BQC 2007 Part II: The Pairs
Succulent Pairs, (insert adjective more suitable for the fruity homonym here) Pairs
The brain was in steep decline and was already painfully amnesiac by the time the Pairs competition commenced. A CAT scan would have revealed a disturbing and ever expanding black hole sucking any useful information into a bleak, impossible void. My 3rd-in-the-British-championships-on-aggregate partner from last year, Gareth, was in better mental condition. This I was determined to believe, even if I had quite shockingly beaten him by six points in the sports and leisure individual category - one of his specialities. Thinking about that, it might have been a bad omen.
And so, when we got the very listy preliminary round and we stared at the paper in a kind of catatonic dumbness for longer than was healthy, I thought we would do atrociously (meaning middle table obscurity: Fulham or Aston Villa style). Nothing was coming. No real contentment with any of our suggested answers was forthcoming. There was quite a weird pause when we expected the other to start filling the entire sheet with proof of their all-round genius. When it dawned on both of us that neither of us were going to burst into propulsive scribbling action we concluded that this wasn't going to be our round, and if it wasn't going to be our round there was a fair chance that future rounds would also scupper our momentarily feeble minds with their impenetrability.
So sighing in an irksome manner, we filled the sheet as best we could. When we finished we turned our papers over to Darren and Scott, who were sat on the other side of the table. Looking at their more proficient sheet (I could tell immediately ... just like getting multiple choice innit?) my heart sank. They had some omissions, but our paper was a vacant, tumbleweed-strewn lot where the wind blew cold and frosty compared to theirs. Then the answers were read out: eeek, ow, damn, maaaaan, how did that happen? That was rubbish.
Um, I got most of the Best Foreign Film Oscar countries of origin wrong, for deep, scarlet shame; got all my mythological Muses mixed up to disastrous effect and failed to get any of the many Rovers' Return landlords; I even put Barraclough for one of the answers ... the actor's real name! The brain was scrambled and being whisked further into abject nonsense! (surely we had had enough Corrie questions on the day; I know it's quintessentially British, but for those who don't watch it, you risk plunging us into hell). I had horrific premonitions of a future cursed by mental decline. Soon I would be going "blah blah blah", buying National Lottery tickets in their dozens and playing music on my mobile phone whilst sat on the Tube or on a London bus. Our round score was 27: middle table obscurity it was.
The knock-out phase began. We were seeded - how we were seeded I hadn't a clue. Gareth and I found ourselves confronted with nice, long questions, which if you pondered in sensible fashion in league with a ready, well-oiled mind brimming with the right factoids, you could answer in a very smug and pleasing manner. However, my grey matter machine was clattering along like a rust-ridden Tin Lizzie desperate to pull over and wheeze its last and rest peacefully on the side of the road. It was petering out: spluttering sounds of death and taking many facts into temporary oblivion with it. There really was a hole being bored into my brain and many, many facts were leaking from it. (And yes, I CAN get more melodramatic. I can go Halle Berry Oscar-collection ballistic. It dilutes the quotidian boredom, and can even get quite enjoyable at times.)
As a result, we, okay I was screwing up on questions I would have got any other time. Q's on Three Men in a Boat (I had read the comedic blighter and crossed it out when I had put it down as the only logical answer) and the mythical Echidna (so, so obvious) were missed, to name but two regretful examples. There were more. We should have been scoring two more than our actual tallies every round.
We weren't going to get any round concluding 4-point risk questions (you hand them in at some point-worthy juncture, the size of the score depending on the moment, the more obscure the better, you submit your answer) on the full, maximum point button because I didn't expect Chris to set any long questions on the kind of youthful subject matter which I know in insufferable and frightening detail.
Everything else - history, myth, old TV - is all surface in my brain: like slightly useful plaque. And I was right. The subjects were all born long before Gareth and I (Statue of Liberty, Joe Bugner, Betty Driver ... I mean, we couldn't even get one point for that last one because we couldn't remember her sodding surname. Damn you, you evergreen Corrie!) So we relied on getting most points in the main section and prayed that everyone else would flounder when faced with the risk of either taking 4, 3, 2 or 1 points. A sort of passive tactic, if you will.
