Crossing The Floor: Quiz Night (8) The Night of the Quizzing Dead

It was time for the non blondes very own Victoria to put us to the test, and boy did she do that, in the latest round of the terrifying Meakins Cricket Club Quiz

The first half was categorised. We started off with Cars All those Sunday evenings watching Top Gear should have paid dividends for Debs and me. We did ok, but missed a couple. Especially the question about the make of car that's name translated as 3 diamond. We could picture the badge with the 3 diamonds on, but skirted round all the Asian makes while missing the correct answer of Mitsubishi. We moved to a section of odd ones out, which saw a welcome 5th return for the mascot of our quiz, the worlds largest rodent. Ladies and, we give you the Capybara. Now onto sports. We usually do well on sports, but Vicky's somewhat wide definition of Sport ranging from Fly fishing to Canoe Polo (Not sure how you get a horse in a canoe!) did not help us. Her next section had answers that were occupations. We did well on this, helped by knowing a Bishop and a Carpenter from the soap Neighbours! Sadly neither of our jobs helped with answers being a Trade Unionist or Early Years Practitioner (don't' mention Classroom Assistant!). The first half ended with science. Now my claim to be a one time Physicist was looking increasingly foolish, as we managed none of the fist six questions. Thank god for the break. The scores were in. Campos 26, Muppets 27, 3 non Blondes 31 and Sixth Sense 32. It was too close to call. Being stuck on a slimming world Red Day (again) I watched as everyone gorged themselves on rolls and chips and cake and everything else I can't eat!

The second half was hard core general knowledge (and I mean hard!) We had a vast swathe of blank spaces where we should have known the definitions of words like; Ligneous, Esurient, Lambent, Tourbillion, Caprine & Gnallic. I felt as inarticulate as a....errr a thingy! We did start to improve. Debbie accurately calculated the number of Wednesdays in a December, and my blogging hero Dave Gorman provided the answer to "What is a Googlewhack". This blog also helped one team out with a previous post giving the name of the depressed robot in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Second half finished, we knew we had struggled. We needed a miracle on the throw outs. Well, I had said this was a macabre quiz. The first

throwout was multi choice on Cereal Killers. Right up Debs street (I think she has dated a few in the past!). The second was the highlight of the whole quiz. 20 pictures of gravestones of famous dead people (My apologies to Yoko Ono, who I thought was. Apparently she is still alive) These were fiendish, requiring a degree of reduction. Some of the writing was very small, so a magnifying glass was passed round, making us all look very scholarly (and somewhat shortsighted). I would have expected Sixth Sense to do well, as the film said "They see dead people", but we managed to pip them with 12 out of 20. Sadly it was never going to rescue our second half.