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History Men beat Electric Pigs
The History Men stay in 3rd place with a narrow
victory over the Pigs
 Ivor
casts his mind back to those good old Radio Days
We
were back in our lucky seats in the almost funereal
calm of the snug at the Parrswood. Actually
the only time there is not a funereal calm at the
Parrswood is when there is a post-funeral wake but
tonight there was nothing to disturb the
machinations of our brains as we ground out the
correct answers, or often the incorrect answers - or
indeed no answer at all. The Pigs were
excellent company and were unlucky to have lost.
A tough paper with 16 unanswereds (9 for the Pigs
and 7 for us - so it was well balanced), 8 steals (5
to the Pigs) and a slightly better two rate for us
(9-6). The Pigs went first first and the game
was very close with the Pigs ahead until the Woody
Allen round when scores were levelled. It fell
to Anne to get the winning two points (her first of
the night). One of the few benefits of age are
memories of Listen With Mother and Mrs
Dale’s Diary played on the old wireless.
Young Michael T and Young Richard might be
astonished to hear that some of us did not have a TV
until the early 1960s.
Lord Ted
(R3/Q3)
Our star tonight was Vanessa (4 twos) displaying
knowledge from strange liqueurs to foreign footie
managers. Young David was in his element with
LOTR and foreign rivers. Guy from the Pigs was
'Mr Unlucky' with four unanswereds but at least he
knew where Sarah Lancashire was born as they both
attended Hulme Grammar School. The motorway to
Bradford also fell well for Dave from the Pigs; he
is a Bradford Uni alumnus. It is on such fine
margins that a tricky quiz is decided. Indeed
on low-scoring quizzes we often get less confident
and there were several occasions when both teams
felt they could have gone for the two instead of
conferring, but didn’t.
I am reminded (memory is episodic) that we once had
an on-line discussion as to whether to reduce
the quiz to six rounds from eight to allow earlier
finishes for drinking and conversation. Father
Megson, priest of the Reeks and confessor to the
Charabancs, opined that all quizzers like it to be
long and stiff for maximum enjoyment. Maybe
his flock is following the catechism.
Never mind the Oscars a whole WithQuiz round is
the greatest honour
(R7)
Opsimaths lost to Albert
Second place is starting to look like it might be
'in the bag' for Albert
 MOBO
manages to thwart Eveline's urge for violence
I came as an observer and manoeuvred my way through
clouds of ignorance and piss to discover that this
was a very hard quiz for the participants. We
followed the pattern of last week's fixture: a
roaring start followed by an abject collapse after
about three rounds. Fortunately our opponents
failed to take advantage of this lapse. There
were some complaints about the Woody Allen round (a
whole round on one individual!). We were saved
in the end by some inspired guesswork from Ian but
the combined score tells it all.
I arrived late because the one disabled space in the
crowded Bowls Club car park was occupied by a
vehicle not displaying a blue badge. Eveline
offered to carry out a sustained bout of vandalism
on the offender. However I counselled her that
this was not the brutal regime of The Sun In
September. She should learn to think of
Kingsway as being like the Rio Grande: on one side
Didsbury, land of hard-working, god-fearing Yankee
farmers, and across the river Burnage, like Mexico,
land of revolution, violence and corruption
accompanied by endless bouts of tequila- quaffing as
long as you aren't caught using your mobile.
 Mike
and the Opsis just can't lay a glove on Albert
Another defeat - this time at the hands of
second-placed Albert. No complaints they were
much the better team with Ian particularly
outstanding. Somehow when the first question
of the evening came to Brian and concerned the
artist who had recorded a relatively recent pop
album we had a collective inkling of our doom.
The truth is Brian, Howell, Hilary and myself are
totally bereft when it comes to knowledge of the
current pop scene. And so it went - with
Jeremy, Julienne, Ian and Eveline mopping up the
points. Early on it did look as if we might
fall to an epic record-breaking defeat but we
rallied and won a few of the later rounds to add an
air of respectability. The Opsis only notched
up 3 twos all evening and 2 of those went to Hilary,
our MVP.
