? Scott has had enough stinkers to fill an ODS.
It's good to see the "Oh, I know this Jeopardy question because it was just on LearnedLeague!" pipeline going the other way every now and then.
Keno comes from China, where instead of numbers, they use characters from a classic poem.
Amanda initially read it as "Stemutation". That is not the first time that bad kerning has (almost) screwed one or more of us up, so read unfamiliar words closely.
That "album name in hexadecimal" question was LL84MD16, March 11th, 2020 -- the last day George went to the office before lockdown. It's been a hell of a 20 months, ain't it.
Profanity warning: F-word at 6:51.
Welcome to a new season! May your coin always land right and may you always KI rather than D.
"Kowloon" means "nine dragons": eight mountains and the last emperor of the Song dynasty.
Corvette Summer is a perfectly acceptable Teenager In Over His Head movie, and it also has Annie Potts.
Dixie Carter got zero nominations for Designing Women, y'all. Zee. Roe. Its only Emmy win was for Best Hairstyling.
Oh hey, here's another podcast to listen to: How LearnedLeague founder Thorsten A. Integrity writes trivia questions. (slate.com)
The Tour de France does use cumulative-time scoring, but the 2020 winner "only" took about 87 hours.
George is the grandson of a furrier, but had neither opportunity nor inkling to enter the family business.
Isamu Akasaki (who died earlier this year), Hiroshi Amano, and Shuji Nakamura received the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the invention of efficient blue light-emitting diodes which has enabled bright and energy-saving white light sources".
Also, Digimon is a Tamagotchi knockoff, with the addition of inter-device combat. It was invented and marketed as the "boys'" version of Tamagotchi.
It stands for "Confederation Of North, Central America, and Caribbean Association Football". Points off for using the O from "of".
The actress who won the Tony for Oklahoma! is Ali Stroker, who played Ado Annie, a role originated by... that's right, Celeste Holm.
Vacation was nice, especially the part where George didn't have to talk about Amanda smoking him 6(5)-3(3).
This one's really all over the map. Watch the Ted Lasso Christmas episode if you need to.
An animal named after the Greek terms for broad and foot? Perry the animal named after the Greek terms for broad and foot?!?
This is why George never goes for Best Wrong Answer -- sometimes the only word you know is the word Thorsten is looking for, despite it being nonsense.
And we have quibbles! Of course! Also, if you got Q1 wrong, consider yourself lucky because then you didn't have that one line going through your head all day.
George is safe from relegation, and Amanda needs a win and a particular person to forfeit to climb out of the red. We don't like the odds.
We were out at bar trivia (we won) and came home to a large amount of spilled water on George's part of the couch. How was your hardest-day-of-the-season?
The other auction George was thinking of is the Vickrey auction, which is a sealed-bid auction where the second-highest bidder wins. It won Vickrey the Nobel Prize.
In point of fact, Robeson was not allowed to leave the US due to his communist leanings.
Other things new people are told to get: grid squares, chem-light batteries, left-handed wrenches.
Some day when there's a Sopranos question, George will probably talk about how it's all tangled up with his first marriage. So hope for no more Sopranos questions ever.
If you have Peacock, you should watch We Are Lady Parts. That doesn't have anything to do with LL or the podcast. It's just really good.
For those of you not in the Midwest, Amanda differentiating "Big Ten" from "B1G" refers to the rebranding of the Big Ten Conference after it expanded to 14 teams.
The second living person to have an element named for them was Yuri Oganessian; oganesson is the heaviest confirmed element and the only synthetic noble gas (but may be a solid at room temperature).
While editing this, we turned on Peacock to watch The Amber Ruffin Show, and it wanted us to choose an avatar for our account. One of the choice was ET, so I guess that's where that's streaming nowadays.
No one's really certain what Merrick had, but he might have had some form of elephantiasis arising from his condition.
The sequel to the Bill Haley movie was called Don't Knock the Rock. It was remade just a few years later as Twist Around the Clock, which itself had a sequel named Don't Knock the Twist, which is really stretching it.
See if you can detect when George had to walk over to the basement door and shut up one of the cats.
It was in fact probably ten times worse of a famine than the Holodomor, just for the record.
George doesn't know whether 221B Baker Street existed at the time, but it's a tourist trap Holmes museum now.
Seriously, if anyone wants to point us to an explainer on how the hell Broadway economics works, we will read the hell out of that.
The book Amanda's mom read was Unbroken, which is about a WWII POW, but he was not a survivor of that particular ship.
George was kind of right, in that she has also discovered a lot of the other thing. Like... 800 of them.
The name of the bird comes from the Latin for that particular bird, which is derived from the Greek for that particular bird, which comes from the Egyptian for... yeah, it's just that bird again. Someone looked at once once and it's just been called that name for five thousand years.
Despite his protestations, this is actually the 11th Classical Music question that George has gotten right in a row -- he hasn't missed one since reading The Classical Music Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained from DK. It's still his worst category, though, so you should at least give them a 2 for when he reverts to the mean.
This is our eighth meeting, seven of which have been in even-numbered seasons. George leads the series 3-0-4 before today.
We were probably thinking subconsciously of Roy Kent, who is a footballer on Ted Lasso, which is one of the best shows in the entire world.
"Ramadan" is in the Fables & Reflections collection, along with the superlative "Three Septembers and a January".
Closing out a firmly Meh first week with a couple of firmly Bleahperformances. Hope your weekend goes better that our week did.
George gave his MoviePass card to Amanda so she could see it. A week later, MoviePass made it so you couldn't see the same movie more than once on the same card. Sorry about that.
Prospero Hall makes the Top Gun Strategy Game, so that kinda links up those questions, except it doesn't. Also, the Top Gun Strategy Game consists of two phases: volleyball and dogfighting. It is awesome.
It took Amanda 10 hours to get that answer, and we're going to talk you through every. damn, minute of it.
Wherein George rants about his weird Ukraine problem and strange topology terminology.
Happy holidays, all. Get some rest. See you in February.
We don't consider ourselves cultured for not watching Glee, it just didn't hit us at the right time. We haven't seen Avatar either, for pretty much the same reason.