Two And A Half Hounds

The team arrived in good spirits this week around 7.30. We'd all been doing the things we enjoy which for Graham was taking the family to the carvery up the road. Daren had been for a beer with "Caspar", one of the London Reds; not his real name but his friendliness and ghostly complexion left very few alternatives. For my part I'd enjoyed 50 minutes of German techno on my new wireless headphones on the cross trainer. Each to their own as they say.

The first round came up before we knew it and it was dingbats. Usual story, up to 8 quite quickly then a lot of fruitless wrestling with the remainder. Last week's defeat still rankled a bit and with a while since the last win it was fair to say the Hound was "up for it" this week.

Not so up for it as to do any obvious prep for the current affairs round and we struggled with who's just sold an LA mansion for $200m, which comedy was doing a one off 2 hour comeback special and SE trains latest excuse for late running. I think everyone found it tough though.

The Hound was on safer ground though in round 3 which was history. Mainly through Graham we nailed some exact years, only falling the wrong side of the fence in a Vasco de Gama/Ferdinand Magellen debate. How many people can claim that as their Thursday night activity?

Connections and it was one of those baffling ones. We had Jane Seymour, Michael Flatley, Alexander the Great, Dan Ackroyd, Benedict Cumberbatch and Kiefer Sutherland. Clutching at the most flimsy of straws we came up with Last Of The Summer Wine characters, any answer being better than a blank.

Ten pointers were dispatched in a flash and we arrived at halfway. At this point, Daren had given all he had for the team and peeled off to make his own way home leaving Graham and myself to battle on up the mountain fending off the attacks from all sides. Would he be missed? I give you some examples from the following round:

Correct Answer       Hound Answer

Pol Pot                        Sammy Davis Jnr
Pope Francis             Tony Bennett
The Dalai Lama        Sophia Loren

Who says we're all getting a bit celebrity obsessed.

In our defence, the questions weren't, for example, who led the Khmer Rouge and was responsible for genocide in Cambodia. No, siree Bob. Of course, we might still have made the same guesses, who knows. The question was actually who was born Saloth Sar in 1925. A fun round.

Next up, jeopardy and what would happen this week? Well it all seemed a bit more straightforward. Bronco and steer wrestling had to be part of a rodeo and Dorset Blue Vinny couldn't be anything but cheese. You shouldn't be able to spot a good bear trap but there were no blanks on the sheet.

Music and I think it was 20/20. To be fair, Siobhan hadn't thrown in any Ed/Bruno/Justin/Olly so we were very much on home turf. Answers in and we'd gone for the jeopardy, but so had the Anoraks. The answers came through, we'd bagged the ten pointers, we'd aced the jeopardy. It would come down to who had basically got most questions right, usually the area we win but this week there were 5 Anoraks and we were outnumbered 2:1. The scores, came through, Anoraks 156, Hound 158! We'd done it by the equivalent of half a wheel!. We zipped up our shirts, made sure the sponsors' logos were visible and punched the air. Our first addition to the pot for a while and one that definitely meant something. Cue large glasses of red all round, except for Graham who was driving.

Certainly some redemption for last week.

The connection was that they all had two eyes that were different colours or heterochromia. Cleverly topical in that David Bowie was commonly assumed to have this but had one discoloured from a fight.

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.

betwHOUNDeener

.... it's raining cats and dogs as I step off a 412 in Central Croydon. Might have been a good idea to check before boarding the bus, as it turns out that Daren and Robson are comfortably ensconced in the Foxley Hatch. A quick phone call and a rendezvous at the Oval Tavern is agreed.

After trudging through the ever increasing puddles, I uphold my part of the bargain by finding a table before the other two arrive by taxi. A particularly small table with no accompanying seatage,but a table nevertheless. The pub is surprisingly full of both diners and quizzers. A kind couple close by offer a spare stool, and two fold up chairs more suitable for outdoors are eventually found. Just in time for the start of the quiz, a table of diners gets up to leave and we are in there like Flint (remember him?).  




Played by James Coburn, but never really rivalled Bond in the popularity or longevity stakes.

Our only previous experience of this quiz was very positive, and despite the lack of birthday celebrating lovelies this proved to be the case again. They get through the questions quickly for a start, leaving plenty of time for chat and general carousing.

Round 1 didn't tax anyone much, general knowledge with the ten answers starting with the respective letters of "Oval Tavern". We avoided the Henry VIII bear trap and scored a full house.

