c4countdown

Paul Hammond

I'm slightly confused - Sainsbury's thought Pollock/Pollack sounded a bit stupid, so they replace it with... something else that sounds stupid. A fish called Colin? Why didn't they take this opportunity to call it something cool like... I don't know, Delishofish. I'd buy that. Are you sure the new n...

Paul Hammond

The funniest one for me is her pronunciation of some of the vowels - O in particular. I'm not sure how to put it into text but it's the way she goes up at the end. It's just hilarious. I suppose thinking about it, it's not entirely dissimilar to the S and F thing. She does have very noticeable diph...

Paul Hammond

I think Phil's right that he doesn't need to declare this before the contestant chooses, though. He can just say, "I already knew what was behind the doors, and look, here's a goat that you didn't pick." The contestant still needs to be assured that he was always going to do that though, ...

Paul Hammond

I don't think time would have allowed them to set out the necessary conditions beforehand, but I think most people would assume that Monty Hall knows what's behind all the doors and will always reveal a goat behind a non-picked door. I think Phil's right that he doesn't need to declare this before t...

Paul Hammond

That's not fair. It was March 30th in Jason's time zone. (I mean Seattle, not Mars).

Paul Hammond

I thought that publicly saying that somebody is on your Ignore list, and certainly encouraging other people to add them to their Ignore lists, was a major no-no on civilised boards? It probably happens elsewhere, but I don't frequent boards like that. On one of the more strongly-moderated ones that ...

Paul Hammond

I've always taken "off his own bat" to be a cricketing reference, something about how it's him scoring the runs rather than... I dunno, if he's the other batsman and just runs up and down a bit? (I don't know much about cricket, can you tell?). So "off his own back" does sound in...

Paul Hammond

Since you were quite dismissive of the Roman Abramovich thing

, I feel entitled to say that I don't see the Susie Dent vs. Jennifer Garner one at all. They've got quite similar hair, and ears, I suppose. But that does not a lookalike make.

Paul Hammond

In this new family friendly era, I think the obvious choices for Apterous guests are Donny and Marie Osmond. They are never short of wholesome anecdotes, and could also entertain us with their I'm A Little Bit Country routine.

Paul Hammond

Ooh yeah, that's better than my one.

Paul Hammond

JimBentley wrote:Hahaha, that's it! I've been trying to think who it was all evening. Cheers, Paul!

.......A well-known money launderer......................Stephen Porritt

Paul Hammond

Matt Morrison wrote:Does anyone else feel like they've seen Steven somewhere before?

Yes. In the director's box at Chelski. He seems to have almost completely lost his accent though, remarkable.

Paul Hammond

No, Leeds is definitely not US territory.

Paul Hammond

I just Wikipediaed (oooh ugly word) Blame it on the Boogie and it turns out that the authors were David and Mick Jackson , not Michael Jackson. So it was written by two Jacksons, but nothing to do with the Jackson Five! And of course, Mick Jackson's full name is Michael Jackson, so the statement is...

Paul Hammond

Yes, I was thinking of the JFK memorial at Runnymede. About 20 miles west of the centre of London. Again, maybe a slight stretch to describe it as US territory, but Wikipedia does so it must be etc. etc. For the town names, the answer is that they have the stress on the final syllable, which is very...

Paul Hammond

Yeah, I think at this point I must allow Googled answers. But hopefully a certain amount of forehead slapping will ensue.

Paul Hammond

Not that Torres. Another, equally famous player.

Paul Hammond

4. Correct, the City of London. Technically it is a city in its own right. Permanent population about 8,000, only a square mile in area. So, smaller than Wells. Whether it should really be considered a city is debatable. So that leaves: 2. Which, although it may seem kind of dull, is probably my fav...

Paul Hammond

Yeah, let's drop the spoilers.

For no. 4, Wells is the sensible answer. It being a trick question, though, I'm after the other, still quite defensible, answer. Not Westminster.

Paul Hammond

Good work so far. 1. [ The trick, of course, is that you might think the first words uttered were "the Eagle has landed", but that was actually some time after touchdown. It does depend exactly how you parse it, and when you consider the moment of arrival on the moon to be. "Contact l...

Paul Hammond

Yes. I mean, maybe use spoilers, especially if you've got the whole lot!

[edit] Wait, is there no [spoiler] tag on this forum?

[edit] OK I suppose you can use something like [ color=#EEEEFF] spoiler text [ /color]. Works in my browser, anyway.

