Thursday, January 16, 2020 Game Recap and Discussion (SPOILERS)

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DBear
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Re: Thursday, January 16, 2020 Game Recap and Discussion (SPOILERS)

Post by DBear »

Got the obvious Panama City FJ but Belmopan kept trying to sneak in my mind.
Cheers to the writers for the Rock Opera category, which is probably the closest they'll ever get to a Prog Rock category. :D 8-)
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Re: Thursday, January 16, 2020 Game Recap and Discussion (SPOILERS)

Post by MarkBarrett »

The Talking Mime wrote: Thu Jan 16, 2020 9:36 pm I don't know what it is, but I can never keep east and west straight. I always have to do that "Never Eat Shredded Wheat" mnemonic just to differentiate the two. So it's not surprising that I went in the wrong direction and said Belmopan, thinking Belize was in the uppermost left corner of Central America. Nope, apparently it's Guatemala. Note to self, hit the geography books hard.

Part of me wanted to see a single-player round for FJ, but I was glad that Shanu got into the plus side just in time.

So if Veronica ends up making the ToC, would her 21-letter name (22 if you want to count the hyphen) be a ToC record?
I took a quick look and the longest I found if I'm counting correctly was (no hypen) Jill Bunzendahl Chimka (20)

For 17 there are:
Pranjal Vachaspati
Ashok Poozhikunnel
Vinita Kailasanath
Stephen Weingarten

Just remembered to add one more with 19: Jim Tompkins-MacLaine
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Re: Thursday, January 16, 2020 Game Recap and Discussion (SPOILERS)

Post by Picked Off »

Felt so bad for Priscilla after reading that Slate article earlier in the day.

Got FJ instantly and assumed I was missing a trick.
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Re: Thursday, January 16, 2020 Game Recap and Discussion (SPOILERS)

Post by davey »

I've been thinking there's been a conspicuous lack of geography FJs this season, so of course they give us 2 in one week... :twisted: It didn't help that I somehow read it as "South America" for the first few seconds... :roll:
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Re: Thursday, January 16, 2020 Game Recap and Discussion (SPOILERS)

Post by opusthepenguin »

Rough game to watch. Near the end I was kind of rooting for a single-player FJ because at least that's a talking point for poor Shanu and Priscilla when it's all over.

If that coin was made of aluminum, it wasn't floating in water. That looked like the old surface tension trick to me.

Count me as one who didn't need "a boy falling out of the sky" to identify Icarus as the subject of the painting in the W. H. Auden poem. I knew that, the name of the painter (Breughel) and the name of the poem Auden ("Musée des Beaux Arts"). It's a good one.

For FJ, I spent a short while convincing myself that Brasilia was farther east than Paramaribo. Fortunately, that left me ample time to reread the clue.
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Re: Thursday, January 16, 2020 Game Recap and Discussion (SPOILERS)

Post by The Talking Mime »

MarkBarrett wrote: Thu Jan 16, 2020 9:47 pm
The Talking Mime wrote: Thu Jan 16, 2020 9:36 pm So if Veronica ends up making the ToC, would her 21-letter name (22 if you want to count the hyphen) be a ToC record?
I took a quick look and the longest I found if I'm counting correctly was (no hypen) Jill Bunzendahl Chimka (20)

For 17 there are:
Pranjal Vachaspati
Ashok Poozhikunnel
Vinita Kailasanath
Stephen Weingarten

Just remembered to add one more with 19: Jim Tompkins-MacLaine
It was probably because of the hyphen, but Jim Tompkins-MacLaine was the first name I thought of. I went to count and found he came up short. I'm too lazy to go in depth to corroborate your findings, so I'll assume Veronica would have the record.

