Ep 408: Ann Russell, Cassie Palmer (March 21, 2012)

Rounds: Here.


Richard makes reference to a "cave incident" that Ann has had.  She explains that she once went on a self-guided cave trip; she was with a group of scouts (who had all the torches).  When they got near the end of the cave -- this was about a kilometre underground -- suddenly the cave narrowed off.  Ann did not like the looks of that, so she decided to wait around while everyone else moved off to look at the rest of the cave.  Which they did, leaving her in complete darkness for the ten minutes or so until they returned.  As she said, "Those ten minutes... one K under the ground in complete darkness were very scary."  She does not "do" caves any more.

Tonight's challenger is Cassie Palmer, a district nurse.  Her daughter, Millie, is almost three years old; just before Millie turned two she suddenly could read the alphabet.  Cassie and her husband were surprised as to how this could be, since they had not sat down and taught it to her.  Then one night when they were eating dinner and watching Letters and Numbers -- as they do every weeknight -- Lily was putting up the letters and Millie was calling out the letters as Lily put them up.  So that was how it happened.


Cassie started off with two good words to have a 14 point lead after the second round; then the situation reversed in the next two letter rounds.  Cassie struggled with the numbers throughout, and when she somehow wrote down an invalid answer on the last round she dropped out of contention.  Ann solved the conundrum first in any case, ending up with a 46 to 20 win in a game that was quite similar to yesterday's game in some ways.

I saw a word a little too late for it to count, and could not get the conundrum, but aside from that it was a good game for me; I was particularly pleased about the last numbers round.  A comfortable win in the end.