Sunday 17 March 2024

Mastermind semi final five preview

Okay, dear readers. I’m going to give you the list of tomorrow’s semi-final five specialist subjects. See if you can work out which one would be my banker and which one looks like a Londinius nul points.

British Prime Ministers of the 18th Century

Rock band The Stranglers 1974 – 1990

American Poet Elizabeth Bishop

Oscar Winning Animated Feature films

It’s easy for me to say where the nul points are likely to be scored. I’m afraid that I am not at all familiar with the American poet Elizabeth Bishop, so any points there look very unlikely.

As for the other three subjects, they each have the potential to being me one or two, but none of them looks like a secure source of points. I liked the Stranglers a lot really from the end of the punk period through the early – mid 80s, but how many questions in the round will relate to this I don’t know. I know a bit about all Prime Ministers, but nowhere near as much about the 18th century ones as I do about the 19th century ones. Then Oscar Winning Animated Feature films. I’m not clear about the parameters of this round. Does it mean just films that won the Oscar for Best Animated feature film, or does it mean animated feature films that won ANY Oscar? The former has only been going since 2001 so that’s really doable. The later – not so much.

Forecast – well I’d always rather underforecast than overforecast, so let’s save anything higher than five would be pretty good for me.

Little things . . .

It can happen that you go to a quiz which, hand on heart, you think was not that great and yet still walk away remembering a couple of questions that you felt proud of yourself for getting right.

Last Thursday’s rugby club quiz was not very good. Yeah, I know, I’m always criticising other setters’ quizzes. If it makes anyone feel better about it they can start their own blog and criticise mine if they wish. Or we ca sit down together, discuss it face to face and then agree that I was right. RIP Brian Clough.

Now, this is as always just my opinion but on Thursday night I felt that there were issues with the quiz. In no particular order these were –

It was a quiz in which every other round had a different theme. I’m not saying that it is impossible to make a themed quiz which is satisfying to the teams playing, but it is difficult. It requires a level of real skill to prevent rounds from becoming mini specialist quizzes. Each themed round can alienate teams who do not have a particular knowledge of or interest in that subject. I felt that this was pretty much the case on Thursday.

It was a quiz in which too many of the questions excluded the younger players. In the four general knowledge rounds too many questions required the teams being able to remember the 60s or fifties. It was a quiz which would have sounded old fashioned when I stared playing in the club. In 1995.

There were too many whythe’ells. A whythe’ell is a question which provokes you to ask – why the ‘ell are they asking that? It’s the kind of question where you wonder why the setter would think that anyone else might know it and why the setter would think anyone else might be interested in it.

Having said all that, as I did say at the start of this post, there were a couple of questions that left me glowing. Four of the rounds were not themed and would end with the answers to questions 7, 8  and 9 all being connected, and the answer to number 10 being what connected them. So we were asked

The actor who played Withnail in Withnail and I

The Team Sky rider who won four tours de France beginning in 2013

The member of the Carry on Team who played the Black Fingernail.

Now, we had all of the answers – Richard E. Grant – Chris Froome – Sid James, but could not see any connection. Then it struck me – Grant was born in Swaziland/ Eswatini, Froome in Kenya and Sid James in South Africa.  So born in Africa was the connection.

Then in the very last round we had this one.

Which team, beginning with ‘H’ did Eric Morecambe think had won the FA Cup?

Which team sport was played in the Olympics from 1900 to 1936 and shares its name with a Volkswagen car?

Which Elvis Presley song begins with the lines “As the snow flies on a cold and grey Chicago mornin, A poor little baby child is born”

Now, we had the car and the song – Polo and In the Ghetto quickly. But the Eric Morecambe one? All I could think of was that I did recall him from time to time coughing - h’Arsenal!- So we went with that, which gave us

Arsenal

Polo

Ghetto.

What did I know about any of them? Well, I was pretty sure that the first ghetto was that of Venice. And I also had a feeling that the term arsenal derived from Venice somehow. And Venice has Marco Polo airport. So I went for Venice. Bingo.

I’ll be honest, I’ve been mentally congratulating myself ever since over that one. Which all goes to show, little things please little minds.

Tuesday 12 March 2024

University Challenge 2024 Sudden Death Quarter Final - Manchester v. Christ Church, Oxford

The Teams

Manchester

Bluma De Los Reyes-White

Ilya Kullmann

Hiru Senehedheera (Capt

Dan Grady

Christ Church, Oxford

Eliza Dean

Melika Gorgianeh

Arthur Wotton (Capt)

Elliot Lowe

Howdy pardners and thank’ee kindly for joining me for another wee dram in the last chance saloon. And following last week’s fine performance from Christ Church it really was a case of you pays yer money and takes yer choice here. I couldn’t pick a winner before we came under starter’s orders.

