Off piste on the Butter Mountain

You must forgive me for going off-piste again with this post. Blame it on me being piste off that there's no Mastermind tonight

In the building where I work there is a ban on putting used Dolce Gusto/Nespresso coffee pods in the bins. And the thing is that I do like a Dolce Gusto when I sit down at my desk in the morning to find out how many calls to the DAP have come in overnight. Normally the empties are taken and disposed of by one of my colleagues. However, she was on leave all last week and part of the previous so on Thursday I took a carrier bag into work in which to carry away the empties and dispose of them elsewhere.

Come the end of the day, as I was taking my empties-filled bag to my car, my boss asked me what I was going to do with them. To which I replied that my plan was to add them to the EU’s empty coffee pod mountain. At this point it’s probably a good idea to tell you that my manager is still in her mid 20s. She looked at me askance. “You know,” I continued, “like the EU butter mountain?” No, of course she didn’t know. Total incomprehension. For one thing, we haven’t even been part of the EU for a good few years (sadly in my opinion, but feel free to disagree.) For another thing, according to my perfunctory research there hasn’t even been an EU butter mountain since about 2017.

I mean, it’s not that I’m nostalgic about the European butter mountain, you understand. I’m only nostalgic about the mental picture it conjured up the first time that I heard the phrase. When I was a kid it conjured up images of various woolly hatted continental types skiing down an unusually yellow and slippery mountain somewhere outside Strasbourg. I suppose I felt it belonged in the same category as Max Boyce’s outside-half factory and Ken Dodd’s jam butty mines. Somehow I can’t see the Destination X team visiting any of those destinations. Well, not in the first series anyway.

It's sodding started early this year.

It’s sodding started, hasn’t it. Look, I get it that the ending of the England v. India 5^th test was a big sporting occasion. Not of that much interest to me if truth be told, but I get it. But come on, don’t take Mastermind off to make room for it. Or if it HAS to be one of the Quizzy Monday trio, then take it in turns. This time Only Connect, next time UC and then Mastermind after that. Not gonna happen. What makes it worse is that I didn’t know Mastermind had been taken off until I actually tuned in for it.

Destination X Review (Spoilers)

Should we talk about the BBC’s Destination X? Of course we should. But it’s not a quiz? So what, it’s my ball and we play by my rules.

Okay, so it’s been inaccurately described as The Traitors v. Race Around the World. I will come to what’s so inaccurate about this a bit later. Now, I love both of these shows and if you’re familiar with both of them you’ll be aware that these are very different shows. Now, the danger of trying of combine the appeal of two very different shows is that you end up falling between two stools and when you fall between two stools you often just fall.

To briefly summarise what the show seems to be about, 13 contestants met in what looked to be a very small and rather fake departure lounge in Baden Baden airport. This was narrowed down to 10 contestants, who were helicoptered away to where 2 buses with windows (temporarily) blacked out– one for the day and one for the night awaited. On each show they were taken to a well-known European destination. On the way there were stops for clues. At the climax of each show, each remaining contestant had to put their x on a high-tech interactive map to mark where they believed they were. The one who was furthest away was unceremoniously ejected.

Does that sound in any way similar to The Traitors to you? There’s no voting, for one thing. Yes, the contestants don’t all get all of the clues, and so they can be sneaky about what they reveal to each other, but it’s all very tame considering how much the promotion for the show has been pushing this angle. As for Race Around the World? Well, both shows see people travelling a lot. That’s about it. In Race Around the World we do at least get a glimpse of the life and culture of the places being visited. There are chances for us to vicariously stop and smell the roses a little. Alright, to be fair we did get to see a little more scenery in episode 2, but there’s only so much they can show you without losing the play along at homeability. And in Race Around the World, an integral factor is players negotiating hurdles with transport. In Destination X, the transport is all laid on.

So, if you choose to watch because you’ve bought the hype about its similarity to those shows you may well be disappointed. Watch it with an open mind and judge it on its own merits and you may find, as I did, that you give it a cautious approval. The first two episodes did enough to make we want to watch episode 3 this coming week. You know me, I’m a bit of a misanthrope but for all that I do find some of the personalities on board to be quite interesting. Having said that, I could do without Nick – the one who has run a marathon in every country on Earth – continually being dragged into the diary room to tell us he is prepared to be ruthless when it is necessary.  Rob Brydon is a good old Baglan (area of Port Talbot) boy, so he will get no criticism from me and he does the job of presenting the show perfectly well. I think he realises that this is not The Rob Brydon show and that a relatively understated approach works.

