Ep 406: Ann Russell, Marc Lissner

Rounds: Here.


Two new contestants tonight, after Norm's successful retirement on Friday.  Taking the champion's seat is Ann Russell, a retired school-teacher.  In the following she implicitly refers to another person by saying "we" several times; I would assume this is her partner.  Anyway, before they retired they bought a country house down at Maslin's Beach, which she notes is right near the Mclaren Vale wine area.

(I'll digress here to note that Maslin Beach is the name of both the suburb and its associated beach, with Maslin's Beach being a common name for the beach specifically.  The southern half of this beach was Australia's first official nude beach, and used to host the Maslin's Beach Nude Olympics every year, although I gather from limited research that it has not been held for a few years.)

When Ann and her partner retired they could not decide which house they preferred, and so they ended up living in both houses.  They have a long weekend down the coast, and a short week in the city where they "see [their] family and go to the dentist and things like that".

In the challenger's seat is data analyst Marc Lissner.  He proposed to his fiancée at Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria, and if you've not seen pictures of it before do yourself a favour and do an image search -- there are some breathtaking pictures of it out there.  Marc points out that it inspired the Disney castle.  Richard asks why he chose that location, and Marc responds that it was a magical castle and he'd learned about it at school, so when they were in Germany he decided that that was where he wanted to propose.  (Oh, and the answer was yes.)


Ann starts off with an invalid word (a bit oddly, too, but we'll get to that in due course), giving Marc some early points.  The next two rounds are even, with her numbers choice proving too difficult for everyone.  Ann scores well in the next two rounds, including an excellent word in round 5, and with Marc doing rather poorly in the next numbers round she has a large lead.  Marc manages to get most of the ground back in the final numbers round, and it comes down to the conundrum.  Ann solves it first and takes the win, 40 to 26.

I had a poor start to this game, and was never really comfortable.  I ended up missing two other longer words that I'd have like to have seen, but I found the best results in the numbers rounds and solved the conundrum reasonably early to finish with a very comfortable win.  In fact, due to Lily's difficulties with the numbers I was only a point off the combined David and Lily total, so it arguably wasn't as bad as it felt at the time.