Queen Street in Oxford, looking east towards Carfax. Buildings of various architectural styles line the street, all housing shops at street level. The ground is brown tarmic, with thick grey stones marking the edge of the roadway. There is also various street furniture, like bins and benches. The shadow of the photographer and another person appear at the bottom of the image. Apart from them, the street is almost completely deserted, despite the broad daylight.

The lost quiz

I want you to cast your mind back to the spring of 2020. Your mind will undoubtedly protest, insisting that no good can possibly come of this, but you should coerce it to go there nonetheless. If you do, it may remind you that the population was broadly divided into two camps: key workers, whose overriding emotion was exhaustion; and everyone else, for whom instead it was boredom.1

At the time, I was a doctoral student writing a thesis about probabilistic combinatorics.2 This, for reasons that were a mystery to pretty much no-one, was not considered to fall into the former camp. Consequently, one of the things I did to alleviate the ennui was resurrect Escaping Oxford. This was confusing, and borderline irresponsible, as at the time it was a travel blog. You will be pleased to hear that I rapidly pivoted into writing about much safer places to “visit”, such as my Animal Crossing island.3

Another thing I did, though, was start live-streaming quizzes on YouTube. This wasn’t particularly original as an idea—the quiz was the default social activity at that time, alongside collective panic. But I do have in my favour that I have always liked writing quizzes, and so I hope I was forgiven for taking the opportunity to present them to almost as captive an audience as I could possibly get.

Ten of these are still available to stream.4 They didn’t get a huge audience, and what they did get was mostly my friends—with the exception of a couple who commented on the first one to say that they were quarantined on a cruise ship, and they’d enjoyed doing my quizzes as distraction. I have no idea who they were or how they found it; I only know that they replied one of the last ones I did, some time later, asking if I was planning to upload any more. I had moved on to trying to get some sort of normalcy back in my life by then, so I never replied.5

When I was looking back on my laptop for some filler to post today,6 I stumbled upon the quizzes. I briefly considered posting them, but there was a problem—like the YouTube quizzes, my blog is mostly read by my friends. So a large proportion of readers here will have already done those quizzes, and even if they’ve forgotten could always just go back and watch the recordings.

But then I found a quiz that hadn’t been streamed. Not publicly, at least. It turns out (and I’ve completely erased this from my memory) that I did a bonus quiz as a social for the Department of Statistics, which I didn’t post publicly. While some of my friends will, therefore, have done that quiz already—and to them I apologise—the overlap is much smaller. Posting that here therefore feels acceptably new.

The quiz was in four rounds. At the top of my record of the answers I’ve written “All answers correct at time of streaming”; I haven’t updated any of the questions, so (if relevant) you should interpret the questions as if it were 1st May 2020.

Warm-up

  1. Which Scottish football team plays at Ibrox Stadium?
  2. What name is given to the song used as the personal anthem of the US President, used to accompany his appearance?
  3. Which fact-checking and urban legend website is named after a family in the works of the author William Faulkner?
  4. What was the name of the revolutionary organisation founded in 1765 by Samuel Adams? It is name-checked in the musical Hamilton owing to Hercules Mulligan’s involvement.
  5. Which British sitcom features, in its opening sequence, the title character dropping out of the sky in a beam of light, while a choir sings “Ecce homo qui est faba”?
  6. What is the surname of Phileas, the protagonist in Around the World in Eighty Days?
  7. Which 2004 book by author David Mitchell, set across six different timelines, was made into a film by the Wachowskis?
  8. What name is given to a type of connection found on much Apple hardware that was developed by Intel? Its third iteration uses the same socket as USB-C.
  9. Which London theatre, next to Leicester Square tube station, has recently seen productions of Fleabag and The Catherine Tate Show Live? In the 1970s, it was where the musical Godspell made its West End debut.
  10. By what nickname was the Northern Irish snooker player Alex Higgins best known?

Guess the performer

Which artist (solo artist or band) had albums with these titles?

