Yan Tyan Tethera

So I've been trying to tackle some of my areas of general knowledge weakness. I know there areas in which I need to improve. There are a lot of them. So step 1 has been to identify those areas. Step 2 is to collect together all manner of resources that can help me to improve in those areas. Now these resources can come from all over the place. The internet is of course a great resource but table-spoons full of salt need to be taken with every nugget gleaned from a less than gold-plated source.

Therefore I have also been building up my library of reference books. Here's a quick rundown:

For Christmas I got the following:

Brewers Dictionary of Phrase and Fable
Now this is a corking book that gives you the origins of words, phrases, sayings etc. Fantasitically useful and incredibly comprehensive it was however a little disturbing to find that the first entry I stumbled upon was wrong. The Duke of Wellington is known as The Iron Duke. According to Brewers it is due to his "iron will". Which is utter garbage. Wellington was nicknamed the Iron Duke because in 1829 he forced through the Catholic Emancipation Act and due to its unpopularity he put iron shutters over the windows of his London home (Apsley House) lest they be smashed by an angry mob.

Still nonetheless a fantastic book - but a reminder that just because something is in print it is not necessarily more reliable that an internet source.

England in Particular
At the risk of being accused of parochialism there is much about England that I don't know. Whilst international general knowledge is still firmly on the agenda it would be foolish not to brush up on local knowledge. After all, Euro and World Championships aside UK general knowledge remains a staple of quizzes from pub level through to Grands Prix.

Whereas the first nugget I stumbled on in Brewers was a disappointment, the first in this book was a corker. In Yorkshire, Cumberland, Cornwall and Suffolk sheep farmers count their sheep using numbers derived from ancient British languages. All have enough similarities to one another to indicate a common ancestor language. "Yan Tyan Tethera" is 'one two three' in Cumberland whereas "Hant Tant Tethery" is the equivalent in Suffolk.

Some people can learn general knowledge from lists. I can't. But I can learn when something is interesting, which is perhaps why I am more of a general knowledge magpie. As a magpie I will remember this nugget about sheep farming.

101 World Heroes
As I don't learn well from lists I like to learn by placing information into its context. On the face of it this book looks like a kids book. 2 or 3 page potted histories of key figures from history illustrated with nice pictures. However the text is aimed at adults and provides the context around key events not just in the individual in question's life but also the age in which they lived. Context. As I write I have it open at the write-up for Brunelleschi. I know his name and I know one of his claims to fame. Through this I hope to understand more of his story and in doing so set additional information into context in my mind. It won't necessarily help me in a buzzer-quiz or Quiz League of London environment where speed of recall is important. But this method has definately helped me in Grand Prix events, where I come at an answer by recalling something else from the contextual story and gradually piece it all back together until I get the nugget I want. Other people may find all this easier. But as I'm not blessed by autism or aspergers I have to find long hand ways of learning.

Whitaker's Almanac 2008
Current affairs is another area of knowledge that you simply can't ignore. Yes the internet is a fantastic source for this knowledge, but Whitakers has it all in one place. Having said I don't learn well from lists, sometimes it is unavoidable.

what a world

We live in a crazy fucked up world.

A couple of days ago Benazir Bhutto was assasinated. As per custom in that part of the world she was buried the next day and (thanks to her family's wishes) no post-mortem was performed. Now her body is at the centre of a storm, because the precise cause of her death is of political significance. Was she shot as some witnesses and the doctor on the scene suggest? Was she killed by the subsequent bomb blast? Or did she hit her head when she tried to duck inside the car?

Such is the significance placed upon a death that can be considered a martyr's death that there is now talk of exhuming her body in order to prove she is a martyr. If she died from a blow to head caused while ducking the bullets/bomb she would not qualify as a martyr. I repeat, this is a crazy fucked up world.

And now, in the latest twist in the history of the young Pakistani nation Bhutto's legacy has been placed in the hands of her 19 year old son. I fear for him.

Blackpool

So the European Quiz Championships have been and gone. The crème de la crème (plus me) of European quizzing assembled on a very very windy, grey, wet, November weekend in Blackpool for as intense a quizfest as you could possibly hope. I'd not spent that long in Blackpool since my days as a Students' Union activist. It hasn't improved.

FRIDAY
You know it’s going to be a memorable a weekend when you go into your hotel room and find a stick of Blackpool rock with Quizzer written through it, and a QUIZ ME KWIK hat on your bed.

Sadly, what was missing was my nice bright red polo shirt, the team colours of the Welsh Quiz team. For I am a member of Cymru’s B team. Yes indeedy. Don’t be too impressed though. The first quiz of the weekend was the qualifying tournament for the international team tournament. Wales B didn’t qualify…..by a long way. By the end of this quiz some of my teammates were losing the will to live. We beat Hungary’s first team who put in a valiant showing on their first outing, and 3 other scratch teams. In one round we even outscored the Welsh A team. But at the end of the qualifiers we were left out of the reckoning. Shame.

