Give a Dog a (bad) Nickname

I’ve outlined my philosophy on quiz compilation quite a number of times over the years. You can boil it down to the central tenet that when you compile a pub quiz then your one overriding purpose is to give the teams the best evening’s entertainment that you are capable of. If you try to keep sight of this goal you can avoid many of the failures that blight quizzes of this sort.

Yeah, it was my turn to set the quiz last Thursday. I’ve explained in the past that I usually set picture handouts, even though they are my personal least favourite type of handout since they rarely offer you the chance to use what you do know to help work out what you don’t. You tend to either recognise the face, or not – there’s rarely helpful clues in the picture. But . . . other people like them. Since it only tends to be Jess and I who use picture handouts, I feel that I should keep doing them, even though I don’t actually like them myself.

But I will admit that my pleasure in making a quiz for the club is not totally selfless. I don’t like the kind of question master who asks something mind-bogglingly obscure and boring then congratulates themselves when nobody gets the answer. But now and again I do like it if I manage to come up with a question which people don’t all get right, but when I give the answer it makes some of them metaphorically slap their foreheads and go D’Oh! For example, I asked –

The Dial of Destiny is the latest film in which franchise?

Which paper fastening mechanism is defined as a rectangular sheet of springy steel curved into a cylinder, with two flat steel strips inserted to form combined handles and jaws.

Which range of die-cast metal car toys were introduced to the UK in 1956 and manufactured in Swansea for the first three decades?

What is the connection between your last three answers?

Now the connected answers were :-

Indiana Jones

Bulldog clip

Corgi toys

If you only look at answers two and three then it’s obvious. But Indiana Jones? Well, of course, Indiana, from whom Henry Jones Jr. took the name, was the family Jones’ dog. So they are all named or nicknamed after dogs.  (Any reader who is thinking that I could potentially have used Lasse Viren as an answer is a person after my own heart.)

I usually use a nine part connection as the last round, and this week all of them were the names of Gladiators in the current revived series on BBC. Only one team had a full house which surprised me a little.