Only on Only Connect

One thing I have been doing this weekend is catching up with some back episodes of my favourite quiz show, Only Connect.

And sometimes, there are just moments of that show that you really – really – wouldn’t get anywhere else.

Unbelievable. What an answer in the infamous final Missing Vowels round.

See also:

Panamadonna
Maltaylor Swift
Bolivia Newton-John
Argentina Turner
Myanmary J Blige
Turkmenistannie Lennox

That last one is something I didn’t think I’d be typing out today. Or on any day, to be absolutely honest.

On Connections

Mmm. I haven’t played the NYT Connections game for a while, but while other members of the family were at piano class, I thought that I’d give it a go. And it was while I was doing that, that I found this article by Connections editor, Wyna Liu.

This isn’t a new article: it’s a year and a bit old, but it does make interesting reading. Because it does rather make it seem like Wyna came up with this revolutionary idea of how to make the game work:

There would have to be a mix of categories for the game to feel challenging and satisfying. That’s where the puzzle element could come in: Some categories might be defined by their use of wordplay — palindromes, homophones, adding or dropping letters and words — rather than the literal meanings of the words on the cards. I saw three areas of potential difficulty that could be adjusted: the familiarity of the words, the ambiguity of their categorization and the variety of the wordplay.

But if you have ever watched Only Connect, the TV quiz show which began in 2008, then you’ll already have been enjoying “Connections” as “The Wall” for 15 years before NYT and Wyna began their version.
And they “saw” how to make it harder a long time before she did.

If there is a regular criticism of Connections, it’s that many of the answers are rather America-specific: baseball team nicknames or supermarket mascots; stuff that anyone outside the US wouldn’t know. But although it attracts an international audience, it’s an American site, and there’s ample opportunity for you to learn stuff about America from the internet.

Equally though, there was surely plenty of opportunity for Wyna and the NYT to know that “Connections” already existed. And I’m not saying that it was trademarked or anything – as far as I know, there’s no legal axe to grind here – just that pretending that it was a concept that they came up with… well… that’s a bit much.

Still, I do occasionally go and get my Connections fix. And when I need some more, I go to Puzzgrid, which… er… also pre-dated Connections. And why makes no bones about where it got the idea from (and pops a subtle dig at the NYT):

And why not go and enjoy the original on Only Connect, since it has just begun its 20th series?

Other Only Connect posts on 6000 miles…
Other Puzzgrid posts on 6000 miles…

5 points

I’m enjoying Series 19 of Only Connect in the few minutes of my spare time at the moment.

Thanks to my daughter’s drawing of a certain bird to get one of her Cubs’ badges, I was able to guess this one after the very first clue:

That’s 5 points to me, while the combined efforts of Jezz, John and Jane didn’t even manage to get the link at all. Can you see it?

I’ll share the answer below.

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That’s a silver-eye, a pink-eye, a black-eye and a red-eye.
I don’t blame you for not getting the bird: I wouldn’t have done if it wasn’t for the drawing, (and shouldn’t that be in italics as a Linnaean name?) but it seems to get fairly simple after that.

Of course, Z.lateralis is the Australasian equivalent of our own Zosterops virens, the Cape White-Eye.
Which would still fit the question.

First question: poo

It’s been a hectic week, so I only got round to watching the first episode of the new series of Only Connect. And it was off to a flier with the first question (as always) (not really) being faeces-related.

The great thing about being a bit late for this one is that there’s really not very long to wait until the next one.

(Reference: the named characters ending up in “less than ideal” situations regarding poo in Slumdog Millionaire, Back to the Future, The Shawshank Redemption and Trainspotting, in case you were wondering.)