QuizList

Two recently-notified Monday quizzes:

Cos Bar, 148 Queen Victoria Street, EC4V 4BY:  6.30 start, £2 entry, no details of prizes.
The Shaftesbury, 534 Hornsey Road, N19 3QN.

And the Washington in England’s Lane has its quiz on a Tuesday - check listings for details.

For fans of Space Invaders, I’ve been in a pub where a notice says you get £100 if you beat the landlord’s score.  More details if you mail me.

Now to the second of my ‘Thirteen Questions’ Challenges.  Here’s where I give you clues at the rate of about one a week leading to an answer.  Guess when and as many times as you like and at the end there’sll be a small prize.  The last winner got his picture in the posting! When I ran that competition, I told you that the answer was a city.  No such clues this time and for a while it won’t be obvious what it is.  The clues will be a mixture of cryptic and general knowledge and sometimes they won’t actually lead directly to the ‘thing’ but a part of the answer will be important.  So here we go with the first:

1.  Is no-one in charge here?

We begin with a quiz for every night of the week (on which quizzes usually happen) in Weymouth:
Rendezvous, Town Bridge, St Thomas Street, DT4 8AW:  Sunday quiz, £50 prize for winning team.
The Swan (Wetherspoons), 41/43 Thomas Street,  DT4 8EH:  Monday quiz, ‘Redtooth’ type format, £50 for winning team.
The Rock, 41 Abbotsbury Road,  DT4 0AQ:  Tuesday quiz.
The Black Dog, 3 St. Mary Street, DT4 8PB:  Wednesday quiz.
Moby Dick’s (formerly the Cork and Bottle), 85 The Esplanade,  DT4 7AT:  Thursday quiz.

Thanks also for the clarification on The Castle, Pentonville Road, in Islington:  it does run a Tuesday quiz, which apparently used to be on Mondays.

And good news for fans of my Thirteen Questions challenge:  a new one will begin next week, with suitably crap prize.

Not so good news for the person who went up to answer the following jackpot question (I wasn’t there so I am paraphrasing the question) ‘Ed Ricketts who did something something was the real-life basis for which character created by which Nobel Prize Winner?’  (The answer is ‘Doc’ in ‘Cannery Row’ by John Steinbeck., and I believe that you had to get all parts right.)  Not alone did no one in the pub know it, I suspect that no-one within the  hemisphere knew it.

The good weather has brought low attendance at some quizzes usually packed to the gills, so good advice at the moment might be to concentrate on those which have a fixed prize (rather than something dependent on cash takings….).

Well, a fun-filled posting this week.  Congrats first of all to the ‘lads’ on their £500 jackpot win;  I wasn’t there to share it but the luckiest man in quizdom, Fletch, managed to be there as he has been for every major jackpot win over the last few years.

New (to the site) quizzes to report include the following:

Sunday
The Dick Turpin, 383 Long Lane, N2 8JW, 020 8883 3494.  Now I think that makes it a clean sweep of East Finchley pubs currently running quizzes or having had one in the past;  the only exception I can think of is the Alexandra in Church Lane which redeems itself with a good jukebox and a bottle of Celtic Crossing behind the bar.

Monday
The Distillers, 66 West Smithfield, EC1A 9DY.  Some details from the QM as follows:  start time 7 pm, £1 per person, 6 maximum team size,  cash and drink prizes and even a prize for last place.   The range of questions will change every week and there may be music and picture rounds.

Tuesday
Well, this is more like a request for information, as I saw a reference to a quiz in ‘the Castle’ on Tuesdays in Islington - anyone know whether the Alwyne Castle, which I already list, is meant here,  or the Castle in Pentonville Road?

And to note also that the Victoria, North Hill, N6, has changed its quiz from a Thursday to a Monday night, with a change of  QM as well.

