On Quizzes, Dinner at Jesus
Tuesday was one of those quiet days where nothing much seems to happen. Its amazing how in Oxford you can just have days pass you by with nothing of consequence really happening, just staying in your room surfing the net and reading, which was pretty much what happened for me after a tutorial in the morning. The evening however involved going down to the Turf Tavern with Douglas to take part in the quiz. I had surmised that I would find Jon Ayling, Alex Pinder, Ben Pope there, as it is their usual haunt on a Tuesday evening and I was right, and I did manage to convince them to do the quiz. In the end, we came a respectable 4th out of 10 teams, posting a pretty decent score of 37 out of 60 after being stymied by the last round on pop music lyrics. It is a measure of Oxford students that the only three lyrics we got were from Louis Armstrong's What A Wonderful World, Erasure's A Little Respect (both written well before our time) and a face saving Eminen lyric (which was guessed from its abundance of profanities!).
Wednesday was the big day - our interview with Granta for a spot on the University Challenge television series. All in all, I thought the 40 questions they asked were very difficult, some of them bordering closely on obscurity, and I can but cross my fingers and hope that we did well. The scoring system is certainly interesting - it will be calculated on a team basis, so as long as one person on the team gets the right answer, then it will count towards the total score, but similarly, if all the members get the answer right, it will still only count as one point. Thus, a crucial factor is the breadth of the team, which I feel is decent enough. It has been a dream for me to appear on the show, and I do hope we will succeed - we'll find out by monday or tuesday, so fingers crossed.
The evening was spent having a very nice dinner at Jesus College at the invitation of Charles and Derrick. They were given special high table food in celebration of their victory in Table Tennis cuppers and kindly invited myself, Bianca and Xin Hui as guests. The food was nice enough, though things started out with a very odd cold soup which I did not much like, but it steadily got better, though still not as good as Trinity guest night, but perhaps I am biased.
Wednesday was the big day - our interview with Granta for a spot on the University Challenge television series. All in all, I thought the 40 questions they asked were very difficult, some of them bordering closely on obscurity, and I can but cross my fingers and hope that we did well. The scoring system is certainly interesting - it will be calculated on a team basis, so as long as one person on the team gets the right answer, then it will count towards the total score, but similarly, if all the members get the answer right, it will still only count as one point. Thus, a crucial factor is the breadth of the team, which I feel is decent enough. It has been a dream for me to appear on the show, and I do hope we will succeed - we'll find out by monday or tuesday, so fingers crossed.
The evening was spent having a very nice dinner at Jesus College at the invitation of Charles and Derrick. They were given special high table food in celebration of their victory in Table Tennis cuppers and kindly invited myself, Bianca and Xin Hui as guests. The food was nice enough, though things started out with a very odd cold soup which I did not much like, but it steadily got better, though still not as good as Trinity guest night, but perhaps I am biased.
posted by Caleb Liu | 9:06 PM
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