Ep 390: Roman Turkiewicz, Natalie Simmons (February 24, 2012)

Rounds: Here.


Richard asks Roman if he gets stage fright before his acting performances.  Roman admits that he does a little, but he uses it to his advantage by channelling the energy into his character, enabling him to get off to a good start.

Tonight's challenger is Natalie Simmons, a horticulture student and keen gardener.  She has loved gardens for her whole life, and has visited some great ones throughout the world.  Natalie recently visited England and saw some National Trust gardens that she says were really beautiful; she also saw some lovely gardens in California last year, and New York.  But a few of the gardens that she loves the most are in Melbourne, such as the Heide garden at the Heide Museum of Modern Art, or Rippon Lea.


There's some good back-and-forth from the contestants, together with a mutual invalid word that I have some sympathy for.  Natalie has just the better of it, and takes a slender one point lead to the critical calculation.  Unfortunately for her she is not able to take advantage of the opportunity presented, and Roman reclaims the lead.  He seals the win with another very fast solution to the conundrum, winning 44 to 28.

I did reasonably well, although I ran out of time while trying to write down one eight and overlooked another that I should have seen.  A tricky numbers round eluded everyone but I think it was findable; I'd half-tried the approach that Lily later came up with and just not paid enough attention.  Bother.  Against that, my conundrum speed was excellent tonight (and it needed to be in order to beat Roman to it), and I finished just three points behind the David and Lily combination.

As usual, details after the break.