Ep 384: Christopher Piggott-McKellar, Tiahn Hannaford (February 16, 2012)

Two new contestants tonight after Alan's successful retirement yesterday.  In the champion's seat is Christopher Piggott-McKellar, a policy advisor for the Queensland government.  He did a little freelance radio journalism after he finished university and before he started working for the government.  That let him travel a lot and visit some pretty amazing places in northern Australia, and Arnhem Land in particular.  He feels very privileged to have done so, and thinks that everyone should explore our continent -- it's a marvellous place.

In the challenger's seat is high school student Tiahn Hannaford.  Tiahn wants to study psychology after she finishes school; she is really interested in looking at how the human brain works, and how people relate to one another.  She's interested in more than "just counselling people"; she wants to look at the quirky things that they do and find out why.  This makes me think of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.


The contestants mostly find sixes in the letters, with some lower and a single seven.  The numbers go a bit each way, but Tiahn missed a findable target in the first numbers round and that ten point difference carried over all the way to the conundrum.  She still had a chance if she could have solved it, but it was a tough one tonight; Chrisopher took the win, 45 to 35.

Nine-letters words were my weakness in this game, which is not unusual.  I missed the available full monty, and was not able to solve the conundrum until well after time was up.  Still, it was a pretty comfortable win in the end, continuing this week's run of scores in the sixties.

As usual, details after the jump.