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Friday 7 June 2002
Last Monday night our friend
Paul was a contestant on Who
Wants to be a Millionaire (which will screen next Monday
night at 8.30pm, channel 9 for Australian viewers).
As required, he had organised
a couple of phone-a-friend buddies which included Jud (another
one of our sushi guzzling pals) and Big-P as well as Nic
and me all acting as one team. So around 6pm that night Big-P
and I wandered over to Jud and Nic's place for pizza and the
possibility of being called up by Eddy Macguire (host of the
show, and all round Australian celebrity type) if Paul got
stuck. Paul and Jud had been practicing all weekend with Jud
getting faster and faster at using key words to get the answers
out of google. Big-P was
supposed to load a copy of an encyclopedia CD-ROM onto his
lap top to be back-up just incase Jud's Internet access was
down but unfortunately somehow the CD-ROM got forgotten in
the excitement of the day. Fortunately the connection was
up and running so there were no worries there. Around 6.15pm
the station called Jud and told him that Paul was in the hotseat
and that we should be on standby incase he needed to call
us.
Jud had a shot of whiskey
and took his seat in front of the computer... He practiced
his impressive "hello Eddy!" voice and had to be
kept away from downing a second whiskey. Seemingly moments
later the phone rang again and Eddy Macguire was on speaker
phone... he made fun of us a little and then Paul got to ask
his question. He gave us the key words "flag
quarantine ship" and we had twenty seconds to find
the colour (either black or yellow). As you can see -- the
only colour listed on the page is blue... and blue was not
the answer but by then we had run out of time, Eddy was making
fun of us again and the audience was laughing at us. Perhaps
if we had tried "quarantine
flag colour" or even "quarantine
flag" under the images tab we would have seen that
the colour is yellow and we might have helped Paul win $32,000.
It was not to be. In the end, Paul went against his gut reaction
- which would have been right - and came away with the measly
$1000 prize. Devastation all round... Paul explodes here.
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