It’s a small world (after all)
SKT here. As I left work on Thursday I heard, “Is that Stephen Kent-Taylor?” It was a bloke I used to work with at KPMG (I left KPMG in 1999). He’s now working for KPMG in Sydney, whose offices are, I gather, near where I’m working. Weird huh?
I then had a Cherry Guevara Magnum (a pun on Che Guevara the Cuban revolutionary) - my fourth in the series of nine. It was good, but not up the awesomely high standard of the Chocwork Orange Magnum.
We two (trivia) kings
We followed through on our intention, as revealed in Anne’s post yesterday, and last night returned to our local pub (or “hotel”, as they call them here) to try our hand at the trivia quiz for the second week running. Regular readers will recall that last Thursday we came first, and won $40 of bottle shop (off-licence) vouchers. That bought us two bottles of Banrock Station (white wine) and twelve bottles of Tooheys New (beer) – not bad given our tight budget!
The quiz is in three rounds, and after last night’s first round we were joint last (there were five teams there). Oh dear, we thought, last week was a big fluke. Two large teams on the other side of the room were very vocal and were winning. We were ashamed. Our brains had been put to the test, and had been found wanting.
However, we pulled ahead to third place after the second round and then went on to win, after storming the third round! Another $40 voucher – lovely, thank you very much. OK so we spent $24 on beer during the quiz, but we’re still up.
Anne’s knowledge of capital cities helped us out. She knew the capital of North Korea and brilliantly guessed the capital of Syria. I knew the capital of Romania, thanks to learning all the European capitals with a housemate at uni, but I’m useless outside Europe.
My enviable strengths came to light on the TV Theme Tunes part of the quiz, where I correctly identified the theme tunes played as L.A. Law and Mork & Mindy, thus proving that my childhood was well-spent. I was annoyed at myself when, asked to name five Nicole Kidman movies from the nineties, I included Dead Calm which was from the eighties, apparently. Damn my sickening inability to remember production dates of movies.
We were both poor on the intros round, where the first ten seconds of a song is played and you have to give the title. I got “Mmm mmm mmm mmm” by The Crash Test Dummies, and Anne got “Unbelievable” by EMF, but the rest were odd US M.O.R. A.O.R. bands. And, of course, Crowded House. We were also poor on sports, though Anne was better than I was, obviously.
All said, we are a good team. We are unbeaten. I’m setting us up for a fall really, since both weeks we have won by less than two points. Only adds to the drama.