Confirmation Sunday

Today was Confirmation Sunday at the Mint. Four new Methodists were confirmed, and several new Mint members were welcomed to the family. Among those welcomed were Joe and Kirsty, who were mysteriously absent; however, they were welcomed in abstentia. The confirmation portion of the service can be found on pages 97-101 of the Methodist Worship Book, and was really quite boring. It was followed by communion. We sang two hymns with tunes I knew today; one was "Great is Thy Faithfulness," and the other I knew what was at the time we sang it, but I can't remember anymore. It was one of the "printed in the service sheet" type hymns that consists of new words written recently set to an existing tune, in this case number 272 in Hymns & Psalms. Hymn 272 isn't one that I'm familiar with, but I know the tune by two different names (one from the Baptist Hymnal, taken from the first line, and one from every other hymnal in the world, taken from the refrain).

Andrew's sermon was necessarily brief; however it contained a few golden items. He began by discussing some sort of Millionaire's Club that is run out of Hong Kong, which has an annual membership fee for its highest level of $15.2 million per year. He then turned to cheaper clubs, noting that you can get a family membership to the British National Party for 40 pounds for the year. He then went on to say something in the vein of BNP, thirty pieces of silver, and selling your soul. He then launched into an attack on the BNP as being the antithesis of Christian values, and encouraged everyone at the Mint to vote for anyone except a far-right party at the upcoming elections on 4 June.

He briefly touched on the discussion topic for tonight, MP's Expenses. I hadn't planned to go tonight, but as I was thinking over breakfast "I hope Andrew talks about the MP Expenses crisis today," I think I am going to have to change my plans to go!

Lunch after the service today was rather sparsely attended. There were three students, me and two Japanese girls. Olive popped by, but another couple were doing the lunch today. Andrew and Liz came by just after the two Japanese girls had left; they discussed the topic for tonight with the three of us (me and the two doing the lunch) that were still there. Olive, while she was there, called me "Jim" at least three times. Some things, apparently, never change . . .

Victoria Inn Pub Quiz

Tonight, Gavin and I (with several friends Gavin managed to enlist) entered the Victoria Inn Pub Quiz. We thought it would be a fun evening. It was.

One of Gavin's housemates is from Germany (he's a PhD student in Geography), and he came up with our team name: Chuchächtgli, a Bavarian-Swiss German dialect's word for "small kitchen cupboard." I'm not sure I spelled that right, but it's pronounced "choo-chehy-chuh-tuh-lee," I think. The guys doing the pub quiz never could get it right, so we didn't worry about it too much.

For the first five questions, we were given a set of five pictures of people. They were Lily Allen (a British pop singer), Barack Obama, Willie Nelson, Phillip Scofield (best known as a TV presenter; known to me as Jason Donovan's successor as Joseph), and some soccer player whose name I can't remember. The questions were this:

1. Name her latest album (after much brain wracking, we came up with it, It's Not Me, It's You)
   
2. Name his two daughters (I thought it was easy; apparently, I was wrong)
   
3. Name him
   
4. Name his co-presenter in Going Live (we named the puppet, Gordon, the real answer was someone else)
   
5. Name him (needless to say, I didn't get this one)
   

The next fifteen questions covered topics such as General Knowledge (we got 3.5), Linguistics (we got 4), and Medicine (we got 4). Thus, our total score for the first 20 questions was 17.5, good enough for a 2.5 point lead over second place.

The next twenty questions were Current Events, Religion (and anything that might relate to it), "Man About the House," and Locations in Music. We got four out of five of the Locations in Music, including one before we heard the song in question. The guy doing the second half of the quiz, before playing the music, said "I want you to tell me where the Devil went down to." And one of the other guys and I looked at each other and said "Georgia." Which was, of course, correct. And the guy doing the quiz said that was the hardest one. In reality, the one for which the answer was Reno was the hardest one, as most of the groups didn't get it. Incidentally, the person whose paper we were scoring said that the Devil Went Down to Paris.

We didn't do too well in the Religion section, mostly because we put aside the thought that perhaps the correct answer to "Give the name of the only book of the Bible which gives a full account of the Ascension" (today is Ascension Day; that was question one in the section) might be Acts, which was the correct answer, opting instead to go with Luke. We also missed the location of Ascension Island, saying it was in the Pacific (remember what I said about a Geography PhD student? He was embarrassed.) rather than the Atlantic. We did, however, correctly answer Enoch as the great-grandfather of Noah. I don't remember the fifth question from this section.

We did fairly well on Man About the House, four of the questions in which were "Around the House" type questions. We also got the name of the American version of the British sitcom Man About the House, with me correctly knowing that it was Three's Company. The guy doing the quiz said that knowing that wasn't something to be proud of, but something to be ashamed of; when my teammates protested that I was American, he conceded that that was a good reason, as the "football" questions did put me at a bit of a disadvantage.

The Current Events section went fairly well, too. We only got three right; however, that was good enough for a total of 14 points on the second half of the quiz, bringing our grand total to 31.5. There were eleven teams, and the last place team had 21.5 points. The second place team had 27.5 points, with teams 3-10 scattered in between. We utterly destroyed the field to win by four, which is a rarity in pub quizzes. It's much more normal to win by 1.5 or less, with winning by two being a pretty good job. All told, we split the entry fees to end up with £12 each. We're going back next week to defend our title and try to make some more money!