Apologies to all who were waiting on my report from the USA quiz I hosted in The King’s Head, Galway, on Monday night last. I’ve been very busy at work this week, I’m afraid. This work has born fruit with the launch yesterday of the Claremorris Community Radio iPhone app, which you can download for free on the Apple App Store. It’ll come in handy on Thursday nights for After the Fact. 🙂
Right, so back to last Monday. Firstly, I was delighted with the large crowd who turned up. The main floor of the bar was full – indeed several late-arriving tables had to move upstairs and look down on the stage from the balcony. As an aside, it’s a bit strange to have quiz-goers looking down on you as you ask the questions…
Most of the crowd were actual American citizens. Indeed the winning team were a family on holiday from Detroit, Michigan. Naturally, it shouldn’t be too surprising that people from the country on which the quiz was based would win but it was a close run thing. I did try to introduce a little randomness to the questions (more on that in a minute) and also added some clues to the questions to aid the Irish people in the room.
I was subject to some light-hearted heckling throughout the night about my pronunciations. I don’t think I was that bad but one table in particular seemed to have appointed themselves the pronunciation police. Such examples of heinous error on my part included called the capital of Montana “Heleena” (as opposed to “Hellena”), calling Holyoke as “holly-yoke” (and not “hole-yoke”) and calling the explosive springs in Yellowstone “geezers” (they said it should have been “guy-zers”). For the last one, I finally decided to test THEM out and asked for a show of hands for the correct form. It finished about 60/40 for their version but that hardly made me such a language criminal, did it!?
The quiz featured two picture rounds (one about cowboys and one about US sport) and two audio rounds (‘Songs involving America’ and Grammy record of the year winners). I’ve included one of each after the jump for you to try.
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Here are the answers to the questions posed in the USA quiz post from the end of last week.
Here are the answers to the questions I posed in the 
In honour of the day that’s in it, here’s a small quiz on the office of President of the United States of America.
