They've been ratcheting up the specialty "educated" games for the last couple of weeks while still keeping the general games on the "piss easy unless it's about pop culture in which case it's obscurantist to the max" level (when was the last time you ever saw a single throw away distractor on TV or pop, or less than two on anything that required you to crack a book more challenging than Dick and Jane?).

I agree with you for the most part, but I think confirmation bias might play a role here. You and I have the same general strengths and weaknesses, i.e., we're better at more academic questions and worse with pop culture. I have often made the same complaint, that the distractors are ridiculous on questions I know and the distractors on pop culture often all seem plausible. That said, I think it's entirely possible that for many of the academic questions that I know in advance, there are three or four good distractors. I say it's possible, as I often don't even pay attention to the wrong answers. For that matter, it's possible that the distractors are ridiculous on some of the pop culture questions that I do know in advance. I am going to make an effort for a couple of weeks to pay attention to both situations.