It all comes down to the game play, though, and I felt that episode 2 did this better than episode 1. The destination of Episode 1 was Paris. I was pretty much certain it would be so after Mr. Brydon said that the destination was one of the first cities in Europe to be electrically lit. Then he gave us a list of European cities with copies of the Statue of Liberty and didn’t mention Paris. Admittedly there was a strange interlude in Alsace Lorraine, where, amongst some red herrings the contestants were given some clues that belonged in Sybil Fawlty’s Mastermind round on the Bleedin’ Obvious while others would not have been out of place amongst the prize clues in 3-2-1 (ask your grandparents).

I enjoyed the second episode more especially the set piece where the contestants were separated into two teams, put in cable cars which stopped at the same point, high above the ground, and then told to carry out activities to earn a clue. That was fun. Mind you, the big clue that the winning team earned couldn’t have made it a lot more obvious that we were going to the Matterhorn. I mean, it wasn’t quite the full Alpen box, but even so. Mind you, only Marathon Nick seemed to understand it.

Well, as I said there was enough to make me want to give it another go for episode 3. I have to say, though, normally when I like a reality game show, I’d like to play in it myself. In the last 9 years or so I’ve visited over 20 European countries. I love travel, and the idea of travelling all around Europe – and never seeing hardly ANY of it! – is something which just seems wrong.

Mastermind Heat Four subjects

Good morning all. I’ve just had a glance at tomorrow night’s specialist subjects on the Mastermind website. They are – the playing career of Sunil Gavaskar, The Hunger Games, the composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein and Edvard Munch. I’ll be honest, it’s a case of - pools dividend forecast poor - for me. Cricket is not my favourite sport (unlike several relatives. Both my first cousin and my daughter’s soon to be father-in-law work in cricket in the South East.) I’ve only seen the first film of The Hunger Games series and never read any of the books. I know very little about Leonard Bernstein and as regards Edvard Munch, I’ve seen one version of the Scream in Oslo, but that’s about the length of it. I hope there will be some pieces of low hanging fruit in at least a couple of these rounds, because if I get any points, that will be where they’re most likely to come from.

We got a lot of points in Thursday night’s quiz, but typically it was one of the points we didn’t get that I remember most. Thursday night’s question master, whom I like a great deal as a person, is the same one who has been nicknamed Captain Slapdash by my team. It’s a nickname he’s earned, I’m afraid, by giving some answers that he could have found were just plain wrong by the simplest google search. Well, he was going great guns on Thursday until we got to round 7 out of 8. “Sport.” He announced. “Who was the only British swimmer to win a gold medal in the 1980 Summer Olympics, and you can have a bonus if you give me the event.” – Easy – said I – Duncan Goodhew, 100m breaststroke.- The answer the Captain gave ? Sharron Davies – 400m individual medley.- I couldn’t stop myself from protesting but it did no good.

Being the kind of person I am I thought – well, Duncan definitely won gold, and Sharron definitely got silver on the podium, but in light of revelations about the East German doping programme, and Gold medal recipient Petra Schneider’s subsequent admission that she was doped, has Sharron Davies, I wondered – been retrospectively awarded gold? Apparently not, which is a bit of a scandal if you want my opinion. It’s not even as if she was the only silver, either. Phil Hubble – who I think was swimming for Hounslow at the time - won silver in the 200m butterfly.

Is it some comfort that at least the East German cheating was eventually revealed to the world, even though Sharron Davies has yet to receive the gold medal that her performance deserved? You’d have to ask her that. She’s been quite open about the fact that everyone in the sport knew the East Germans were at it at the time.

