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by John Nolan

To quiz or not to quiz answers … and more

April 3, 2012 in Housekeeping, Quizzes

Firstly, I must say thank you to Evelyn for her report on last Friday night’s quiz. I still cling on to a hope that some day she’ll see the light regarding quizzing… ;-)

After the break, you can see the answers to the picture rounds she included in her post, To quiz or not to quiz.

In other news:

  1. I am the host at Gilligan’s Tuesday night quiz this evening. Please feel free to come on in if you’re in the neighbourhood (of Claremorris). Admission, as always, is €3 per person.
  2. Following a great win by Team B last Thursday night, the first series of After the Fact has gone in to extra-time. The (definitively) final showdown takes place this Thursday as Andrew and Marcella take each other on without the assistance of team-mates. You can listen in on Claremorris Community Radio at 7pm on Thursday night or prepare yourself by listening to our previous shows.
  3. Think you know your food? I’m hosting Galway’s first ever Foodie Quiz on Monday night in The King’s Head bar, on High Street. Tables of four are just €20 and this includes a bottle of wine! If you’d like to enter a team, please email john@tablequiz.net.

Right, on to those answers…

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by Evelyn O'Connor

To Quiz or Not to Quiz…

March 31, 2012 in Quizzes

Let me begin with a confession. I do not quiz. My multitude of university qualifications suggest that I am really quite smart but all it takes is half an hour of quizzing and you’ll find me huddled in the corner, rocking back and forth, drooling. Quizzes make me feel stupid. Very stupid!

But last night I broke my no-quizzing rule and headed to Paddy Phillip’s bar in Ballyhaunis for a table quiz run by the local golf club. Accompanied by three of my best girly mates – two of whom actually like quizzing – we didn’t entirely shame ourselves, coming joint sixth out of twelve teams. By all accounts it was a tough quiz, the winners achieving just 74 points out of 100. Our meagre 57 points weren’t completely dismal however – third place were only three ahead of us on 60!

Meanwhile John was at home rocking back and forth in the corner, trying to deal with missing a quiz he’d like to have attended so that his wife could go to a quiz she made it clear she was, at best, ambivalent about attending. Apologies John. I’ll babysit next time. And the time after that. And the time after that. Well, you get the picture!

Anyway, you can check out a couple of the rounds below and hopefully you’ll be spared my comedy cringe moment from last night: about four minutes after announcing to my team-mates that I hoped there’d be a dingbats round (implying that here at last my quizzing strengths might come to the fore), a dingbats round appeared! So far so sitcom moment. Then I tried doing them (see below). And let’s just say I didn’t cover myself in glory!

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by John Nolan

Do you know Jack’s answers?

March 21, 2012 in Quizzes

Here are the answers to the questions and picture rounds posted in Do you know jack? the other day.

Often, a winning team is faced with a dilemma with their winnings, if those winnings are cash.  Thankfully, this wasn’t a problem for ourselves on Friday last as we got a (non-Christmassy) hamper featuring bottles of whiskey, yummy Kettle Chips and Easter Eggs.  It genuinely was a hamper as it came in a nice wicker basket and, obviously enough, featured four of each item thus preventing any arguments breaking out over the Easter Eggs. :-)

Click the link to see the answers. By-the-by, how did you do with that tricky final one? We thought the answer was obvious but, judging by the reaction in the room, that wasn’t the case at all tables.

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by John Nolan

Do you know jack?

March 19, 2012 in Quizzes

Strangely, with all the quizzing that goes up and down this land, it’s rare that a quiz establishes itself sufficiently that it becomes an annual event.  The Claremorris AFC sports quiz is one such contest but they’re quite rare.

So it was cool that, last Friday night, Ger and myself entered the Ballyhaunis Town FC quiz in The Hazel bar as the defending champions.  12 months ago we’d had a very good night in the company of my father and father-in-law.  Not only did we win the quiz, but we also won most of the raffle prizes!

