damn victoria, you sure showing your SCOTTISH PRIDE tonight!
and THAT'S called using your loaf .....

Victoria actually said the answer to the last Missing Vowels question!

Only after the musical sting had played, thankfully. Given the Nordiphiles buzzed inside the time, if they'd have been one point behind rather than than two there might have been some grumpiness.

I thought the walls tonight were really easy, we got 80% of them in about a minute - and I'm not the best at them at all.

Pleased to see the Elves win. They are a great team and Anne is cute too.

She's quite often on the QI podcast (There's No Such Thing As A Fish). They had VCM on as a special guest this week as a return favour. Some interesting factoids about proposition bets. I imagine conversations with VCM often swerve towards gambling in some form or another.

Jon

Wow. I had no idea that QI had a podcast. I have subscribed straight away. Sounds like an interesting thing to listen to on the way into work.

Is that the first time a wall has been solved without a single incorrect prod?

Also, why is a single half hour PMQs any different from two quarter hour sessions, particularly as you no longer need to go through the rigmarole of preceding every question by asking about the PM's engagements for the day ("I refer the speaker to my previous answer")?

The series only required that it was something that occurred on a Wednesday. Twice a week on Tuesday and Thursday wouldn't have worked!

There is more chance of serious probing of the Prime Minister in a longer session. The first few minutes are the usual question about what the PM has been doing then a question about when he will visit the MP's constituency for some reason. That would happen twice a week in the old system.

I think BLiar just found it 'below himself' to appear in the Commons.

The Leader of the Opposition gets six(?) questions which a good debater can use to get a point over, Milliband usually fails of course!

I was a civil servant for s very short time in the Department of Education during the late 60s. Questions are sent to the PM in advance and everything got dropped when one came in to the department so that every likely fact and answer could be provided to him so he hopefully sounded as if he knew what he was talking about. Not that we got to see or hear any of it them.

Isn't it the 'supplementary' where PMs can get caught out but few MPs seem to use written questions. They ask a question which is really a way of making a short statement in the Commons, if they are an opposition MP the PM then puts them down usually without actually answering and they have no chance to respond. With a written question they can respond.

Can I just pop in to say I was really pleased with myself for getting one answer on the first clue and one of the missing vowels which nobody got?

Got '20 years' on the first clue (sequel to The Three Musketeers) and got Arctophile and Teddy Bears in the missing vowels....

Not the first by a long shot. I know we did that with one of ours, and I have a feeling the History Boys may have done so on the same show. It must have happened a few times before.

Just to clarify, you did this by touching the screen just 16 times, without any other guesses at all, and this happened with both walls on the same programme?

Actually I think Tony Blair just felt, as you seem to, that the old system was a bit inefficient and a waste of his time, as he now has to prepare just once for PMQs instead of twice.

I did realise that. I just wondered when the programme became a platform for her political views and if that is going to be a continuing theme. Although it might be a moot point whether her other hilarious anecdotes are any better.

Come to think of it, couldn't they just fill up any spare time with more missing vowels questions instead?

It takes as long to prepare for a 30 minute PMQs as it does a 15 minute one as you still have to be briefed on all possible subjects. Doing it on a Wednesday means that you only have to do it once a week.

Yes, I know that. I basically wondered why VCM made a disparaging comment about Tony Blair on the basis that he cut it from 30 minutes a week to, erm, 30 minutes a week with the corresponding reduction on workload.

I wonder if WAMP would have been an accepted answer.

I use Windows IIS and have always used WAMP at home.
Only used LAMP on remote servers.

Those who change a tradition are rarely thanked for doing so, even if the change is positive. Plus I don't know what VCM's politics are (and don't care, frankly) but quite a lot of people have quite a low opinion of Tony Blair these days, regardless of which end of the political spectrum you're on.

I've checked. We definitely did the wall with only 16 touches (it took us a while to settle on the last two groups, but we didn't prod anything while we were thinking). I'd misremembered about the History Boys though - they had quite a few missteps, but got there pretty easily in the end.

[Edit} Actually, it's only 12 touches - the fourth group resolves automatically when you get the third.

The answer is yes, it should have been.

This has been discussed on the POV message board: http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/mbpointsofv...59441&skip=255

(If you use IIS, isn't that WIMP? That's assuming you use MySQL and PHP as well.)

Yes there are different setups. I think you can still use IIS for the domain hosting/DNS as well as using Apache.

Must admit, it's been a while since I had to tinker with it myself as I use a remote host these days which uses cPanel.

btw, didn't know POV message boards were still going

Quite an exciting game, and I thought the Chessmen had blown it on the Wall!

A bit of a shame that when VCM said the answer to one of the first round questions was "sports in which there's been more than one world champion with the same name", she completely overlooked the American Phil Hill who was F1 World Champion in the early 60s.

At least the team captain knew that as he mentioned "another Hill".