MOBO
looked on benignly for the most part as an away fan
seated in the window. Whatever his secret he
certainly has got his charges firing on all
cylinders this season. The line up was
completed by Paul who did a sterling job as QM for
the evening
Post-match, as ever, we turned to politics with the
weird constituency of Gorton and Denton about to
choose .... well who knows? The latest
prediction from those in the know seems to be a
three-way tie between Reform, Labour and David
Paulden. Once we'd exhausted politics we fell
to admiring Jeremy's fabulous photos - this time
from his recent trip to Costa Rica. All in all
a pleasant evening spent with good friends - but,
oh, it would be nice to win a match now and again!
We're running into Spring!
(R5/Q1)
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David Paulden from Salford
(R2/Q2)
CKC lost to Prodigals
The Prods clinch the league title with 3 matches to
go
 Michael
apologises for having to cancel the open-top bus
parade
It was a remarkably anti-climactic win to take us to
the title. Ordinarily, there is not much between us
and CKC; last time we played them (44-44) there was
literally nothing at all. Yet in one of the
oddest matches I can recall, we took an early lead
as some questions landed nicely for us (Charles
Darwin and Ted Dexter for me, for example) and
landed horribly for our opponents. The
expected CKC comeback did not materialise, not even
when Jimmy's lucky pen ran out of ink.
It's been a pleasure to play with Jimmy, Richard,
John, and Anne-Marie over the past year. The
Prodigals have also applied to the league committee
for extra medals for Joe Lawless (Jimmy's son) and
Mark Bassett, with their super-sub appearances when
we were short. Sadly, the torrential rain
today has put paid to the planned open-top bus tour
of the Didsbury Dozen.
 Kieran's
admiration for his opponents knows no bounds
The perfect storm; the league's, by some distance,
best team - and quiz setters on whose papers we
historically don't have a clue. We hated the paper
(though objectively it wasn't terrible) and the only
upside was that everything was brought to a speedy
conclusion by 9.50. Mike Heale would have loved that
but would also have been apoplectic about everything
else.
The early finish meant that post-quiz we were able
to spitball:
crap towns (Telford and Widnes to the fore), stand-ups who are actually funny despite one's prejudices,
decent chippies in Manchester, the slow death of Rusholme's curry mile, feckless footballers,
weird
mathematical occurrences, the relative appeal (or
otherwise) of West Ham, Arsenal, Leeds, City,
Lincoln, Liverpool and Scunthorpe and the best
insults aimed at by election canvassers.
Bolton's finest
(R4/Q7)
Many, many congratulations to the Prodigals on
retaining the title. They're a quite wonderful quiz
team and the best imaginable company during and
after the game. They didn't gloat, crow or
patronise; we just played a quiz match, one team got
a record stuffing and we all moved on. I can't say
it was a pleasure but it was much less traumatic
than it could have been. In the fourteen seasons
since our hegemony ended in 2011 the Prodigals are
now the joint (sorry I had to get that in) most
successful team in terms of league titles. Only
another sixteen (for the tie) to go lads. I had to
get that one in as well.
Jimmy, Michael, Richard and John, well done you're
brilliant. Now could a couple of you please bugger
off to lay waste to other quiz leagues for the next
two or three seasons?
Mr Booth
(R6/Q6)
Ethel Rodin lost to Bards
The Bards win a nail-biter down in Ladybarn by a
single point
.. on the other hand ...
Last
week's History Men paper came in for a bit of stick
and not all of you think this was fair.
Tony
sent me this message during the week ...
"Mike, several of my team have asked me to let the
league know that last Wednesday's quiz paper did not
deserve the shellacking it received on QuizBiz.
They added that in their view it was one of the
better quizzes we have had all season. I am
happy to pass this on for promulgation as I was on
the point of writing to say the same."
Oldham's (Urmston's?) finest
(R4/Q2)
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This week's Quiz paper set by...
... The Charabancs of Fire
Average Aggregate score 64.8
Another low-scoring paper with plenty of interesting
questions but sadly not plenty of points.