Somehow, our answering the main 15 questions was enough to get us through every stage. After doing several of these 15 question rounds we were in the final. Mighty duos had long fallen away. Small yippee. Time to get slightly nervous. Time to choke like an incumbent US President mindlessly scoffing down a pretzel. Of course, the last batch of questions was harder than anything we had been presented with before and, ACK, there was a Scottish loch I felt like drowning my head in. The blanks stayed for some time, like increasingly unwelcome visitors. Yawning gaps they were. Not being able to stand this, we pulled ourselves up for one more big push. Yes, if we did that and beat our two fellow finalist duos we could have an amusing trinket to show confused yet surely amazed housemates, who would go slack-awed with jaw on hearing the words "British champions."
We guessed loads. We had to. "Hmmm, mangoes are quite popular aren't they with everyone else in the world?" was one shot in the dark that miraculously found its target. Then there was the saucy postcard. There was only one person famous for producing illustrations for naughty seaside postcards. One guy. The one and only. His name lives on in reference books as a result. I knew it. Yet ... and yet I couldn't squeeze it from my failing brain. It was just a big block: a total bloody white-out on this guy I had written several questions (well, the same one again and again). This annoyed me most of all. A sure sign that sleep deprivation had succeeded in pulling down the shutters on vast areas of my memory. The visual arts department was apparently one of those closed for renovation, or was on strike due to sleep shortages. So when I saw "Donald McGill" on the answer sheet we were meant to mark, the department was re-opened temporarily just to confirm that, yes, that answer is certainly the one we had in our files, but sadly could not retrieve for you at the correct time: you can now make some kind of screaming sound or let fly a string of frustrated expletives. That's all the excuse I needed to go medieval on my own ass. I thumped my table theatrically and let out a kind of yelp-cum-growl. This might cost us, I thought. We completely banjaxed this one, I then said. Self-lacerating swear words accumulated in greater quantities.
Small mercies were evident in this quarter-hour of uncertainty. Thank God, Gareth twigged the Rorke's Drift/ Michael Caine character in Zulu connection for end-of-round risk question, though I thought Chris totally missed a trick by not putting a reference to indie band Bromhead's Jacket (think of the musically inclined kids, please, won't someone think of the children, please). We went for two points and we waited, ravaged by pessimism due to our knowing we got a fair few less than previous rounds. There was not a chance in hell or Hades of us winning was the thought taking pole position in my thoughts.
Finally, what seemed like hours, nay aeons of tortured anticipation later, Chris read out the final positions. "In joint second, two teams on seven points ... ". Up until the word "seven" I believed that we were one of those losers (not meant in the pejorative sense, ok?). Then I realised: we got 8. We had won!
Wahey. More sounds of jubilant gibberish. We were champions, my friend. Hurdling the computer and projector leads, Garath and I picked up our trophies. Okay, not really trophies, but miniature owls. "Wise" ones, obviously. And another DVD to add to my first choice (for jointly winning Art & Culture in the indivs) Scarface (the Cuban remake). Look! It's From Here to Eternity. Good film. Deborah Kerr is hot. I mean, in the film, not in the year 2007 *shiver*.
Our aggregate, stymied by our ultra-crappy preliminary round, came nowhere (mid-table obscurity) but we had won the competitive title. Teams - see Germany dragging itself into the 2002 final - often get lucky routes to World Cup glory, so why not us? We got the title. We had owls. A warm glow resided in my stomach. The leeching lethargy was momentarily forgotten. Winning is brilliant. I heartily recommend it.
NB: The official story of one day quizzing in the Midlands is told here. Also many thanks to Chris and Jane for putting on another superlative event.
