QuizList

Quiz new to me is the Thursday night:

Trinity Arms, 45 Trinity Gardens, Sw9 8DR, 020 7274 4544, with cash prize.

And also listed as having a monthly Thursday quiz is:

The Horsehoe, 26 Melior Street,  SE1 3QP, 020 7403 6364.  Not sure of the vintage of this information so any further details would be welcomed.

World Cup themed quizzes stil seem a bit thin on the ground.  Speaking of which, good luck all tonight.  I drew Germany in the World Cup sweepstake at work, and given that I firmly believed for some time that they had won the 2006 tournament (did they not?)  maybe I have a bit of a chance.

Apologies for having deleted Madden’s, East Finchley, when in fact it does still run its Tuesday quiz.  I think whoever told me must have confused it with the Winchester, where the same QM’s quiz did stop.

And how we ended up there last Tuesday resulted from trying to do another of those bloody annoying quizzes where you are told ‘yes, it will be on if enough teams turn up’ and hanging around while that is established.  Combine that with the gauntlet of smokers on the door and I don’t think I’ll be going back to that particular pub.

Forgot some other names we have applied to people whose real names we may not know and who are seen at quizzes:  ‘The Bloke from Lost’ and ‘Solomon Grundy’.  The latter is, in fact, two people, a bit like something in ‘Mad Max 3′ – hence the post title.

Someone’s looking for World Cup themed pub quizzes so let me know if you hear of any.  I did find http://www.puregroove.co.uk/in-store.aspx?CntProv=Events&CntItem=f487abf5-9e17-439b-beae-d2a4597fdefe but cannot make head nor tail of it.  And the debate continues on whether it’s right for pubs to charge an entry fee for the England matches…

From thinking about TV quizzes last week I progressed to thinking about the kind of people you meet at quizzes.  Often you don’t know their names so among ourselves we sometimes come up with a nickname to make it clear(ish) who we’r referring to.  Let’s see, we had ‘The Big Eejit 1′, ‘The Big Eejit 2′, ‘The Big Eejits’ (plural), the ‘Ancient Mariner’, ’Flat Eric’,  ’Free Gorgeous’ (so called because of his pronunciation of ‘Three Gorges’), ‘Professor Plum’ (so called because of his pronunciation in general), ‘Postman Prat (with his black and white can…)’ and many others, one of which is slightly politically incorrect so deleted.  Mind you, we do seem to have steered clear generally of political incorrectness, unless any of ‘The Big Eejits’ are of Irish extraction – not so far as I have noticed.

News otherwise:  go to ‘One-off quizzes’ for details of one on 2 June.  And be prepared for a shortage of quizzes during the World Cup, as might be expected….

No new quizzes, but the site is updated with the ones I previously received.  And there is a contestant call for TV quiz  ‘Only Connect’, which I actually can’t claim to be able to identify.  Mail me if you want the details.

Of course, a liking for pub quizzes is not usually synonymous with a liking for TV quizzes.  I tend to find the latter a bit annoying – usually it’s a toss-up as regards who is the smuggest and most annoying, the contestant or the QM, and I would struggle to think of a TV quiz with really interesting questions.

That said, ’1 versus 100′ has a good format and has translated well to quiz machine territory.  No doubt you all have your favourites also, but there are many which are just pants.

Once, in a idle moment, I started trying to think of alternative versions of TV quizzes. Some TV quiz shows are beyond parody, like ‘The Chase’, but some others could be adapted.   For instance, there could be ‘Innit to win it’, like the original but with even less articulate participants.  Or ‘Come and have a go if you think you’re thick enough’, based on the original but with even easier questions.  Or ‘D*ckheads’, like ‘Eggheads’ but… no, just like the original.

Folks, who is the quizzer who never comes out on Sunday nights when there is an episode of ‘Lewis’ on?  Now far from me to betray any confidences….  However, this signals that tomorrow I hear that ‘Lewis’ is all about quizzes.  Cue geek participants, I suppose, if the cliches of television drama run true to form.

I declare a ‘Golden Goal’ in the marathon place name challenge, with with a good guess coming in.  Working almost backwards, here are the answers to the clues:

6.  Has a famous namesake in the USA… you just put a ‘New’ before it.

7. .. and one of its biggest population centres could be a namesake of a famous London street.  Fleet (Street)

5.  Used to have something in its name; not now. Used to have a ‘South’ before it and a ‘ton’ in the middle.

4.  Stone age stone for a tourist attraction.  Pebble Beach – Pebbles – Flintstones – geddit?

3.  Contains an airport. Go there and you might find your luggage labelled with ‘sou’.

2:  Strange thing about the fields there – you might just find a hippocampus in one…

1:  A prominent local football team might display all three primary colours.  But not at the same time:  red, white and black for home, yellow and blue for away.

Which leads back to clue 2.  Now, as well as being a name for a seahorse, the hippocampus is an important part of the brain.  And a famous song tells us of someone who wants to ring his mother and say ‘I can never come home again because I seem to have left an important part of my brain somewhere in a field in…’  Yes, there’s your answer.

I’ve got a lot of updating of the site to do, but it won’t be done this weekend.  My computer seems to have finally died, and I am working on a Heath Robinson type arrangement of a tiny netbook hooked up to a decent sized keyboard and mouse.  So you’ll have to wait…  But one new or relaunched quiz I’ve been sent is the following:

The Warrington Hotel, Maida Vale, W9 1EH, with a Monday night quiz.  When I get more information I’ll let you know.