I enjoyed the qualifier so little that I am seriously contemplating not putting myself forward next year. But there is plenty of time for me to talk myself round.

Later that evening we had an icebreaker quiz where teams were drawn at random so as to let everyone mix with people of other nationalities. It was great. On my team was Tom, European quizzing’s true prodigy. A fixture of the Belgium international team, Tom is an exceptional quizzer. His knowledge of European tv programmes came in handy when the xenophobia of British tv programming executives became increasingly apparent throughout the quiz. How do all of the other nationalities know about German soap operas? Because they aren’t so close minded about such things as the Brits. Shame on us.

We did fairly well. Certainly well enough to partially erase the trauma of the earlier quiz. The evening’s quizzing finished with some buzzer quiz action. The questions were supplied by a contingent of North Americans who had joined us for the weekend. Sadly a lot of the questions were so US-centric that no-one had a clue. Still, my knowledge of Buffy the Vampire Slayer won my team a few points.

SATURDAY
This was the big day, the highlight of the weekend for most. Saturday morning saw us file in for the Individual Championship. Allotted to tables, your finishing position owes almost as much to the arbitrary draw as it does to your answers. There was a top table, then 3 columns of tables. I started on table B1, one table below the top. To be in with a chance of winning the tournament you need to be on the top table in the last round. So I felt that I had a slight outside chance of being there or thereabouts. Certainly a lot better than in 2006 when I started on table 9. I just needed to get promoted up one level and then hope there were always 3 people worse than me each round.

I didn’t do well enough in round 1. I ended up moving sideways. Still there was always round 2. I stayed where I was. But by round 3 the best players were starting to appear near in greater numbers in the higher tables. I got relegated. After some table pingpong I finished on table 2. One row below where I had started. Officially I came 36th, although if you go by points scored I was 49th out of 92. I’m not unhappy with that, although it was tough. Oh yes it was tough. I scored a whopping 10 points less this year than last. At this level that’s a lot! The winner was Nico Pattyn – for once not the bridesmaid. It completed a bad year for Kevin Ashman who has lost his British, European and World crowns in the space of 12 months.

At this point it is sad to note that Lieven Van Den Brande, who was this year’s runner-up, died about three weeks after the event. A great loss to the quiz world, and of course to his family and friends.

In the afternoon there was the team (club) competition. Not having a club I tagged onto the Finnish national team. There were only 3 of them but they are phenomenal. It was probably the toughest quiz of the weekend but they were so good that we came 6th. I probably contributed a half dozen answers at most. Those guys are simply awesome.

It’s at events like these that the whole ‘big fish small pond’ thing comes to mind. I’m a good pub quizzer, and probably one of the better players at the pub quizzes I go to. At Grand Prix events I am a medium sized fish in a bigger pond. Always somewhere in the middle of the pack. But at the European Championships the sheer quantity of information that I don’t know (or even knew existed) astounds me. What is more astounding is that people for whom English is at best a 2nd language are so incredibly good. While I may still finish in the middle of the pack the gap between me and the best is huge. Admittedly some of the best players do have 20+ years on me, but still….

Saturday evening saw the final of the International Team tournament, and England edged out Belgium to retake the crown for the first time since 2004. But look out England and Belgium, the Finnish and Norwegians are on the cusp of becoming genuine contenders!

A trip to a pizza restaurant, some ‘beat the intro’ music quizzing and Singstar karaoke saw the night to an inevitable drunken conclusion.

SUNDAY
Despite a 3am finish, at 10am on Sunday morning my partner JR and I were in our seats ready for the Pairs quiz. It was good fun and probably the most enjoyable quiz from the formal programme. We could have done better than we did, but we kept talking ourselves out of answers when actually we should have gone on gut instinct grrr.

The ‘gala’ dinner and presentations rounded off the main part of the event. After which a bunch of us experienced Blackpool at its best. Tacky amusements and the Doctor Who exhibition. On the way back to the hotel David Stainer gave us the benefit of his quiz machine expertise. Our winnings went some way to paying for a curry we stopped off for on the walk back.
Drinks were had at the final pub before the hotel. We met the Norwegian contingent there who were amazed to find that they were no longer serving food. Well it was 8.01 and the restaurant shut at 8. Great customer service! What do you call somewhere where the beer is warm, the staff are rude and they have just stopped serving food. An English themed pub!

Still Jenny got her Bamber Gascoigne quiz book out an impromptu buzzer-less buzzer quiz began. I was doing rather well, second only to Stainer when we were joined by the Norwegians, and some more Brits. It was tougher but I still managed to hold my own, despite some ill-informed barracking from a member of the Wales A team.

At kicking out time we headed back to the hotel. But that wasn’t the end. Oh no. We found some buzzers and carried on. At some point the evening morphed into an episode of QI, with people venturing supplementary ‘interesting’ facts in an attempt to garner extra points. With the added spice of innuendo bingo the evening carried on until 3 am. At which point we all retired to our respective rooms.

MONDAY
Monday was all about farewells. Next year we head to Oslo. It can’t come soon enough!