go, gail trimble

'Who the hell?' I hear you cry. Well, Gail Trimble is a girl at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and she has been brilliant in University Challenge. She is a pleasant looking student who looks very much like a girl doing classics at Oxford who might be in the choir. She is engaging, and she is pleased when she gets a question right, because it's a game and that's the object. Because the world is full of lunatics, some people hate her for this with a splenetic fury that defies rational explanation and makes me hate them with a splenetic fury that is perfectly explicable using reason.

Fine if they just hated her, but they go on websites and forums and bellow incoherently into the empty ether about how she is a smug, posh bitch, and this is the sort of thing the nice ones say. Except it isn't an empty ether. When we call someone a bitch online, they find out about it. If Gail Trimble is human, she knows all about the unfathomable bile, and if it doesn't upset her, she isn't human, however much she understands the misplaced envy of people that can't bear the fact that she's good at quizzes, and she's a girl, and she speaks in RP.

My friend Jon has started a group which hopes to drown out some of the forum lunatics with a small, steady stream of banality. You can find out about it here.

In the meantime, Corpus Christi are in the University Challenge final tonight. If you don't care about quizzes, don't watch. But don't hate people just for being good at them, you weirdos. Go Gail.

It just goes to show you can't be too careful.