Hound In Cleveland

All questions are equal, but some questions are more equal than others.

It was the best of questions, it was the worst of questions.

And so we found ourselves on another Thursday evening, this time licking our wounds (not each others' mind) in third place. To get there, we need to rewind back to Round 6 - Jeopardy - Question 1

"In which county is Middlesbrough?"

Now, regular readers will know that Siobhan is prone to the odd slightly tricksy question in the jeopardy round and counties, almost as much as birthplaces, provide a rich seam of such questions ready to be mined. Politicians have a habit of creating and removing them and changing county boundaries to suit their ends; plus when is it a county?, or a Unitary Authority, a Metropolitan Borough?

Middlesbrough to us seemed right in the middle of such machinations. A tentative "Cleveland" was uttered by Graham and myself. Daren eyed us suspiciously, then left the answer blank. No-one disputed this, see how the rest of the round unfolds and return.

The rest of the round went well, confident on 8 with only material doubt on "Which is the most common blood group"? We were 90% on O. So it was back to Middlesbrough.

By now Graham's tentativeness (is that even a word?) had firmed up, the answer was Cleveland. However 'Boro fans were prone to claiming the game with Leeds as a Yorkshire derby, clearly it used to be in Yorkshire prior to the creation of those poxy new-fangled things in the 70s. It wasn't in Durham, Tyne & Wear or anything like that. It had to be Cleveland.

Yet we still smelt rat. We'd done well on the ten pointers and felt in the box seat. We've tossed away quizzes before being aggressive on the jeopardy round and if someone else was good enough to bag all ten then fair play to them was our attitude. Passing 'Boro there was no need/point gambling on the blood group. Music done, chocolates narrowly missed, the answers were in now. Cue removals of phones, tablets and various other devices and lots of tapping ensued.

Well https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/middlesbrough certainly opened our eyes. Basically Cleveland doesn't exist any more, the answer was North Yorkshire. Surely our caution had paid off and for once, a banana skin averted.

However rumblings were going on around the pub around the veracity of the answer. It seemed Siobhan was looking for the answer of Cleveland and also the Anoraks had checked this with her before submitting their answer. How would she deal with this and more significantly how would Daren react? I predicted a riot.

Well, the first five rounds' answers were provided then Siobhan announced the jeopardy would be out of nine with Question 1 effectively omitted. Naturally our blood group answer was correct so we had 8 out of 9, placing us third with the Anoraks first.

Well we fumed, we seethed. Naturally if we'd known of this approach we'd have answered O and as the scoring went, won the quiz. Yet to our credit, we didn't riot. There were times I thought we might and maybe in retrospect, it was the right course of action.

Very much a pyrrhic victory for the Anoraks. We fumed and seethed some more, debated the rights and wrongs of it all and made our ways home. Grr.

Well to lighten the mood :

An impala from a golf course in SA.

Hounds in attendance, Steve, Daren, Graham and myself

App of the night, usually Kevster's domain but the newly tabletted Graham suggested Akinator Free

Blogger, see below

It is better to have quizzed and lost than never to have quizzed at all.