Don’t forget, I’m hosting a quiz in Claremorris tonight. It’s at 8.30pm in Warde’s Bar on Main Street. Please come along if you’re anywhere near! We’ve got some picture rounds, an audio round and a couple of Hallowe’en themed rounds. It should be a fun night.
Ok, on with the answers. I alluded to the fact that one of the answers called out the other night was wrong. To be more accurate, one of the questions was wrong.
After a couple of weeks away, I returned to Gilligan’s for Tuesday quiz night last evening. The welcome was warm but the questions were hard.
At the end of the night, my team had scored a hard-fought 59. Pitiful on any other night but good enough for second place on this occasion, just two points behind the winning team.
I’ll give you a sample of how this state of affairs came about, after the Continue.
Here are the answers to the (tremendous amount of) questions posed earlier in De ja voodoo.
My mate Ger is next week’s quiz master at Gilligan’s but I’m afraid I won’t be there to report on his quiz. A ticket to next week’s big European Championship qualifier between Ireland and Armenia has come my way so, obviously, I’ll be in Dublin on Tuesday night.
Hopefully, the Ireland team won’t catch the grabbing-defeat-from-the-jaws-of-victory bug that’s going round.
The week is but halfway through and already I have done two quizzes. Whilst one was in Galway (and featured movies, some music and more movies) and the other was in Claremorris (and featured our return to Gilligan’s Bar), they had some striking similarities.
None more obvious than the fact that, in both of them, my team were in a leading position at the start of the final round before throwing it all away. Of course, nemesis rounds do happen from time to time but they seem particularly cruel when they occur in round 10*.
As a post on the movie quiz will require some work (stills and audio clips etc), I’m going to take the easy way out and report on these in reverse order. Thus, let’s start with the opening evening of this year’s Gilligan’s Tuesday quiz night.
It’s time for a bumper post. This one will include all the answers to those mentioned in Spot the ball-room and one more.
No, I haven’t remembered what the tie-breaker question was that we answered correctly with “3″. However, I have remembered a spot prize question, which the quiz master posed mid-way through the night. Here it is:
Name either of the Westmeath men who have played at centre-field in an All-Ireland football final in the last 15 years.
I’ll give you the answer to that at the very end of the post. If I was to give you a clue, I’d say don’t take it too seriously…
The quiz master delighted in a bit of word play. Whether this was intentional or not, I’m not sure. At one point he created a hubbub by mistaking the ‘l’ for an ‘r’ in a question relating to venue of the Pope’s election. I’m sure that was deliberate. However, his introduction of the raffle prize (a ticket to the All-Ireland football final) as one of the “most converted” items around probably wasn’t.
I had a definite sense of deja vu on Thursday night when I sat down in the Park Hotel, Kiltimagh, to await the start of quiz in aid of the local GAA club. We took part in a quiz there last Easter and, as it was available, I sat down at the same table we’d used that night. History was to repeat, in another way, shortly after when the quiz master started speaking and I realised it was the same man who hosted the Karate club quiz last week.
The host was in more ebullient form this time. He started off by telling us all that first prize was going to be a set of Kiltimagh GAA Club hoodies, whilst the runners-up would be getting a matching set of windbreakers. “No, no – only joking!” First prize was actually four night’s B&B, sponsored by the venue. (Just like that night last Easter, funnily enough.)
The runners-up were to receive four free tickets to the Mayo county senior football final. Remembering last year’s dire battle between Ballintubber and Castlebar Mitchells, we wondered if this was also a joke… *
After round 3, we were three points behind the leaders. Frustratingly, we could never get closer than a two point deficit for the rest of the quiz. Our final score of 84 was good enough for joint-third, two points behind tables 6 and 15. Thus, a tie-breaker was needed to separate first and third. However, at least we got to dodge the county final tickets.
Here are the answers to the questions posted yesterday in Found and lost.
I mentioned in that post that some of the questions were, to put it mildly, a bit easy. Throughout, it was also possible to see how the question setter’s thought process had developed. Sometimes this was very obvious. For example, check out these three successive questions in round one:
How many ‘Angry Men‘ were there in the famous 1950s film?
How many people traditionally sit on a jury?
Complete the title to the famous film: ‘The Dirty……‘
They had obviously hit a rich seam of questions there.
If you’re not in, you can’t win. So goes the old maxim. My team very nearly proved this truism on Friday night as we got lost on the way to a quiz! However, luckily (for the blog’s post count, if nothing else) our path crossed with that of a local farmer, who helpfully pointed us in the direction of Turlough, Co Mayo.
In a first for the blog, I managed to capture some of our manic chase to reach the quiz in an Audioboo (that’s “podcast” for recent arrivals to this site) and you can check it out for yourself right here:
When we did arrive at the Turlough Inn, we found probably the most packed quiz I’ve ever taken part in. 26 tables were crammed in to a pretty small Irish pub. How packed in? Well, the route to the toilets from our table involved a journey out one door and back in another. It was handier than having to say “Excuse me…” about 20 times!
Mind you, we were in the most remote part of the bar. ‘Remote’ here meaning furthest away from both the quizmaster and the aforementioned toilets. We found it very hard to hear the quizmaster; the amplification just wasn’t up to the job of getting the better of such a large crowd. Not that I’m saying we couldn’t hear the questions – everyone hushed at those points. We did have rounds sneak up on us though as the hush would arrive like an aural Mexican wave out of the blue as, in our part of the bar, we presumably didn’t (actually couldn’t) hear the quizmaster announce the start of the round.
The questions were, from a difficulty point of view, all over the place. There were some very hard ones, of course, but many of the others must have come from the primary school curriculum. Examples of the (many, many) ridiculously easy ones include:
How many people sit on a jury?
What type of animal is a beagle?
What’s bigger: a hurricane or a tornado?
I’d tell you more only, as my team-mate Marie said afterwards, “It’s hard to remember questions you didn’t have to think about.”
Here are the answers to the questions posed in Sorry about that, Chief.
Here are the answers to the (tremendous amount of) questions posed earlier in 
