The Olympics of Quizzing

I don't know about you but I've watched a lot more kite-surfing and modern pentathlon in the past few weeks than I usually do.

I've watched less football, but I'm probably watching too much football normally if I'm being honest with you.

As The Olympics came to a close yesterday, to be replaced by another of life's sporting behemoths - University Challenge - it had me wondering what an Olympics of Quizzing would look like.

And I'm not talking about the World Quiz Championship, or whatever the highest level of normal quizzing is. I'm imagining an integrated quiz-sporting festival, which combines quizzing with all of the other regular sports.

I'm talking a variation on the pole vault where how high you jump determines what quiz questions you can see. Armando Duplantis (current world record holder and hungover TV show appearer) would have a full selection to choose from, but would he be able to answer them all, whereas Kevin Ashman from Eggheads would likely struggle with the athletics but nail all of the questions he gained access to.

Or a 10m platform diving competition where they ask you a question as you leap and you have to answer it as you come out of the water. Same with the vault in gymnastics.

Or a marathon with a question after every mile, sort of like that guy who drank 25 glasses of wine during the London race this year.

This would test the mind as well as the body, like chess boxing, but on a grander scale.

On second thoughts, maybe we should expand the scope and include things like chessboxing in this new festival of competition, because there are as many different ways of challenging the mind as there are of challenging the body.

Mind-Body Dualism

The philosopher Rene Descartes is famous for his idea of mind-body-dualism, which states, from a summary on the Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy:

"That the mind is indivisible because one cannot perceive one's mind as having any parts. On the other hand, the body is divisible because one cannot think of a body except as having parts. Hence, if mind and body had the same nature, it would be a nature both with and without parts. Yet such a thing is unintelligible: how could something both be separable into parts and yet not separable into parts? The answer is that it can’t, and so mind and body cannot be one and the same but two completely different natures.

This prompted a lot of scientific and religious discussion in the centuries which followed (and to throw my hat in the ring - just because one cannot conceive of the parts which make up a thing that surely does not prove that it does not have parts), and remains a question which interests modern philosophers.

So we have the Body-Olympics for things like running and shot put, and the Mind-Olympics for things like quizzing and scrabble.

Why not the Mind-Body Dualympics for things like Poker-Archery, Sudoku-Judo and the Cryptic-Crossword-Triple-Jump.

This is my official call out to the IOC - get on with it.

Queen's, Belfast vs Liverpool

But back to the matter at hand - the new series of University Challenge. Which could be combined with the Team Pursuit to make a new Dualympics event.

The first episode of this new series features Queen's, Belfast and Liverpool. Remarkably, Liverpool haven't been on since the 16/17 series, while Queen's University last appeared in 22/23.

Queen's won in 1981, but haven't made it past the quarter-finals in the BBC era, while Liverpool have made the semis on two occasions since 1995, losing to Trinity Hall, Cam in 2006 and St John's, Ox in 2016.

Rajan tells us that Liverpool is home to the world's third oldest University press, which would have won them the bronze medal at the Mind-Olympics.

Here's your first starter for ten

Queen's get off to an incredible start, which I'll talk about before getting onto the troublesome subject of how to grammatically deal with the fact that their name has an apostrophe in it.

Thompson earns the honour of the first question with sample, and Queen's rattled off a perfect set of bonuses on musicians who were awarded posthumous Pulitzer prizes (for music, unsurprisingly) with Scott Joplin, Thelonious Monk and Aretha Franklin, who would have made quite the jazz trio.

Rankin takes the second starter with Cologne and another hat-trick followed. Carlisle made it three from three for Queen's, and they finally dropped a bonus, but lead by 70 points.

Onto more pressing matters.

How to use Queen's in a sentence?

The issue is that Queen's already has an apostrophe in it, so whenever I write Queen's like this I worry that people will read it as something belonging to a/the Queen. If this isn't an issue for you then you can skip onto the next section.

If it is an issue then you also have the option to skip ahead, but you'll miss out on some good rambling.

The easy (cowardly) solution would be to use their full name - Queen's University, Belfast - every time I mentioned them, to avoid confusion. But that is a long and unwieldy name, and despite the fact I've dedicated an entire section of this blog to a single apostrophe, I generally dislike the unwieldy.