Round 2 is sport and the first hint of controversy. We went for Jochen Rindt as the first german to win the F1 championship (and btw the first to win it posthumously), but turns out he was born in Germany but represented Austria. Everybody else just put Schumacher, and they got it right according to the answer given. 9 out of 10 still a great return, including two ice hockey questions and to my approval 3 Scottish ones.

Round3 was guess/name the Year with 3 choices each time. Hound has excelled at ths kind of thing in the past, and it was once more thus, 9 out of 10. We fell down on the year that included the banning of CFCs by the EU/the freeing of the Guildford 4 and certain films released (can't recall which ones). We put 1990 but it was 1992. I think we all know which CFC I wold like to ban, 

The mid-quiz break was taken up by Round 4: 20 dingbats to solve for a point each (see also blog title). Turned out that the second page was much harder than the first which made me look good for a moment that soon passed. The worst one that we didn't get was

ROSE
DAFFODIL
TULIP
DAISY

which was merely a bunch of flowers, doesn't work for me, no suggestion of 'a bunch' anywhere.

The one that we almost got and quite a good one was..

BUV-1LL which was abominable (a bomb in a bull). We couldn't get past V-1 being a rocket.

Hardest one was BOY (right facing arrow) YOB which is apparently 'Altar Boy'.

There were two other q's where our answers were 'good but not right' making 15 out of 20.

.... ok time for a picture of a festive pig...

Round 5 was a wipeout round (aka jeopardy round in Hound parlance) with a cats/dogs theme. We left out 4 answers, at least two of which we would have got wrong. We didn't know that a puggle is a cross between a beagle and a pug, but there was a dog lover somewhere in the house.

Round 6: Song intros, we got 7 out of 10 (14 points) which I think was pretty good, annoyed personally at missing The Ramones - 'I wanna be sedated', but there you go. A grand total of 63 points for Hound (papers switched with another team to mark, again saves time).

The reading of the results in reverse order was as suspenseful as it has ever been. Starting in 13th place with 39 points. There were actually 15 teams as those level on points were given equal billing, without adjusting the places.  4th place - 59 points, 3rd place - 62 points and realisation that it was second place for us. The winners.... the kindly couple who had earlier offered me their spare stool (that now sounds bad), they nailed the cats/dogs round earning the extra 10 points to give then 73. in other words we would have won if there had just been 1 q in that round that they didn't know. But they knew them all - so well done them. Most teams had 6 or so players, so quite amusing that a pair and a trio took up the first two places.

Plenty of time then remained for various virtual parlour games, with both Robson and I now tableted up.  This include a crushing victory against the Eggheads where all 5 hounds made the final before crushing Judith Keppel, oh what might have been! A few more drinks and booted out at 11.30 on the dot.

Definitely one for the occasional future trip, though if we were to make it our regular quiz funds in hand might suffer. Here's to Hound in 2016. For info see our full answer sheet below, the 15 points are the separate dingbats.

G-Force   

Christmas Hound

Now regular readers of the blog may see the Hound as an unstoppable quizzing juggernaut steamrollering all in its path, rarely getting a question wrong. Well, by way of a counter view some of the wrong answers this week included:

- Mistaking various types of nut for types of jellyfish
- Entering Bruce Forsyth as an answer, the correct one being the King of Thailand
- Mistaking a picture of Mother Teresa for Lenny Henry

How did all this happen? Were the questions tougher, or us more pissed? Let's rewind.

I was bit late, Southern Rail had claimed Steve as a victim but I wasn't going to miss the last quiz of the year. Already in situ, Kevster, Daren and Graham were discussing the fiendishly difficult GCHQ Christmas quiz, what do they get up to down in Cheltenham?

Additionally Leeds were at Wolves on the telly and already 1-0 down.

First up and to make it more difficult all the faces were dressed as Santa with rather full white beards and Christmassy hats. Other than the aforementioned, we nearly mistook Cheggers for Bill Clinton, and we did mistake Donny Osmond for Ben Whishaw, probably not for the last time. Equaliser for Leeds!

We did ok on the current affairs and I think even question-spotted a couple. Next up was a brain teaser round featuring logical type questions. We actually spent more time debating the phrasing of the answers than actually arriving at them, I give you:

"Why can't you take a picture of a man with a wooden leg in British Columbia"?

Now "you can't take a picture with a wooden leg" restates the question rather than the concise "you need a camera"

Wolves 1 Leeds 3!

Connections and the randomness pointed us towards birthdays and with Graham having one, we'd be shot for not getting Christmas birthdays, multiple Brit award winner Annie Lennox sealing it.

