Quiz takes a puzzling turn

FOR some years now I have been getting more and more bored with University Challenge. Its question devisers are obsessed with the flags of small African states, the periodic table of the elements, Chinese dynasties, and fantastically obscure and specialised scientific queries.

But it reached its ludicrous peak last week with this question, which I am sure Jeremy Paxman did not understand: ‘An unpolarised beam of light is incident on a pair of ideal polarisers whose transmission axes have an angle of 60 degrees between them. What fraction of the original incident intensity is transmitted through the pair?’

I have forgotten the answer because, as with so many of these questions, I did not care that I did not know. Surely a quiz only works if you wish you had known the answers, and kick yourself for not doing so?

IT OCCURS to me that if we had not discovered that the coronavirus existed, and so had not descended into a constant floundering panic about it, it would be doing far less damage than it is. Alas, some people fall ill and die, but they always have and always will. This is not the Black Death, and we might be better off if we stopped behaving as if it was.

THE most dangerous and frightening political leader in our part of the world is Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Not only does he ceaselessly stir the pot of war in Syria, making it almost impossible to end that terrible, tragic conflict. He is now making grotesquely cynical use of migrants. To get his way in Syria, he deliberately encouraged these poor people towards the Greek frontier in a blatant, almost medieval piece of blackmail. At home he has destroyed formerly free media and independent courts, and flung scores of journalists into prison. But he is, alas, our Nato ally and we dare not undermine him. So we go on and on about Vladimir Putin instead.