Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Quiz Night at the Caledonia

Four us from the Dunabogdány Cricket Club decided to form a pub quiz team a few months ago to play at the Thursday night pub quizzes conducted at the Caledonia, our local Scottish pub. These pub quizzes are a lot of fun in a friendly atmosphere. They started in the UK, but from what I can tell they have been catching on all over.

We’re pretty good too: in five outings, out of fields of 12-20 teams, we have placed in the top three all but once, when we came in fourth. So this means we get to bring prizes home, like cases of Scottish stout or Russian champagne, which seems to serve as a fairly adequate justification to our loved ones for wasting our Thursday evenings in a pub. It’s really work that we are doing, when you think about it.

We have a suitably dumb pub quiz team name: “The Sons of Richie Benaut”. I don’t know what we do if we need to grab a chick as a substitute player one day. Here they are, looking appropriately cerebral:

Adrian


Steve


Mike


3 Magyars, 2 Brits, 1 Aussie, 1 Yank, and 1 Finn. I didn’t post a picture of myself because you already know what I look like. Zsolt, the waiter took a group shot but it didn’t turn out well as it’s as dark as the bowels of Loch Ness in there, but they smiled in that one.

We have maybe a little bit of an advantage over some teams, since not only are questions asked in English, the native language of maybe half of the participants, they are also skewed somewhat towards the anglosphere, all four hemispheres of which are represented on our team. But there’s usually a tricky Hungarian question that only Steve and the natives get, and a couple sops for the various Euro carpetbaggers who turn up. Anyway, aside from having a good geographic mix, our realms of knowledge complement one other pretty well. Mike answers the serious questions. Steve answers the less serious question, and is a whiz on pop music circa 1950 to about 1985, as well as with the movie round. Adrian is up to date on the week’s news, and knows a bit about kangaroos and tennis. I sort of fill in the gaps. I’m supposed to field USA-oriented questions too but I’ve been getting these all wrong lately.

One of the unfortunate aspects of the quiz night is that we have to purchase beer, or else Patrick, the owner of the Caledonia, will throw us all out on the street. But we don’t drink them, of course. The competition is always just a few brain cells behind and we’ll have these dumped into the potted plants, or on each other, as soon as no one is looking.

Actually, we have a cozy relationship with the Caledonia, since Patrick sponsors DCC, which means for every forint we spend at Caledonia, we get a kickback to buy wickets and googlies and stuff. So, while we may look like a pack of pub wasters, in reality we are more of an investment cabal.

Howard the quizmaster comes around to take our entry fee and distribute answer sheets.

We start with the picture round. Name that city based on a grainy picture of a famous landmark. I grab the paper, because I studied architectural history at Bryn Mawr, I’ll have everybody know. And then I promptly give it back because some of these are really hard. The magic of Google enabled me to find some similar images, posted below. Answers at bottom, and remember I’m doing you a big favor because these are bigger and more colorful than what we got.

A



B



C



D



E



F


On to the general knowledge round. Only a couple are tricky. Name of John Glenn’s spacecraft. That’s mine, but it’s been a while since I saw the Right Stuff. I know that it’s a Mercury, but I don’t know what its mother called it. I think it was the third launch, so let’s say Mercury 3.

What was Justin Timberlake’s first band? Hmmm, we know it’s a boy band, but we don’t know too many boy bands. Perhaps this is a badge of honor. We know it’s not Boyz2Men. We know it’s not New Kids on the Block because those guys are all middle-aged Oscar-winning actors now. So that leaves us with the Backstreet Boys. Younger ears at the neighboring tables overhear our struggle, chortle softly.

Now it’s the current events round. I haven’t been following the news so much but Adrian’s been mesmerized by CNN all week. Libya, Ivory Coast, Gorbachev tribute… boom boom bang…

Science round: Mike's chemistry degree has us in good standing with the first few questions. Then: “How many teeth does a normal adult have”. The entire room goes silent as tonguetips march across molars and bicuspids. 32. Okay 32. But Steve wasn’t having any of it. Steve only has 28. Heated words are exchanged. He said "normal adult", Steve.

The thing with Steve, though is you have to know when to listen to him. “How many legs does a lobster have?” Six. Eight. Steve shushes us. He was at the International Lobster Exposition in Slovenia last year where he learned, as the rest of us have not, that a lobster has 10 legs. How the heck did it get 10 legs? It doesn’t matter, just write it down.

Music round. Out come the speakers. There are a few those Golden Oldies from the early sixties that you have heard a million times but probably don’t know who sang them, unless you’re Steve, who racks up a few more points for us.

Then I hear the words I have been waiting for: “For the next musical selection, instead of the name of the artist or band, I would like the name of the composer…” Finally, I get to show of! Violins: Doodoodoodleodoo-du-du-du. The Four Seasons. Vivaldi. Rats! Everyone knows that. But the next one is a little harder. Elgar’s Enigma Variations. Probably not too many other teams got that one.

Movie round: Audio clips from mainly unfamiliar films, most of which Steve has seen. Some of them are musicals. West Side Story I get. Another is Chicago, which seems to pop up in every pub quiz we attend. There was a period of a month or so a few years back when Moni would watch Chicago every freaking day, and I thought I might lose my mind. But now it’s paying off handsomely.

Now it’s time to switch sheets with another team and do the scoring. We learn that Justin Timberlake’s first band was something called N’Synch. John Glenn’s Spaceship was Friendship 7. But other than that, we are not doing too badly.

And indeed it turns out that other teams also found the questions difficult.  The lowest scoring teams really had low scores. And as the team names are read off in ascending order, the scores aren’t increasing very quickly either. 3rd prize is read off – a round of drinks on the house. The 2nd prize winner is revealed and it’s not us. That means that we have won something better than having our entire beer tab for the night paid off, and what could be better than that? We don’t know because we weren’t paying attention when the prizes were read off! Except for Adrian:

“We won a car”

And he wasn’t putting us on either, with 43 points out of 60, the Sons of Richie Benaut have won a weekend car rental  for use anytime in 2011! That’s great, we can gather up 5/11 of our Cricket Team and go someplace. Like Dunabogdány, for example. After we find a designated driver.

Answers:
A.    Stockholm
B.    Dublin
C.    Damascus
D.    Sofia
E.    Mexico City
F.    Dresden

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