Ten pointers were bagged, Patty and Selma being Marge's sisters, Sunderland not playing in claret and blue and various cocktails being non alcoholic. Half time assessment, the ten pointers nudging us in front but the Santas not helping.

Next up, now I don't know if Siobhan had backsolved this but how appropriate that the letter themed round would be Z for the last quiz of the year. Notes get a bit shaky here, zoology, zirconium, Zucchini and Zambia may or may not have been answers.

Final score, Wolves 2 Leeds 3!

Then we came to the meat of things with the jeopardy. Box was jellyfish, clout was jellyfish, or was it cloud? We went with it anyway. Where was Eric Liddell born? It looked like a banana skin, it smelt like a banana skin. We went Scotland anyway.

The way the results came out we would have had to nail the jeopardy to win, I.e. put down all our right answers and none of the wrong ones, something we've struggled with recently. Hey ho. Not sure we answered the original question, just call it a bad day at the office, something there's been fewer of recently.

So there we have it. Another year's quizzing. Or is it? Stop press, The Oval on the 30th for red wine, Xmas jumpers and a chance to exercise the brain one more time, like I won't spend much of Xmas day playing quiz up anyway.

The Strange Case of Hound and the Mammoth Jugs

Mr. Robson Holmes, who was usually very late in the evenings, save upon those not infrequent occasions when he was up all night, was seated at the usual table. I stood at the bar and picked up my pint which  was engraved with the date "1664." It was just such a pint as the old-fashioned family practitioner used to carry -- dignified, solid, and reassuring. 

"Well, Daren, what do you make of it?" 

Holmes was sitting with his back to me, and I had given him no sign of my occupation. 

"How did you know what I was doing? I believe you have eyes in the back of your head." 

"I have, at least, a well-polished, silver-plated Samsung Tablet in front of me," said he. "But, tell me, Daren, what do you make of this week’s picture quiz? Since we have been so unfortunate as to be landed with ‘Visual puns’ and have no notion of the answer to most of them. This fiendish opening round becomes of importance. Let me hear you answer by an examination of it." 

"I think," said I, following as far as I could the methods of my companion, "that number 7 is a is a pair of tea cups with mammoth’s heads and tusks for handles”. 

"Good!" said Holmes. "Excellent!" And so begun ‘the Strange Case of Hound and the Mammoth Jugs’.

Back in the real world, Kevster, G-Force, Steve, Robson and I pored over the 12 ‘Visual Pun’ pictures with some consternation. Most of them were so blurred that it was difficult to discern anything visual let alone decipher the punnerry

Pre quiz agenda items had consisted of the troublesome trysts of Kevster and the venue and format of this year’s Hound Xmas do. Robson, revealing his wild side, also offered to hold his house warming party on a Tuesday morning at 11.00. 

The visual puns troubled us for most of the first half of the quiz, especially the elephantine mugs and we finally settled on Tea Trunk as being marginally better than no answer at all. When the actual answer of ‘Mammoth Jugs’ was given, Kevster was apoplectic and audibly deflated all at the same time.

The rest of the first half of the quiz followed the usual format – Current affairs, History and then Connections. The connection caused a few more problems than usual: What links Ham, gate, jersey, port. Graham got that one by question 5 which is a bit slow for us.

Unfortunately the 10 pointers got the better of us – the origins of Masala Wine and the tube line Tuffnell Park is on proving elusive.

Having undertaken some market research during the half time interval it was obvious that some of the other teams had got the 10 pointers so this meant we would have to go for the full ten on the jeopardy round, always a risky strategy but Hound is as Hound does.

This week’s round 5 was brought to us by the letter Y. Fairly easy given there are only 14 words in the English dictionary that start with the letter Y as far as I’m aware and Yo Yo is 2 of them. Yogi Bear and Yootha Joyce made welcome appearances here.

And so into the valley of jeopardy rode the 5 (half a point and half a point more)

Unfortunately the designer of the VW and the club that Bruce Grobelaar scored for were to be our downfall (Porsche and Crewe Alexander)

And so the music became incidental. Fortunately we didn’t recognise the squealing f**kpig that is Justin Beaver but I imagine that we got most of the others.

Come the scores and our 10 pointer and Jeopordy failures cost us dear, finishing 2^nd last (oh the shame) although only 16 points off of first,so one of the 10 pointers and not answering Hitler and Southampton in the jeopardy round would have given us victory. All if’s, buts and maybe’s I know.

And so dear reader, this is where we leave The Hound for another week but look out for the next instalment – coming soon