dhkendall wrote:seaborgium wrote:I was with Jerome in the audience. When the FJ category was revealed, he decided we should play the precall game, and told me to go first. I named the only 18th century author I could at the moment, which was Swift.
One more than I could come up with.
Yeah, that can be a tough category. I remember talking with a fellow English Major at UCI about our likes and dislikes. He said his favorite was the 18th century, but went on to talk about Dickens and such. So I asked if he had really meant 18th century or the 1800s. He realized his mistake and agreed that he had meant to say 19th century. Then he paused, thought, and said, "Who even
wrote during the 18th century?"
Even for specialists, there's a bit of a gap between Milton and Wordsworth where it seems like not a lot happened.
dhkendall wrote:jeff6286 wrote:I'm wondering if the spy novel category was inspired by a Saturday Night Live sketch from this past December, featuring Robert DeNiro as a suspense author promoting his newest book, and features the titles of many of his other novels. Here is the transcript:
http://snltranscripts.jt.org/10/10habacus.phtml
Titles named in the sketch include The "Abacus Conundrum", "The Harlequin Protocol", "The Ichabod Formula", "The Pinochet Sudoku", "The Nostradamus Mechanism", "The Godiva Gyroscope", "The Pokemon Directive", "The Vespucci Containment", "The Grimmelman Mosaic", "The Marmaduke Betrayal", "The Picasso Imbroglio", "The Brenda Effect", "The Fuddruckers Ultimatum", AND "Mac for Dummies".
I think "The Marmaduke Betrayal" is my favorite.
Is it just me, or do these all sound like Big Bang Theory episode names?
It
was just you, but not anymore. Thanks!
dhkendall wrote:opusthepenguin wrote:StevenH wrote:The Somalia/Mali clue brought back a memory of a FJ from one of Terry Linwood's game.
It put me in mind of the FJ clue last year: "In only 2 cases can you add 2 letters to one country & get another country: Austria/Australia & this pair." They wanted Niger/Nigeria and later had to acknowledge they'd forgotten all about Mali/Malawi. I wondered if "What is Malawi" would have been accepted for this clue. The clue was "You can find 'Mali' spelled out in the name of this other African country."
I'm guessing no, as the other clues had the letters in the TOM clues (the word in quotes in each clue) in consecutive order, and "Mali" is not in consecutive order in "Malawi".
I was going to nitpick that the letters
are in consecutive order. They're just not uninterrupted. But I see that my traitorous dictionary disagrees with me, insisting that "consecutive" entails not only sequence, but an unbroken sequence. I have a hazy recollection that there have been rulings to allow broken sequences such as the Mali in Malawi, but I don't recall the details or if they would apply here. You're probably right, especially since, as you point out, "Mali" was in quotes. I certainly wouldn't fault the judges for ruling against "Malawi".