If I ever get on the show, if I go by my full first name and not the shortened form I use, that's 16 letters. No matter the length, it'd look good in the Archive one day. :lol:
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Re: Thursday, January 16, 2020 Game Recap and Discussion (SPOILERS)

Post by Woof »

Oy! And I thought yesterday was painful to watch. Yeah, I really felt bad for Priscilla as she looked like she was struggling out there. Veronica wisely stayed clam while her two opponents self-destructed. FJ was easy if you knew that SA was East of the bulk of NA.
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Re: Thursday, January 16, 2020 Game Recap and Discussion (SPOILERS)

Post by seaborgium »

I think I caught whatever the challengers had through my TV, reading "easternmost" and thinking "westernmost." And then I got that wrong, naming San Salvador because it belongs to the only Central American country with no Caribbean coastline. (That portion of coastline, however, is more east-west than north-south; Guatemala is basically west of El Salvador, and Guatemala City is the westernmost of the capitals. Mexico City is still farther west, but that's not Central America.) If I hadn't become disoriented (literally), I would have gotten this easily.
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Re: Thursday, January 16, 2020 Game Recap and Discussion (SPOILERS)

Post by twelvefootboy »

opusthepenguin wrote: Thu Jan 16, 2020 10:28 pm
If that coin was made of aluminum, it wasn't floating in water. That looked like the old surface tension trick to me.
Yes, of course it was. I had to look it up because I thought it might be hollow. A lot of trouble for a penny valued coin, but that is what the Japanese do. The surface tension even looked obvious in the picture. Aluminum clocks in at 2.7 gm/cc and Magnesium at 1.7. Sodium (0.97), K (0.86), and Li (0.53, lightest of all metals) do float, if you don't mind the exploding thing.
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Re: Thursday, January 16, 2020 Game Recap and Discussion (SPOILERS)

Post by talkingaway »

I psyched myself out on FJ!. I figured it couldn't be as simple as the "last" Central American country you hit traveling from the US to Colombia - but, apparently, it is. I don't know why, but the fact that it was a FJ! clue made me think that Central America did some weird boomerang thing, so I went with Managua, Nicaragua. I should have known - I knew the Panama/Colombia border is where you "enter" South America, and I knew Colombia is on the western coast of South America, so Panama would virtually HAVE to be the easternmost country.

I felt so bad for Priscilla. I'm sure there's a universe out there in the multiverse where her nerves were significantly calmer, and I hope she knows that. In fairness, I felt the boards were tough in general. Not ToC tough, but harder than most, at least for me.

Beatles alert! I was just thinking this past week, "Huh, no Beatles clues for a LONG time on J!, and I figured that should be a J! favorite." Maybe they milked all the clues? Maybe it's too bimodal - either really easy trivia that everyone knows, or stupidly obscure facts? Too much of a "trivia circuit" category? Or maybe it's selection bias and I ignored them - a quick search finds 3 clues with the group name in addition to the FJ! where the group name isn't there. I guessed Lennon on "Nowhere Boy / Backbeat", but clammed, figuring it was a coinflip between him and McCartney.

Precalled Tommy in "Rock Operas" for a nice neg. Well played, writers.
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Re: Thursday, January 16, 2020 Game Recap and Discussion (SPOILERS)

Post by This Is Kirk! »

I had Panama City down for FJ right from the start, but did have some minor reservations. For some reason my mental image always has Central America oriented more north-south than it actually is.
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Re: Thursday, January 16, 2020 Game Recap and Discussion (SPOILERS)

Post by Volante »

twelvefootboy wrote: Thu Jan 16, 2020 11:21 pm
opusthepenguin wrote: Thu Jan 16, 2020 10:28 pm
If that coin was made of aluminum, it wasn't floating in water. That looked like the old surface tension trick to me.
Yes, of course it was. I had to look it up because I thought it might be hollow. A lot of trouble for a penny valued coin, but that is what the Japanese do. The surface tension even looked obvious in the picture. Aluminum clocks in at 2.7 gm/cc and Magnesium at 1.7. Sodium (0.97), K (0.86), and Li (0.53, lightest of all metals) do float, if you don't mind the exploding thing.
Just because it's using surface tension doesn't mean it's not floating

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/float
float verb
1 : to rest on the surface of or be suspended in a fluid

