The Latest Next Big Thing

[womzilla]

Literally.

"The Next Big Thing" is a weekly radio show produced by WNYC, the New York public radio station and syndicated by NPR to radio stations nationwide. It focuses on interesting people doing novel things.

The longest segment of the current show (9 April 2004) is a profile of John McCallion and Robin King, a married New York couple who are the boardgame editors of Games Magazine. I've known John and Robin since 1993, when I met them through the (now defunct) kNights of the Square Table, which was a group of play-by-mail gamers founded in the 1940s as a chess club but which had long featured chess variants and non-chess games by the time I joined it that year.

If you missed the show, you can delight in hearing John and Robin recount their lives together by listening to the show's archive (warning: RealAudio). The segment on John and Robin is "clip 4", so you can skip directly to it. It's 18:17 long.

And if you listen closely, you can hear a certain womzilla reading clues from a party game at a couple of points. ("1040. W-2. U2. 1099.") I am not identified during the segment, but I am thanked in the closing credits.

Comments

[sarah-ovenall.livejournal.com]

Felines! Canines! Incisors! Molars!

That was so cool!

[holyoutlaw.livejournal.com]

The answer is U2.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

Of course it is. That was one of the easiest sets of clues in the game.

You can hear John McCallion blowing one of the slightly more difficult ones elsewhere in the piece by correctly identifying the outlier but misidentifying the common link among "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, Raging Bull, Dances with Wolves, The Godfather". Some of the clues were actually very hard, including one along the lines of "Billy the Kid, Cinderella, Abraham Lincoln, Spartacus".

[sarah-ovenall.livejournal.com]

Raging Bull because the movie was black and white? Or because the book it was based on was nonfiction?

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

(I've let this sit long enough that anyone who was going to guess has done so.)

Nope. Raging Bull, because it was the only one of the four not to win the Best Picture Oscar.

By the way, the game was Go Mental. Not bad for a small-press trivia/party game.

[sarah-ovenall.livejournal.com]

So what happens if your reason is correct, but not what they were going for?

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

Excellent question. I don't remember what the rules say; I suspect it's along the lines of "if everyone agrees that the player is right, give them the points."