Post Script: Apres Quiz Gig
Thus, shining with the radiation of sweet triumph, I returned to the Big Smoke to make it in time for the opening chords of Teen Age Riot. Sonic Youth were playing Daydream Nation for the Don't Look Back gigs in Camden, and no introductory song could be as ecstatic, kinetic and downright mindblowing as hearing Teen Age Riot. It filled the Roundhouse and every punter's heart. Thurston Moore started like most guitar wig-out masters ended: abusing his equipment and shouting like an arthouse nutter after just one song almost immediately. Yes, during the opening song. Lee Ranaldo did the same, but in a more respectable grey-haired fashion, i.e. running a violin bow across his guitar (he sings my fave SY songs, which I knew were never going to get played at such an event), and, almost from the very start, I began making a series of disparaging remarks about Kim Gordon: "She's dressed like a prostitute!"; "She looks like she's dancing at a wedding like someone's 54-year-old pissed-up mom"; "Kim's singing again. Toilet break it is" and "I wonder what she looks like up close. I bet it's like Zelda from the Terrahawks. Far from perfect skin. Brown and wrinkled with lines like a decaying, giant, intricate bar code. Ewww." (Carroll suggested she might look like Marsha from Spaced)
Having said that I think Kim is a vital part of SY's appeal. I just can't stand the stuff she does most of the time during the live shows; her sagging stage-craft standing in sharp contrast to the magnificent hustle of the stickman positioned behind her. For we should all worship Steve Shelley a mite more for his thunderous, metric drumming (he's the ever-smiling, hard-working engine of the band ... I salute him). He is a fulgent god among men.
And I sat there, being slowly steamed by the cloying atmosphere, thinking: "I'm glad I got seats, otherwise I might collapse face first onto someone's overpriced pint". This happened at university. I slammed into a table of drinks, upending at least half a dozen pints, and was assaulted with looks of pure malevolent "what have you done?" by a bunch of rugger buggers and their airheaded molls.
Instead of paying for the Exxon Valdez-size spillage, I dashed back to halls prison escapee-style and slept like a baby high on dream state deviance. But back in September 2007 I left my gig companions "Glasses Boy" Jamie and "Hairy Eyes" Paul (who got the train home to Surbiton - a name which I think should be used for some kind of sedative - because they are such MASSIVE party animals (hey, I kid and mock gently, with brackets inside brackets)) and met with Ben, who kindly described my confused hairstyle as that of a "1930s butler" for a couple of drinks in scummy Camden, and decided that I was far too sickened and shattered to go to a club and share in Joe's birthday festivities (prolly due to our setting up in a Spoons pub for more than long enough and saying things like "I can't believe that We Are Scientists song came out two years ago ... where in smeg have our lives gone?). A taxi ferried me home.
Of course, the memory plays around with the feelings and key images in the aftermath of a lovely, much-needed slumber, which I eventually got, just as my eyes felt as if they were about to come apart; something I had deduced from examining the complicated the intricate and worryingly busy network of disturbing, violent vermillion streaks covering both of my sclera.
Having finally rested, everything took on a far more rosy hue. The BQC was an experience getting ever better in remembrance (well, I was runner-up and part of the new British pairs quiz champions - or did that go to the aggregate scorers?) and Sonic Youth played an immaculate set - I forget the stuff they played off their newie and 256th album Rather Ripped - and they made me want to listen to one of the greatest albums of all time, and certainly the finest to have had Gerhard Richter paintings on its front and back covers, again and again and again. The corrosive despair of fatigue vanished, making me feel a tad different about the whole day, just like you forget the constant and interminable traipsing through the 'orrible mud at Glasto. That is all that matters. The mental keepsakes we are left with. We live with the memories from which we extract and chuck away the details concerning boring and mundane matters of transport and waiting that punctuate the kind of events I have described above. You tend to recall the stuff that made you feel extremes of emotion: in this case, nothing at all bad now the tiredness was gone. Instead, you are easily reminded of the exhilaration and a warm contentment. So, a very good Saturday it was.
