Quiz this!
Guest blog by Lyn

Last night I was at a work trivia night.

I mostly enjoy trivia nights, but they bring out the worst in some people. OK, the worst in pretty much everyone who attends. The guy who runs it is usually a megalomaniac. All the people who huddle, convinced of their intellectual inferiority. Those who smugly announce to the room their intellectual superiority (“Oh. That’s easy!” – to every question).

As most of the questions were about sport, music I don’t listen to, and TV shows I don’t watch, I did pretty badly. The question I was most embarrassed about getting wrong was: "for which three movies did Jack Nicolson win an Oscar?" I got two of the three, and I’m shocked – shocked! that he didn’t win for "Chinatown". If you can get all three without cheating and looking up IMDB, then you should have been on my table.

First thing I found at work this morning is a string of emails about all the so-called ‘correct’ answers that were actually full of shit. George Lazenby is so not the first James Bond – Sean Connery was in Doctor No. The capital of the Netherlands? Well we answered The Hague, and it turns out it’s Amsterdam – but most guidelines list both as correct. And some singer called Lulu did too sing a cover of Locomotion, but a workmate concedes it may not have been released in Australia.

The very worst question however was: “which film changed the way we see cinema?” I thought the answer would be the first 'talking' film, but I couldn’t’ think of the name, so we wrote down “Debbie Does Dallas”. The answer? Jaws. Jaws? Seriously?? I love the film, and it’s supposed to have changed the way we don’t go into the water anymore, but it’s hardly the first anything. Maybe "the first big motorised fish" film, or "coolest film score". I was expecting the next question to be: which colour is the best colour in the world. Yellow! Of course! A point to table nine!

So you can keep your damn quiz nights with your stupid professional quiz night punters. Next time I get the urge, I’m just going to curl up on the couch and ask myself questions from the 1980s Trivial Pursuit set about the Soviet Union and Michael Jackson. Good times.