Thus wrote Charles Dickens - paraphrased to hell and back maybe but bear with...
Quiz The First
Applegarth, Braithwaite near Keswick
28th October 2015
Simply getting the teams picked had been a mission in itself - four teams of three, must be mixed gender, can't partner anyone you're married to nor can you partner anyone you're a parent to or a child of. The twelve contestants chewed it over for a while before eventually the youngest amongst us grabbed a pen and some paper and worked out all the options and combinations - from which the team captains then randomly selected their players.
Twelve family members had gathered to celebrate the 70th birthday of the thirteenth attendee and, given that most of us present had on many occasions either joined or crossed swords in quiz battle, I had offered to compere a quiz for everybody. And now finally, 72 hours, a couple of long walks, several large meals and one visit to the local vets later, the teams were identified, gathered and ready. Quiz on...
Fortunately our location's extremely flakey wireless broadband network had one of its better hours during the opening round of the quiz - 'Feel Free To Use Your Phone' - featuring a range of questions unanswerable without the help of the internet even by a team of Einstein, Stephen Hawking, Brian Cox, Magnus Magnusson and that camp, bitchy, fella from The Eggheads. (eg - what is the post code of the London Theatre shares its name with the chemical element that boils at 2963 degrees centigrade? *)
Over the course of the day nine more rounds followed covering a range of topics from identifying dog breeds from various puppies through to guessing the mileage between varying combinations of attendee's post-codes with more traditional music and 'connections' rounds thrown in.
Suffice to say there were breaks for food, even more breaks for drinks and eventually a winner was declared around 0130h on Thursday morning. Congratulations to Jane (Hamster), Ashleigh (Hound) and Mark (brother-in-law of no previously fixed team affiliation) who won by a handful of points with only one point covering the other three teams.
The Applegarth Quizzers
Purley Arms, Croydon
5th November 2015
Pre-quiz chat included our nominations for possible answers to this week's anticipated 'U' category - we came up with, Ultravox, Uncle Remus, Ultraviolet, Uncle Bulgaria, Umbilical cord, Ursula Andress, Uzbekistan and Ullysses.
Mention of James Joyce's great work led to my making a statement -"I was recently given a copy of Ulysses but it's sheer size has put me off - thickest book I've ever had" - which I can now back up with evidence which I think you'll agree conclusively proves my claim...
Joyce's Ulysses - all 980 pages of it...
Anyhow.
Round 1 - ten politicians to identify from photos of one of each of their respective two faces... We were confident we'd got 10/10 but we got number 8 horribly wrong.**
Round 2 - Current Affairs - footballers have bad teeth, Cameron 'wore' a digital poppy, Nigella Lawson has a recipe for avocado on toast and Tom Waits feels ripped off by Adele's new single. Apparently. We usually get seven out of ten here - with hindsight the writing was on the wall early on. 6/10
Round 3 - November 5th - other than knowing Guy Fawkes actual name (Tom Guido apparently) and who starred in Bonfire of the Vanities (Tom Hanks & Bruce Willis) we had reasonable treason/firework/gunpowder/bonfire knowledge. 8/10
Round 4 - Connections - Gordon Brown, Wayne Rooney, Katie Price, Mario Balotelli, Jonathan Ross, Tony Blair, Sepp Blatter, James Hewitt and Lance Armstrong all share what in common... *** 9/10
Round 5 - 3 x 10 pointers - breezed them 30/30
Round 6 - 'U's - Umbro, Unibomber, Ugg Boots, Ulysses, Ugly Betty, Urals, Usher, Uriah Heap, Under Milk Wood and Uwe Rossler - we only got one of our pre-quiz predictions correct but all of the actual questions correct. 10/10
Round 7 - Jeopardy - not our best effort at this - confident on half a dozen of them, wary of a couple and stumped by a couple more we played safe and banked what we knew. 6/10
Round 8 - Music - with no anodyne male crooners to trip us up this week we styled it out for a smooth 20/20
In all, seven teams competed with final scores ranging from 89 to a very impressive 173 - the Hound came third with 148.
So, there you go - a tale of two quizzes. All that remains is for me to post this and then do "a far, far better thing" and get myself some food.
* W1F 7TF
** Jacqui Smith and NOT, as we thought, Harriet Harman
*** They've all had effigies of themselves burnt publically
A Tale Of Two Quizzes is now published...
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ReplyDeleteA magnificent octopus. Hola from Tenerife and see you gang manyana.
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