And if I don't want to use the full name I have to use the shortened Queen's, but that then leaves me with a dangling possessive. A garden path possessive, I suppose, as it leads you to believe that there is a possessive where there is none.

Another alternative would be to never use the name Queen's, and to always use a synonym of some sort - the Belfast quartet, the Northern Irish foursome etc. That would also be unsatisfactory.

But these are solutions which would work, even if they are a bit clunky.

The biggest problem arises when trying to denote that something actually does belong to Queen's. If, for example, I were to refer to the Queen's captain Rankin, or the Queen's mascot. Without further punctuation it would appear that I was talking about a captain or mascot belonging to the Queen.

And if I were to flip the apostrophe and say the Queens' captain, then I would be referring instead to a captain belonging to a group of Queens.

Leaving me no option but to always say the Queen's University captain, or the Queen's University mascot, which is mightily arduous. Though not, perhaps, as arduous as a 350 word section on the subject of a single apostrophe.

Any students of grammar please inform me of a more pleasing solution.

Liverpool fight back

Cartilage provides Liverpool, through Day, their first points of the evening. She is delighted and beams with a fist pump. Their resident chemist Sajit provides three correct answers on molecular structures, and Day is just as pleased by this as she was by her own starter.

But not for long

Thompson becomes the first person to pick up two starter questions with Greenland on the opening picture round.

They returned to form with another hat-trick on the bonuses, before Liverpool captain Williams got his first starter with Dreamgirls, a film which would have surely proved too "low-brow" for a University Challenge question a few years ago.

Sajit takes the dubious honour of the series' first incorrect interruption, but Queen's can't pick up the points. McKillen then makes it a full house for the Northern Irish quartet with serotonin, earning them a bonus set on American sandwiches.

Rajan says that one of these sandwiches shares a name with a famous French novel, so they guess Les Miserable (it was Monte Cristo), which prompts great mirth from the audience. Seeing this, Rajan milks his own laughter a tad too long, giggling his way into the third bonus, which is on the Sloppy Joe.

Making up for her earlier mistake, Sajit gets Liverpool going again with Barcelona, and again Day cheers her teammate.

Would the Real Slim Shady please stand up?

Rankin takes the music starter within a few seconds, knowing not only that the song being played was Eminem's seminal masterpiece, but that it was released in the year 2000.

Rajan asks Rankin if he was born in 2000, which he wasn't. But that's hardly surprising, given that someone born in 2000 would now be 24! Or 23 at the time of filming. Some of this years contestants may have been born far later - perhaps even as late as 2005, which is quite disconcerting.

Another clean sweep of bonuses put them 80 points ahead, before another Thompson starter pushed their lead into triple digits.

Boatswains

The subtitles on my rewatch alert me to both the fact that the word boatswain is pronounced bosun, and that the word bosun can be spelled boatswain. I might start referring to all of the UC contestants who aren't captains as boatswains from now on.

Consecutive starters from Liverpool skipper Williams and his boatswain Sajit keep them in it. Ashcroft tries to get in on the fun but his guess of bhaji is wrong and for the first time in the match Day looks like she's having a bad one.

Queen's boatswain Thompson picks up the pieces, and he also picks up the pieces from a Sajit error on the next starter too. The gap was back into the hundreds, and with only a few minutes left Liverpool were done for.

They made a late charge to try and bag a spot in the high-scoring loser play-offs, but their final score of 125 is not going to be enough.

Queen's 240 - 125 Liverpool

A magnificent performance from Queen's, who sail into the second round. Liverpool will be kicking themselves for a few incorrect interruptions, which may have been what costs them a spot in the repechage.

After the gong, Rajan discusses Queen's mascot with them (Queen'ses mascot? Now you see the trouble I'm in. I could just say 'Queen's University's mascot, of course, but like I said earlier, that would be the cowards way out).

Their mascot is a potato, for whom Carlisle has knitted a scarf. She is going to knit another scarf because they won their match. Rajan asks if the second scarf will be worn by the same potato, but Carlisle doesn't know - it depends on the potato, she says.