Paul Hammond

These are either trick questions, or at least questions with Quite Interesting answers (I hope). A couple of them I have picked up from various other forums, the others I came up with myself. Feel free to add your own. No Googling! :) 1. What was the fourth word spoken on the moon? 2. True or false ...

Paul Hammond

I'm going to stick my neck out and say that "Andrea" is the invention of somebody close to these forums. I'd like to say that it's because her punctuation and spelling is a bit too correct, even with the "OMG" stuff that has been thrown in, or because it is strange that she hasn'...

Paul Hammond

Next question, when doing essay titles, when and where should I use capital letters. I tend to use them for everything but prepositions and conjunctions, so "A Political History of the United States". Anyone strongly disagree? I can get quite obsessive about this, to the extent of going t...

Paul Hammond

I don't think etymology is particularly relevant to how offensive a word is. "Nigger" just means "black" etymologically, after all.

Paul Hammond

Which horse is Kirk riding? Stick some money on that one.

Paul Hammond

This calls for some statistical analysis of first-game-of-the-day performance by octochamps ;) . I think I'd be flagging after 6 games regardless of where the overnight break fell. I need a little lie down after a couple of competitive games on Apterous. Five real-life games in one day must take som...

Paul Hammond

One little thing missing from this excellent recap is the audible groan that Kirk lets out when Peter declares BEHOVE

Paul Hammond

Phil Reynolds wrote:
Phil Reynolds wrote:How would you use UNCREATES?
[...]

And then of course these stupid non-words come back to bite you on the bum.

Heh. It did cross my mind that Charlie had deliberately set that up.

Paul Hammond

Rosemary Roberts wrote:
Brian Moore wrote:I just hope no-one asks me to explain the difference between a quasimodal verb and a defective quasimodal verb.
Careful! In this thread you are liable to be accused of quasimodo-phobia.

I think you're right. But it's just a hunch.

Paul Hammond

Of course, it should be some non-linear function of the distance away from the target, to reflect how much easier it is to merely get close to it. Max(10-d^2, 0), say. I'd like to see Jeff explain that to the audience, though

. Howard's suggestion is in effect something like that, I suppose.

Paul Hammond

I had ORBITERS, but somehow failed to see ARBITERS.

Paul Hammond

I had the Newsnight election special on my DVR, but I hadn't got round to watching it. Now you've ruined it for me. Thanks a lot.

Paul Hammond

All I heard was "after a game like yesterday, can we flummox the banker yet again?". At least I think he said "banker". Pretty sure he was talking about Deal Or No Deal, though.

Paul Hammond

I reckon that unless you frequent places like this you would not necessarily be aware of record scores, second-best records and so on. I mean it's only since I started reading this board a couple of weeks ago that I knew anything much of the history of Countdown beyond faint memories of things like ...

Paul Hammond

I'm childish enough to find the fantastically rude DC guests very funny, so Josef doesn't bother me at all. It's no worse than things like Mock the Week making off-colour jokes about him.

Paul Hammond

I'm new to Apterous and love it, but it appears to me from other comments that, for many or even most people, the Chat and Spectate features work at least some of the time. I'd really like to get them working here, but so far I have drawn a blank. I've tried different versions of Java, different web...

Paul Hammond

FFS. I knew I shouldn't have ready any new posts until I got home.

Paul Hammond

Welcome to the forum, Paul! :) Entering numbers rounds on apterous takes some getting used to, so I wouldn't assume that you're worse than you thought. Have you tried practice mode where you don't have a timer going when you're entering the calculations? Hope you enjoy the threads, and I agree that...

Paul Hammond

Hello all, I'm another one of those lapsed Countdown fans who has rediscovered the show recently. Thanks to shameless on-air plugging from certain contestants, I have also discovered this board, and I'm glad I did. I have also become hooked on Apterous like a crack addict (to other Apterites, if I s...

Paul Hammond

Tried all that, and even tried using IE6 rather than FF3.0.5 :shock: . No difference. I saw in another thread that you were sick of bug reports, so I'm a little hesitant to post this, but just in case it's useful, here are some Java log excerpts. Hope they're the right bits: {Spectator} Spectator cl...

Paul Hammond

Hi, Neither Chat nor Spectate work for me. Are those features for paying users only? Or maybe I need JRE 6 update 7 specifically? I'm on JRE 6u12. [edit] I'll try update 7, anyway. Nope, still get Spectator [Spectator client]: java.io.IOException: An existing connection was forcibly close by the rem...

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