New Bloodhound

3 of us in house. Myself, Nigel second time for Hound at the PA, and Gerry debuting at the PA but you may remember him from the Sun Quiz a while back.

Straight into the pictures...

An old favourite, items from the kitchen. Gerry pretty much mopped up on his own. You might spot the following amongst some slightly easier items; cauliflower florets, apple corer, salad spinner and egg slicer. Once we changed gherkin for banana in Q8 full marks were assured.

A bogey 6 on the current affairs round. Asda added a rubber duck in lieu of peanuts for an online shopper, and a Big Issue vendor increased his sales massively by investing in a contactless card reader. Oh and the TV licence went up. Comes up every year that one.

Round 3 olympics, thankfully not just The Winter version. Back on track with a faultless round, all of us contributing.

A good connections round, we only got the connection, all Olympians, after realising that Q9 was Vanessa Mae not Nigel Kennedy. Geena Davis was an archer (great get by Nigel), General Patton shot rifles, Menzies Campbell and Dr Benjamin Spock both rowers. We couldn’t recollect the actor who played Oddjob in Goldfinger. Harold Sakarta a Japanese wrestler.

10 pointers. Probably my best get of the evening was this ship;

The Graf Spee scuttled in Montevideo harbour in 1939 after the Battle of the River Plate. 

Nigel was straight onto Podgorica as the capital of Montenegro, a fact which escaped the Anoraks forcing them to go big on the Jeopardy.

Another maximum in the chains letters round, landscaping being the toughest to come up with.

We got 8 definites for the Jeopardy round, always helps when they ask for the star sign of those born on February 29 and you have just such a person on your team. Piscean Gerry is technically uunder age, perhaps that’s why he doesn’t drink? We would have got a ninth, the late Jan Ludwig Hoch mp for Buckingham and businessman is indeed Robert Maxwell. Didn’t risk it though as we had no idea of the rapper starring with Michael Caine in the 2009 film Harry Brown. It was this guy.

Plan B. The team sometimes calling themselves Plan B never got it. This Korean dish also featured. 

Kimchee.

Wrong title for the George Michael song but no other slip-ups in the music round. Scores on the doors and first of six teams by a comfortable 12 points. Only 6 questions wrong and 1 unanswered. I certainly know how to pick ringers!

G-Force

Big, big love Hound, ooh, ah, huh.

In the week that Tom Daley and his delightful partner announced they were having a baby, a man breast fed a baby and Oxfam seemed to cover themselves in glory it’s important to look to less enlightened times for some sort of perspective;

Anyway, on with the quiz. Only 2 Hounds present this week, myself and  Graham ‘gizza job’ Agozza. Steve and Kevster missing due to work commitments, Pete attending a 4 year olds birthday in his capacity as Father and young Robson being in Hong Kong, having taken a wrong turn somewhere.

Given that the week covered, Pancake day, Valentine’s and the Winter Olympics we had quite a few bases to cover. Graham was confident on the olympics as his “elder brother used to like Ski Sunday - when it was on”.

No surprise then when round 1 was born, died or happened on 14th February. See below which has some of our workings out, which may or not be right.

Current Affairs; Oxfam came up! Which US city has just had a record 11 day ‘murder free’ streak and what animal is the symbol for the Chinese New Year?

Round 3 was the correctly predicted Valentine’s Day. We sailed serenely through with answers of ; GroundhogDay, Shakespeare! Full moon and Valentino Rossi.

Connections; what connects, Bono, Snoop Dog, Sara Palin, Ron Howard and Jon Bon Jovi?  I still don’t have an answer for that one so perhaps Graham can recall. We didn’t get it, whatever it was.

10 pointeres; what was Peter Lodge the first person to say on the underground?. The Green Goddess and Mozambique were the 2 remaining answers and we were confident of having bagged the 30 points

Half time came and Graham was unhappy as Celtic were winning in the football.

Onto the second half 
Chain letters started ok but we went awry when I confused Nappa, which is a specially treated leather beginning with N with Nubuck, which is is a specially treated leather beginning with N. That meant we missed Kingfisher which would have possibly lead us to ‘Butterfly, oyster and diver’ being types of knives. Somehow we managed to get back on track .

Jeopardy - I have sparse notes for this round as presumably I was concentrating so hard on the answers as we had decided to go all out for the 10. Braeburn being an apple and the Jets and Sharks being the protagonists in West Side Story were simple fare but then things became a bit more tricky. A last minute decision to change Gold to Diamonds as the commodity that the 7 dwarves were mining would prove to be pivotal.

Onto the music, which included Fleetwood Mac and Labi Siffre and it was time for tea and medals.

Our ten pointers and a full house in jeopardy won the day, Beating the Anoraks into second place. 

If you want to know the answers to any of the questions above, send £10 to The Hound, C/O The Purley Arms, Purley. 1 question per household. Your Statutory rights are not affected, peace, love and out.

Here’s a picture of Robson in Silhouette with a strange man in the background 

Oz-Bound Hound

Pre quiz banter not up to much this week, partly my fault. 4 of us present, usual hilarity once in progress.

Easy intro, comic duos.

More nonsense than usual in the current Affairs round I think, my notes are very sparse. Par score of 7. Shazam being bought by Spotify is about all that I remember.

Round 3 was Heroes and Villains. What character from a 1962 movie was voted the greatest film hero of all time in 2003 by the American Film Institute? I thought of Spartacus or Ben-Hur, but both were earlier and not sufficiently heroic. I also managed to confuse the Countess of Bathory with The Scarlet Pimpernel, but otherwise good.