Hiru Senehedheera came in too early on the first starter, which remained obscure until the mention of the answer’s trusted lieutenant, Dessalines created the opening to allow Arthur Wootton in for his first starter with Toussaint L’Ouverture. The Oxford skipper took 8 starters last time out, so his buzzer finger would be crucial to CC’s chances of progression. Two bonuses followed on digraphia. Hiru Senehedheera didn’t have to fish too deeply for the mathematician Poisson to answer the next starter (see what I did there?) Medical terms combining Greek and latin derivations, for example neonatal, provided us both with a full house. Yeah, I did take a lap of honour. Dan Grady won the buzzer race to provide the name King Kong for the next starter. Two bonuses on Schopenhauer were taken. I loved the response to the question about Ixion – it’s not in Percy Jackson so I don’t know! Various clues to the word jazz went begging for the next starter. Anechoic chamber? Nope, me neither but the Manchester skipper knew it for the next starter. Two bonuses on the prophet Elijah followed. The picture starter brought a halt to the Manchester charge as Arthur Wootton took his second starter recognising the locations of the cities of Tokyo and Kyoto. More Japanese places with name elements in common brought one bonus. This meant that as we neared 10 minutes the score stood at 55 – 35 to Manchester.

None of us knew what ANT stood for so the next starter went unanswered. Right, now I’m very sorry but the first words of he next starter, “Born in 1791, which physicist – “ were enough for me to shout FARADAY! And so confident was I that I’d completed another lap of honour before Hiru Senehedheera buzzed in with the same. To be fair, it is a very short lap. A UC special set on prominent thinkers whose name appears in other words proved to be surprisingly tricky and we both only had the one. Ilya Kullmann buzzed in before the next starter revealed that the Shakespeare title character it wanted was female. He answered Macbeth. Cleopatra was the answer but CC shot wide of the open goal. So the next starter asked about the four corners National Monument in the USA. Oliver Wotton knew it was maintained by the Navajo nation. Amol announced that their bonuses were on relativistic mechanics and I prepared for the strains of the Baby Elephant Walk to start. Gawd knows what the questions were about, but just like my good self, CC didn’t get any of them. Nobody knew the Non-juror bishops for the next starter. Eliza Dean came in early for the next starter on Negritude. Musical performers named in Angela Davis’ work Blues Legacies and Black Feminism were not as hard a set as it sounded, and CC failed to score. With the gap standing at 5 points we came to the music starter. Nobody could identify the music from the ballet Swan Lake. Arthur Wotton won the buzzer race to answer about Robin Hood Bay to earn the dubious reward of the music bonuses – more pas de deux from other ballets. Nul points. CC were having a purple patch with the buzzer, but failures on the bonuses meant that they weren’t pulling away from Manchester. Dan Grady stopped the rot on the next starter which asked for gravitational waves. Blue plaques in North Staffordshire paid fitting tribute to Elizabeth Wardle, the lady behind the Victorian copy of the Bayeux Tapestry where the naked men in the borders seem to be wearing cycling shorts. Currently in Reading Museum and check it out if you don’t believe me. Manchester took a full house. Nothing daunted Arthur Wotton knew that the upside down tree is the baobab for the next starter. A timely full house on Jose Luis Borges gave CC the lead by 95 – 90 with just a few minutes to show us who wanted it more.

Arthur Wotton certainly wanted it. He won the buzzer race to identify two of the three German states that border Poland. Bonuses on de Toqueville’s “Democracy in America” – which surely inspired Kim Wilde’s immortal “Kids in America” – brought two correct answers, which meant that Manchester would need a full house to even the scores. So to the second picture starter. Elliot Lowe correctly identified a sculpture, of which one of the figures depicted on it was Aeneas. Three more 17th century artistic portrayals of the story of Aeneas netted now for them. Still, Manchester now needed at least two visits to the table. Both teams sat on their buzzer a bit for the next starter until Ilya Kullman identified Topkapi Palace as the residence of the rulers of the Ottoman Empire. Bonuses on industrial catalysts brought one correct answer. Would it be the catalyst that set off a Manchester revival? It looked like it when Bluma de los Reyes-White gave the correct answer of Nobel Prize winning scientist Calvin (the awards committee obviously ignored his partner, Hobbes.) South American cities taking their names from cities in Spain gave them a full house, and the lead. None of us knew the Roman poet Sextus Propertius (or even his stupider brother Emptius Propertius). Hiru Senehedheera came in too early and lost five on the next starter but CC could not take advantage. The Manchester skipper made immediate amends, winning the buzzer race to identify the painter Lucien Freud. The Japanese costume designer Emi Wada did nothing for Manchester other than to run the clock down. Arthur Wotton’s buzzer finger fired too early on the next question, but Manchester couldn’t find the word wax to seal the deal. Yet still Captain Fantastic Wotton came back to take the next starter on the word confederate. Only one bonus on small choo choos in art left them one bonus behind Manchester. Dan Grady just won the buzzer race on the next starter on Simone de Beauvoir. GONGGGG! Yes, after a terrific match it all came down to the last starter. 145 played 130. Congratulations to Manchester, and many commiserations to Christ Church.

