So we both held up our pieces of paper and we had both picked the same number between 1 and 100 – 37.

Quizmaster Michael was a bit flustered by this and asked us to have another go, and neither of us were allowed 37.  So we did and we both chose the same alternative number – 73.  At this point Michael thought there was a conspiracy to wind him up and just drew lots.  Quite appropriate since in Crawley we have a bit of a tradition of close results, recounts and drawing of lots to decide elections.

A lot of excitement over a half-case of wine!   Jayne and I donated ours to Horsham party as future raffle prizes, since we still have a few bottles in the cellar, which is what we call our bin cupboard.  A good evening though, and I even had a beer.

Basically they are both general knowledge in all but name.

February 16th

1. Television used to close down between 6pm and 7pm in what was called the ‘toddlers’ truce’. This ended on February 16th of which year??
2. Which Wimbledon singles champion was born on February 16th 1959?
3. On February 16th 2006 the US Army decommissioned the last Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, or MASH. What was the number of the MASH unit in the TV series of the same name?
4. February 16th 1950 was the birthdate of Peter Hain, but where was he born?
5. On February 16th of 1947 William Lyon Mackenzie King became the first person to be a citizen of which country?
6. John Schlesinger was born on February 16th 1926. For which film did he win the Oscar for best director in 1969? (The film itself won the Oscar for best picture, the first X-rated film to do so)
7. The Kyoto Protocol was adopted in December 1997 but only came into force on February 16th of which year after ratification by Russia satisfied the so-called “55% clause”??
8. Author Iain Banks was born on February 16th 1954. What was the name of his first published novel?
9. Walter Winterbottom died on February 16th 2002, aged 89. He was the first person to hold which job?
10. The Elks was founded on February 16th 1868 in New York when it changed its name from ‘the Jolly Corks’ Membership was opened to African Americans in the 1970s and women were allowed to join in the 1990s after a court case, but which significant group is still banned from membership?

2010

1. The 2010 Nobel prize for literature was won by Mario Vargas Lhosa. What nationality is he?
2. On what date did Ed Miliband become leader of the Labour party?
3. In February a charity single by Helping Haiti reached No. 1 in the UK charts. What was the song?
4. The World Cup finals were held in South Africa in 2010. Which was the only one of the 32 finalists to not lose a game?
5. In the general election, the Tory manifesto was called “invitation to join the government of Britain” and the Lib Dem manifesto was called “Change that works for you/Building a fairer Britain”. What was the Labour manifesto called?
6. In January David Tennant made his last appearance as the Doctor. Who replaced him?
7. In June 2010 Kevin Rudd resigned as PM of Australia. Who replaced him as Labor Prime Minister?
8. Who celebrated their 70th birthday in 2010 by performing in a run of 6 sell out concerts at the Albert Hall and releasing an album which reached No. 3?
9. In June 2010 British Airways apologised after a photograph in a staff magazine showed a frequent flyer boarding pass in which name?
10. Which country officially ceased to exist on October 10th 2010?

On reflection, I think that the last one is unfairly difficult.  Most of the others that you don’t know you could have an educated guess at, but this was one of the few that absolutely nobody got right.  In its own way that is very poignant: last year a country officially ceased to exists as a country and we didn’t even notice.  The people who live there have a sense of national identity every bit as strong as ours I am sure.

The first No. 10 is possibly my favourite question.

Feel free to post answers below.

Quizzes often have picture rounds, and it is really easy to get pictures of anything you want in the internet age and the invention of Google Image Search.  Of course going on an image search can get you into trouble – just ask Gary Glitter and, as Pootergeek pointed out on Twitter the other day, all you have to do is miss the H out of a perfectly innocent search for “Theresa May” and you end up with a screen full of images of British porn star Teresa May.

I’ll just wait while you all verify that.

All done?  Good.  Anyway, to avoid such a situation, and any possible copyright violations, I limited myself to photos I took myself, combined with some very shoddy Photoshopping.   So you can’t cheat in the traditional way, but any regular readers who know who I have met and where I have been will have a head start.

Who?

Who?

Who?

Who?

Who?

Who?

Who?

Who?

Who?

Which city?

Which palace?

