"No idea if this was good enough to take us off the bottom of the table but I must report the season proper started here for the Pigs with our first win and league points in a 29-28 thriller at the Moss vs the Bards.  The thrill being not so much the securing of said points and win but the nature of it.  Behind for the entire game and pretty much resigned (truth be told) to another winless week (as distinct from pointless, which quiz nights NEVER are, of course) and still 4 points in arrears entering the last round, the Pigs went ahead for the first and last time with their last-gasp bonus-point clincher from the Lottery question.  1994 - our number, at long last this season, had come up."

Charabancs of Fire scored a notable victory over the History Men at the Swan - Ivor writes:

"Another mid-table clash (how the mighty are fallen compared with a few years ago) and for us there was no way back having fallen ten behind after only two rounds"

Opsimaths and Ethel Rodin fought a tense affair at the Albert Club with the score swinging heavily towards Ethel in Rounds1 and 8 but sufficiently the other way in Rounds 2 to 7 to ensure an Opsimaths victory

A wide range of subjects were covered from pop singers who went to war to the introduction of the poll tax in 1275.  In between some home town themed rounds evenly balanced between City and United (why doesn't Bolton Wanderers ever get a look in?).  I particularly liked the Alphabet Soup Round 6 since Mount Godwin-Austen fell to me and Ethel's John had already mentioned K2 earlier in the Round.  If I was to raise one criticism I felt starting the quiz with a trick question about Grand Nationals in the First World War was a misjudgement.

In the City-themed Round 7 I struggled for ages with Cassandra eventually dredging up the name 'William Connor' (but I have no recollection of City substitute Dave Connor).  After the match Roddy helped me remember the Daily Mirror's Cassandra's famous diatribe against Liberace:

"He is the summit of sex - the pinnacle of masculine, feminine, and neuter.  Everything that he, she and it can ever want.  I spoke to sad but kindly men on this newspaper who have met every celebrity coming from America for the past 30 years. They say that this deadly, winking, sniggering, snuggling, chromium-plated, scent-impregnated, luminous, quivering, giggling, fruit-flavoured, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother love has had the biggest reception and impact on London since Charlie Chaplin arrived at the same station, Waterloo, on September 12,1921.

This appalling man - and I use the word appalling in no other than its true sense of terrifying - has hit this country in a way that is as violent as Churchill receiving the cheers on V-E Day.

He reeks with emetic language that can only make grown men long for a quiet corner, an aspidistra, a handkerchief, and the old heave-ho.  Without doubt, he is the biggest sentimental vomit of all time. Slobbering over his mother, winking at his brother, and counting the cash at every second, this superb piece of calculating candy-floss has an answer for every situation.

There must be something wrong with us that our teenagers longing for sex and our middle aged matrons fed up with sex alike should fall for such a sugary mountain of jingling claptrap wrapped up in such a preposterous clown".

Eat your heart out Fr M this is true full frontal invective.  Liberace famously sued and won damages.

Ivor's report from the Swan echoes the feeling that the balance of hard and easy in the paper wasn't quite fair to the team going second:

"It was not a night for inspired guesses.  Rupert (making his first appearance of the season for us) guessed the Betty Hutton film of a girl who gets into trouble was called Blanche De-Flowered which actually sounds more likely than the The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek.  And surely the pencil dress H-line should have been HB line?  One would also have hoped that the inventor of the electric chair was an electrician but I suppose being a dentist he already had the chair.

Talking points?  Perhaps the questions were a bit unbalanced  in the first half - and wasn’t Gillian Shepherd in the Major cabinet?  Our QotW vote went to the one about the poll tax."

The poll tax of 1275 led to the widespread introduction of what in England?

Back in 1999 it seemed to me from what I knew about the web that it offered exactly the sort of facility that could support and enhance our Wednesday quizzing activity so I set about registering withquiz.org.uk and playing around with software trying to find out what I needed to do.  Then (as now) I chose Microsoft’s Frontpage to engineer the site (I had acquired a free copy).  It's a fairly basic package but quite adequate for our needs.  By the start of the 2000/01 season I was just about ready to put something up on a site each week.  Of course at first I was just ‘talking to myself' but gradually the word spread and the website took off.  I think I was right in judging that the site would enhance our quizzing hobby though it took quite a while to persuade everybody of this.  But even Mike Heale (so I was told) had taken to consulting the website before he packed up quizzing (and, sadly, everything else).

Essentially the site combines 3 elements: 1) information about the competition in which we are engaged to help participants know what’s going on, 2) commentary from some of the participants on the matches, the question papers, the venues, Sean the barman at the Swan, Jitka’s latest malapropism, or whatever, and 3) an archive of all the questions we have asked each other over the past 10 years.  In terms of time taken by me to upload this material, the information element takes a few minutes (providing you all send me the results promptly – which you invariably do these days), the commentary takes an hour or so of editing (though of course all depends on you the correspondents and what you decide to send in at midnight on a Wednesday) and the question paper usually takes 2 to 2.5 hours to get loaded up just right.  It’s all a labour of love for me.  By which I mean I enjoy doing it and am chuffed at what I think has been the success of the endeavour.  We now have over 17,000 questions (and, of course, answers) on the site and get visited on average about 48 times a day.  The site has helped attract new teams and new players.

My favourite website week?  Well there have been a number of weeks when the Megson column winged its way to my computer from deep inside some local Post Office and left me laughing out loud, but the best week by far was the one a few years ago when the airwaves went blue with limericks to commemorate Roisin’s  Shannon gaffe.  Great fun!

Anyway enough of the nostalgia.  I’m looking forward to this being the first season during the life of the website that SPW/Napier Girls/Griffin Braggarts/etc/etc do NOT win the league title.