Ep 331: Toby Baldwin, Tom Museth (December 5, 2011)

Rounds: Here.


Toby returns as the carry-over champion, and we learn that he's still very much involved with music.  He considers it more of a passion now than a career, but he is actively involved with bands, doing live sound and studio recordings.  He also plays instruments, usually in other people's bands; mostly heavier rock and punk rock, but he's "been known to dip [his] feet into the waters of country and pop music occasionally."  Richard jokes that the punks might think those were pretty muddy waters, and I can't tell whether he intended that pun or if it was just coincidence.  Toby grants that it is somewhat damaging to his street cred.

Tonight's challenger is Tom Museth, a technical editor, web developer, and former journalist.  Richard asks more about the journalism; Tom started off with feature writing in magazines -- he mentions finance and horticultural ones specifically, but adds that it was "all kinds, really" -- and after a while migrated to newspapers, mostly doing investigative journalism.  Then he moved into the production side of things, becoming a subeditor, so he's really covered quite the range of possibilities in journalism.


The contestants start off equal, but Tom mostly ends up a letter behind in the letters rounds, and somewhat worse off in the numbers rounds.  Neither contestant got to the target in any of those, so there was certainly room for improvement.  Toby is safely ahead going into the conundrum that neither of them solve, and takes the victory 48 to 13.

I was so glad to have unseen episodes to watch again after two weeks of familiar ones.  This was tempered somewhat by the SBS video player being extremely uncooperative tonight.  In fact, it took me somewhere around four hours of attempts before I was able to view the entire episode; at the worst parts, I would get maybe 30 seconds of new footage, then it would stall, and eventually say that "The selected item is not currently available".  It is mind-boggling just how poor this is; properly buffering data is not hard!

Aside from that, this was a decent game for me.  I finally found a nine within time (actually before it, since I was anticipating the final letter), and mostly optimal results for the rest.  A missed numbers target and one shorter word than I would have liked are the only blemishes here.  (And I'm putting the latter down to the frustrations of thee hours fighting with the website.)  A comfortable victory, and my highest score of the series to date. 

As usual, details after the jump.