Unfortunately, though I’ve changed the e-mail attached to this site, I have a feeling I am not getting every e-mail sent through the contact form as my statcounter shows that some of you have exited the site through the contact form and there is no evidence of the e-mail.  If you’ve mailed me and I haven’t replied, persevere;  I did get several this week and always do reply unless your e-mail is one of the following:

1.  A request for a link or publicity for a tv or other quiz which doesn’t require a reply.  I’ll put the link on the site if relevant;

2. Abusive (e.g. an e-mail received from some touchy types with an N6 quiz some time ago calling me a c*** and suggesting I be burned in effigy because I didn’t like their quiz);

3. Patently silly (e.g. a long rant about why video quizzes are better than others and asking me whether I had every met a QM with any personality.  I think the reverse problem sometimes operates, i.e. too much personality).

Moving on swiftly:  I know some of you enjoyed the ‘13 questions’ thing I ran which gave clues to the name of a city and I’m planning something similar, so watch the proverbial.  Also, when time allows I like to include examples of interesting quiz questions I’ve heard.  Here was one from a couple of weeks ago:

‘Beside which body of water is there a sign reading “This is the site of the first defeat of imperialist forces in the Western Hemisphere”?’

I went down the blind alley of the Boston Tea Party until I worked it out.  I will spare the blushes of my team-mate who didn’t know what the ‘Western Hemisphere’ was.  And if you want to know the answer, when I did a bit of research I actually found that the statement is more like: ‘Giron, site of the first defeat of Yankee imperialism in Latin America.’  And the mystifying title of this posting is a reference to the event taken from popular culture….

Let’s start with three new quizzes from Eddie, who is an authority on all things Islington-based, but has also come up with that rarity - a Friday quiz:

The Eagle, 2 Shepherdess Walk,  N1 7LB, is advertising a Monday Quiz with Joel as QM.  Starts 7pm, they are still doing their Sunday one.
 
The New Rose, 84-86 Essex Road,  N1 8LU, is doing a Thursday quiz starting at 8.30.  Female DJ does a quiz with Pound shop prizes , apparently.
 
The Boundary House, 1 High Street, EN3 4EJ
Opposite Southfield Road, near Ponders End is advertising a rare Friday Quiz with 8pm start. 

News also of another Monday quiz to add to the listings:

The Normanby, 231 Putney Bridge Road, SW15 2PU, with a lot of music questions and also some material on video screens.

Thanks as ever to all who send quizzes and changes to the listings in.  Thanks also to those of you who mailed asking about the bad taste team name….

I’ve changed the Quizlist e-mail address as I could not get round the problem of sporadic blank e-mails - use the site link to mail me and when I reply you’ll have the new address.

Next update on or before Saturday 13 June - I’m away.

Which is why it’s nice to start with a new addition to the listings:

The Nightingale, 51 Nightingale Lane, Wanstead, E11 2EY
8:30pm every Tuesday
Free to enter, a drink for the winners.
This quiz also has mixed theme rounds and guest quizmasters.  Thanks to the correspondent who sent that in and apologies that my reply was a blank e-mail;  the mail server associated with this site is playing up again and I never know the mails are blank until I get the puzzled replies.  I’m seeing the technical genius behind this site, Carl, soon so hopefully he will have some suggestions about sorting it out.

I’m beginning to think there’s material for a PhD thesis on pub quiz team names.  I mentioned some last week which were well past their sell-by date;  then there’s the category of bad taste names based on news events (as in one a couple of years ago - fill in the blanks ‘***** ****** in the afternoon - he’s busy in the evenings’.  Mystified?  Mail me and risk a blank reply…).  Then there’s a whole subset of names which are guaranteed to annoy the particular QM overseeing the evening’s festivities, like ‘Let him have it, Chris’, a filmic reference which has resonances in terms of a notoriously hard to win jackpot…  QMs are fair game, and think of all the grief they give us;  digs at other teams probably shouldn’t be attempted, but I have heard a few, mostly aimed at those perceived as ‘professionals’. Pot and kettle, I would think.

Somewhat annoying are those names with obviously deep significance for the team themselves, which shouldn’t bother the rest of us but tend to intrude into our consciousness - for instance, who’s Mrs Neville?

Anyway, I wil leave you to ponder all this, as I am off once more - which reminds me of an apocryphal newspaper headline from many years ago, following the exploits of a well-known explorer:  ‘Doctor Fuchs off again’.  Now, that wouldn’t be such a bad team name….