This year, the quiz veterans were both otherwise engaged so we had to call upon two chaps of our own vintage: Kevin and Adrian. Our team turned out to be, erm, a bit better than everyone else in the room and we ended up winning by just 14 points.  eek! :-)   We finished on 92/100 and no-one else broke 80.

We only won a bottle of wine in the raffle though…

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by John Nolan

Looking out for No. 1

February 7, 2012 in Interactive, Quizzes

Here’s a quick post, just to publish the audio round from last Friday night’s Gorthaganny National School quiz.  As I said in my previous post, the theme was simple: each song features a number in its title. Teams had to identify the number in each case and enter it in to their swanky buzzer.

You can listen to the 10 tracks by clicking the ‘Read the rest….’ link.

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by John Nolan

Behold, the future!

February 5, 2012 in Interactive, Quizzes

Here it is.  The buzzer with which my team took part in last Friday night’s quiz in Ballyhaunis Golf Club.

The quiz was a fundraiser for Gorthaganny National School for, as the headmaster said at the end of the quiz, it’s now a case of “back to the ’80s” in the schools sector with fundraising events becoming common once again.  The money raised at this event will go towards the purchase of the this very buzzer system.  If it provides the school children with as much entertainment value as we got on Friday night, it will be money well spent.

The quiz itself was broken up into four sections: 40 trivia questions, 10 picture questions, 40 trivia questions and 10 music questions.  The trivia questions were, as I predicted, just like questions on Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, with four options.  The picture round was funny but a tad easy, as each question showed a famous person and a professional look-a-like, with us having to enter A or B to identify who was the real deal.  The music round showed off another of the buzzer’s modes.  Each of the songs featured a number in the title and we had to type this number into the device.

On the whole, it was a very enjoyable quiz which is testament to the school staff who created it.  The first 40 questions dragged on a bit as no time limit was enforced on the participants.  However, after the interval, they did introduce a limit of 30 seconds on each question so they obviously had noticed the slow pace themselves.

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by John Nolan

Deep in the rough: answers

September 27, 2011 in Quizzes

Righto.  Here are the answers to the questions posed in the Deep in the rough article on Saturday.

As I said in that post, I hate using superlatives.  However, as well as having possibly the worst quality photocopying for the picture round, this quiz also featured the definitively dearest raffle I’ve seen at a table quiz. The going rate for the past number of years (around here anyway) is €2 for a “line”, with three of them offered for €5.  Here, €5 got you one line of tickets.  Of course, these days, the lines are put into the bucket whole, so this is really one ticket.

Buying multiple lines of tickets seems preferable, normally, for two reasons: it increases your sense of having a chance (you have three tickets in the hat, after all) and it means that, should you win something early, you could still win again. :-)

Not so on this night in Ballinlough where the usual three lines would have cost you €15!

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by John Nolan

Deep in the rough

September 24, 2011 in Quizzes

Last year I took part in a very enjoyable quiz at Ballyhaunis Golf Club so I was quite excited to hear that the same club were hosting another event this year.  Confusingly though, it was taking place in Ballinlough – which is a completely different town, in case the different names didn’t already make that clear. :-)

Things started going wrong, however, when Ger arrived with too many team-mates!  There’d been a bit of a miscommunication earlier in the week when I took the heretofore unheard-of step of sourcing potential quizzers for our table.  We actually had seven people mooted for the team at one point and I stated that, if we had one more, we could have two tables.  However, we went our separate ways then and, while I informed folks that we wouldn’t need their services, Ger went off and found that “extra” team-mate!

So we had five people. I got on the phone and called in my father-in-law, who I knew was keen to take part. He arrived and we let the organisers know that we’d be hoping to find two other folks to make up a team.  Fairly promptly we were sorted out. Joe and Rita, a nice couple from ‘out the road’ had come in to the quiz on the off-chance that they could get on a team. As Ger had brought a car-load of family members, he stuck with them and myself and the father-in-law teamed up with the locals.

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