Spawny Hound

A full pack of six hounds for the first time since the old king died. Some of us keeping powder dry for the following day's Cheltenham watching, but most treating it as a warm-up.


Pre match banter included England's relegation to cricketing minnow status, Annie Power falling at the last hurdle and Carlton effing Cole.


Picture round kicked in with distorted pictures of celebs. Consensus was that we probably had too long to answer these chucking out at least one correct answer (Meat Loaf in favour of Piers Morgan, well they were distorted). Julie Goodyear and Graham Gooch also proved beyond us.


Full marks on the Current affairs, not sure if this has been achieved by Hound before, but it certainly has now.


A round on Kings requiring little historical knowledge. King Kong, Billie Jean King, Don King, Midas etc. We couldn't remember Peter Wyngarde who played 'Jason King' on TV in the early seventies, but got the rest.


We got the connections (types of bread), having first considered potatoes, paper and terms for hard-ons. Much more interesting was a tangential discussion about Ligers. How big are they! And why? At least Seven Seas of Rhye was acknowledged as Queen's first top 10 single, a fact that was once ridden roughshod over in Theo's quiz.   


Got all of the 10 pointers, although it took a bit of a Eureka! moment to realise the monsters Inc characters.


The Top 10 round is now but a distant memory. Characters from classic novels this week all of which we recognised except for Bathsheba Everdene (Far From The Madding Crowd). 20% were Dickens related questions, which I understand is the standard European minimum for any literary based quiz rounds.


The Jeopardy round had more bear traps than you could shake a stick at this week. Just as well, as different teams blew up on different questions, we got two wrong for good measure but were not forced to pay. Suffice to say that Belfast is on the River Lagan. The other wrong answer was in respect of a slightly perplexing question about Russian leaders. Our man Boris Yeltsin was the first president of the Russian federation, but apparently the question was subtly different from this. Can't even remember the answer, may have been Gorbachev. Others mixed up their boy bands or failed to name Boston as being the city with the longest standing marathon race. All of this playing into our hands.


Nothing too difficult in the music round, we got the wrong Lighthouse Family song, and couldn't remember the name of one of Holly Johnson's solo efforts.


Nobody was more surprised than us as the usual reverse order announcement of the results failed to mention us until after |"and winning the quiz this week....". 139 points,