A
whole round on Woody Allen films was way too much -
especially when a brief description of the plot was
all that you had to go on. In our ignorance of
Mr Allen's oeuvre we settled for Hannah and Her
Sisters each time only to find the devious
setter had kept that answer for the spare question.
Best
round for me was the final round with the answers
all sharing the same 3-letter ending; well-crafted
with the theme making the answers gettable even if
the you weren't familiar with the specifics posed by
the question.
One
quibble: according to Wikipedia Sarah Lancashire was
born in Urmston not Oldham.
...
so what were Kieran's views ...
Anything I say about the paper will come
across as sour grapes so I'll limit it to: motorway
numbers are right up there with London underground
stations and (for the oldies) telephone area
dialling codes as the mark of desperation with the
deadline looming. And setting a whole round on the
works of one individual is just too narrow, too
exclusionary. Enough said.
George Pounds on
(R1/Q1)
...
and Ivor's ...
Yes,
the quiz was tough but no complaints from us as the
pain was meted out fairly and poor performance is
always a good reminder that no matter how good you
think you are there are always areas for personal
improvement. Whether that includes watching
all of Woody Allen’s output is debatable. We
did end up using Broadway Danny Rose as a
default answer - it never appeared even in the
spares - and some of his films we had never heard
of. We suspect they might all involve ageing
neurotic New York men in pursuit of rather younger
women and being not quite our cup of tea. The
Run-on round, integrating great art with non-art,
was well devised though I spent too much time trying
to think of a thyroid disease to follow Turn of
the Screw so was totally caught out there.
...
and finally Michael T's summary ...
On
the paper, first, I think Tony is right that some of
the criticism of the History Men's paper last week
was a bit splenetic, so I apologise for that.
There's nothing wrong with a hard paper, as the
Charas proved again last night. The only
gripes were the motorway questions, which had me and
Richard reaching for the absinthe, and the Woody
Allen round. While we did quite well, having
seen a lot of his movies, we did wonder whether the
clue "Woody Allen chases younger women" narrowed it
down at all, or whether - as Martin suggested - that
was just one of his home movies ...
Burnley's Sean Arms
(R2/Q4)
Question of the Week
This week I've chosen Round 2 Question 4 ...
To date who is the only Premier League football manager to have an English pub
named in his honour? Since he shares his birthday with King Henry VIII it
seems apt that the pub sign shows his head superimposed on the body of Henry.
For the answer to this and all the week's other
questions click
here.
Football manager: one of a kind
(R8/Q1)
QuizWas
22/03/17
It was almost 9 years ago that our good
friend and quizzing colleague Dave Barras (The Men
They Couldn't Hang) died suddenly.
For no particular reason I was trawling the WithQuiz
site this week and came across this wonderful
tribute penned by Gerry Collins reminding me not
just of Dave and his immense contribution to our
league but also of how well Gerry can write and put
into words what we are all feeling. Here's
Gerry's piece reporting on Dave's funeral ...
"It
was dark, dreich and dismal at Macclesfield crematorium
yesterday as many of us gathered to say goodbye to Dave.
A sullen contrast to the rich and colourful patchwork that
had been Dave's short life as we heard described in an
eloquent ceremony.
One thing that stayed with me (apart from the grief etched
into Gilly's face) was the description of the little bits of
paper left lying around the house when Dave took to setting
quizzes. I recently heard Seamus Heaney's widow saying
that she still missed her husband's untidiness about the
house; his clutter of little jottings and phrases that might
one day be nurtured and coaxed into poetry.
Good quiz questions are maybe more ephemeral than good
poetry but they have this in common: they don't just happen,
they both need a lot of work, a lot of teasing and wheedling
before they can be published. Above all they both need
inspiration. Dave had that inspiration. An
inspiration that made us realise that there is more to
knowledge than knowing the answer; that knowing how to ask
can yield a still more rewarding pleasure.
Quizzing, by its nature, will always be about the trivial
and the banal. But so is life oftentimes. So
take a leaf out of Dave's jotter and make the most of both.
Rest in Peace, Darlo lad. You are and will always be
missed."
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