Withington Pub Quiz League - quizbiz 07/12/16

The Dunkers keep their unbeaten record - and their 4 point lead at the top of the table

The Results

Dunkin' Dönitz just keep on going - this time beating The Electric Pigs at The Griffin. Kieran reports....

"For the first time in three weeks the Griffin was empty, well almost. It was certainly devoid of bar staff but, I assume in an effort to drum up business, someone, I can only describe as 'a man with a guitar', had been allowed to, erm, ply his trade in the middle room at the back (the one without TV screens).

You see he couldn't be said to be 'singing', nor indeed coaxing a tune out of his instrument. There was just this constant........ noise as a backdrop to the quiz. From time to time we could make out the odd phrase from much loved iconic songs of the last forty years or so. We just couldn't ignore the cacophony as Otis Redding, John Lennon, James, The Traveling Wilburys and many other classic acts were put to the sword. He even, and I don't have the words, 'did something' to the Roy Orbison vocal part from Handle With Care. I know we're living in a barbaric age and civilisation is collapsing all around us but there are some things that that are worth going to the barricades for and Roy Orbison and George Harrison are both on this list. Whatever he was doing should be regarded as a war crime and I'd like to see him in The Hague double quick and thence to the gallows. Andrew Pig offered to preview his karaoke act from the forthcoming City Council Labour Group Christmas party (see below for a picture of the real thing!) as an antidote but we weren't reassured when he claimed there were no high notes in either The House Of The Rising Sun or Sunny Afternoon. I thought Andrew should simply smash the guitar over the f***ing Philistine's head but, good, non-violent, democrat that he is, even under extreme provocation, Andrew declined.

Nine wins from nine, and it's starting to feel a bit like it used to many years' ago. But we have a huge game against the Shrimps next week to finish off the first half of the season and if we lose that things will suddenly look very different. We're pretty happy with our Wednesday evenings so far, apart from the off stage carnage tonight obviously.

It's a beautiful noise

And it's a sound that I love...

Well it used to be."

Albert lost to The Opsimaths in a sombre Fletcher Moss. Sadly the popular landlady, Jane, has just died following a short illness whilst on holiday in Mexico. Understandably the bar staff were tearful and the pub less than its usual boisterous self.

This was an important match for the standings at the top of the table and the Opsimaths came through the test with flying colours. As Mike says below the first half (in particular Round 3) was a shoo-in for the visitors and after this the Albert squad just couldn't claw back the deficit. Mike was uncharacteristically quiet for a team captain (perhaps I should follow his lead). His most skipperish activity was choosing between some wrong answers to a pop music question that ended with the letter 'O' - none of which he recognised. The greatest laugh at our end of the room came from the home team when I repeated the question about 'Celtic gods' as 'Celtic dogs' (my hearing is really crap these days - especially in the Fletcher Moss). Had I not been corrected I might well have plumped for Scottie or Greyfriars Bobby as the name of the Scotrail operator.

These days the Opsimaths seem to have got the teamwork thing cracked and many of our scoring answers were achieved by one member spotting the theme and quickly writing down possible theme-related words to help the other members on subsequent questions. This worked pretty well most of the evening (with Clare excelling at theme-spotting) - though on the first two questions of the 'Bond villains' theme round I was adamant that the link was celebrities with 'country' surnames (as in 'Rosa Luxemburg' and 'Hugo Montenegro'). Mr Big promptly blew my theory out of the water!

To underscore the Albert view of the evening Mike O'B has sent me his version of the beautiful, doleful, World War One soldiers' lyric We'll Never Tell Them, which was sung to the music of one of Jerome Kern's earliest hits (and was featured in Joan Littlewood's Oh! What a Lovely War)....

"And when they ask us, / and they're certainly going to ask us / the reason why we didn't win last night, / oh we'll never tell them, / we'll never tell them / there was a quiz but darned if we knew where."

He continues....

"So much for the first half of the quiz when we decided that the Charas were goblins from the deepest, darkest part of Hell. The second half was better for us but the lead the Opsimaths had built up was too great. Ah well! Back to the drawing board and our attempts to train a platoon of flying monkeys to bring us the answers."

