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!

Pudsey Bear and Pub Quiz

The BBC, a large British news organization, organizes an annual charity appeal known as Children in Need, and one entire evening of its programming is set aside for raising money for British children's charities each year. This year, it will occur on 14 November. In the run-up to the broadcast, many shops are selling items featuring Pudsey Bear, the Children in Need mascot. Both Boots Pharmacy and Build-A-Bear Workshop are among the shop selling Pudsey merchandise. Yesterday, Will purchased me a smalled, stuffed Pudsey from Boots. It is adorable!



Another notable event from yesterday is that Will and I went to the Bowling Green, a nearby pub, for the weekly pub quiz. The quiz consisted of 40 questions which had to be answered by each team on a sheet of paper. The top two teams won prizes, as did the team judged to have the funniest name. Will and I came in last, probably because we had the smallest team and the least knowledge of local history and culture. Following the 40 questions and the announcement of winners, another 5 bonus questions were asked. Any team that correctly answered the five bonus questions would have received a cash prize, though in this instance, no one did. Thus, the cash prize rolls over another week and will increase by five pounds next Sunday. Despite our poor performance, we had a good time, and we are considering asking Kim and Chris to join us next week.