Paxman’s dangly bits
We’ve assembled a Dream Team this week - Pete’s dad is around for the first time in ages, as is Ivan. We should be in with a good chance of a second victory in four weeks, and if there are any cricket questions we’ll be laughing. Well, I’ll be groaning but Ivan will be laughing.
One of the questions in round one is which painting depicts a scene at a farm near Flatford Mill. I say it’s The Hay Wain, but Pete and his dad both say it’s American Gothic. I don’t like to try to overrule both Hinstridges at once so we put American Gothic. I should have overruled them. Such are the disadvantages of a team of six. Luckily, the advantage of a large team is that at least one of us knows the answer to almost every question. We’re in a solid-looking second at the end of the round.
Round two sees us leap into the lead, pulling out four points where we’d been two behind. We then get all five answers correct in the beer round - they are the five films recently nominated for best film in the 2008 Oscars - but so do several other teams. The tie-breaker requires us to guess the total number of epsiodes of Dallas, and we apply the usual average theory. Pete, Stu and Pete’s dad are going for numbers in the three hundreds; Oli, Ivan and I are going for sub-100 guesses, so we end up on a bit less than 200. The answer is 357 and most teams were closer. I offer my apologies and head to the bar.
My favourite question in round three asks who is the youngest person ever to score a point in Formula One. It’s my favourite question because I turn out to be the only person in the pub who knows that it’s Sebastian Vettel. By the end of the round we have an eight point lead, and even with our abysmal record of collapsing in the later stages, we think it would be hard to lose this one.
The final round sees us agonising for a very long time about US states and their capitals. These are a pub quiz standard but tonight’s setters have given us an impressively original take on it. We have to work out which state and its capital have common male names as first syllables, which have common female names, and which has a male name for the state and a female for the capital. Oli says ‘Alaska and Juneau’ startlingly quickly, suggesting he might actually have thought about this question beforehand. While Pete writes down all 50 states, I suggest Kentucky and Pete’s dad says the capital is Louisville so that seems to sort out the male syllables. We struggle for a while on the females, narrowing it down to one of Louisiana, Maryland or (possibly) Pennsylvania. The capital of the first one is Baton Rouge and the last one is Harrisburg, so we think it must be Maryland. But what’s its capital? Stu suddenly remembers that it’s Annapolis, and even though it turns out that the capital of Kentucky is not Louisville but Frankfort, we’ve done enough to preserve our lead and take a dominant victory.
But the Dream Team will be losing a member, at least temporarily. The newly Doctored Ivan is moving to St. Andrews to do teaching and research. We’ll just have to hope that Pete’s dad can make it along more often than he has done in recent months, or that the frequency of cricket questions in Prince of Wales quizzes drops dramatically.