Churlish

It was a more close run thing this time round, but the perfect record in 2008 for the Old Brown Shoe pub quiz has been maintained. So it is four wins out of four, and the 50 points scored today means that we have managed to score above 50 in every quiz so far this year. Churlish of us to keep winning? Perhaps, but I fully intend to.

The three other rounds this week were "starting with the letters MI", "history and geography" and a round where you had to decide whether something was to be "eaten, worn, flown, spent, drunk etc." We decided to put our joker on starting with MI, reasoning that knowing the first two letters of the answer would really help in guessing it, and other similar rounds had proven easy in the past. Again, we proved inspired on the joker, with that round being by far the easiest of the quiz (most teams scored at least eight, with lots of nines). We managed a full ten again for yet another twenty on the joker.

We scored a decent eight on history and geography which has proven tricky in the past. We were tripped up by a question asking what month JFK was assissinated in (despite Dave remembering that it was a cold one due to the fact that he went to get some coal that morning). We guessed February but it was November apparantly. Given that I wasn't yet born in 1963, I couldn't prove or disprove the popular notion that everyone can remember exactly what they were doing when they heard the news that JFK was shot. On a sidenote, I could draw a parallel to a similar shocking event in recent times, namely the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Do I remember what I was doing? Actually, I was out on an army exercise when the news first broke, and I only realised when I received a text message from my parents after I got back into camp.

We ultimately went into the final round with 44 points, after scoring a 7 in a pretty tough news round and getting a good 9 in the wear it/eat it/fly it/drink it etc. round, thanks to Keith's usual genius at this. I was very pleased to know that a Sopwitch Camel is actually an airplane (and thus to be flown) - Justin will be proud of me. It was proving to be a close quiz though as we took a bare 2 point lead into the final round - it was our usual close rivals the Shoe People led by Nigel in hot pursuit.

It proved to be a bugger of a final round. We were well stumped by questions like what river runs through Berlin (the Spree), the national flower of Indonesia (the Jasmine or the Rafflesia), the animal responsible for Minnesota's state nickname (the Gopher) and the organ that produces immune cells (the Spleen). We weren't surprised when we only managed a six, and given our slender lead we were fully expecting a tie-break. Thankfully, the team two points behind only managed a six as well, meaning that we maintained our two point lead for a win.