The brain was in steep decline and was already painfully amnesiac by the time the Pairs competition commenced. A CAT scan would have revealed a disturbing and ever expanding black hole sucking any useful information into a bleak, impossible void. My 3rd-in-the-British-championships-on-aggregate partner from last year, Gareth, was in better mental condition. This I was determined to believe, even if I had quite shockingly beaten him by six points in the sports and leisure individual category - one of his specialities. Thinking about that, it might have been a bad omen.
And so, when we got the very listy preliminary round and we stared at the paper in a kind of catatonic dumbness for longer than was healthy, I thought we would do atrociously (meaning middle table obscurity: Fulham or Aston Villa style). Nothing was coming. No real contentment with any of our suggested answers was forthcoming. There was quite a weird pause when we expected the other to start filling the entire sheet with proof of their all-round genius. When it dawned on both of us that neither of us were going to burst into propulsive scribbling action we concluded that this wasn't going to be our round, and if it wasn't going to be our round there was a fair chance that future rounds would also scupper our momentarily feeble minds with their impenetrability.
So sighing in an irksome manner, we filled the sheet as best we could. When we finished we turned our papers over to Darren and Scott, who were sat on the other side of the table. Looking at their more proficient sheet (I could tell immediately ... just like getting multiple choice innit?) my heart sank. They had some omissions, but our paper was a vacant, tumbleweed-strewn lot where the wind blew cold and frosty compared to theirs. Then the answers were read out: eeek, ow, damn, maaaaan, how did that happen? That was rubbish.
Um, I got most of the Best Foreign Film Oscar countries of origin wrong, for deep, scarlet shame; got all my mythological Muses mixed up to disastrous effect and failed to get any of the many Rovers' Return landlords; I even put Barraclough for one of the answers ... the actor's real name! The brain was scrambled and being whisked further into abject nonsense! (surely we had had enough Corrie questions on the day; I know it's quintessentially British, but for those who don't watch it, you risk plunging us into hell). I had horrific premonitions of a future cursed by mental decline. Soon I would be going "blah blah blah", buying National Lottery tickets in their dozens and playing music on my mobile phone whilst sat on the Tube or on a London bus. Our round score was 27: middle table obscurity it was.
The knock-out phase began. We were seeded - how we were seeded I hadn't a clue. Gareth and I found ourselves confronted with nice, long questions, which if you pondered in sensible fashion in league with a ready, well-oiled mind brimming with the right factoids, you could answer in a very smug and pleasing manner. However, my grey matter machine was clattering along like a rust-ridden Tin Lizzie desperate to pull over and wheeze its last and rest peacefully on the side of the road. It was petering out: spluttering sounds of death and taking many facts into temporary oblivion with it. There really was a hole being bored into my brain and many, many facts were leaking from it. (And yes, I CAN get more melodramatic. I can go Halle Berry Oscar-collection ballistic. It dilutes the quotidian boredom, and can even get quite enjoyable at times.)
As a result, we, okay I was screwing up on questions I would have got any other time. Q's on Three Men in a Boat (I had read the comedic blighter and crossed it out when I had put it down as the only logical answer) and the mythical Echidna (so, so obvious) were missed, to name but two regretful examples. There were more. We should have been scoring two more than our actual tallies every round.
We weren't going to get any round concluding 4-point risk questions (you hand them in at some point-worthy juncture, the size of the score depending on the moment, the more obscure the better, you submit your answer) on the full, maximum point button because I didn't expect Chris to set any long questions on the kind of youthful subject matter which I know in insufferable and frightening detail.
Everything else - history, myth, old TV - is all surface in my brain: like slightly useful plaque. And I was right. The subjects were all born long before Gareth and I (Statue of Liberty, Joe Bugner, Betty Driver ... I mean, we couldn't even get one point for that last one because we couldn't remember her sodding surname. Damn you, you evergreen Corrie!) So we relied on getting most points in the main section and prayed that everyone else would flounder when faced with the risk of either taking 4, 3, 2 or 1 points. A sort of passive tactic, if you will.
