Tag: quiz

Day 72 – No more questions, your honour

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Right. Finally getting around to sitting down and writing this.

It’s been a busy day. Overseas conversations, moving an office, dropping off magazines with vulnerable people, a walk in the Green Belt, two runs, piano practice, dinner.

Actually haven’t done dinner yet, because I’m writing this before I start.

Oh, and finishing off writing a round for tonight’s quiz.

We won last night’s quiz, and it was a lot of fun… but…

I think I’m all quizzed out. I know. Bizarre to hear that coming from me: “Mr Quiz” as I am known to at least one person. (To be fair, that one person makes up completely ridiculous monikers for everyone, based mainly on the place he first meets them, so this was more about our initial encounter being in a pub where a guy was asking questions, rather than any particular penchant or specialisation people might think I have.) (“Mr. Kitchen” and “Ms. Bus Stop” will surely back me up on this.)

But I do like quizzes. Weirdly, I have been enjoying setting questions more than I have enjoyed answering them lately. And it feels like I’ve been doing nothing but quizzes for a while now and I need a break. So once this weekend is over, I’m taking one, as far as quizzes go.
At least, there will be nothing organised: I might dip in and out of Quiz Up or pop in a Dale Collins or two on Quizando in a spare 5 minutes, but that’ll be it.

Got to keep the brain ticking over.

So, full effort on getting a clean sweep this weekend and then sit back, relax and switch off the question and answer game.

Day 60 – Good morning

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Not just a salutation, but also a description of how my pre-9am period has gone.

So let’s run through the happy stuff for once, shall we?

A really cool quiz last night. I’ve been quizzing for 25 years, and I played rounds I’d never done before – novel stuff. It’s made me look at how I’ve been writing quizzes during lockdown and thinking about how to break the mould. Some really good ideas, even for regular stuff like music and geography.

There was Cyril’s speech. He was on time for once, nogal. And finally, a meaningful relaxation on the lockdown, countrywide, from June 1. As predicted/hoped for here:

If the purpose was to ready the healthcare system, then whether or not we managed to do that, there is very limited purpose in keeping the lockdown on: even in Cape Town, capital of the African branch of the pandemic.

Alcohol, yes – under strict conditions. Tobacco, no – which still rankles, even as a non-smoker. Exercise when you want. Stay at home if you don’t have to go out.

But we’re getting there. This was overdue.

Overnight, the first decent storm of the winter season. Over an inch of rain, 80kph winds whistling around the house even now.

Love it. Not every day, obviously, but there’s something so cleansing about a good storm, washing away the leaves, the dirt and in this case – metaphorically, at least – the virus.

And I went out for a run in this.

It. Was. Amazing.

It may have been my favourite run ever. No worries about aresholes with no masks, because there was no-one sensible enough to be out in the gales and the rain, and even if there had have been, the wind would likely have dispersed all their infectious exhalations anyway.

Link I said: cleansing.

That fifth kilometre. Downhill. Fast*. Alone. Such a fantastic feeling of freedom.
I really needed that.

It feels like we’ve turned a bit of a corner. The virus is still wreaking havoc out there, but we are at least a bit more on top of the things that we can control.

 

* 4:32. fast for me. 

On Quizzing

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Last night went… “ok”.

Sure, we lost the quiz by one point, but we only had 4 players against everyone else’s 8 (thus less chance of crowdsourcing a correct answer), and we finished ahead of several (or more) other teams who clearly were nowhere near as good as us, and several of which were full of unpleasant old white people.

It was one of those evenings where the majority of our 50:50 decisions didn’t work out for us. It happens. But it was still annoying. Irritating. Infuriating. Exasperating. Infuriating. (We did well in the Thesaurus round, by the way.)

Bad luck aside, we did noticeably fall down on one tough round: 1970s music. There was a clear, gaping hole in our knowledge. Obviously, we can’t know everything, but one this particular round, we could have done much, much better.

This morning, I decided to do something to remedy the situation, so that next time we could win the quiz again – as is the tradition when we play quizzes.
I opened up a Spotify playlist full of the top hits of the 70s and set my brain to Learn Mode.

Exactly 12 minutes later, I decided that losing a quiz by 1 point (or actually, however many points) was far preferable to putting myself through listening to anything else from those ten years. I don’t like not knowing things, but in this particular case, I’m so very, very happy to make an exception. My god: I swear that I was the only good thing to come out of that decade. 3652 days of exciting musical opportunity and all we got given was Fleetwood Mac, Elton John, Neil Young and the god-awful ABBA.

It’s fine; I’ll pass, thanks.

And I’ll proudly wear my “yes, we could have done better in that round” badge when scoring 2 out of 5 on crap music next time around as well.

Sheffield boy

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This worked well.

Yep. That’s me.

This was an interactive quiz on the New York Times website, of all places. It asked me a few questions about what words I used for various things when I was a kid: infants, bread rolls, being grumpy and certain items of furniture, and then worked out where I was most likely to have grown up, given the dialect that I used.

Apart from being extremely accurate, it brought back some great memories. Playing Tiggy-Off-Ground in the school playground (that’s On-On to my kids now), for example. It was our standard go-to game before school started in the mornings (but only because you weren’t allowed in the back playground before school and you weren’t allowed to play football in the front playground, obviously).

And then there was that “being grumpy” question. To be fair, they could have pinpointed me with just that one answer. I really don’t think there’s anywhere outside Sheffield where “mardy” is a thing.

Made internationally famous by these guys, of course:

As the test was unfolding, I was wondering if I could fool it into thinking I was from Newcastle, and yes I surely could have done, but that was hardly the point.

If you’re reading this in the UK (and you’re from the UK), give it a go and let me know how you get on.

Different names

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I was binge-watching Only Connect again last night.
I got as far as Series 11. Episode 21.
The Scientists vs The String Section.
Gripping stuff.

And while there were many brilliant questions on offer, there was one which stood out for me, so I’ve elaborated upon it a little and reproduced it here.

All you’re looking for is the thing which connects these clues. The sooner you get it (correctly, of course), the more points you score.

Here we go:

Strudel (Israel)

Sleeping Cat (Finland)

Monkey’s Tail (The Netherlands)

Elephant’s Trunk (Denmark)

Snail (Italy)

Curled Alpha (Norway)

Wild A (Serbia)

 

That’s your lot, I’m afraid. If you’re still struggling (or if you’re not), the answer is down below. How quickly did you get it? Did you get it? Leave me a comment and tell me how you got on.
I’m guessing that my resident Israeli reader might have got this one sewn up. Unless she actually went for “apple pies”. Because it’s not them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The earliest yet discovered reference to this thing is a religious one; it features in a Bulgarian translation of a Greek chronicle written by Constantinos Manasses in 1345. Held today in the Vatican Apostolic Library, it features it in place of the capital letter alpha “A” in the word Amen. Why it was used in this context is still a mystery.

It first appeared on a typewriter in 1889.

And it has no official name in English.

The answer is… the @ symbol.

Well done if you got it.