The USGS also uses 'float' in the context of surface tension:
https://www.usgs.gov/special-topic/wate ... -and-water
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Re: Thursday, January 16, 2020 Game Recap and Discussion (SPOILERS)

Post by floridagator »

This Is Kirk! wrote: Fri Jan 17, 2020 12:05 am I had Panama City down for FJ right from the start, but did have some minor reservations. For some reason my mental image always has Central America oriented more north-south than it actually is.
Sometimes a mental picture is all you've got to go on

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Re: Thursday, January 16, 2020 Game Recap and Discussion (SPOILERS)

Post by opusthepenguin »

Volante wrote: Fri Jan 17, 2020 12:17 am Just because it's using surface tension doesn't mean it's not floating

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/float
float verb
1 : to rest on the surface of or be suspended in a fluid

The USGS also uses 'float' in the context of surface tension:
https://www.usgs.gov/special-topic/wate ... -and-water
Fair enough. I wondered about that. I certainly didn't have any success when I tried to think of a different verb to describe what that coin was doing lounging on top of the water like that. As an added note, I just tried the surface tension trick with a US penny and couldn't get it to work. So even if the Japanese coin is denser than water, it's still comparatively rare.*

EDIT: I'll also note that the clue states that the coin can float "on" water, rather than "in" it. I think that's a good way to describe something that floats due to surface tension. Not that I'm saying "in" would be wrong or that you can't use "on" to describe the way buoyant objects float. I'm just saying the word choice has the right nuance.

---------------
* This is an obscure pun. I went searching for a term that means "low density" and was delighted to find that "rare" was once used in that sense. (We've preserved this meaning in the word "rarefied," but I think that tends to be applied only to gases.) So we can correctly observe that it's a rare coin that will float.
Last edited by opusthepenguin on Fri Jan 17, 2020 10:12 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Thursday, January 16, 2020 Game Recap and Discussion (SPOILERS)

Post by opusthepenguin »

Thank you for this. We usually hear reports of the Internet piling on. It's good to read about a cyber group hug.
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Re: Thursday, January 16, 2020 Game Recap and Discussion (SPOILERS)

Post by yclept »

Veronica could have just walked away with the easiest $13,000 she will ever make but decided to go for it in FJ. I am not sure how I would play this personally if I was in this situation. I am really curious if she would have gone with $12K+ if she was all alone.

Can’t help but feel bad for Priscilla. That was tough to watch and I can only imagine how she felt watching it back last night, if indeed she did. Perhaps, months after the fact, she can have a good laugh over it if surrounded by friends and family while watching it.
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Fourth Podium Poll for Thursday, January 16, 2020 (SPOILERS)

Post by opusthepenguin »

The Fourth Podium poll is up:

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=5534

I'm trying something a little different this time in suggesting that we take the poll at that link but then come back to this thread to discuss it. That way our discussion of the game is all in one place. Optionally, you can also edit the Subject line as I have done when posting about the poll to this thread. If you reply to this post, you'll keep my new subject line. You can then delete all my nonsense and substitute your own. (Note: your JBoard settings may cause a post with a different subject line to appear at the end of the thread rather than in its chronological position. Depending on your point of view, this may be a bug or a feature. The point is, you have options and can change this behavior.)

