University Challenge: St Andrew's vs. Somerville

Finally caught up with Monday’s University Challenge. It’s been ages since I actually bothered to follow a TV show with any regularity and I am 99% sure it’s because this time, I’ve started documenting my scores. I am a terrible, horrible geek..

Today was St Andrew’s against Somerville, Oxford (one of those ones that used to be all-female and has recently-ish gone co-ed; I was pleased to see that their male:female ratio was 2:2 instead of the considerably more usual 4:0.) Somerville scored a respectable 150, but were outgunned by St Andrew’s excellent 255.

I . . . scored 300. Dropping to 255 if you discount bonuses to which I didn’t know the starter, but that’s what the rest of the team is for. And 150 of those points came in starters. Needless to say I’m ridiculously pleased.

Geeky things I knew today (questions paraphrased from memory):

“Identify the Shakespeare play in which a supernatural event is reacted to with the following:” – answers being, respectively, the ‘dead corse / again in compleat steel’ bit from Hamlet, the ‘thy bones are marrowless’ bit from Macbeth and the bit in The Tempest where Ferdinand hears Ariel’s song.

“Identify the Greek physician, mentioned in Homer, who was later revered as a god of medicine” – Asclepius – ” his daughter, a goddess of healing” – Hygeia, from whence ‘hygiene’ – “and another daughter whose name is a modern English word meaning ‘a universal cure” – Panacea.

“In each case give the name of a dukedom that can be suffixed with -shire to form a county. 1) Conferred on Richard Plantagenet by his brother Edward IV in 1486″ – Gloucester. “2) Borne by a close ally of Richard III who later rebelled and was executed at Salisbury” – Buckingham. “3) Borne by Richard Neville, whose daughter Anne Richard III married” – Warwick. (My fairly decent Wars of the Roses knowledge is derived entirely from Shakespeare’s Henry VI and Richard III.)

There was also a question asking “Which author, awarded [some prize] for The Graveyard Book, created the comic-book character the Sandman?” to which the answer is of course ‘Neil Gaiman’. I love it when UC has questions about cool stuff. (I would of course include Shakespeare, Greek myth, etc. in this category, but many geeks would beg to differ.)

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