iPhones are killing the joy of the sacred pub quiz for the old school. Non-googling quiz-masters in Northern Ireland are fed up with young whippersnappers using their internet-enabled phones to find the answers to difficult questions during quizzes.
Cheats!
BBC NI has run an interesting article on this heinous NI crime that ends with a powerful argument for legalising mobile phone jammers to level the playing field.
One quiz-master comments that he has tried his best to find un-googleable questions for his quiz. Is there really such a thing?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
Someone once thought I'd be a useful person to have on a quiz team because I worked in a university (talk about naivety). The quiz was held at a local GAA and most of the questions were things like, 'who was the third team captain who raised such and such cup in 2005'. I'm not sure that would be googleable. It did ensure though that a team from the club won the prize.
This is not quite in the same league with those guys with earthmovers who stole the cash machines, but it is interesting. I wonder how those not so bright quiz kids sleep at night?
I go to a quiz night here in California occasionally, but so far this kind of thing hasn't hit. It does seem counter to the spirit of the thing. Kind of like looking up the answers to a crossword.
On another level, there's a real question as to how much we want to be enslaved to our references. I've been going to a group that reads Finnegans Wake together. So far we've decided that we don't want internet access as an augmentation of this. Rather struggle along together. But we do have a lot of paper references, and the latest one is a book of annotations. Even this seems a bit too easy to me, though obviously we get a good deal further. Slippery slope, though.
As there are a lot of Irish crimewriters who check in here, perhaps these cheaters will provoke some sort of crime story, where the non-cheaters decide to take matters into their own hands...
Hanging's too good for them. They should bring back hanging for the likes of them. Hold on...
Post a Comment