February 25th 2010

It was a dark and stormy night as the 3 hounds gathered to do glorious quizzing. Also, I did a bad thing on the way home (more of that later).

'It's raining Cats and Hounds' comprised;

Barnett of Brum ("I had fish and chips - you can stick that in your report")
Robson Hound (2 different sandwiches, 1 is a starter the other is pudding)
and yours truly (2 chicken Kiev and sweetcorn - no chips)

Pre quiz talk was all about the raffle. +/- £600 and only 2 keys to pick from - surely someone would win the cash and maybe even the Hound- Could we dare to dream of such riches?

On with the quiz - we thought the opening round was tougher than usual and were not too surprised with our low score of 25/30. The only surprise was that left us wallowing in joint last place - not a customary position for a hound, having to come from behind, but we felt confident that the music round would restore our fortunes.

Unfortunately the music round proved just as troublesome - we were totally blind-sided by track after track and were dismayed to hear in the break that all the other teams (including the Bob-sleigh hamsters) had found it pretty easy. The Hound was limping home.

So going into the last round it looked as if our only hope lay with the raffle and we hastily procured more and more tickets.

Now, something strange happened in the last round, either; we played a blinder, the other teams had a shocker or Theo's scoring system finally worked in our favour. Whatever it was, we suddenly ended up in second place scooping the bottle of wine as our reward. Totally baffled we awaited the raffle with more tickets than it is wise to shake a stick at.

Unfortunately we didn't hold the winning ticket - but more bizarrely, the winner wasn't able to identify the right key so it rolls onto next week - but now with 10 keys.

Finally, the bad thing. On my way home and struggling with Robson's forgotten umbrella and trying to check my pockets for my mobile I dropped and shattered the bottle of wine outside Purley Kitchens and bathrooms. oh dear.

Special Caveat received from Robson -

At risk of coming across as slightly defensive £47,000pw on £56m =
around 4.35%.
You can't get that anywhere on a deposit basis, maybe in a fixed term
bond.
Best you can do is 3% = £32,000 and that's with tin pot companies
I doubt you could rock up with £56m and stick down.
And you can stick that in your status report.

February 18th 2010

It was a tense finish.  90 minutes of stubborn resistance and
occasional flashes of brilliance had passed and 'The Year of The Hound'
were deadlocked with, well just about everybody else in fact.  How on
earth it can be that around a dozen teams can enter a quiz, answer 90
odd questions and find themselves all on the same final score I shall
never know, but that is what happened - and The Hound prides itself on
its collective ability to be able to deal with any situation.  Theo set
the tie-breaker question in motion and a dozen team representatives
scrambled from all quarters of the pub to submit their various
guestimates within the 30 permitted seconds - The Hound bated its
breath and drained its glasses...

It hadn't started spectacularly well - El Barnetto of Brum was still
'ooop north' being literally snowed into a second floor flat.  Our
recent tradition of enjoying a 'special guest' to supplement the core
team was not observed this week, although there was the threat of being
joined around the halfway mark by one of the all-time sporting greats -
none other than cricketing legend Lord Tony of Bunghole, who was in the
area having the first net of the season (in February?!) and thought he
might as well pop in on his way home.  Which was nice.  The first round
had yielded a return of 26 (?) points from 30 questions and left us in
joint second.  We had Robin to thank for the chemical symbol for
Methane (CH4 apparently) and the processes of elimination which led us
to deduce that the 'hypocentre' of an earthquake is below it and not
above it and the earth's human population in 1900 was 1.3 billion not
3.1 billion.

To borrow a legendary commentating Colemanball, the second round saw
The Hound 'open its legs and show its class' as we answered all 21
musical questions completely correctly and gained maximum pointage -
our knowledge variously covering all colours of the musical spectrum,
from Jedward and Helen Shapiro to Bizet.  Joint leaders, by a point,
with one other team going into the last round.

Glasses were refreshed with Numbers and Pride and numbers were swollen
with the arrival of His Holiness the Bung.  I can't remember any of the
questions we were asked (not even the anagram I'm afraid although, once
again, Robson Hound got it with alarming speed) nor how many of them we
may have got correct (although we went T.F.F.F.T in the True/False
round and we should have gone T.T.T.T.T) but given that we led going
into the round and it ended with a mass tie-break it is fair to
conclude that pretty much everyone else had a better final round than
we did.

Some readers, i.e. Danny, might be intrigued at this stage to know that
two pairs of white trainers were in evidence, along with a pair of
black shoes and a literally enormous pair of sliver trainers.  Pre
match meals for the starting trio had variously included toast, bacon &
lentil soup and a plate of gammon, rice and peas.  Make of that
whatever the hell you will.

... Theo announced the tie-breaker answers in no particular order - the
question had been fairly straightforward, 'how many legs does the
world's largest millipede have?', but the range of answers was quite
spectacular.  The literally hilariously (?!) named team of 'Ashley Cole
has joined John Terry sleeping on the sofa' went with 1.4 million legs
(I kid you not) whilst some other bunch of soft in the heads had gone
with '80 legs'!  Daren had immediately said, '272', I said it was lower
but couldn't quite get it together to come up with an actual lower
number and Robson, well I can't actually remember what Robson said to
be honest.  But 'two hundred and seventy two legs' was our answer.
Theo's answer, the answer that actually mattters in such circumstances,
was '256' and nobody could get closer to that than us and so it was
that The Year of the Hound collected another crate of lager and cocked
its metaphorical leg over the competition once more.

The Year of the Hound is over - long live The Hound.