EDIT: Here are the clues and correct responses if that's a help to the scroll-uppers versus the tab-switchers. (Didn't they appear in Gulliver's Travels?):
Poll Questions
$600 "P"ICTURE THIS: In 1948 at age 42, he was Major League Baseball's oldest rookie ever
$1000 PARK CITY: The San Diego Zoo is just part of this vast park named for a conquistador (Shanu: What is Cortes?)
$600 REAL PEOPLE ON SCREEN: An entrepreneur: Anthony Michael Hall in "Pirates of Silicon Valley" & Steve Sires in "The Social Network"
$1000 REAL PEOPLE ON SCREEN: A rock star: Aaron Taylor-Johnson in "Nowhere Boy" & Ian Hart in "Backbeat"
$200 WEATHER: In 1937 a search party was sent for one of the goalies when a soccer game was stopped in England due to this weather condition (Shanu: What is a tornado?) (Priscilla: What was a blizzard?)
$600 5-LETTER WORDS: The Carabao is a popular variety of this tropical fruit (Veronica: What is a guava?)
$200 COINAGE: (Sarah of the Clue Crew carefully places a coin in water.) Made of this lightweight metal, Japan's 1-yen coin weighs only a gram and can float on water
$1000 COINAGE: In 2019 the U.S. Mint issued quarters with a "W" mint mark for the first time, indicating they were minted at this N.Y. location
$1600 MYTH IN MODERN LITERATURE: The title character of Margaret Atwood's "The Penelopiad" tells the story of running this kingdom while waiting for Odysseus to get back (Veronica: Who is Penelope?)
$1200 ROCK OPERAS: The title of this 1973 rock opera by The Who is partly drawn from an incorrect understanding of schizophrenia (Priscilla: What is Tommy?) (Shanu: What is Bohemian Rhapsody?)
$2000 STATES' COMMON SURNAMES: This 7-letter last name of 2 U.S. Presidents is particularly common in Minnesota, Nebraska, Wisconsin & both Dakotas (Shanu: What is Harrison?) (Veronica: What is Adams?) (Priscilla: What is Jackson?)
$2000 NATIONAL SPELLING BEE WINNING WORDS: "Sweet melody" music maker struck with handheld hammers (1949) (Priscilla: What is harpsichord?)
DD1 $400 clue in WEATHER (Shanu wagered $1000): In a 2-week period in 2018, the East Coast was walloped by 3 of these storms named for the direction from which they came (Shanu: What is a polar vortex?)
DD2 $1600 clue in STATES' COMMON SURNAMES (Shanu wagered $4000): Martinez is number 1 in this state where Susana Martinez was governor from 2011 to 2019 (Shanu: What is Arizona?)
DD3 $2000 clue in ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA (Shanu wagered $1500): Organized in the 1830s, this group of lawmen merged with the Texas State Highway Patrol in 1935 (Shanu: What are the Texas Marshals?)
I got all three of the Daily Doubles correct
MY COMMENTS IF YOU WANT TO QUOTE THEM
Surprisingly, "only" 12 triple-stumpers in this game. So not even the highest in recent memory. Not even close. I'm no cheezguyty, but I think that would be December 2 when we had 16 with Alex Damisch vs. Joanna LeRoy vs. Mohammed Ali. Any more and they won't all fit on the same poll. And more recently we've had THREE games with 14 triple-stumpers (including one the day after the 16 TS game). To wit:

1-8-2020 Lisa Warne-Magro vs. Rachel Kline vs. Shaun Gold
12-31-2019 Karen Farrell vs. Susan Stoltzfus vs. Bill Coulter
12-3-2019 Alex Damisch vs. Stephanie Sumulong vs. Theodore Conrad

This game felt worse though with two contestants simultaneously in the hole and the very real possibility of a single-player FJ. Add to that some terrible negs, Shanu uncovering and missing all three DDs, and the sympathy that everyone who isn't a robot was feeling for Priscilla and you've got an extra painful match.

I don't know if it's any comfort to Shanu, but if he'd gotten those DDs and the consequent $13000 (!) swing in his score, he could have entered FJ in the lead... only to lose on a missed FJ. Or maybe he wouldn't have been so rattled at that point and would have parsed FJ correctly (or not done whatever he did that put him on the wrong side of Central America) and won the game. Dang.
CORRECT RESPONSES
$600 "P"ICTURE THIS: Satchel Paige
$1000 PARK CITY: Balboa
$600 REAL PEOPLE ON SCREEN: Bill Gates
$1000 REAL PEOPLE ON SCREEN: John Lennon
$200 WEATHER: fog
$600 5-LETTER WORDS: mango (Alex said "Those are mangoes", so the archive has that as the correct response. But wouldn't the plural version be ruled incorrect based on the category? Or do they give leeway on that issue?)
$200 COINAGE: aluminum
$1000 COINAGE: West Point
$1600 MYTH IN MODERN LITERATURE: Ithaca
$1200 ROCK OPERAS: Quadrophenia
$2000 STATES' COMMON SURNAMES: Johnson
$2000 NATIONAL SPELLING BEE WINNING WORDS: dulcimer
DD1 $400 clue in WEATHER (Shanu wagered $1000): nor'easters
DD2 $1600 clue in STATES' COMMON SURNAMES (Shanu wagered $4000): New Mexico
DD3 $2000 clue in ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA (Shanu wagered $1500): the Texas Rangers
Last edited by opusthepenguin on Fri Jan 17, 2020 12:38 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Thursday, January 16, 2020 Game Recap and Discussion (SPOILERS)