Christ Church achieved a BCR of 37, while Manchester who scored fewer starters had a BCR of 63, and that’s what won it and lost it.

Amol Watch

With the ANT starter Amol made he slightly cryptic comment “I thought that was going to take you some time to work out.” Er, they didn’t work it out, Amol. They had it wrong. Amol seemed surprised that Christ Church didn’t know de Toqueville wrote ‘Democracy in America’. Well, they’re all easy if you know them, Amol, and difficult if you don’t.

Interesting Fact That I Didn’t Already Know Of The Week

Digraphia means languages which can be written in more than one script.

Baby Elephant Walk Moment

In a ratio relating to the rest mass of a particle and its mass when travelling a velocity v the Greek letter gamma is used to represent a factor named after which Dutch physicist and Nobel laureate born (buzz)

Sheep and Goats

I once had it said to me that anyone can have one good specialist round in Mastermind but it’s having two good specialist rounds in a row that sorts the men out from the boys, or the sheep from the goats, or whatever happens to be your analogy of choice.

I’m not totally sure I agree. For one thing not just anyone can have one good specialist round. There’s a number of factors which can work against you. There might be a mismatch between your understanding of the parameters of the subject and the question setter’s. You may have inadvertently chosen a subject that is just too wide. You might be under the weather on the day or overwhelmed by the atmosphere and the experience of actually being in THE chair. For whatever reason you might have been underprepared as well – family or work circumstances, hubris or just plain laziness.

I stress now that I haven’t carried out any kind of statistical analysis on this but it’s my impression that having a ‘mare is less likely on your second subject than your first. Just taking the current series, if we take the arbitrary score of 7 as an underperformance on Specialist, the of the 16 specialist rounds we’ve seen in the semi finals of this series so far, only four of them fell into this category. This may well be because you’ve already shown that you can prepare one specialist subject well to get you into the semis in the first place.

For what it’s worth I always found it helpful to view any subject I felt I could take on as being equally good. Once you start saying things like – I used up my best subject on the first round – you are actually giving yourself excuses for not preparing the next subject as well as you can. And as in real life, preparation is the best guarantee of success you ca possibly give yourself.

Mastermind 2024 Semi Final 4

The Tale of the Tape

Name

Specialist 

Score

Specialist 

Passes

GK Score

GK Passes

Total Score

Total Passes

Tie break

Sharon Chambers

8

0

16

0

24

0

-

Sadie de Souza

13

0

10

0

23

0

3

Elliot Hooson

9

0

10

1

19

1

-

Thomas Nelson

10

0

16

0

26

0

 

Well, well, well. For the first time in this set of semis one of the heat winners was unable to take part. This meant that the highest scoring runner up was brought in to take his place. Scott Torrance was the unfortunate contender forced by circumstances to miss out. You could make a case that the other three contenders were unfortunate too, since taking his place was Thomas Nelson. Only two heat winners scored higher than Thomas’ 26 and no passes in the heats, unfortunately one of them was in the same heat as his.

Sharon Chambers kicked off the evening with her round on Peter Cushing. Sharon scored 6 points, considerably better than the four that I managed. But I was fairly certain that this was going to leave her in difficulties. You have to reckon on at least one of the other contenders getting close to a maximum in specialist which would leave Sharon too far behind.

Elliot Hooson’s subject, the History of Percussion Instruments, really was the wild card specialist of the night for me. What I mean by that is that I had no reason to think it would be a round that would particularly suit me and yet it was the kind of round where good general knowledge might pick you up a couple of points. Slightly more as it happened. I took 3 for an aggregate of 7 with what looked to be two decent rounds to go. Elliot scored 10 with a quality round which looked as if it would leave him in contention as we turned for home.

Sadie de Souza was answering on what I thought would be my banker subject, the Sarah Jane Adventures. Well, actually it only provided me with my joint worst score of the night. I took another three, although if I could have counted answers which were on the tip of my tongue I could have doubled that. Still, that took the aggregate to double figures with only one round still to go. Sadie produced a very fine round to take the lead with 11.

Finally then came Thomas. He was answering on Sir Bobby Robson. My thought was that I’d know enough to get a couple on this. As indeed I did, I fact, a couple of couples. That four took me to an aggregate of 14, my second best of the semis. I can’t remember the last time that I scored at least 3 on all four specialist subjects. Last time out Thomas trailed the leader by two points at this same stage. Last night he was ahead by one after a fine 12 points.