Somehow, our answering the main 15 questions was enough to get us through every stage. After doing several of these 15 question rounds we were in the final. Mighty duos had long fallen away. Small yippee. Time to get slightly nervous. Time to choke like an incumbent US President mindlessly scoffing down a pretzel. Of course, the last batch of questions was harder than anything we had been presented with before and, ACK, there was a Scottish loch I felt like drowning my head in. The blanks stayed for some time, like increasingly unwelcome visitors. Yawning gaps they were. Not being able to stand this, we pulled ourselves up for one more big push. Yes, if we did that and beat our two fellow finalist duos we could have an amusing trinket to show confused yet surely amazed housemates, who would go slack-awed with jaw on hearing the words "British champions."
We guessed loads. We had to. "Hmmm, mangoes are quite popular aren't they with everyone else in the world?" was one shot in the dark that miraculously found its target. Then there was the saucy postcard. There was only one person famous for producing illustrations for naughty seaside postcards. One guy. The one and only. His name lives on in reference books as a result. I knew it. Yet ... and yet I couldn't squeeze it from my failing brain. It was just a big block: a total bloody white-out on this guy I had written several questions (well, the same one again and again). This annoyed me most of all. A sure sign that sleep deprivation had succeeded in pulling down the shutters on vast areas of my memory. The visual arts department was apparently one of those closed for renovation, or was on strike due to sleep shortages. So when I saw "Donald McGill" on the answer sheet we were meant to mark, the department was re-opened temporarily just to confirm that, yes, that answer is certainly the one we had in our files, but sadly could not retrieve for you at the correct time: you can now make some kind of screaming sound or let fly a string of frustrated expletives. That's all the excuse I needed to go medieval on my own ass. I thumped my table theatrically and let out a kind of yelp-cum-growl. This might cost us, I thought. We completely banjaxed this one, I then said. Self-lacerating swear words accumulated in greater quantities.
Small mercies were evident in this quarter-hour of uncertainty. Thank God, Gareth twigged the Rorke's Drift/ Michael Caine character in Zulu connection for end-of-round risk question, though I thought Chris totally missed a trick by not putting a reference to indie band Bromhead's Jacket (think of the musically inclined kids, please, won't someone think of the children, please). We went for two points and we waited, ravaged by pessimism due to our knowing we got a fair few less than previous rounds. There was not a chance in hell or Hades of us winning was the thought taking pole position in my thoughts.
Finally, what seemed like hours, nay aeons of tortured anticipation later, Chris read out the final positions. "In joint second, two teams on seven points ... ". Up until the word "seven" I believed that we were one of those losers (not meant in the pejorative sense, ok?). Then I realised: we got 8. We had won!
Wahey. More sounds of jubilant gibberish. We were champions, my friend. Hurdling the computer and projector leads, Garath and I picked up our trophies. Okay, not really trophies, but miniature owls. "Wise" ones, obviously. And another DVD to add to my first choice (for jointly winning Art & Culture in the indivs) Scarface (the Cuban remake). Look! It's From Here to Eternity. Good film. Deborah Kerr is hot. I mean, in the film, not in the year 2007 *shiver*.
Our aggregate, stymied by our ultra-crappy preliminary round, came nowhere (mid-table obscurity) but we had won the competitive title. Teams - see Germany dragging itself into the 2002 final - often get lucky routes to World Cup glory, so why not us? We got the title. We had owls. A warm glow resided in my stomach. The leeching lethargy was momentarily forgotten. Winning is brilliant. I heartily recommend it.
NB: The official story of one day quizzing in the Midlands is told here. Also many thanks to Chris and Jane for putting on another superlative event.
