"What Every Schoolboy Knows"

In the Celebrity Who Wants to Be a millionaire? episode rerun on Sept. 12, 2024 the second pair of celebrities were Ike and Alan Barenholtz. And they played great. They won the $ 1,000,000 prize for their charity by answering all the questions correctly.

And they didn't use any of their lifelines until they reached the last two questions where they used all four lifelines.

So they were definitely great players for Celebrity Who Wants to Be a millionaire? and for all Who Wants to Be a millionaire? programs in general.

So I couldn't believe the trouble they had with the $ 500,000 question before answering it correctly. They used two lifelines, and they thought they knew the correct answer, but they and their phone-a-friend were not certain.

As it turned out, they chose the correct answer to the question of "in what country is there is a historical marker saying Ferdinand Magellan was killed here?"

But I would not have hesitated an instant to answer the question. I knew where Ferdinand Magellan was killed. And I knew that way back in the previous millennium.

I can remember reading as a child that someone named Ferdinand Magellan was a famous explorer and wondering where he explored. And a few years later I read a few books about famous explorers and so I know that Magellan was killed in a battle in the Philippines. And this was probably when I was still in elementary school.

And when I was a child I also read an English translation of Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1869-70), where the lost expedition of Laperouse in 1785-1788 is discussed, and someone says he only knows what "every schoolboy knows" about the expedition. And I knew he was wrong about what every schoolboy knew about the Laperouse expedition, because I was a schoolboy who didn't know anything about it. So that shows that different people know different things.

Still I would have thought that every schoolboy (or girl) would have known that Magellan was killed in the Philippines, until I saw that episode. Which just goes to show that you can't assume you know what other people know or don't know, because different people know different things..