From Becky, a Tuesday Trivia fan:

I’m preparing for an audition on Jeopardy! Do you have any study recommendations? Thank you!

I always hear the same recommendations when I ask this question of Jeopardy! veterans (I almost said Jeopardy! vets, but that sounds like the people that give Alex Trebek’s Chow his heartworm medicine). And I concur with their expert advice:

1. Don’t try to master the Jeopardy! subjects that intimidate you because you know nothing about them (opera, baseball, whatever). Forget those. Instead, look at Jeopardy! standbys you know but might be a little rusty on (world capitals, presidents, kings of England, etc.) and get them fresh in your mind.
2. Spend some quality time with The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, which has pithy, what-you-need-to-know capsules on thousands of Jeopardy! subjects. Mike Dupee’s How to Get on Jeopardy! . . . and Win! is also full of great lists and quizzes, but it’s sadly out of print.

Reader Emily got shafted!

I’d be very much interested to know your opinion concerning the ridiculous ending to the San Diego Academic League city championship. My school, Scripps Ranch High School, was playing La Jolla High School in the to-be-televised final match. To skip a half-hour of poorly-pronounced and vaguely-worded questions, I’ll summarize by saying that at the end of the match, the score was tied. The tiebreaker question asked, as best as I can recall, “Which country was the first to be established with the help of the United Nations?” One of my teammates buzzed in and answered Israel — this was ruled incorrect and the correct answer given as Libya, to the surprise of the team, our coaches, and our friends and parents sitting outside the TV studio. According to the tiebreaker rules, our wrong answer meant that we lost a point, and so the other team won the match.

However, we were sufficiently mystified by the answer “Libya” that upon our return home a few of us researched the question online. We found sources from the United Nations and the CIA World Factbook to suggest that Israel was, of course, founded before Libya (the former in 1948; the latter in 1951) and that both had been founded by UN resolution. We had the resolution number and citation for the Israel resolution. We lodged a formal protest the next day, but after a few days’ negotiation our protest was ruled against. The commissioner of the city league found some sources that seemed to indicate that Libya was the correct answer, and he mailed some computer-printed sheets to our coach. One of these sources was allegedly from the Encyclopedia Britannica (although there was no heading, URL or other clues to suggest that this was the case), and unequivocally stated that “Libya was the first country established by the United Nations.” The other source came from a website called “Debbie’s Encyclopedia,” the URL of which begins with “members.aol.com,” and says on the subject: “Libya was the first country to be established by the United Nations. It is the only nation with a single-colored flag. It’s green.” I’m pretty shocked that these unreliable sources were used to discount our sources that included United Nations resolutions, but the match was broadcast on Sunday and there was nothing we could do.

In your vast bank of knowledge and experience in quizbowl, Mr. Jennings, I’d just like to seek your professional opinion concerning the accuracy of this question. We can’t find any source to suggest that Libya would be the right answer, and really no conclusive information at all. Can you think of evidence for either side, or in your opinion is this just a poor question, particularly for a city tiebreaker?

You don’t need any particularly vast experience in quiz bowl to see that this question sucks, and that your “commissioner” is either a bit of a dim bulb or, more likely, doesn’t care much about the early history of the United Nations and just wants this to go away. My former BYU quiz bowl teammate Nephi lives in La Jolla. Maybe I should send him down there to put a rock with the Libyan flag on it through someone’s window.

This kind of disputed finish wasn’t uncommon in the college quiz bowl world when a similarly monolithic and complacent organization was running the show, but things are a lot better now that the prestigious tournaments are being run by player-organized groups like ACF and NAQT. Mistakes still happen, of course, but not they’re not made by unfeeling idiots.

I’m sorry to say there’s not really much you can do at this point, other than know in your heart of hearts that your team won the match. (Since the final was broacast on TV, you might be able to get a local journalist to write a human-interest story, but I doubt it’d change anything.) Your school may want to work with other schools to try to get this broken tournament fixed before next year. Obviously, you can’t just oust all the entrenched incompetents, but an easy fix might be to get better questions. NAQT, in particular, offers high-quality high school questions at outrageously low cost.

Bill$Dollar has a friend with an antenna and a beef.

“What unusual distinction is shared by these countries, and no others? Afghanistan, Australia, Burma, Canada, French Polynesia, India, Iran, Nepal, New Zealand, and Sri Lanka.” I sent this question to a friend with the hint following and he said you forgot Tonga. Nit, nit, nit. He DXes (listens to distant radio signals: FM, AM, TV) so he know this stuff.

Maybe poor Emily, above, can send your friend her copy of The CIA World Factbook. Tonga is on boring ol’ UTC+13 time last I checked.

Best subject line of the week: Gretchen wants to say

Apologies for mistakenly sending you fishing lure photos

Hey, no apologies necessary! Those were the best fishing lure photos I got all week. I’m serious; check these babies out.