(NOT the Kaline) Katabatics

My second-most-time-consuming-league is the Learned League, a trivia league Ryan and I (and 10,000+ other people) play in.  I learn stuff in that league, as I did on this, the 5th of Friday’s 6 questions:

See? Just by reading this I learned that “katabatic” means “downward”.  I guess (with lots of confidence) that it is the Greek opposite to “acrobatic”.  I know “acro” means high because the Acropolis, I know from somewhere, means “high city”, because it sits on a hill over the ancient part of Athens. From that I surmised an “acrobat” must be someone who does his batics up high.  I considered the possibility  synchronized swimmers might be “katabats” — we always look down to watch them perform — and the answer might thus be “swimming.”  But I had just recently watched my quadrennial two minutes of Olympic synchronized swimming and never heard them called “katabats”, and while synchronized swimming at its best might be phenomenal, I don’t think it’s ever really been a phenomenon.  

Also, question 3 on the same day was explicitly about synchronized swimming.  The guy who runs Learned League, my fellow league commissioner Thorsten A. Integrity — a made up name, even better than Ron Mock —  would never put two questions about the same topic in one quiz.  

So it was time to draw on my subconscious.  Most of the day I waited for it to produce an answer, but the only thing it produced was a whisper.  Even less than that, a whisp, the faintest of perceptible tiny air movement, that I maybe once heard the word “katabatic”, that it had a hint of the catastrophic.  What could be a downward catastrophe?  An avalanche? A volcanic eruption?  A sinkhole? A maelstrom? How about a wind shear bringing down an airplane?  I could only maaaaaybe feel the whisp when I thought of wind shear.  So  I wrote “wind shear” for my answer. 

It was right! (Technically the answer was “wind” but Thorsten A. Integrity’s middle name is some Greek, or more likely Danish, word meaning “reasonably merciful”, so he counted “wind shear” as good enough.) 

Only 19% of the thousands of Llamas (Thorsten’s name for us Learned League members) got that one right. I’m surprised it was that many.  My opponent incorrectly believed it was a relatively easy question, so assigned it 1 point,  so I earned 1 point for listening to the wind whisper its name.  I correctly guessed it was the hardest question, so I  gave it 3 points … but my opponent also got it right, so I outsmarted myself, and we tied, even though I got 5 questions right and he only got 4. Somehow he knew I would have trouble identifying the 1970’s TV show with the catch phrase “Dyne-O-Mite!” I thought it was “The Jeffersons”, maybe.  It was “Good Times.” So I missed my 3 point question. (44% of Llamas got “Good Times”)

Now that I’ve dodged every probability on the planet and fascinated you with a story about someone else’s trivia league — the second deadliest topic after someone else’s fantasy league — here is the application to today’s results:   they were katabatic for most of us.  Which is news in a league a collective 261 games above .500. 

I am beginning to think we’re all a bunch of scaredy-cats, trying to avoid the mandatory Competitive Balance Expansion Draft that will kick in when we finish with the average EFL team having won more than 90 games.  Right now, if we play .500 ball from here on out, the average EFL team will win about 93 games.