u/CauliflowerAdequate

How common are such big scores in a losing cause? Inspired after seeing the final frame score in the Yuan Sijun vs Jimmy Robertson semi-final at the Shenzhen Open - spoiler, Robertson lost 94-83. The frame total is just 18 points below the 195 record, too, back when Mark Williams vs Ding Junhui finished a frame 101-94 in the quarterfinals of the 2023 UK Championship. Williams conceded 12 fouls (value 53) to Ding's 3 (12). I don't know what the fouls split was for Yuan Sijun vs Jimmy Robertson but presumably high! Those 83 points for Robertson aren't far off Ding's 94, which I believe is the record losing score in a frame.

Funnily enough Jimmy Robertson does hold a great all-time frame-score record himself: his 178-6 victory in the final frame against Lee Walker in the first round of the 2021 Scottish Open (7 Dec 2021) was the most points scored in a single frame.

I'm looking around for other cases of 80+ in a losing cause. From that reddit link: "Peter Lines (England) won 108-84 in a frame versus Dominic Dale (Wales) in the fourth round of the 2012 Wuxi Classic qualifiers. Dale conceded 14 fouls (value 60) to Lines' 8 (36)." Then there's also "Sean Storey defeated Graham Cripsey 93-92 at the 1992 Asian Open" and memorably the "deciding frame of the semi-final between Wilson and McGill at the 2020 World Championship ended 103-83, with balls still remaining on the table".

Any other big scores ending in defeat that people can remember? Is there is a list of highest losing scores out there somewhere? Presumably Robertson's 83 would be well up there.

I found this weird old clipping tucked inside my 1990s Klingon dictionary: a Klingon warrior (I think from one of the movies) points his disruptor right out of the page and asks "nuqDaq yuch Dapol" meaning "Where do you keep the chocolate?" Can anyone ID which character it is? I suspect it’s from one of the later films, but I can’t tell if it’s an actual frame or just a publicity photo. Here's the image! https://imgbox.com/e1NXOrDj

Oddly, the ad is for the British subsidiary of Informix Software, a database company specialising in online transaction processing for retail, finance and energy. Informix’s database product was bought up by IBM in 2001 - a few years later, in 2005, IBM swallowed up the company itself, now renamed Ascential Software after losing its headline product. The database software still exists today as IBM Informix and HCL Informix.

I found the clipping while clearing out my old Star Trek stuff. Judging by the news stories on the other side, it looks like the Wednesday 14 February 1996 edition of The Daily Telegraph. I wondered if the “Where do you keep the chocolate?” line could be Valentine’s Day reference?

The complete text reads:

>THE PRINCIPLES OF INFORMATION: > >nuqDaq yuch Dapol. > >Your organisation may possess entire galaxies of useful information. > >But it will do you very little good unless you can make sense of it all. > >That's why so many database-driven enterprises are turning to Informix to help them translate their potential into commercial success. > >No wonder we're boldly growing so much faster than any of our rivals. > >INFORMIX (R) World leaders in database technology. > >FOR THE BEST INFORMATION, RING (0181) 818 1081. INFORMIX SOFTWARE LIMITED, 6 NEW SQUARE, BEDFONT LAKES, FELTHAM, MIDDLESEX TW14 8HA.

I'm leaving the original details intact as there's no risk in them - (0181) was an old-style Outer London area code, abolished in the "Big Number Change" of 1999-2000 when all of London adopted (020). Bedfont Lakes is a business park next to Heathrow Airport - IBM are still located there, but 6 New Square is now used by the UK Home Office. Searching for that "For the best information" line turns out to be a good way of finding other quirky Informix ads from the era! But I could only find poor quality text-only OCRs on the Internet Archive rather than images.

Still, that was enough to discover Informix re-ran the advert in The Times (of London) in March 1996 with the same different wording: https://archive.org/stream/NewsUK1996UKEnglish/Mar%2011%201996%2C%20The%20Times%2C%20%2365524%2C%20UK%20%28en%29_djvu.txt

But I can't track down an image for that one, so they might not have used the same photo.

In fact the only other reference I can find to this advertising campaign at all is one post from the old tlhIngan-Hol Mailing List Archives, made by the late Anthony Appleyard of UMIST, a well-known sci-fi and fantasy superfan who even got his own Wikipedia page! It was posted on Wed 14 Feb 1996 - though the text gets the day of the week wrong - under the title "An unusual use of Klingon": https://www.kli.org/tlhIngan-Hol/1996/February/msg00185.html

>In the British newspaper "Daily Telegraph" (Tue 14 Feb 1996), p3, there is a quarter-page ad with a photo of a Klingon, and under it "nuqDaq yuch Dapol" (which seems to mean "Where do you keep the chocolate?") in inch-high type, and below that in smaller type an advertisement (including two Star-Trek-ish references) for a database software selling company called Informix. The idea is to convey the trouble in understanding incoming information unless you buy e.g. Qwertyuiop Incorporated's software.

Anyway that's the only other reference I can find to this unusual advertising campaign and I can't see an image of it anywhere online, so thought I would share it with you guys! I know there are people who are interested in cataloguing real-world uses of Klingon so could so perhaps they could be told about it, I feel like this unusual find should be archived somewhere!

Scoring more than 80 but lost the frame anyway

Klingon language IT ad in 1996 UK newspaper