The Great Victory Blitzkrieg

Last night was definitely one of the highlights of the quizzing career. An absolute storm of a performance, and we needed it. With only two questions wrong, this week's round up would probably seem a little sparse, so I am going to include the snowball questions to beef this post up a bit. So sit back ladies and gentlemen, while I fill you in on our once in a blue moon triumph.

05/08/14
The Victory Superdome (Pub)    Team: Me + 3 others
Rank: Joint 1st (Win on the tiebreak)           Points: 96/100           Snowball: Not chosen

We absolutely needed all guns blazing to clinch our narrow win this week. We finished the first half with a roaring 50 out of 50 which drew some envious groans from the other tables, but obviously a good start is no guarantee, and one fault on the first half would have lost it for us. Below are our pains in the proverbials:

1) Which capital city stands on the Han river?
2) In Hamlet, what was Yorick's profession?

Tiebreak: In centimetres, what height is Tom Cruise?

Snowballs

1) The alien ALF came from which planet?
2) Which famous author drowned in the river Ouse in 1941?
3) What was the name of the 'aristocratic' owner of the manor in the sitcom To the Manor Born?
4) Charles Darwin died in which year?
5) Which celebrity will be attending the Flavours of Herefordshire Food Festival this year?

I'm not entirely sure how many of these we would have got, but it's all academic anyway. Our great (but not bitter!) rivals who we beat on the tiebreak won £100 on Question 5. We also saw some friends lose out on question 3, due to some ambiguity over the meaning of the question. Details below.

How did you do on those?

Main Quiz Answers

1) Seoul
2) Jester

Tiebreak: 170 cm

Snowballs

1) Melmac
2) Virginia Woolf
3) Richard DeVere
4) 1882
5) Mary Berry

The Excuses

Main Quiz

1) We went with Hanoi, but I had my doubts. I knew that one of the main two cities in Vietnam was on the Red River and I underthought it. I realised that I should change my mind when I went for a pee, but our answer paper had been collected by the time I came back.
Quiz Bread and Butter: The mouth of the river Han separates North and South Korea and as such forms part of the Korean Demilitarised Zone. There is a River Han in Vietnam, but Hanoi is on the Red River and Ho Chi Minh City's principle river is the Saigon.

2) We went with gravedigger, which is not as off the mark as it first sounds. Yorick's skull was found by a gravedigger in the final act of the play, so this must have caused the confusion. I think I might need to go and see Hamlet though, as it causes us a lot of grief in quizzes at present.
Quiz Bread and Butter (sort of): Polish pianist Andre Tchaikowsky donated his skull to the Royal Shakespeare Company (after he'd already died of colon cancer, obviously) with the express purpose that it be used to portray Yorick. In fact, here he is starring opposite David Tennant in 2008.

Tiebreak: We went with 164, pipping the other teams guess of 160.
QBAB: Born Thomas Cruise Mapother IV in Syracuse, New York in 1962, all 3 of Cruise's wives - Mimi Rogers, Nicole Kidman and Katie Holmes - have been taller than him. Kidman was the tallest at 180 cm, then Holmes, (175 cm) and Rogers the shortest at 174 cm.

Snowballs

1) Apparently ALF is an American sitcom that ran from 1986 - 1990. The general theme of the show is that he crash lands on Earth and gets taken in by a middle class family, the Tanners.
QBAB: ALF stands for Alien Life Form. The actual name of the character is the totally space age Gordon Shumway. I think.

2) Best known for her books 'Mrs Dalloway' and 'To the Lighthouse', Woolf is understood to have had bipolar disorder, which caused her to commit suicide in this way.
QBAB: Born Adeline Virginia Stephen in 1882 in Kensington, Woolf and her husband Leonard founded Hogarth Press in 1917, which is now an associate company of Chatto & Windus.

3) This question raised a few eyebrows as the premise of To the Manor Born is that Richard DeVere is a self-made millionaire and not an aristocrat, as opposed to the female lead Audrey fforbes-Hamilton. Sadly this put our friends on the wrong track.
QBAB: To the Manor Born originally ran from 1979 - 1981 and starred Penelope Keith as Audrey and Peter Bowles as Richard DeVere.

4) Anybody who loves money ought to know this really as Darwin takes pride of place on the reverse of the £10 note. Darwin was born in Shrewsbury in 1809 and died at Down House in Kent (now part of Greater London). Down House is now owned by English Heritage and open to the public.
QBAB: In 2017, Darwin is set to be replaced on the £10 note by Jane Austen, after a campaign to ensure that a woman other than the Queen remains on UK banknotes.

5) Best known for the Great British Bake Off, Mary Berry was probably the obvious candidate even if you didn't know. Not that I'm sour that our rivals won the money or anything!
QBAB: Since 1970, Berry has released over 70 different cookbooks. Her autobiography is called Recipe for Life.

That's enough for today I think. Let me know how you found those, and see you all again soon!