Post Script: Apres Quiz Gig
Thus, shining with the radiation of sweet triumph, I returned to the Big Smoke to make it in time for the opening chords of Teen Age Riot. Sonic Youth were playing Daydream Nation for the Don't Look Back gigs in Camden, and no introductory song could be as ecstatic, kinetic and downright mindblowing as hearing Teen Age Riot. It filled the Roundhouse and every punter's heart. Thurston Moore started like most guitar wig-out masters ended: abusing his equipment and shouting like an arthouse nutter after just one song almost immediately. Yes, during the opening song. Lee Ranaldo did the same, but in a more respectable grey-haired fashion, i.e. running a violin bow across his guitar (he sings my fave SY songs, which I knew were never going to get played at such an event), and, almost from the very start, I began making a series of disparaging remarks about Kim Gordon: "She's dressed like a prostitute!"; "She looks like she's dancing at a wedding like someone's 54-year-old pissed-up mom"; "Kim's singing again. Toilet break it is" and "I wonder what she looks like up close. I bet it's like Zelda from the Terrahawks. Far from perfect skin. Brown and wrinkled with lines like a decaying, giant, intricate bar code. Ewww." (Carroll suggested she might look like Marsha from Spaced)
Having said that I think Kim is a vital part of SY's appeal. I just can't stand the stuff she does most of the time during the live shows; her sagging stage-craft standing in sharp contrast to the magnificent hustle of the stickman positioned behind her. For we should all worship Steve Shelley a mite more for his thunderous, metric drumming (he's the ever-smiling, hard-working engine of the band ... I salute him). He is a fulgent god among men.
And I sat there, being slowly steamed by the cloying atmosphere, thinking: "I'm glad I got seats, otherwise I might collapse face first onto someone's overpriced pint". This happened at university. I slammed into a table of drinks, upending at least half a dozen pints, and was assaulted with looks of pure malevolent "what have you done?" by a bunch of rugger buggers and their airheaded molls.
Instead of paying for the Exxon Valdez-size spillage, I dashed back to halls prison escapee-style and slept like a baby high on dream state deviance. But back in September 2007 I left my gig companions "Glasses Boy" Jamie and "Hairy Eyes" Paul (who got the train home to Surbiton - a name which I think should be used for some kind of sedative - because they are such MASSIVE party animals (hey, I kid and mock gently, with brackets inside brackets)) and met with Ben, who kindly described my confused hairstyle as that of a "1930s butler" for a couple of drinks in scummy Camden, and decided that I was far too sickened and shattered to go to a club and share in Joe's birthday festivities (prolly due to our setting up in a Spoons pub for more than long enough and saying things like "I can't believe that We Are Scientists song came out two years ago ... where in smeg have our lives gone?). A taxi ferried me home.
Of course, the memory plays around with the feelings and key images in the aftermath of a lovely, much-needed slumber, which I eventually got, just as my eyes felt as if they were about to come apart; something I had deduced from examining the complicated the intricate and worryingly busy network of disturbing, violent vermillion streaks covering both of my sclera.
Having finally rested, everything took on a far more rosy hue. The BQC was an experience getting ever better in remembrance (well, I was runner-up and part of the new British pairs quiz champions - or did that go to the aggregate scorers?) and Sonic Youth played an immaculate set - I forget the stuff they played off their newie and 256th album Rather Ripped - and they made me want to listen to one of the greatest albums of all time, and certainly the finest to have had Gerhard Richter paintings on its front and back covers, again and again and again. The corrosive despair of fatigue vanished, making me feel a tad different about the whole day, just like you forget the constant and interminable traipsing through the 'orrible mud at Glasto. That is all that matters. The mental keepsakes we are left with. We live with the memories from which we extract and chuck away the details concerning boring and mundane matters of transport and waiting that punctuate the kind of events I have described above. You tend to recall the stuff that made you feel extremes of emotion: in this case, nothing at all bad now the tiredness was gone. Instead, you are easily reminded of the exhilaration and a warm contentment. So, a very good Saturday it was.
posted by That Quiz Guy at 4:01 PM
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