Still, it is interesting to speculate how many cheats who won Olympic titles who have never been conclusively revealed as such. The first three Olympic Marathons have all had the finger of suspicion pointed in their direction. First across the line in 1904, Fred Lorz, was definitely cheating, and found out too. He said he had caught a lift after dropping out, and ran into the stadium after being dropped off a mile or so away as a prank. In 1900 baker’s roundsman Michel Theato has been accused of using his local knowledge to take shortcuts enabling him to win. A similar accusation has been levelled at the inaugural 1896 winner, Greek shepherd Spiridon Louis. Host nation Greece were without a win going into the final event, and to an outpouring of national joy the first three men to finish the race were Greek. However, 4^th placed runner Gyula Kellner from Hungary reported that the third placed man had boarded a carriage for at least part of the journey. Kellner was awarded third while the hapless cheat had the athletics vest stripped from his back in front of the stadium. The speculation goes that Louis, the winner, may have cheated in a similar way. I suppose you have to say, though, that considering any Greek winner had been promised free haircuts for life, you can understand the temptations.

Probably the most famous case of a disqualification in an Olympic Marathon, in 1908, wasn’t a case of conscious cheating at all. Dorando Pietri entered the White City stadium comfortably ahead of the field. However he was in a bad way. A group of officials kind of gathered him up and ushered him over the line, by the Royal Box. When the second person over the line was an America athlete called Johnny Hayes the US officials protested and Pietri was disqualified. Urban myth has it that one of the officials in the photograph taken as Pietri was bundled over the line was Sir Arthur Coan Doyle. I suppose there is a vague resemblance, but it has been proven that it wasn’t.

Dorando’s is not quite as sad a story as it may sound, since there was a huge outpouring of sympathy for him and he was presented with an inscribed silver cup by Queen Alexandra. This cup is still in existence and is currently kept in the vault of the Unicorp branch in Carpi in the province of Modena in Italy. For the centenary of the Dorando Marathon, it was displayed in London during the London Marathon.

Coming Back to Loomis Day

I broke my shoulder on 30^th May, and in the short post I wrote the next day I said I had planned a great post on Loomis Day. This was during the spring break from Quizzy Mondays, you appreciate, when I planned to keep the blog going by posting on anything I found interesting. Best laid plans of mice and men ganging aft agley there.One of the interesting things I found out about was Loomis Day. On a whim on about the 29^th I googled to see whether the 30^th May was anything sigificant, and the fact that it was World Loomis Day caught my eye.

Mahlon Loomis was born in New York state in 1826. By the end of the 1840’s he had qualified and begun to practise dentistry. The second half of the 19^th century really was the Age of the Inventor and nowhere more so than in the USA. Loomis invented a process for making dentures entirely from porcelain, but as an invention it was not a great success, commercially or otherwise.

His fame, such as it is, and the whole basis for Loomis Day rests on his claim to have sent a primitive radio signal between two peaks in Virginia in the late 1860s, decades before Guglielmo Marconi. He demonstrated his wireless telegraph system before Congress in 1868, applied for a patent and four years later, received patent number 129,971 for it.

I don’t think it brought him much luck or success. The theories on which he based his work were severely flawed, and when Marconi came along it seems that what Loomis did was largely forgotten. It’s a funny thing, but History shows us that just because you invent something, this doesn’t mean that you’re going to make any money from it. You may be aware that a man called Elisha Gray submitted a patent for a telephone at more or less exactly the same time that Alexander Graham Bell did. There’s allegations that Bell’s crafty lawyer who was in the patent office at the time incorporated a key idea of Gray’s into Bell’s application and ensured it went forward first. None of which is to even mention Antonio Meucci, who, it is claimed, invented a telephone system to communicate with his bedridden wife from his workshop. He filed a patent caveat in 1871 but was unable to afford the full patent, and so he lost out to Bell.

Then, conversely there’s the case of George Selden. Selden wasn’t even an inventor. He was a lawyer, and a smart one at that. In the late 1870s he applied for a patent for an automobile. Until Henry Ford came along he was pretty successful in extracting licensing fees from automobile manufacturers in the USA. Henry Ford took him on in the courts where is successful appeal made the Selden patent useless – there was only a year left on it anyway.

As for Thomas Edison, well, we probably all know of his 1,093 US patents. What we don’t know is how many of these related to things that were not actually invented by Edison himself, but assistants in Menlo Park. Not that Edison himself was a great businessman himself anyway.

John Logie Baird? Never made a packet from television, but then the television system he invented was mechanical and a bit of a dead end in the evolution of telly. Even Philo Farnsworth, the man with the best claim to being the father of the completely electronic television system used for much of the 20^th century had to fight tooth and nail to get his just dues from RCA.

