And then there was quiz night. There was much debate about what exactly we were accomplishing by hanging out at the Inn. Were we, mayhap, stalking celebs? Fortunately, we didn’t settle on this as our primary objective. Were we then, intent on getting sozzled on the wide array of beers available for sale? Or perhaps we were just there to prove our intellectual superiority (in the face of seasoned quiz night veterans, excessive amounts of alcohol and performance anxiety) by walking away with the grand prize in our first tilt at the title? Fortunately, we didn’t have such grand ambitions either.
So, the evening ended up being unfocused, somewhat bleary and rather all-over-the-place. This wasn’t just the beer talking, we had endless difficulty deciding what we wanted to do, so we tried to do a little bit of everything.
First observation: I never thought I’d say this but San Miguel out of a can tasted much much better than I thought it would. I work hard at cultivating my beer snob image and the thoughts of drinking beer out of a can is tantamount to sacrilege. But it tasted surprisingly good. Shock and horror. I do confess that my taste may have been slightly impaired by a few lesser beers beforehand, though.
Second observation: the great majority of celebrities did not show. As stalkers, we thought the engine was running but in actual fact, the train never really arrived at the station. Boo. There was only one stalkworthy “celebrity” (I’m playing fast and loose with that term). This understandably led to some wailing and gnashing of teeth as the wannabe stalkers had to let loose some internalized angst. So, no celebrities. Bah. Not much stalking.
There was also valid criticism levelled about my struggle to come to terms with the concept of stalking per se. Namely, visible cameras do not a good stalker make. Nor actually, does proposing “The Stalkers” as a name for your pub quiz team. Not that I really consider the name we settled on to be a massive improvement; but skin is in, as they say.
The quiz. I was completely sure that we would have our ass sliced, diced and ripped apart by obscure questions and then handed to us in an ass salad by the veterans. I was already finetuning my veritable arsenal of excuses (“Yeah, we were all drunk. Otherwise we woulda been Jeremy Paxman and Stephen Fry combined”, “Those were actually rather silly questions”, “We had a bad place to sit, we couldn’t scope out the opposition”, “The quiz was clearly rigged. We demand a recount”, “Our resident vamp didn’t take one for the team and flirt enough with the quiz master”, “They probably got our scores mixed up with someone else. We didn’t do that badly”).
I spent most of the quiz in happy oblivion because I couldn’t see the scores unfold from round to round; but soon enough we actually did get into our stride. In the stone cold sober light of day, I’m slightly ashamed of a few we fluffed (aargh, I didn’t remember a Shakes quote. I should be flogged) but my modest ambition was to do better than 50% and we achieved that much at least. In summary, our place kicker did well but we were a team lacking specialists. We also lacked someone who could spell properly and actually broke the eraser off a pencil rubbing out answers. (Yes, I am well aware that I am going to be beaten up for making that observation).
So, for next time. We need more people reading Google News the week/month before (check), make sure the person doing a part postgrad in linguistics actually uh … knows how to answer the language round (um. I was drunk. I think the quiz was rigged. See excuses above), and we can win! Or at least come close to the heady heights of a playoff question. Which brings me to my question to the quiz virtuosos: Is the number of chapters in the bible actually 30,000 odd? I have a webpage which says different. Wikipedia says different too. In fact, there are 30,000 verses in the Bible but I distinctly remember the question being about the chapters, not verses.
My new excuse: the quiz masters got it wrong. It was all a conspiracy.
