Quiz Up The Hound

First one of the year, thanks to Xmas and NYD falling on Thursdays so I for one was straining at the leash. In fact we were generally keen with all five of the regular crowd in place early.

As implied by the blog title, much of the pre-quiz activity was spent playing the rather splendid "quiz up" app. Hence I managed to lose to a fella from the Philippines on chemistry, a geezer from Thailand on the Premier League and most irritatingly, some fool in Purley on spelling. Would this be a sign of things to come?

Today, the usual top ten, connections, jeopardy rounds etc. would be tossed aside and replaced with 12 mini rounds covering events from each month of the year. Calling some of them events might be a bit tenuous, e.g. some woman calling 999 because there weren't enough sprinkles on her ice cream wasn't a make or break of 2014 for me but lets see where we go. First up though, we saw dead people, specifically 12 celebs deceased in 2014 - pictures of them before they died mind. Now obits don't normally feature large in the quiz but we did alright with 10, weirdly managing to get the wrong member of Cream to die. Bit of a break before we kicked things off properly, from which I can reliably report that the Paddington film is marvellous and Temuri Ketsbaia and Faustino Asprilla remain Newcastle legends.

So here were go, January through June in the first half, recorded highlights were the Seahawks winning the superbowl (none of us had a clue), Iceland having more fat people than Ireland and Italy, maybe it's all those whales they eat, and Helena Costa being the first female manager of any football team of note. In fact having just googled her, in the name of research naturally, what were they thinking?

Ten pointers still happened and two of three was maybe par, with us failing to get the top selling car of 2014, Ford Fiesta apparently. Bernard Jordan and Phillip Seymour Hoffman did us proud though. Onto the break and wotsits plus an embarrassing defeat for Graham on flags at the hands of a Columbian bloke, Rodriguez Hoyez Lopez I think.

Onto July and apparently things other than the world cup happened, who knew? Highlights of this round included bagging a suburb of St Louis, much debate on who won the Community shield and the C of E playing the Vatican at cricket, who naturally don't have a single Italian in their team. Thankfully and thoughts of making the music round 2014 based had been pooh poohed although I think George Ezra qualified. Elvis and Nik Kershaw didn't.

Chox round and we were first up, unfortunately we were wrong but does it matter? With the unusual quiz format, how we'd done was hard to predict but a nine point win resulted!

So a top up for the Hound coffers and much hope for 2015. We have much training to put in with the 5 in 5 being a mere month away.