Well, coming back to our old friend Marlon Loomis, the founder of Loomis Day was a certain Richard Birch. Richard Birch, who passed away in 2005, was a librarian with a fine track record of creating minor holidays – possibly his greatest triumph being National Trivia Day. And if that particular celebration day doesn’t light your candle, may I respectfully suggest that you may be reading the wrong blog.

Neanderthal or Not?

I don’t have red hair. In these days I don’t have much hair of any other colour for that matter. When I was first born I had black curls but these soon disappeared and eventually were replaced by hair of my natural light brown colour. However, when I first grew a beard, now that was red. It’s white now and I am considering a new career as a department store Santa.

Some time ago I read a remarkably ill-informed article that confidently asserted that red hair was a genetic inheritance from Neanderthals. Now I’m reliably informed that this is, in civil service parlance, a consignment of geriatric shoe repairers i.e. a load of old cobblers. The genes responsible for red hair in homo sapiens are not the same genes that produced red hair in Neanderthals.

Not to worry though. After UC on Monday night I watched the latest edition of BBC2’s Humans. According to this, pretty much everyone of western descent outside of sub Saharan Africa do have about 2 percent Neanderthal genetic material. Well, not native Americans and South American Indians. No, like many people ultimately of Asian derivation they have a small percentage of Denisovan genes. Basically, the Denisovans were another species of human, like the Neanderthals and pretty much contemporary with them. Little fossil evidence of Denisovans has yet been found, but the genetic evidence is pretty much irrefutable.

I’m not an expert on any of this, I hasten to add.

So, prior to discovering that my red beard was not significant, and pretty much all of us have either Neanderthal and/or Denisovan genes, why was I so interested in the fact that it seemed that I was (a tiny) part Neanderthal? I’m not sure, to be honest, but this might have something to do with it. In Oaklands Junior school in the early 70s, my three best friends had a) a Nigerian father and a Jamaican mother – b) A Dad from Pakistan and a mum from Sweden - c) A Turkish father and a Mum from Italy. I used to really envy their exotic heritage, while all I could offer was a Scottish grandfather. I used to go on about him, you’d better believe it. Even though he died before I was born and I never even visited Scotland until my Mastermind final in 2007 when I was forty three.

Not, you understand, that I’m trying to imply for one minute that Scots have more Neanderthal DNA than anyone else. Even if some people do persist in depicting stereotype Scots with flaming red hair – I’m looking at you, Groundskeeper Willy!

University Challenge 2026 - First Round - Bath v. Southampton

The Teams

Bath

Lewis Blakeborough

Sajjan Johal

Joni Wildman (capt.)

Luca Romagnoli

Southampton

Cormac Stephenson

Zain Mahmood

Florence Williams (capt.)

Ben Hermanns-Kermode

After two high scoring contests which may well see all four teams involved playing in at least one other match, what was Monday night’s third heat going to bring us?

Well, the first starter fell to Jodi Wildman of Bath who recognised several allusions to the cardinal compass direction West. Soren Kierkegaard yielded both of us just the one bonus. “Born in the year after Turner, which British artist – “ always looked to be pointing towards John Constable. To be honest both teams sat on their buzzer a bit and it wasn’t till his native Suffolk was mentioned that Florence Williams came in with the answer. The playable character classes in the 2014 D and D handbook were actually easier than they sounded and provided Southampton with a full house. Ben Hermanns-Kermode knew the German operation to rescue Mussolini – which only proved to be a stay of execution for him (Mussolini, not Ben Hermanns-Kermode). Jellies in the natural world brought two bonuses. So to an early picture starter and a warning sign in English, Greek and another language. It surely had to be from Cyprus. Ben Hermanns-Kermode thought so and was right. Bonuses on maps of islands with British overseas military bases brought two bonuses. Luca Romagnoli struck back knowing that the word finger could precede three other given words. Bath were able to answer two of the bonuses on cities that are important stops on the Trans Siberian Railway. This meant that the score stood at 65 – 35 to Southampton as we approached the 10 minute mark.

