'Phone a friend?

We went to 'The Poachers' for the monthly quiz on Sunday night. It had been quite a while since we'd been able to get together enough people for a team of four, so typically we ended up with six, as Magical Dave and Alex were visiting from London.

The pub was as full as I've ever seen it, so it was fortunate that Reallyfatbloke and Chemical Al had got there early and nabbed a table large enough for our 'enhanced' team, although we had to raid the garden to get enough chairs for all of us to sit down.

While RFB was getting the beers, he said. "I had a look at your most recent blog posting."

"Ah, yes. It took me a while to work out how to do that.", I replied.

"What? Getting the video clip to work?"

"No. It was what to write that was the difficult bit. I wasn't quite sure how to get the right sort of tone."

After a slight pause, RFB said, "You were aiming for 'preachy', I presume?"

You can go off people.

The quiz itself was suitably humbling, although hardly any of the specialist rounds played to our combined strengths.

None of us had sufficient knowledge to recognise many of the (allegedly) famous bridges of the world from their photos. Once we'd got Tower Bridge and The Golden Gate Bridge we were pretty much down to, "Isn't that the really tall one in France where they went on 'Top Gear'?".

It was only slightly better on the "Name the Sports Stadium" round.

If it hadn't been for our knowledge of American State Capitals, films and wine, we'd have done a hell of a lot worse than the fourth place we actually achieved.

Oh, and here's an amusing thing if you want to annoy a Manchester City supporter.

One of the questions was: "Manchester City are sponsored by the airline, 'Etihad'. What is the English translation of the word 'etihad'?"

Answer: 'United'