Some kid with seemingly encyclopedic knowledge won University Challenge. Despite the reports, he did not do it alone, although he probably could’ve managed.
This show makes me uncomfortable as I always start questioning the quality of my childhood/secondary/tertiary/life education. If I were to somehow end up on University Challenge, I’d probably be like Neil in the clip below*:
It appears while I was studying popular culture (or whatever it was I did at university**), Alex Guttenplan was busy learning the following:
Who argued for the theory of evolution of species in the 1986 book The Blind Watchmaker?
According to the Book of Exodus, Amram and his father’s sister Jochebed are the parents of which prophet?
What period of time is 11 days shorter than the solar year?
Which Scottish Island gives its name to the 93 chess pieces discovered there, right?
International Books Day is held annually on or about 2 April, which is the birth date of which children’s author born in 1805 in Copenhagen?
At its brightest, which planet can reach an apparent magnitude of -4.7 in the earth’s sky?
In the Schrödinger equation of quantum wave mechanics what quantity is represented by “h”?
King Thibaw was the last king of which country?
What is the highest two-digit number, both of whose digits are primes?
Named after a Dutch physicist born 1865, what is the splitting of atomic spectral lines in a static magnetic field?
Are you still there?
Forget it, I’m going to watch The Young Ones.
*For readers in the US, that was indeed Hugh House Laurie, Stephen Fry and Emma Thompson, all doing their best for Footlights College.
**Try telling your father you’re taking a class called From Elvis to Madonna. Or that an entire lecture (in a different class) focussed on Prince’s Little Red Corvette, of which the significance now completely eludes me.
Answers: 1. Richard Dawkins; 2. Moses; 3. The lunar year; 4. Lewis; 5. Hans Christian Andersen; 6. Venus; 7. Planck’s Constant; 8. Burma; 9. 77; 10. The Zeeman effect
Questions courtesy of the Independent, along with a nice little look at the Guttenplan man.
Style icon/sulky sourpuss Chloë Sevigny has executed a perfectly-formed media backflip by blaming the reporter for candid comments she made during a recent interview.
Speaking to Chicago’s AV Club last week before the release of new film Barry Munday, Sevigny seemed enthusiastic and open as the the interview followed the usual ‘coolest girl in the world’-indie it girl-Boys Don’t Cry Oscar nomination arc.
When talk moved to the latest season of HBO’s Big Love and the reporter mentioned the show had taken some flak for being over-the-top, she quite frankly admitted:
It was awful this season, as far as I’m concerned. I’m not allowed to say that! [Gasps.] It was very telenovela. I feel like it kind of got away from itself. The whole political campaign seemed to me very farfetched. I mean, I love the show, I love my character, I love the writing, but I felt like they were really pushing it this last season.
Such honesty is rare in Hollywood, and made me re-think my whole perception of her as an actor slash muse slash queen of the Brown Bunny bj. Maybe she’s worth all that indie cred, after all?
But two days later, she spoke with Entertainment Weekly and blamed the whole thing on the AV Club:
I feel like what I said was taken out of context, and the [reporter] I was speaking to was provoking me. I was in Austin and really exhausted and doing a press junket and I think I just… I wasn’t thinking about what I was saying. You know, after a day of junkets sometimes things slip out that you don’t mean, and I obviously didn’t mean what I said in any way, shape, or form.
& if you need further proof that she’s kinda beautiful (above Terry Richardson photo notwithstanding) and wears lovely clothes but ultimately lacks any real backbone, look what she did with Beck:
Blimey, who knew former Megadeth guitarist Marty Friedman left the band as didn’t suit his refined taste in music? He told Ultimate Guitar mag:
I didn’t think Megadeth were aggressive enough! It was getting to the point where everything was kind of mid-tempo, old school metal. And there was so much cooler nu metal happening at the time, that I really felt we needed to get modern because this shit that we were doing was not aggressive enough. And our pop stuff was not pop enough.
He now lives in Tokyo, the land of pop, where he’s fluent in Japanese and known as Mr Heavy Metal.
In this Heavy Metal Major League clip, a dude in full Kiss regalia tells Mr Heavy Metal ‘you’re awesome!’ before announcing to Paul Gilbert (aka Mr Big), ‘you suck!’. The host then selects balls painted with alphabet letters from a box and the two axemen must ‘play ball’ by playing a riff from an artist starting with that letter*.
TV in the UK is all The F Word this and X-Factor that. If only the producers would look to Japan…or listen to more heavy metal.
*Gilbert’s first choice of Yngwie Malmsteen for ‘y’ is pretty impressive…but perhaps I just don’t know enough metal guitarists?
