I’m busy quite a lot of this week, and I know you lot like to chat about Uni Challenge and how fixed Only Connect is, so here is a post just for you.
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I’m busy quite a lot of this week, and I know you lot like to chat about Uni Challenge and how fixed Only Connect is, so here is a post just for you.
So, at which point do I gently poke at SPDFLGHT in the Physical Constants category? It’s not constant!!!!! Definitely not!!!
SPDFLGHTNVCM is however.
As we chatted to the Strategists afterwards, they wondered what would have happened if they’d have challenged for ‘Mme. Bovary’ on MMBVRY. I suspected it would have been denied: there’s a rule that says Missing Vowels questions will always use British English spellings except in direct quotes. David B?
I thought it was a fair shout of a challenge. Personally, I’d have probably allowed it or at the very least offered the chance to ditch it and use the spare.
(in a vacuum)
All physical constants are only constant in context. CCLRTNFFRFLL isn’t constant throughout the Universe (or even Earth) either but there is a published contestant value that is treated as invariant in various physical equations.
However, I am fuming at misspelling Bob Seger’s name wrongly. Arse.
Very true, on an Earth oriented basis, SPDFLGHT is the most variable. If it wasn’t we wouldn’t have pretty rainbows! Now that would be sad.
See the 3rd entry, the defn of g(n), on this page: http://bit.ly/cgjoCn
Surely that is what your Question Verifier is for, though? If not, then what does she do? (He said, trying to apportion away at least part of the blame.)
Another great episode – I much preferred this one to last week’s. The show has firmly got into the point where it offers the “blimey, I actually got one” sort of delight, at least for me; if the show ends up with higher ratings for its early episodes than for its later ones then that might explain why.
Bad luck, Tom! I fear that your confidence dropped half-way through the wall (I’d have got the “Three”s and nothing else) and you didn’t recover from that.
It wasn’t the verifier’s fault. It was correct on the official script, but for some reason it was wrong on the import spreadsheet. It’s my job to make sure that the data in both sets is the same.
>“blimey, I actually got one” sort of delight
This is a source of much debate. Given we had a longer run this time, we ‘reset’ to the kind of difficulty we had in series 1, which is about half a level down from before. People seemed to recognise this in the early episodes and enjoy the show more. However, I also think viewers have been enjoying these later episodes a lot (as the record figures show) and, coupled with the fact that people are getting better at the game too, this either ends up in a contradiction or that viewers like both ‘halves’ of the competition but for wildly different reasons.
From what I can tell on Twitter etc., most people’s experience of the show is that they might get one question from the first half of the show (2 on a good day), a connection or two from the wall, and half of the missing vowels.
Of course, the deciding factor is how many viewers are put off by the question difficulty versus how many people watch it purely because the questions are so hard. Since the first figure is impossible to measure, there is no real way of knowing.
Ooh, on the basis of the quarter final, I’d have lost a lot of money if you could bet on the outcome of Only Connect!
Amused that the board gamers couldn’t work out the Patience variations on the Connecting Wall – I saw Klondike and that was the first thing I thought of.
It was a fantastic game to play. My only regret is completely missing the opportunity to shout “bring on the wall” at Victoria Coren during the opening chat.
It was a great episode and I was convinced you’d win! It’s always nice to see people when they can answer the questions.
On Masterchef they’re cooking deep-fried curry for breakfast. Nice to see Glaswegian cuisine getting a look in.
BREAKFAST DOES NOT GET HARDER THAN THIS.
Incidentally, the actual General election is getting called tomorrow apparently, but I’m really busy this week so the Gameshow General Election will probably be started at the weekend.
Start it when parliament is dissolved, and as long as nobody apart from you reads this comment, it’ll look like you planned it that way all along.
Absoilutely brilliant! That’d be Monday morning then.
Reminder- Divided starts Tuesday- here’s an interview..
http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/tv/interviews/a212009/andrew-castle-divided.html
Good spot, I had forgotten about that completely.
I didn’t even know S could be a Roman Numeral until tonight- and bravo on the “US Presidents if they were monarchs” question…
No one’s talked about the Uni Chal final yet, so I may as well change that…
(SPOILERS MAY FOLLOW)
Emmanuel and Alex Guttenplan were the favourites, but who else didn’t expect that he’d single-handedly blow St John’s clean off the floor?
The Cambridge side were out of the blocks quickly, Guttenplan wasting no time in bringing up his half-century of starters, and they took the first picture round when he brilliantly recognised that Baile Atha Cliath is the Irish-language name for Dublin. They weren’t quite as brilliant on the bonuses, getting the languages right but not the English names of the towns.
At this point they led by 45, but in no time found themselves behind as their Oxford opponents picked up the next two starters and all six bonuses.
From then on, though, it really was The Guttenplan Show. He wasted no time in regaining the lead for his team, then proceeded to extend it, more and still more, with almost brutal ruthlessness. When the scoreline reached 215-75 after the second picture round, it was game over.