Now, the words ‘Saul’ and ‘my father’ meant that the speaker being quoted in the next starter had to be Jonathan. But was the question looking for him or David as the answer? Well, it was looking for the recipient and Luca Romagnoli was first in with the answer of David. A lovely UC set on the saying ‘all that glitters is not gold’ provided two bonuses and narrowed the gap to 10. As soon as Amol mentioned Metropolitan Cathedral Florence Williams was in with Liverpool for the next starter. Bonuses on works involving the use of the organ (wash your minds out with soap) only brought the one correct answer. Nurungji in Korean cuisine is a term involved in a particular way of cooking rice. There you go. Cormac Stephenson had that one. The Fischer-Tropsch process (gesundheit) amazingly brought me two correct answers – more than enough for a wheezy lap of honour around the Clark sofa. Southampton also took two although not the same ones. With the music starter Amol was extremely impressed that Cormac Stephenson recognised the stylings of Charlie XCX so quickly. More songs dedicated to the artists’ musical collaborators again brought two bonuses. The Mahavamsa is a notable work chronicling the traditions of Sri Lanka. Zain Mahmood had that one and all of the Southampton team had correctly answered at least one starter. Zoological loan words from Celtic languages sounded an interesting bonus set but only yielded one to Southampton. For the next starter three seemingly innocent words led Cormac Stephenson to give the correct answer of object oriented. Fair enough. Cricket records in 2024 brought the two bonuses necessary to extend Southampton’s lead to 100 points. The next starter asked for a city, and it could have been almost anywhere until the mention of the date 6^th August 1945. That made it obvious and allowed Ben Hermanns-Kermode in with Hiroshima. Nicknames of presidents of the USA followed, and they were probably wise not to include any for the present incumbent. Most of which are unbroadcastable. Southampton took two, missing out on Zachary Taylor. Sorry – but every time I hear the name Zachary I can’t help thinking of Dr. Smith from Lost in Space. So as the 20 minute mark loomed just ahead of us, Southampton had extended their lead as the score stood at 175 – 50.

Luca Romagnoli got Bath moving again, knowing that Argentina won the 2024 Copa America. A tough set on eponymous effects in Physics yielded just one bonus. For the second picture round we saw a map of the Elizabeth Line and Florence Williams was the first to identify it as such. Other winners of the RIBA Stirling prize brought just one bonus, but to be honest anything much more would have just been gilding for Southampton. No one knew about hyperons for the next starter – quelle surprise. Luca Romagnoli knew that if it mentions Aldeburgh then the answer is Benjamin Britten for the next starter. The bonuses on direct carving really weren’t very difficult but poor old Bath did not have a scooby. Nobody knew tawny as in owl and port for the next starter. Ben Hermanns-Kermode knew that George Weah had been president of Liberia. Black rivers brought a full house – and held out the tantalising possibility that Southampton might reach 300 by the gong. Florence Williams added 10 more to their score knowing that “construction” and “Galileo” has to be heading in the direction of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. The city of Bialystok (Max Bialystok?) added another full house in quick time. Nobody knew parallelogram was the answer to the next starter. Merciless Ben Hermanns-Kermode was in very quickly to identify the Shatt al Arab as the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates. There was time for Southampton to add a bonus on a surface feature of Venus, but no more, and the final score was 255 – 70 to Southampton.

For the record Bath managed a BCR of 40 while Southampton’s was 66. No way to sugarcoat this pill, I’m afraid, Southampton were better on both buzzer and bonuses. Hard lines to Bath, but remember, it’s only a game.

Amol Watch

Did you know that Amol’s favourite poem is Gray’s “Elegy. . . “? Not a bad choice, but I can’t help plumping for the sumptuous perfection of Keats’ Ode to Autumn.

Amol offered his encouragement to Bath at 16:53 – but for once it had little effect. Bath seemed to have fallen into the mindset that Southampton were going to beat them to the buzzer and as a result, for the most part they did.

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

An unetymological letter p was added to the spelling of ptarmigan by erroneous analogy with unrelated words from Greek. In all seriousness I had wondered why that p is there.

Baby Elephant Walk Moment

The Fischer-Tropsch process is a series of catalysed chemical reactions used to produce hydrocarbon molecules, such as which class of fully saturated hydrocarbons with general formula CnH2n+2. Please spell your answer. (Ironically, I had this right, mainly through dim memories of UC questions in previous years – alkanes often rear their complicated heads. So I’m not so dum de dumdum dum dum dum dum dumdum)