Quizzes

There was a time in the recent past when I thought I had a well-rounded general knowledge of the world.

Sure, I knew that I didn't follow the groups of people who think that hitting a ball by a variety of different means around a course or through wooden posts is the most interesting thing in the world, but no one has much interest in that sort of stuff, do they?

Turns out my general knowledge may more accurately be described as highly-specific-and-limited-to-television-and-movie knowledge.

The first round of a quiz held last night was luckily on movies, so I carried on thinking I was pretty good through that entire round. Nine out of ten. Boom.

The second round was on Tom, Dick and Harry (questions or answers to contain one of said names) and due to the fairly large incorporation of movie and/or television references I continued to shine in the reflection of my brilliance. Nine out of ten. Double boom.

The third round was food and drink. I eat. I drink non-alcoholic beverages. I felt confident. I thought that the monk who developed champagne was called Benedict because that's what a lot of monks are called.

The sports round was even more disappointing than I'd expected. It was on modern sports. I could pull a few names out of a hat if it was a reference that had a couple of decades to seep into the national consciousness, but current references. Give me a break. You'll notice I've stopped giving scores at the end. Boom.

There was a special list round. We discovered that the pink and white terraces weren't one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. I don't know why. They certainly didn't last into the modern one.

True or False sounds like a round where you can guarantee at least a fifty percent victory. Apparently the way that works is by using the same answer throughout. If you change your answer each time due to a gut feeling, the odds drop way lower.

I'm now just pretending that I didn't want to win the box of extremely nice food that was a prize for the winners. Or a bucket of the Christmas cookies that were the prize for the runner's up. That's why I told my team that the full name of the female lead character in Grease definitely wasn't Sandra Dee. And Meat Loaf's character in the Rocky Horror Picture Show was something like Richard.