Thursday 11th February

It was early doors for Team Hound on Thursday (consisting of That Daren, That Robson, That Kevster and That No Longer Anymore A Special Guest, But Still Special Nicky) and, with this additional time advantage, Kevster donned Theo's hat and led us through various quizettes from various newspapers which were breeding on our table.

During this brain-training there was much kerfuffle at the table beside us. Daren realised he should have kept his visage frontwards facing after he turned and was affronted by the same beauty that Kevster and Nicky had been subjected to for some fair few minutes.

As a result, whilst we wouldn't normally discuss the colour of our underwear, but foud ourselves doing so, today's quizette is who was wearing what colour underwear:

Mid-Blue, Black, BLack with lacy edges, Stripey Blue and Grey.

If you have cleverly noticed that there are 5 pieces of underwear to match to their owner, we have also included those belonging to Very Hairy Man With Bottom Protruding From His Jeans.

It was an evening for 'earlies'.. there were even early hot nuts and we speedily decided upon the team name (thank the Lord for small mercies) and assigned ourselves as The Dirty Hound. Whether this was a Freudian thought process related to the exposure of Very Hairy Man With Bottom Protruding From His Jeans, I'm not sure.

Onto the usual mixed bag of round 1. Etymology is important here as there's often words you don't know but with a bit of language knowledge,can get to the answer. Hence I was confident that selenophobia, closely linked to the element selenium named after the sun, was fear of the sun.Incorrect, helium was the sun. Worse was to come though. At the start of the question, which country's Formula 1 circuit... 3 of the 4 of us switched off, took a drink, scratched our ar$es etc, leaving this one to Daren. Imagine our shock, nay horror when Imola turned out to be San Marino, not Italy. Not an easy one to live down. We had a sweep on the points we'd get, it was after the round but that's not really important,Kevster won with 26 - enough for joint top.

*takes baton from Robin*

So, joint second going into the music round, The Hound were tucked into the pack letting the pacemakers (hopefully) exhaust themselves and planning to use Round Two to get into position to kick for home at the bell and romp to another crate of winner's beer. The questions came thick and fast - and The Hound met them head on - thick and fast'ish. Amongst others we got Showaddywaddy, Cream, Rod Stewart, Moody Blues, Gene Kelly, Frankie Vallie, The Jam, Avril Lavigne, Adelle, Kylie, All Saints, Rick Astley, Jason Donovan, The Searchers and The Mamas & Pappas - we missed out on Amy McDonald, Hot Chip, The Hoosiers and a couple of others that I forgot to write down! We went through the bell still in second although the field around us had thinned a little - the joint leaders were a point ahead of us on 62 as we gathered our thoughts, filled our glasses and hunkered down for the final chukka.

*hands baton to Daren*

As predicted, we found ourselves in the 'final' round which as always was a mixture, a melange, a potpourri and dare I say, a veritable hodgepodge of subjects.
Theo (Quizmaster) enlivened the action with the comment that "each team will be awarded a 'joker' subject where the points they score will be doubled. They won't know which subject the joker is being played in but the points will be added to their final score". Absolutely bonkers and in no way a strategy to ensure that the scores could be manipulated so that the majority ended up in a tie break.

sample questions.......

Films Which film opens with the words 'My name is Lester Burnham. This is my neighborhood. This is my street. This... is my life. I'm forty-two years old. In less than a year, I'll be dead'. (It doesn't actually)
History - When was the BBC founded
Sport - Name one of the 2 teams in last weeks superbowl
Entertainment- Which 'soap' currently features a character called Rabbit
True or False They were all true apart from the 'elephant in the room' which was about an elephant doing two laps of a circus riding a bicycle - clearly false
The Last 10 - Cant remember the anagram as i've lost my 'notes' - it had an X in it though and Robson got it almost instantaneously.

To our astonishment we ended up in a tie-break with 8 other teams.

How many floors in the Empire State Building? We said 110, Theo said 102, as did 'John Terry Is sleeping on the couch' and to those victors went the spoils.

4th February 2010

Right, given the new "on-line" format with the status report being available to millions, I started with the intention of a detailed report, including lots of factual content. However, given an earlier than normal start, and I think slightly stronger beer than usual, it all turned into even more of an alcoholic fug than typical and I can remember next to nothing, and can't even read my notes.

It started well enough, Kevster was off to That London to demonstrate sizes of fish or whatever it is they do at these places but managed to stay for about half of the first round.

That proved to be our best; we were given 29 points, and actually scored 28, failing on the location of Rawalpindi and where the Yakusa are based and were joint top. The music round, so often the Hound's strong suit, proved to be our undoing. Maybe the alcohol was starting to kick in but several questions we just didn't have a clue on. That said we were only one point off the lead. Regular text updates were being provided at this point to Pete who was up the Junction, I don't think that's a metaphor, and Kevster who correctly identified the singer of "Let's Here It For The Boy" - maybe they were playing it in the club. Sometime around here I dropped my phone in the urinal, it was starting to unravel.

On the mix of questions that is the final round, entertainment we just about muddled through, Daren managed to identify that Samuel L Jackson did not do any voice over on some film or other, Madagascar? We got one out of five on the True or False, they were all false. We did get the anagram though - SMOKIER.

Bizarrely after all that we were in a tie break, though to be fair, all the teams in the pub but one were. The tie-break question was - What is the largest number of children ever recorded as having been born to one woman in her lifetime. Around 5 minutes after the answer was given, I remembered reading this in the Guinness Book of Records as a youngster - no use then though. More interesting than the real answer though is our guess, supplied by Daren.

Suffice to say we didn't win, or were second.