Dec 24, 2025 3 min read 2025-26

Deck the Halls With Queries of Power

Every so often, you come across a game-changing data analysis tool (this is a theme I'm sure is common across all people, and not specifically related to me). For me, the latest one is Power Query on Excel. My last Excel game-changer was pivot tables, but that came about eight years ago.

Anyway, yesterday, after some wrangling, I managed to import data from 270 spreadsheets into a single table, and when you make that into a pivot table, you are absolutely laughing.

Why not give me the Christmas gift of subscribing?

AI keeps promising that it is going to be able to do stuff like this, but whenever I have tried, it gets stuff wrong and acts like it doesn't know how to do it. Maybe it will get better, but when I ask it to (for example) give me a list of all the times Novak Djokovic has been knocked out of grand slams it isn't capable.

Perhaps we would be better served (even now) teaching people how to scrape for that data themselves (assuming, of course, that everyone else is also desperate for a list of Novak Djokovic's grand slam eliminations.

That's enough about excel, so let's move onto some excellent quizzing...

Here's your first starter for ten.

Campion-Dye kicks things off for UCL with Rothko, and Rajan lets them off for saying Mephistopheles instead of Mephisto on one of the bonuses.

A rapid buzz from Clayworth gets Lincoln on the board, before clarinet gives Campion-Dye a second ten-pointer. A neg from Lakota-Baldwin hands Lincoln an opening, but they can't scavenge the points and a third for Campion-Dye extends UCL's lead. This wins them a bonus set on rope-tying, but they cannot unknot the questions, taking only one.

The picture starter goes to Lakota-Baldwin, and they grab a hat-trick on national flags with unusual aspect ratios. I've said it before, but national flags as the picture round is surely too easy for University Challenge these days. If they wanted they could have zoomed in sections, or flags with bits removed, but straight up national flags is played out.

No one knows that Sikorsky make helicopters, and I am surprised to learn that they only started to be produced in the 1930s, more than 30 years after the aeroplane.

UCL are cruising, with a lead of 75 points. Whenever Lincoln manage to win the buzzer race they can't pick up steam on the bonuses.

Nobody even buzzes on the music starter, which is a great track by Young Fathers. Bonuses on Mercury Prize winners go to Lincoln, who only manage one. Rajan reminisces about his own university days with the third bonus, by Ms Dynamite, which was the anthem of his first term, apparently.

UCL can't stifle their laughter when skipper Doherty mentions thrush during the discussion over a bonus on yeast infections, but it turns out that the question was in fact about thrush, though that wouldn't have been the correct answer.

Lincoln are hovering around about 100 points back, and when Clayworth takes another early buzz of lion, this might be their last chance to get back into it. Two bonuses on constellations are followed by an emphatic Orman-Chan buzz. But they can only take five points on a bonus set about football, and when Lakota-Baldwin grabs the next starter, Lincoln's chances are over.

Lincoln 85 - 190 UCL

A fairly comfortable win for UCL, who didn't do much more than they needed to. Lincoln with a solid showing in their debut UC series, but never threatened their opponents.

One more second round match to come, but not until the new year. So I'll see you in three weeks. Have a nice Christmas, and buy my eBook if you can't think of what to get a quizzical fanatic in your family.