So to the General Knowledge. Sharon Chambers had set one of the highest GK scores in the heats with 16. Starting out 6 points off the lead last night even if she could repeat this a win looked unlikely. It would make things interesting, though. Well, it didn’t quite work out that way, although Sharon did score a good 10.

I would not have enjoyed Elliot’s GK questions had I been sitting in the chair to face them. It’s already happened once during these semifinals that a contender has received a set of questions I have found noticeably less to my liking than others, and this was a second time. Judging by he pain on his face at times Elliot must have felt so too. He tried guessing. He tried passing – in the end he passed five. But he did at least manage the 7 that he needed to go into the lead.

Sadie had scored 10 in her GK round in the heat. With Thomas yet to come she needed all of that and more if possible. Well, she gave it a lash and she produced answers to all of her questions. 8 of them were correct, which gave her 19. Would it be enough? In all honesty I felt that this didn’t look likely. But then strange things can sometimes happen in semifinals.

Nothing strange happened in this one, though. Thomas needed 8 to win, and he reeled off an excellent 14. He never looked in any difficulty, and produced a great case for reinstating repechage slots in the semi-finals. I’m not going to ruin anyone’s chances by making predictions at this stage of the proceedings, but Thomas now has at least a 1 in 6 chance of walking away with the whole thing. Well done sir, and best of luck.

The Details

Sharon Chambers

Peter Cushing

6

0

10

0

16

0

Elliot Hooson

The History of Percussion Instruments

10

0

7

5

17

5

Sadie de Souza

The Sarah Jane Adventures

11

0

8

0

19

0

Thomas Nelson

Sir Bobby Robson

12

0

14

0

26

0

 

Monday 11 March 2024

Give a Dog a (bad) Nickname

I’ve outlined my philosophy on quiz compilation quite a number of times over the years. You can boil it down to the central tenet that when you compile a pub quiz then your one overriding purpose is to give the teams the best evening’s entertainment that you are capable of. If you try to keep sight of this goal you can avoid many of the failures that blight quizzes of this sort.

Yeah, it was my turn to set the quiz last Thursday. I’ve explained in the past that I usually set picture handouts, even though they are my personal least favourite type of handout since they rarely offer you the chance to use what you do know to help work out what you don’t. You tend to either recognise the face, or not – there’s rarely helpful clues in the picture. But . . . other people like them. Since it only tends to be Jess and I who use picture handouts, I feel that I should keep doing them, even though I don’t actually like them myself.

But I will admit that my pleasure in making a quiz for the club is not totally selfless. I don’t like the kind of question master who asks something mind-bogglingly obscure and boring then congratulates themselves when nobody gets the answer. But now and again I do like it if I manage to come up with a question which people don’t all get right, but when I give the answer it makes some of them metaphorically slap their foreheads and go D’Oh! For example, I asked –

The Dial of Destiny is the latest film in which franchise?

Which paper fastening mechanism is defined as a rectangular sheet of springy steel curved into a cylinder, with two flat steel strips inserted to form combined handles and jaws.

Which range of die-cast metal car toys were introduced to the UK in 1956 and manufactured in Swansea for the first three decades?

What is the connection between your last three answers?

Now the connected answers were :-

Indiana Jones

Bulldog clip

Corgi toys

If you only look at answers two and three then it’s obvious. But Indiana Jones? Well, of course, Indiana, from whom Henry Jones Jr. took the name, was the family Jones’ dog. So they are all named or nicknamed after dogs.  (Any reader who is thinking that I could potentially have used Lasse Viren as an answer is a person after my own heart.)

I usually use a nine part connection as the last round, and this week all of them were the names of Gladiators in the current revived series on BBC. Only one team had a full house which surprised me a little.

Mastermind 2024 Semi Final 4 Preview

Phew. Only just made it since there’s only a couple of hours until semi final four is shown. So what are tonight’s subjects, then?

The actor Peter Cushing

The History of Percussion Instruments

The Television series The Sarah Jane Adventures

Sir Bobby Robson

Well, while there’s none of them on the list promises to match my round on The Prose Edda, this does look like a kinder than average set from my own point of view.

Peter Cushing. I ought to get one or two I would have thought. I was quite a fan of his work for Hammer, for example.

Percussion instruments – well, okay, this is the least lijkely subject to bring me points. Even then, though, it’s the kind of thing where general knowledge and good guessing might well bring something.

The Sarah Jane Adventures. Ten years ago I set out to watch every (surviving) episode of every series of Doctor Who, and review them. Ten books later I set out to do the spin off series Torchwood and the SJA. So I have seen all of them and I have written about all of them. Gotta be worth a least one or two, I reckon, and therefore my banker subject of the night. (The books are titled Nothing New To Say About Doctor Who and available on your kindle.)

Sir Bobby Robson again is not a subject I necessarily know a huge amount about, but it should be enough to net something. Taken altogether then an aggregate of less than five would be a disappointment, and more than 10 would be a bit of a surprise.