New Scaratings

Overheard during the SIX Warm-Up Round, during which the clue said the writer had three names:

“Does the ‘O’ in ‘Eugene O’Neill’ count as a ‘name?’”

The O' in O'Neill is a Celtic article, not a proper name. The spelling convention that anglicized O'Neill, O'Conner, what have you, didn't come together until the Normans invaded England and Ireland, bringing with them the confirmative "au," which means merely 'the,' and is of even more antique, Celtic origin.

So your Eugene O'Neill means simply, Eugene the Neill, or more elaborately, Eugene of the Neill clan.

Yeah, I know. We all went with GEORGE BERNARD SHAW. It was just a slow start.

Sorry, GYPSY, I see where you were going. Since you haven't been playing much Six of late (in Rome with the Notorious RBG, in London hob-nobbing with your fellow wizards), you probably haven't observed the minor shift in content. The writer prepping the Warm-Up Round has backed off from the full-on jokey phrasing of the first six questions, and is now dropping in clues like, "Which author with three names...," or "In what even numbered year did X do Y?," then providing only one even numbered year in the four-item drop-down box. This has made the Warm-Up Round truly a warm-up. If you can read, and if you can pass the mirror test, the first six questions haven't been very toothy. Which is fine.

Buzztime considers Six to be a 30 question quiz. I view it, in its present format, as 66 questions, 48 of them bite-sized matches. But should you fail only once in those 48, by going, say 2,3,4,2 instead of 1,3,4,2, you lose the 250 points, sure, but also the 500 point bonus for the matching the four items and the 1,000 point bonus for running all 48 matches. You can run the rest of the quiz but are unable to arrive at a score above 64,250, which won't even get you a seat at the table in West Park Station or Mad River. There are enough subtle pitfalls in this game that I'm just as happy when guest players not at my table can breeze through the Warm-Up Round and feel competitive.

This was the first Wednesday SIX I’ve played in recent memory.

Some of those Matching were, in my estimation, really friggin’ HARD and some were super easy.

It seemed like a particularly uneven game to me. But we only had a team of three, so maybe I’ve gotten too used to leaning on the other players. When it’s easy for them, I assume it was an easy question that was just out of my wheelhouse. But none of us had a clue on the cities in the Phillipines.

SHAKES pointed out that I had the wrong country entirely. I thought they’d asked for the “Phillipines.”

Of COURSE I know all of the cities of the “Philippines.”

Shakes was pulling your leg, O Purple One.

The question had to do with the geographical orientation of four Filipino *islands*, rather than *cities*.

For the handful of New Scaratings readers who merely coasted through their two-year tours in US Navy logistics, the islands and their matches were as follows:

Mindanao - South
Luzon - North
Palawan - West
Samar - East

Extra credit for anyone who has ever before seen the name of Samar in print. Identified as western, Samar doesn't extend as far west as Mindanao - adding a little spice to a Match which everyone but GYPSY and me no doubt solved correctly.

You overheard it because I said it. I thought it was kind of funny, but the thought that popped into my head actually slowed me down on getting to Shaw at the 5th spot.

I hate to quibble, SCAR, but taking the fifth answer in a four-item drop-down box wouldn't have helped much, either.

Ah, a clue to my slow response time !

SCAR, I wasn’t going to call you out like that! Usually when I say I overheard something, it’s because it came out of my own mouth.

I took ownership.