Return Of the Queen's

Hi everyone, it's good to be back! We've missed a couple of Queen's quizzes already this January, so we were itching to get back into the swing of things. We also had some really stiff competition this time around, so it was a bit of a surprise this week to find that we had come second. Not that we demanded a recount of course. I'm not going to beat around the bush any longer, let's get cracking with my first update of the year...

Plug: If you fancy having a go at the 'best quiz in Birmingham' (and to be fair, it does deserve that title), the address is The Queen's Arms, 150 Newhall Street, Birmingham B3 1RY and it starts at 8.30. See you there!

Bio:  Venue: The Queen's Arms                           Team: Me + the Teacher
         Score: 69/80 (2nd)                                        Prize: £10

Best Team Name Competition

Not a bad haul for our first quiz back. We were 'The Seasiders' as always, which isn't funny but at least it's consistent. Judge for yourselves which is the best of these and let me know by commenting or tweeting me at @MPRTaylor.

- In Last Place...

- The Uncivil Engineers and the Hypocritic Oath

- Quiz Akabusi

- If Page 3 is coming back, then I'm going to splash out on a copy tomorrow

 

I'm pretty sure which is my favourite, but this is your opportunity to correct me if I'm wrong. Get voting. On with the questions...

 

 

Questions



 



This was quite the recovery from my abysmal performance at the Bristol Pear on Monday. But as always, we could have been a bit better. Here's the bundle that we got wrong...

 

Firstly, identify these well-known faces...

 

1)                                                                                     2)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3) Which English Premier League football club's shirt sponsor Alpari was reported to have applied for insolvency proceedings this week? 

 

4) In ITV soap Emmerdale, what is the name of the vet played by Dominic Brunt?

 

Here are the 5(!) songs we didn't know this week. You only have to guess the artist for the points. Click on a link below to be taken to a YouTube video of the song in question. Avert your eyes and watch out for adverts, as always.

 

5) Song 1           6) Song 2           7) Song 3         8) Song 4         9) Song 5       

 

10) What is added to gin to made a 'Pink Gin' cocktail?

 

11)  What was the name of the horse that won the 2014 Grand National at Aintree?

 

12) In American Football, what is the maximum number of players per team that are allowed on the pitch at any one time?

 

Tiebreak) In Earth days, how long does it take for Mars to orbit the Sun?

 

Answers

 

How did you do with this lot? Answers below the picture.

 

1) Nick Easter

2) Phil Vickery (the chef)

3) West Ham United

4) Paddy Kirk

5) Alphaville (Big In Japan)

6) KT Tunstall (Other Side Of the World)

7) Noah and the Whale (Shape Of My Heart)

8) Owl City and Carly Rae Jepsen

9) One Direction

10) Angostura Bitters

11) Pineau de Re

12) 11

TB) 687

 

How did you do? Comment below or tweet me - @MPRTaylor

 

Post Match Analysis
and Fact Files

 

Best Moment: The Teacher always excels at the Connections Round, but extra kudos to him this time when he guessed (correctly) that a connection was 'Star Trek characters' purely from our answer of 'Data Protection Act'. He's not even a Trekkie.

Worst Moment: At the Queen's our weakest round is usually the music round, and this outing proved to be no exception. At least this time, we genuinely didn't know what they were, rather than having heard them and putting down tortuously desperate guesses. But as always, not liking a song is not an excuse for not knowing.

 

1) Not someone who I had even heard of unfortunately. We did at least guess a rugby player, opting in the end for England fly half Danny Cipriani.

Fact File: Nick Easter was born in Epsom in 1978. He typically plays in the role of the No. 8, and has been playing for Harlequins in the English Premier League since 2004, with whom he won the league title in 2012. He has also played for the English national team since 2007. Coming from a sporting family, Easter is the son of former English No. 1 squash player John Easter.

 

2) Interestingly, I suggested Phil Vickery as a possibility for Question 1. However, that would have been a completely different Phil Vickery, and stems from my distressing ignorance of both rugby and chefs.

Fact File: Not to be confused with the England Prop, Philip Vickery was born in Folkestone in 1961 and first began as a chef in the town's Burlington Hotel. Vickery has been a regular face on the BBC2 show Ready, Steady, Cook and the ITV magazine show This Morning since the mid 1990s and is notable for his marriage to former This Morning host Fern Britton. He earned the title of AA Chef of the Year whilst serving as Head Chef at the Castle Hotel in Taunton and has also hosted 'Phil Vickery's Pudding Club'.

 

3) We went with Burnley. I defer entirely to the Teacher on football, so I can't really blame him for going with West Ham.

Fact File: Alpari is a financial services company founded in Russia in 1998, which specialises in foreign exchange and precious metals. Its UK arm was opened in 2004 and it is currently headquartered in London. The talk of insolvency was highlighted when the Swiss Central Bank removed the Swiss franc's attachment to the euro causing the franc to rise by 30% against it. Alpari began its £3 million a year sponsorship deal with West Ham at the beginning of the 2013/14 football season.