Post by gnash »

twelvefootboy wrote: Thu Jan 16, 2020 9:35 pm
TenPoundHammer wrote: Thu Jan 16, 2020 7:29 pm Japan's coin could be made out of ANY lightweight metal. Saw no way to narrow that down whatsoever.
I'm imagining a coin made from Sodium or Potassium. That would be epic.
:D :D :D

Make sure you don't handle money with sweaty palms! :D
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Re: Fourth Podium Poll for Thursday, January 16, 2020 (SPOILERS)

Post by opusthepenguin »

opusthepenguin wrote: Fri Jan 17, 2020 10:31 am The Fourth Podium poll is up:

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=5534
:( :mrgreen: :| :| :| :mrgreen: :| :| :| :mrgreen: :mrgreen: :| :mrgreen: :| :mrgreen: :|

Note 1: I'm suggesting this format as a "best practice": Quote my post with the link to the poll, but delete all my blather except the announcement of the poll and the link to it. This will make it clear what aspect of the game you're discussing and anyone who wants to consult the poll won't have to go searching for the link. Meta-discussion welcome on whether this is a good idea or we should just go back to the old way.

Note 2: Remember, :( means you took a guess and missed, :| means you clammed or it was a DD so you don't get penalized for a wrong guess.

Only $6600 for me--$7200 minus a $600 neg. I was so fascinated by what was happening on screen that I didn't notice I wasn't having a great game my own self. I guess it wasn't terrible either. I don't win from the fourth podium, but $6600 gets me halfway to a win against Veronica from the second or third. I like those odds.

Some lowlights of my own play include:
  • I saw the picture of Satchel Paige and thought of his name first. After all, everything about the clue pointed to him AND he looked like the guy whose autograph I got at a Tulsa Oilers game in 1973. But my brain keyed in on the fact that the man was 42 years old, decided that must be a TOM for Jackie Robinson and in a couple of milliseconds I'd switched myself to the wrong response. If this happens on the couch, I cringe to think what my brain might do under the lights.
  • For the San Diego Zoo park area named after a conquistador, I almost went with Coronado because of the Coronado Bridge. This time my brain kicked in and switched me to the RIGHT response in time. We lived in that area for 11 years and had annual passes to the Zoo and Wild Animal Park (now the Safari Park) for several of those years. This would have been an embarrassing miss.
  • Even given extra time because of the two negs, I couldn't figure out "fog", perhaps the single most common weather phenomenon associated with England (definitely with London), and an obvious reason why a search party would be necessary.
  • I totally know the hometown of Odysseus, but it dropped out the back of my head for this clue. "Ionia" was the best I could come up with on short notice and I knew it didn't sound right.
  • I needed the time provided by THREE negs to come up with the 7-letter presidential surname common in the Scandinavian section of the US. That's not because I didn't think of it quickly. I thought of it FIRST... and rejected it because it obviously had too many letters. So I went through Adams, Bush, and Roosevelt (but forgot Harrison) before circling back to Johnson for another look.
  • Spotted "sweet melody" music maker and hammers, the best I could come up with is xylophone, so I clammed.
Last edited by opusthepenguin on Fri Jan 17, 2020 11:14 am, edited 1 time in total.
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