  1. Revolver, Rubber Soul, Abbey Road
  2. B’Day, I Am… Sasha Fierce, 4
  3. The Black Album, 4:44, Reasonable Doubt
  4. Dark & Wild, Wings, Map of the Soul: 7
  5. Honky Château, Reg Strikes Back, Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only the Piano Player
  6. Choke, Miaow, Quench
  7. Hot Fuss, Day & Age, Battle Born
  8. Employment, Yours Truly, Angry Mob, Duck
  9. Foxy Lady, It’s a Man’s World, not.com.mercial
  10. Made in the A.M., Take Me Home, Four

Numbers round

Perform the stated operation and write down the answer.

  1. The number of Wonders of the Ancient World, minus the traditional number of hills of Rome
  2. The number of lines of the London Underground, plus the number of stations on the Monopoly board
  3. The number of Spice Girls, times the number of KFC’s secret herbs and spices
  4. The number of possible four-digit PINs, divided by the number of UK banks that can issue banknotes7
  5. The total number of digits belonging to (human) residents of 742 Evergreen Terrace
  6. In film titles, the difference between the number of Angry Men and the number of Men and a Baby (not counting the baby)
  7. The total, in the works of Shakespeare, of the number of households “alike in dignity”, the number of Gentlemen of Verona, and the number of witches in Macbeth
  8. The number of tiles in an English-language Scrabble set, divided by the number of types of bonus square on the board
  9. The median8 of the ages referenced in songs called “Happy Birthday Sweet ____” by Neil Sedaka, “When I’m ____” by the Beatles, and “____ Years” by Lukas Graham
  10. The highest common factor of the number of states in the US and the number of member states in the UN

Theme round: Oxford9

  1. Including the new Parks College, how many colleges does the University of Oxford have?
  2. In which suburb of Oxford would you find a shark protruding from the roof of a building?
  3. Oxford United FC, as of the suspended 2019–20 football season, play in which division?
  4. The Oxford and the Cowley were models of car made by which manufacturer?
  5. G&D’s is a chain of Oxford ice-cream shops, all called George and ____. What are the three names that can fill in the blank?
  6. “Mousecatcher Lane” is an old name for which central Oxford thoroughfare?
  7. Oxfords are a type of what kind of article of clothing? They are characterised by having eyelet tabs attached under the vamp.
  8. The Oxford Down is a breed of which farm animal?
  9. Name a word before which you might find an Oxford comma in a sentence.
  10. In the film Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, featuring the songs of ABBA, a young Donna Sheridan is shown graduating from which Oxford college in 1979? (In reality, the college did not admit women until later that year.)

I’ll post the answers next week. Have fun!

  1. In case it doesn’t come across, I am very aware that I’m oversimplifying here for effect (citation: my own writing at the time). ↩︎
  2. If you want to know what this is, I actually started a blog post series about it, which I never got around to finishing. Maybe next pandemic. ↩︎
  3. I haven’t played that game for ages. I tried, a couple of years ago, but it reminded me too much of back then. I feel bad sometimes for the poor islanders whose home I’ve abandoned. Forgive me, Broccolo. The fault was all mine. ↩︎
  4. No, I will not link to them. Consider finding it a bonus challenge. ↩︎
  5. If you’re reading this, I’m genuinely sorry—I do feel bad about leaving you hanging. My only excuse is that one of the things I learnt in 2020 (not just from the quiz) is that I absolutely hate the faff of making videos, and I struggle to find the enthusiasm to do it except when, as then, there’s literally nothing else to do. ↩︎
  6. Yeah, you might have been able to tell that this was what this seemingly aimless waffle was aiming at. Like last time I resorted to posting filler on here, I’m preparing a thing for real life that I’m just as behind on as I am for writing stuff for this blog. ↩︎
  7. 2026 note: as a hint, I think this one is now out of date. The answer should be a whole number. ↩︎
  8. This was a quiz for the Stats Department, remember. ↩︎
  9. I’ve left this round in for completeness, but reading through the questions it’s very obvious that this was aimed at an audience that lived, or at least had lived, in the city. If that’s not you, these questions may be rather tricky. ↩︎

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