• Mood: curious
• Music: "Card Sharks" clapping theme tune, a Nick teppanyaki earworm

I am the Weakest Link, goodbye

People fairly often say to me "I bet you must be great at Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?". I'm not. I would be very pleasantly surprised if I could get to £32,000 on that these days. In general, I consider my general knowledge to be fairly poor considering how many quiz shows I watch. So when you want to calibrate something against your peers, you do an Internet quiz about it and compare your score with that of your Friends.

The good folks at BuzzerQuiz have posted a 100-question self-scored free response quiz which they claim was used to select players for the Oxford University quiz squad and various University Challenge teams. It's mostly academic, but contains a few questions on current affairs and pop culture centred around Britain in 2000. Frankly, it's a pretty good quiz - if you like quizzes and have 10-20 minutes free, give it a go.

I scored 41/100 without any help, about 25 of which I knew for sure and about 16 of which were guessed. There were five or six others I really should've got but didn't. I'd be very keen to know how you score on the same quiz; I expect that more of my Friends who try it are going to score more than 41 than not, but I'm curious to know. (Much as there's a theory that people tend to look for partners who are a little more attractive than themselves, I've-got-a-theory that people tend to befriend journals written by people they think are smarter than themselves. Furthermore, you're not likely to bother with the quiz unless you like doing quizzes.) If quiz_master_man or hmtriplecrown can beat 41 even struggling against the UK-specific questions then I will sulk a little; if anyone else from the US can beat 41 then I will sulk a lot. ;-)

BuzzerQuiz may not be familiar to you. They're an initiative which organise competitions in the UK in which teams of four play a College Bowl/University Challenge-like game against each other without necessarily having to be in education. Now with a score of 41 I am likely only to be able to answer one or two questions per match, but I'd still like to try some day, especially as their tournaments are at least nominally open entry and guarantee even the weakest teams several games for their entry fee. In practice, they've only managed to attract established top teams to their contests so far, but hopefully they'll grow to the point where the lesser quizzers of this world can play too. (Seems horribly backward to me, but the organised quiz culture in this country started at the top.) Anyone else interested?