Friday, March 30, 2012 Game Recap & Discussion [SPOILERS]

[Paucle]

I've heard of "Fermat's Last Theorem", but that's almost all I know about it. The only other thing I know about it is that it's some impossible math thing that wasn't proven until recently. That is it. Have no idea what it is about, and the Wikipedia page soon bored me, couldn't make heads or tails of it

It's actually pretty simple. I assume you know the Pythagorean Theorem? a^2+b^2=c^2. Well, mathematicians spent years trying to find another exponent where that worked, but couldn't. The digits can only be "squared," nothing else. But they could not prove it. "Fermat's last theorem" supposedly did, but he didn't show it. He merely noted in the margin of another paper that he'd found a "remarkable proof" for the problem, but didn't publish it before he died. So for centuries, mathematicians tried to find "Fermat's last theorem." They had so much difficulty doing so, most believed Fermat was jerking their chains.

[seaborgium]

Judges: I said "kubasa" (KOO-ba-sah) in K $800 (chuckled at the "Krossword Klues 'K'" title) - originally I came on to say "I know that's not the requisite number of letters and therefore wrong, but could "kielbasa" be concievably pronounced that way to give me credit?" Then a quick Wikipedia check tells me that Canadians generally call "kielbasa" "kubasa", so I could blame it on my ethnicity. Still fall short in the requisite number of letters, but perhaps lenience in pronunciation? (ie if I said "kubasa", would they think I'm trying to pronounce "kielbasa" and credit me?)

I don't know what the correct pronunciation is. But around Cleveland (where the word gets said A LOT!) I've heard that first syllable uttered as "kie," "kuh," pretty much everything BUT "KEEL-basa." Almost as if everyone had a, well, you know, lodged in his throat....

For what it's worth, the L in the original Polish is actually Ł, which is pronounced like the W in "water." At the end of a syllable as in kiełbasa, it sort of sounds like the preceding vowel is swallowed. So there's a pretty solid precedent for not pronouncing kielbasa with an L, since it's not an L in the language it comes from.

Gujarat didn't sound remotely Indian to me, and "Gir" had me thinking about that hyperactive little robot thing from Invader Zim.

Non-English, multisyllabic, with a J in the middle pronounced as it is in English is a pretty strong indicator of an Indian word/name. Think Punjab, or Vijay.

[Sage on the Hudson]

Several of my ancestors were named Sarah.

What about the women?

[omgwheelhouse]

No less than 9 lach trash pickups in J alone for my wife and me.

As a shoutout to Mark Barrett, I'd say that there were plenty of clues tonight that showed that there was no tournament player on stage, so I found the result somewhat satisfying as a fan. Nothing against Beau, he was just sloppy out there. I would have liked to see him come out there focused, knowing that a likely tourney spot was on the line... It may have been partly that he hit a bad run of clues that he didn't know. For some reason, at a point where the middle player looked particularly frazzled to me, I just had this feeling that she was going to win somehow. It felt like a scenario I had seen play out before.

[Bamaman]

I said earlier in the week he had too many bad misses and it would come back to bite him. He was $2,700 short of a lock, with seven wrong responses, including a $2,500 DD miss. A little clamming here and there and he'd have won the game before DD.

[Magna]

Or you could ask yourself why so many Argentines have names like Ginobili, Messi, Sabatini...

Why a large number of them have names like Schultz and Mengele is a more pertinent question.

Actually, when he said German was the #4 language spoken there, I did think of the Nazi migration.

Fwiw, German immigration to South America had been going on for over a century before WWII. Only a small number fled there after the war. Not that that makes your reasoning invalid - South America might have been a more attractive destination for fleeing Nazis because there were already ethnic Germans there.

[Magna]

I'm still trying to understand this clue (from the "EX" category):

Fair market value for the owners of the little store of the route of our highway;
2-4-6-8!
Who do we this?

Can anyone explain this? The credited response was "expropriate," if that helps. tia

[Vanya]

I'm still trying to understand this clue (from the "EX" category):

Fair market value for the owners of the little store of the route of our highway;
2-4-6-8!
Who do we this?

Can anyone explain this? The credited response was "expropriate," if that helps. tia

The clue refers to eminent domain, the power of a government to take private property for public projects, while giving the owner "fair market value." But expropriation usually refers to taking without compensation, so it's a bad clue.

[heisman65]

As for the so-called humour in the clue, it's meant to sound like the old-time (really old-time) cheer: "Two, four, six, eight, who do we appreciate (instead of expropriate)?" Kind lame, and it confused me, but there you have it.

[Magna]

Thanks for the explanation. I agree - bad clue.

Other problems are that the grammar is distorted. It's the property, not the people, that is being expropriated. But replacing "this" in the clue with "expropriate," we get "Who do we expropriate?" It sounds like the owners of the store are being taken captive or something. But worse, the clue doesn't even refer to taking (expropriating) anything. It just mentions a "little store of [on?] the route of our highway." I guess we're supposed to infer that the land the store sits on is needed for a planned highway and is going to be taken for that purpose.

[plasticene]

Theodore Roosevelt came to mind instantly, but I just couldn't think of whom the second New Yorker (despite having grown up in New York) might be until the memory of what "Rocky" supposedly remarked when Gerald Ford asked him to be Veep: "I never wanted to be vice president of anything."

That's "who", not "whom". (Sorry, I couldn't resist.)

[dhkendall]

Or you could ask yourself why so many Argentines have names like Ginobili, Messi, Sabatini...

Why a large number of them have names like Schultz and Mengele is a more pertinent question.

Actually, when he said German was the #4 language spoken there, I did think of the Nazi migration.

Fwiw, German immigration to South America had been going on for over a century before WWII. Only a small number fled there after the war. Not that that makes your reasoning invalid - South America might have been a more attractive destination for fleeing Nazis because there were already ethnic Germans there.

Indeed, I come across Mennonites regularly in my day-to-day life (my work is full of them, my church is full of them, my sister lives in a Mennonite-heavy area of the province, you can't swing an apple cobbler around here without hitting a Mennonite, really), and it seems that every last one of them has family in and/or comes from Bolivia or Paraguay. I've gotten to the point where I've associated the landlocked countries of South America with Mennonite culture more than Spanish culture ...

[alietr]

Theodore Roosevelt came to mind instantly, but I just couldn't think of whom the second New Yorker (despite having grown up in New York) might be until the memory of what "Rocky" supposedly remarked when Gerald Ford asked him to be Veep: "I never wanted to be vice president of anything."

That's "who", not "whom". (Sorry, I couldn't resist.)

[Bamaman]

Or you could ask yourself why so many Argentines have names like Ginobili, Messi, Sabatini...

Why a large number of them have names like Schultz and Mengele is a more pertinent question.

Actually, when he said German was the #4 language spoken there, I did think of the Nazi migration.

Fwiw, German immigration to South America had been going on for over a century before WWII. Only a small number fled there after the war. Not that that makes your reasoning invalid - South America might have been a more attractive destination for fleeing Nazis because there were already ethnic Germans there.

My Nazi comment was a bit of a joke, but it did come to mind when seeing the clue. Thank you, though for the historical information, that does make sense why Nazis may have fled there if there was a significant German culture in the country.