Pub Quiz

Pub quizes are an institution in the UK. Even the smallest villages will throw them once a week. This being Cambridge (almost 360 pubs) you can pretty much find a quiz any night you want. They're a good way to spend the evening.

So last night we went over to a local pub to try our luck. The rules were simple - four rounds of ten questions, each with a one or two themes (this week was Current Affairs/Food, Sports/Words, Geography, Bikes/General Knowledge). Before you start, you pick one round to be your double points round where you get 2 points per question instead of 1. One pound to play, winning team takes the whole pot.

So we were ready. We decided Grace and I would be masters of Current Affairs, since we both read the New York Times obsessively, so we picked round one to be our double points round.

Three hours later we had gotten last place. A meager 21 points out of a possible 56 (there were some bonus questions). The winning team had 42 points, so we actually got half the points they did. But to be fair, we were a team of three and there were, like, ten of them.

Highlights:
-How was Chocolate initally consumed? Gary (our mate) and I immediately huddled in to say "it was smoked!" We high fived each other, both of us remembering that Simpsons episode about the history of chocolate where the narrator says Native (South?) Americans were the first users of chocolate, and they smoked it. Grace thought the answer was that it used to be drunk, but she trusted our confidence. It turns out the Simpsons is not the best source of historical knowledge.
-What Tennis Veteran and famous commentator died this week at the age of 81? We had no idea so we put down "Boris Backhand" which is pretty funny.
-What english word can mean "skin," "barbarous and cruel," or "hill?" I figured this one out (and got a nice pat on the back from the team). It's "callous." We weren't sure if "callous" could mean "hill," but Gary said there was a hill near his house called Callous hill, so we figured it couldn't be anything else.
But the correct answer was "fell."
-What is the name of the colony founded by Swedish settlers in the 17th century near Delaware, USA? This one we were told had a hint embedded in the question. We ignored that advice and wrote down Martha's Vineyard. Correct answer: New Sweden.

Anyway it was a good time. We got a basket of chips (french fries in Americanese). And it was some local guy's 71st birthday so the whole pub sang to him.