Ethel Rodin beat The Bards of Didsbury at the Ladybarn Club.

The Prodigals beat The Men They Couldn't Hang at The Albert Club.

The History Men lost to Compulsory Mantis Shrimp at the Red Lion. Ivor reports on the goings-on....

"Anne is always a little late to the quiz despite living closer to the Red Lion than any other league player, let alone the Historymen, but at 8.40 we thought we'd better give her a ring. The call reached her holiday destination in Spain where she reminded us that - as she told us last week - she was away on holiday. This confirms once again (if quiz results were not enough) that our ageing brains are immune to new information, especially if conveyed whilst 'in cups'. So, we started three-handed against the very promising Mantis Shrimp line-up who, despite the absence of Rachael (wedding anniversary already), had enough of a lead to frustrate our late run. We have now lost five games in a row. My only consolation was that daughter Number 1 was QM and did not make a single blurt - and, for once, neither did her father."

The Paper

This week the paper was set by The Charabancs of Fire.

The average aggregate (by no means the only measure of a successful paper) was, at 69.2, a little below the season's overall average of 73.5 but the paper was full of variety in both subject matter and style of round. In common with the Dunkers we loved the 'two overlapping answers' Round which seems to be becoming a staple of our quiz papers. Who could fail to smile at 'The Rite of Spring Onions' and 'It Happened One Night at the Opera'? The Bingo rounds at the end were nicely formatted with a broad theme (girl's names) to knit them together and give the competitors a little nudge towards the right answer. Whenever I see Damian he's always glad to remind me that it was the Charabancs that invented the Bingo-style round (at least for WithQuiz purposes) and it does provide a welcome alternative to the usual format (except for The Bards, that is, who reject serendipity in favour of proper balance in the relative hardness of the questions).

And, of course, it's impossible these days to get away from the turmoil over the pond to which Kieran keeps referring in his reports. At the end of Round 1 we were reminded of the only 20th century US President to have a mother born in the UK (Carlisle to be precise) knowing full well that the 21st century's next incumbent had a mother born in a small village just outside Stornoway in the Outer Hebrides. Has Donald some 'Wee Free' blood coursing through his veins?

So how did others see the Charas' offering?

Kieran's view....

"Charas Gerry and Roisin were in attendance hoping we weren't going to be hating the experience of their paper. Well we didn't hate it, but I don't think we fell in love with it either. At least not to start with. At half time the score was 16-15 to us, and 8 of the 32 questions had been unanswered. The Pigs score was almost entirely due to 4 twos and a bonus on the 'words ending in O' round. Things picked up after half time, at least for the Dunkers, even though the caterwauling in the pub was still constant. There were only 2 further zero score questions.

We love the incongruous answers that are required in the 'two linked answers' round. The 'Haywain Hemingway' is an auditory delight and 'The Rite Of Spring Onions' deserved to be in the main paper and not discarded as a spare."

and Ivor's....

"We did enjoy the quiz and the varied delights of a Charabancs paper. I actually recognised the Bananarama lyric having heard it in Ibiza in September when they (there are only two Bananas singers now) performed it live at the Hard Rock Hotel. My final question was the Peter Starstedt song character, Marie-Claire, which I only remembered because it was a potential question for a theme round (never completed) on magazines for girls and women."

And finally look out for my latest bonkbuster Ivor in Ibiza when its published later this month. It's with the lawyers right now.

Question of the Week

This week the 'Ah, that's a good question' award in the Fletcher Moss was picked up by the first question of the Round 7 & 8 Bingo Round (which contained a girl's name in the answer):

By what name was the author of the mathematical books Euclid and his Modern Rivals (1879) and The Game of Logic (1887) better known?

For the answer to this and all the week's questions click here.

.....and also

A late addition to this week's QuizBiz........

A mole at the Manchester City Council Labour Group's Christmas party has sent in the picture below (see the comments Kieran makes above in his match report from Wednesday's Griffin tussle).

Apparently Andrew's rendition of the Elvis classic The Wonder of You added plenty of Momentum to what was a fairly middle-of-the -road affair!