Which bridge?

Which country?

Which island?

Which town?

Which ship?

Whose autograph?

What?

Most of those photos have appeared on this site or on my Flickr account, so any stalkers should get full marks.

I think the questions were better suited to an event where they could be given time.  A lot were ones you probably wouldn’t know, but could have a good guess at if you had the time to think about it – and time was the thing most at a premium tonight with a room booked only for a limited period, a guest of honour who had to catch a train back to London, and the Labour party’s natural inclination towards long speeches.

Maybe I would have been better sticking to basic pub quiz questions like “who won the FA Cup in 1985?”, “Who had a hit with “Three Times a Lady?” and “Who is the patron saint of France?” but that wouldn’t have been too interesting.  Or would it?

Given that the winners had a score of just under 50% it was obviously pitched wrong and too difficult.   My own slightly logical, dry and mathematical opinion is that it is the relative score that matters, but I guess there is satisfaction in getting answers right and many people would feel happier coming last with 80% than winning with 50%.

MInd you, we don’t want to be accused of dumbing down the exam questions do we?

To be fair, I did throw in a few questions with 50-50 answers, giving everyone an even chance of getting a point and a couple that everyone should get – but the need to rush probably made people trip over some of them.

Anyway…  Hazel Blears was a delight.  I know that a lot of the more active members, being of a left-wing slant, might have preferred McDonnell, Cruddas, or Diane Abbot or Ed Balls but none of the other MPs who were invited were able to come, many not even replying.  Hazel did reply, did come, and said some good things.

And of course, we have to remember that the majority of members may not feel the same way as the far fewer active members – and there were a few members not seen for ages who turned up for a big name who might not have turned up for John McDonnell.  I think Hazel Blears made some friends tonight and set a good example coming out to visit Tory strongholds and not just go out to key marginals and safe seats.

Most importantly, the evening raised (I hope) a lot of money for the party.  OK, we still have a fraction of the resources available to other local parties but at least we can compete a bit now and get printing lots of newsletters and stuff.

Maybe I should publish a few of the questions here and see what my limited readership thinks of them?  See if I am being too hard on myself, or not hard enough.

An even more controversial idea was to redefine the criteria for winning the quiz.  Instead of the winner being the team with the most points, it could be the team that won the most individual rounds.  This would prove hugely unpopular, but I would love to be able to say to all the traditionalists in the party “OK.  If you don’t like my first-past-the-post idea we will go back to the old-fashioned proportional method of deciding the winner if you think that’s more fair.”

I think I’ve worked out why I am not put in charge of things more often…

Now then, back to the questions.  We have a round on lyrics to Yes songs, a round on Sherlock Holmes, a round on George A. Romero’s zombie films and a round on the seven layer OSI model for networking.  Should cover all the bases I think, except sport.  Just time to dredge up 10 facts about US college football.   I do hope I’m joking.

Diego Garcian dancers at the CCAR international social evening

It is not that I am unsociable or anti-social, but as time goes on I do admit that I am more and more content with my own company.  I am happy enough to go out with friends but I don’t feel bad if I am spending a night in – and now that I have all my books, music and instruments together in one place that is more of a pleasure.  All of which is by way of explaining how unusual it was last week to find myself going out three nights in a row.All three events were different excuses for drinking and chatting, although I only actually had a drink on the third night, but thoroughly enjoyed all three.

First off was a night at a bowling tournament organised by somebody at work.  To be honest I am not great at bowling and have only been a few times in my life but went to make up the numbers and show some solidarity with the rest of the department.  We went to the Hollywood Bowl in Crawley, where we had booked every single lane for the evening, so quite a big evening.

When we started the first one of our team to go got what I believe is called a strike.  The second member of the team then also knocked all ten pins down first go.  Things were looking good when the third person did the same.  I rather ruined it when my first shot went down the left-hand gutter and the follow-up went straight down the right-hand gutter.  Things did get better after that, but not by much, and I ended up with a measly 52, which I am told is very, very bad.

In the second game I picked up a bit and my first three goes were two half-strikes and a strike.  Such competence couldn’t last for ever, but I did eventually end up with 122, which is at least respectable if nothing like the 199 one of my team-mates got in the first game.  Fortunately I am not competitive – I guess everybody guessed that when I stodd for the Labour party in Horsham anyway.