 

4) Soaps are another black spot. We just haven't got the time (or ability to undergo so much pain) to anything other than write even pretty basic soaps off. Being in the Star Trek connections round, we thought this one might feature 'Kirk', but our guess of Kirk Dingle didn't hit the mark. I did recognise the character by sight however, when researching for this blog.

Fact File: Paddy Kirk was introduced to Emmerdale in 1997 and has been a presence on the show ever since. He is generally seen as a comedy relief character. He does appear to have had several relationships with members of the Dingle family, including Mandy, Emily, Del and Chas according to Wikipedia.

 

5) I sense that the Quiz Master might be a bit of an Alphaville fan. One to watch out for in the future.

Fact File: I have already done a fact file for Alphaville from this very quiz some months ago. Big In Japan is the German synthpop band's debut single. It was released in 1984 and went to #1 on the German singles charts, reaching #8 in the UK. 

6) Not on our radar (or even radio), though we had heard this one before and I don't dislike it.

Fact File: Tunstall was born Kate Victoria Tunstall in Edinburgh in 1975. On the music scene since 2000, she first received widespread notice for her single 'Black Horse and the Cherry Tree' from the album 'Eye to the Telescope'. Other Side Of the World is the opening track of this album and it was released as a single in 2005 and reached #13 on the UK chart. It was shortly followed by arguably Tunstall's best known song 'Suddenly I See'.

 

7) This one has me completely fooled. I thought it must have been some dingy heavily emotional 80s band. We guessed the Cure and were astonished to find out how recently this had been made.

Fact File: Noah and the Whale were formed in Twickenham in 2006 and the line up originally included Laura Marling. They are best known for the song '5 Years Time' and Shape Of My Heart is taken from the same album 'Peaceful, the World Lays Me Down'. Shape Of My Heart reached #95 in the UK.

  

8) We went with David Guetta. I wasn't aware that Owl City had done anything other than 'Fireflies'.
Fact File: Owl City is an alias of Minnesota born electronic musician Adam Young and Carly Rae Jepsen of Mission, British Columbia, found fame after finishing third on 'Canadian Idol' and releasing her international hit single 'Call Me Maybe'. The pair issued the single in 2012 from Owl City's album 'The Midsummer Station' and it reached #5 in the UK.

 

9) The last question of the music is usually a topical song on this quiz, but surely we can be excused this one. I doubt you'll find me listening to their greatest hits anytime in the near future.  

Fact File: One Direction is (of course) made up of Harry Styles, Niall Horan, Liam Payne, Louis Tomlinson and Zayn Malik. The band also found stardom after finishing third on a TV talent show this time the X Factor. The song Night Changes is from their fourth album, titled 'Four'.

 

10) The theme in this round was that all the answers must feature the word 'go' somewhere in them. Accordingly we went with (a slice of) mango.

Fact File: The traditionally English cocktail 'Pink Gin' typically consists of Plymouth Gin complemented with a dash of Angostura Bitters. The drink is thought to have originated in the navy in the mid 19th century after Angostura Bitters was discovered to sooth seasickness and cure stomach upsets. The Bitters include various herbs and spices and are now manufactured in Trinidad and Tobago, though they were invented in Ciudad Bolivar (formally known as Angostura) in Venezuela in 1824.   

 

11) Going for this would likely have lost us two points. This is usually the sort of thing I try and commit to memory for occasions such as these, and I will be making a space for Grand National winners as soon as time allows.

Fact File: Pineau De Re is a gelding (castrated male) born in 2003 and who first began racing in 2007. He was foaled in France by Michel Hardy and was trained by Philip Fenton and Richard Newland in the UK. In addition to the 2014 British Grand National, Pineau De Re has also won the 2013 Ulster Grand National. He is bay in colour and his father (or sire) was the noted Marresca Sorrento.

 

12) Likewise, we didn't have enough knowledge to be sure. The Teacher tells me that the qualification 'at any one time' refers to American football having a team of attackers and a team of defenders that constantly alternate depending on who is in possession.

Fact File: I'm not going to go through the rules here, but American Football was developed from Rugby Union and the first version of the game was played between Rutgers and Princeton colleges in 1869. It is the most popular sport in the US, something clearly observable from the list of most watched US TV programmes, many of which are Superbowls.

 

TB) We went with 595 through averaging our guesses. It wasn't crucial in the end.
Fact File: The average distance of the 'Red Planet' from the Sun is 228 million kilometres compared to the Earth's 149.5 million. 687 days is equivalent to 1.8808 Earth years.

That's all for now folks, hope you've enjoyed my long overdue return. Don't hesitate to comment or tweet me and see you soon hopefully. Until next time...

 

 

Back In Business (Soon)

Hi everyone, and happy new year. This is just a quick message to say that I will be resuming work on this blog again very soon after some hectic commitments over the past month. I will aim to have a new post up by Friday, and possibly two by Saturday if all goes to plan (it usually doesn't). I have been contemplating reducing my fact files recently as they take so long to research and edit, but that would be defeatist. I will not be uploading much of the considerable backlog from December, but I shall aim to begin with the Teacher's and my return to the Queen's Arms. If you're very lucky, I'll also put up my incredibly heavy loss at the Bristol Pear (it was almost sensationally depressing). See you soon!