Connections round not too difficult, key words such as Love, Perry, Fifteen led us quite quickly to....

Good work on the ten-pointers. The badger is Britain’s biggest carnivore, and a parting shot from Robson before heading to the Far East and Down Under for 4 weeks. Richard John Bingham was otherwise known as Lord Lucan.


Chain letters round involved some backfilling, but a real head scratcher was the 2005 film set in the 1860s about widower Cedric Brown, starting with N and ending in E?

Nanny McPhee. We were nowhere near.

Well placed but couldn’t get all of the Jeopardy questions. Disney film Tarzan caused us disquiet in case it had a different title, and we didn’t get the king who asked to be rid of the troublesome priest Thomas Beckett.

That’s right, Henry II.

Some slippage on music round. Decent total of 147 but Anoraks got the Jeopardy including at least one guess and scored 160. Well played them.

What about that film hero? Atticus Finch played by Gregory Peck in To Kill A Mockingbird.

Bon Voyage Robson, hopefully someone can join Daren and I next week. After that Daren will be out for a while.

G-Force

Happy Birthday Robson Hound (tomorrow)

Let me set the scene for you:

The events depicted here took place on the eve of Thursday 1st February 2018 in the saloon bar of The Purley Arms. In the week Bruno Mars had cleaned up, Formula one grid girls had gone for a burton and Capita looked like joining Carillion in going belly up.

All the chaps were present in order to celebrate the impending birthday of Robin which at the time of writing was yesterday but which he was keen to point out to well wishers was, at the time, actually tomorrow. I trust this makes sense

Referring to my notes (more sparse than copious) I can see that the first point of discussion was

Robson’s ‘degenerate knee’. Apparently, due to wear and tear, it is now shouting out rude names to passers by - extraordinary stuff I bet you agree.

Next up were, ‘The big 6’ and ‘The Caterham 7’. I have a vague inkling that the 6 refers to some sort of equestrian pursuit and I’m sure one of the chaps can elucidate further upon request. I’m on firmer terrain when it comes to the Caterham 7 which is the proposed venue for this year’s Hound Maundy Thursday jaunt which falls on Thursday 29th March. Pencil in the date, reserve the day off work and get your drinking trousers dry cleaned.

Now the quiz. This started with a picture round, as it ends to do, and this week was herbs and spices with spices taking up most of the work. This played right into our collective ands with only number 7 troubling the little grey cells for a while.

Round 2 followed the normal route for such things and was based on current affairs. One that foxed us was to name the person who had deleted his Twitter account when it was revealed that he was paying people to ‘follow’ him. After the tirade of abuse for Twitter had died down Kevster suggested ‘that Blue Peter rapey person’.  We were none the wiser but after some groping around in the dark we stumbled upon John Leslie. It wasn’t him but it was a Scouse git, so we were on the right lines. All in all I don’t think we covered ourselves in G’ in this round.

Round 3 was intriguingly titled ‘Little’. We soon got to grips with the concept and Robson threw his Little Bighorn onto the table for our consideration. Fairly easy round this and I believe it safe to say we scored highly.

Was there a round 4? I’ll be blessed if I can remember. I think my January of abstinence was fully behind me by this point and things become even more sketchy from here on in. Bear with.

Got it, Connections!!   - Name the author of the 2010 book , an elephant to Hollywood (second time Hollywood has come up now! I Wonder where Siobhan wants to go on holiday). Described on Amazon as “charming, engaging and surprisingly forthright”. This was the only one we got wrong having plumped for John Hurt (I am not an elephant, I am not an animal, I am a human being! - the same thought often crosses my mind upon waking). We correctly divined that the connection was Pseudonyms

Ten pointers and unfortunately the young of a Koala has the appellation of Joey rather than cub so we made a bit of a mess with that. Halving discussed this with the other teams over half time libations we realised we were up against it. Never mind the paddle boys, we hadn’t even got a canoe. We’d have to come out fighting in the second half.

Round 5 chainletters threw up the startling fact that Robson had his hair cut with Steven Hawking. Pete misheard this and  thought he’d said that he’d had his hair cut by Hawking, which would be plausible and it seemed a shame to disabuse him of this notion. Anyway, all answers safely gathered in so confidence was high going into the Jeopardy round with Steve detailed to watch for Bear traps.

Iscariot and glasses came out without smelling ursine but then we came unstuck with “what event comes second in the men”s decathlon?” We pontificated over this one for a while but couldn’t find a consensus.

Then, the coup de grace. “How many prime numbers are there between 1 and 100?” This set our Actuarial bods into a flurry of action with Steve, Robson and Graham furiously number crunching. Unfortunately even these colossal minds were defeated by missing the number 5. 

And so onto the music round, for which I have only written ‘Peaches’ and ‘Goody two shoes’. I don’t know if this is significant.

Anyway, when all was said and done and in the fullness of time we were not surprised that we didn’t win having blown the Jeopardy and missed a ten pointer. Still! Not a bad effort and the  night ended with a rousing chorus of “ Happy Birthday Robson” to which he responded “it’s tomorrow” but no one seemed to bothered about that.

P.S.

The spice was Mace

The Twitter fella was Paul Hollywood 

The Elephant chap was Maurice Miicklewhite

Long Jump comes second

25 prime numbers if you include 5