It was a fun sort of evening though, but I have to say that the Hollywood Bowl is looking a bit tired these days.  When it opened about ten years ago it was bright and shiny and state of the art, but now it looks a bit tatty.  All the display screens are huge CRTs with ten years’ worth of screen burn on them.  Our one was fuzzy and almost unreadable.  Sometimes our lane would take 5 minutes to think about whether to reset the pins and the whole place now looks no better than the old bowling alley it replaced, which was very old by the time it closed.

Friday night was the Ifield Scouts’ fund-raising quiz night.  I went with a couple of colleagues from work and an ex-colleague. There was the usual arguing about a couple of answers – none more heated than the topic of whether Smurfs were Dutch or Belgian.  Suffice to say we chose the wrong one and the chap we over-ruled is never going to let us hear the last of it.  It was all good fun, as quizzes generally are, and included some particularly nice cakes.

The last night out was the Crawley Campaign Against Racism’s international social evening.  This is usually an entertaining evening out, and this year was no exception.  Entertainment was provided by dancers from the town’s Diego Garcian community, music and dancing from the local Portugese Society, a couple of singers, a stand-up comedian and Mr. Chris Mullins performing solo on his bodhrun after reminding us all (yet again) that the largest ethnic group in town is the Irish.

I was quite impressed actually.  I had seen the drums up on the wall at his house so I knew he played, but I didn’t realise he could play well enough to hold together a solo performance.  Maybe next year we should get him to bring along a couple of friends with fiddles or something.

The great thing about these evenings is the chance to catch up with people I haven’t seen for ages, including a couple of people who left my company a year or two ago.  It was also a pleasant surprise to see George there.  George is somebody I ‘met’ on the Flickr photosharing website a few years ago.  We sometimes compare notes and comment on each others’ pictures, but I had only actually met him once before when we were both taking photos at a vintage truck event.

I felt a bit left out at the end, when everybody on my table won a prize in the raffle except me, but otherwise it was a fine time.

And now back to my hermit-like existance for a few nights, though there are a few seasonal events coming up to drag me out of the nest – not least of which is the Spizzenergi gig in Camden Town on the 2nd.

What was strange was that we seemed to come about 9th out of 7, although there were about 10 teams below us.  It turned out that the quiz was being relayed to other bars in the building, so there were more teams than the few we could see.

Pleased, and a little surprised, that I managed to dig out the name of the Queen’s first grandson from my memory.  Not being a big fan of the royals I usually do poorly on royal questions.  Also dead chuffed that my guess of the second Labour MP to get done for using a mobile phone while driving was correct: Balls.

Kicking myself that I couldn’t remember where the Prix de l’Arc de Triomph is run.

Still, an unexpected break from answering emails about policy.

During an interval, a bloke came up to me and asked if I went to the Spizzenergi show earlier in the month at the 100 Club.  It turns out that he had bought a couple of tickets for it but forgot to go!   He had bought them, he said, about 6 months ago and in the meantime lost track of exactly what day it was on…

Oops.

In case anybody is interested, my team won the quiz by a point after a tie-breaking extra round.  The prize was a huge tin of choccies (Celebrations) but being Christians my team-mates decided it should be shared not only by the team but by everybody else in the room too.  Managed to bag a couple of Galaxy truffles though.

It would have been good to get warmed up before tomorrow when the IT department are hoping to do a bit better than last year’s poor showing.   We are already doing better because we haev a full team of six instead of the miserable four that we scraped together last time round.

We still haven’t decided on a team name though.  “The IT Crowd” is far too obvious.  I am still leaning towards calling ourselves “Have you tried turning it off and on again” if nobody else comes up with anything better.

Talking of quizzes, I really felt for Exeter in yesterday’s University Challenge with their haul of a mere 15 points.  I only watched the last ten minutes or so, but even I got more than that – having shouted out two or three starters (correctly) well before either team.  Still, as Paxo says, and I am paraphrasing, they can’t be that bad: they did get to the quarter-final after all and that is not easy.