After the excitement of Christmas the Lemmings gathered for the first time in
some weeks to face the Ox-fford C. For some it had been more exciting than others – Nick had booked a
hotel in the Trough of Bowland to avoid cooking and stress; unfortunately the
hotel was surrounded by flood water by Boxing Day and several roads closed.It was a pleasure to welcome the Ox-fford C team whose questions we had
enjoyed in our last game; it was an evening with no 
distractions from the ladies’ darts, football or
anything else (except for Nick’s sudden attack of sneezing brought on by the
hops) so the question master Rosalie from the Royal Oak had a relatively easy
ride which she conducted with good humour.The questions the Lemmings liked very much as they had clearly been given a lot of thought and introduced some new ideas into the format; in particular it was interesting to learn that The Fisher King is more than a Robin Williams film; even so, the Lemmings still struggled, losing the Specialist rounds with 60 to the visitors’ 77.
Often the Lemmings have made up a deficit in the General Knowledge but the visitors maintained their superiority (with the same proportion actually 0.78) taking the rounds with 109 to 84. Final score 186 to 144 for the Ox-fford C.
Individual scores were Bob 12/6, Wendy 6/21, Nick 12/21, Tomo 18/21 conferred 9/12, pass-overs 3/3; the visitors picked up 5/5 pass-overs.
Another enjoyable evening rounded off with a splendid cheese board with baguettes and salami. Many thanks to Brian, to the visitors for an entertaining evening and to Rosalie for her patience.
2 comments:
Once again, one was confined to answering questions from the dispassionate environment of the internet, questions that I was quite happy with, despite a couple of exceptions below. The Royal Oak certainly found a more forgiving stance, especially in the GK than last year and I would expect exponential improvement in their QSL position to result. From my perspective the quiz was well-balanced – I could answer 3 more questions correctly going first-first and my scores from each position were generally within my normal range. The one imbalance that I felt was that player 3 got a fairly gentle ride – First-First in the Specialists and First-Second in the GK – I got 11/12 of the latter which certainly isn’t a normal event! On the other hand, I struggled a little going first on both teams, but know of others who did not.
A couple of rogue questions seemed to slip through – both Evelyn Glennie and the measurement of angles had far more than one correct answer (Glockenspiel and Minutes were my offerings and any QM sticking to the sheet would have been prising 3 marks from my cold, dead hands each time). Evelyn Glennie further muddies the waters by being pretty handy on the bagpipes, which is woodwind.
A final and more general musing – once again the hardest specialist round for me was Sport. As someone who takes more interest in sport than anything else on TV and has pretty duff Scientific knowledge, this is an odd trend. However, it seems that there is an unwritten rule that only one question must be asked per sport and a particularly obscure sport should always be included (Moto GP, Gymnastics and American Football in the last three quizzes). If the quiz league demographic reflects wider society (see below for an incomplete list of watched sports in UK according to Wikipedia and unhelpfully not referenced) perhaps football deserves a bit more airtime and/or the less popular sports need to have generally quite easy questions asked about them, given that 3-4x as many of us will have decent knowledge of football, compared to golf. We could probably draw analogies with Ents –1970s Number Ones, contemporary Soap Opera and Inter-War Silent Movies all come under the remit, but I think we all know that the latter should come up less frequently and any sensible questions that are asked would be considered very easy by an expert.
Sport TV Viewing
Association football
46%
Rugby Union
21%
Tennis
18%
Cricket
17%
Athletics
18%
Snooker
10%
Motor racing
13%
Rugby League
12%
Boxing
11%
Golf
11%
In my opinion, football and everything connected with it should be consigned to the dustbin of history!
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