But Guttenplan didn’t stop, and St John’s could only get in two more starters, including one for their Aussie contestant, David Townsend, on New Zealand presidents. It at least took their score to treble figures, but it was mere consolation. It was inevitable that Emmanuel would pass 300, and they equalled their highest score right at the end as Guttenplan capped a true champion’s performance with his thirteenth starter of the night.
His final tally for the series was a mind-boggling 62, and while his average per match of 8.86 is short of Gail The Great’s 9.2, there is no question whatsoever that he is up there among her and the other finest contestants in UC’s history. In all fairness, it would have been something of a travesty if his team hadn’t won.
The more mundane stats: Emmanuel weren’t quite as spectacular on the bonuses, answering 29 out of 52 correctly with two penalties; St John’s got 12 of their 15 right, also with two penalties, and Townsend was their best buzzer with a mere three starters. Guttenplan’s dominance is further demonstrated by the fact that if his buzzes were the only points that Emmanuel scored, they’d have still won by 30.
Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy made it four years running that a lady has presented the trophy, and as the undoubted star of the series raised it high above his head, one couldn’t help but wonder if he knew – or at least had some idea – that Cambridge University had been waiting fifteen years for that moment. And, of course, Emmanuel had also done what Durham did a decade previously – becoming champs after losing their first-round match.
One gathers that it will be another July start for the next series – which I still think is too early from a viewer’s perspective. In the meantime, let’s hope that this time nothing crops up which will cause the press to get the result of this series needlessly altered…
*sighs*
Not meaning to look for attention here – but is interest in UC on this site at an all-time low or something?
I saw Alex Guttenplan walking through a college the other day. How’s that?
Everyone knows OC’s where it’s at, these days.
University Challenge is fandabidozi. In fact, it’s the best quiz show on proper television. I’m a bit surprised at the Guttenplanmania but it was a damn good final.
Guttenplanmania was hardly Trimblemania though is it?
No. But you don’t expect it for a person of the male type.
David – Would you have accepted ‘baked alive’ (or even just ‘baked’) for the Charles Babbage question? Or would it have been accepted after a “What do you mean” if ‘Well, Charles Babbage baked himself in an oven to find out what it was like…” came up.
Gas mark three, wasn’t it?
Not sure. Let’s have a look-see at the official script:
“ACCEPT: ‘Went into an oven’, ‘baked alive’ or similar
DON’T ACCEPT: ‘Baked in a pie’ or similar
DON’T ACCEPT: ‘Killed in an oven'”
There you go, then. Points to you!
In fact, it was only 265F, which isn’t even Gas Mark 1.
You can read the whole experiment on Google Books – it’s quite a laugh:
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Fa1JAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA213#v=onepage&q=&f=false
I gather that’s happening for the second series of The Door.
cf The Chamber, the most witless of the torture shows so far and cancelled due to lack of interest after three episodes (*), showing that people want something with a bit more subtlety, though only as much as I’m A Celebrity! over here or Fear Factor over there.
(*) also known as “one more than The Door‘s going to get”! Probably.
I’d quite have liked to have seen The Chamber, if only because I think once you take away the OMG!!! presentation aspects, it’s probably not much worse than many other endurance based shows.
I was amused by the way The Chair and The Chamber got lumped together by various news reporting sites at the time, when really they were very different shows testing very different things.
There’s a couple of videos circulating on YouTube of The Chamber. Here’s one of them:
Mmm, thanks for that, I could have sworn I looked for it on there a while ago and came up empty. Maybe I should have searched form something more specific. Anyway, I’ll have a look when I get home this evening, thanks.
Closer to Gas Mark 1 than to Gas Marc ½, though – Gas Mark 0.8, I would suppose. I’ve only ever used gas ovens with analogue rotary dials so theoretically you could get any intermediate point you wanted.
I’m sure there must be recipes that involve you baking something very slowly, inside a Gas Mark ¼ or Gas Mark ½ oven for hours, but has anyone here ever actually used one in practice?
Most definitely. For instance, certain types of meringue are ‘dried out’ by baking them on a very low heat for several hours.
Aha, there you go:
http://cluckcluck.wetpaint.com/page/Basic+Meringues (though I think they mean F not C)
I do like the mental image of you making your own meringues, not to say that I can’t believe it.
The concept of making meringues cropped up in the DIckson household the other day; we were making our own pasta to a recipe that called for a number of egg yolks alone, and couldn’t think of anything better to do with the whites. In the end we just disposed of them.
Mrs B now has her own cake business (called, FIENDISHLY, “Cakes by Mrs B” – call us for all you wedding, birthday, christening and Bah Mitzvah needs!) which often requires the use of meringue. I recommend her Brazo de Mercedes which is a thick, soft rolled meringue with a vanilla custard filling, and the Sans Rival which is discs of semi-soft meringue layered between buttercream.
Excellent!
In non-game-show news, do the B family watch Ace of Cakes? It’s about a business that really focuses on cake decoration rather than cake bakery as such, but everyone there still has a lot of fun.
There’s got to be a brilliant pun to be made here, but it would take someone funny to think of it.
Indeed we do! We had Ace of Cakes on series link for a while. She hasn’t done any cake carving on that scale but she has done some more unusual shapes than most shops stock. Have sent you a Facebook link to some of her early work.