Anyway.
Last weekend I went away for 2 and a half days of intense mathematical revision before my exam in a few weeks time. So you're stuck there, in some faceless conference centre in the middle of nowhere with about 250 fellow maths students, and no escape for the weekend. Here is a map of the place.
Now by tradition with these events, there is usually some form of "entertainment" on the Saturday night by way of light relief. In days gone by there has been a live band, folk singing, and they even tried a disco once as I recall. However, the sight of 250 mainly middle-aged maths students, atttempting to emulate scenes from Saturday Night Fever had onlookers frantically trying to scrape the images off their retinas with used razor blades, so that was abandonned on health and safety grounds.
The next logical, some may say obvious, step was a quiz night, and that is what they had. I would have been perfectly happy to sit in the bar and contemplate the metaphysics of non-linear inhomogeneous second order differential equations with the aid of a few Grolsches, but unfortunately the quiz was IN the bar, so I had no choice but to join in.
I skulked around and joined the largest team I could find. In reptrospect, I should have smelt a rat when I saw the quizmaster. He had on a headset and was prancing about like a Butlins redcoat on nitrous oxide.
"ARE YOU HAVING A GOOD TIME????? I CAN'T HEAR YOU. I SAID ARE YOU HAVING A GOOD TIME!!! WELL AWRIIIIGHT!!!!
Question number 3. What was unusual about the 1998 World Scrabble final?
So anyway off we go. First round general knowledge. So far so good. Then he announces the second round with a supercilious smile playing across his thin, cruel lips. "This round is called 'clowning about'", and he proceeds to explain, with mounting horror from the audience (OK, from me), how he requires two volunteers from each team to dress up as clowns, work out a clown routine, and then perform it in front of everyone.
Gentle reader, if there is a word in the english language more likely to loosen the bowels than "volunteer" I have yet to hear it.
I shrank into the fabric of my chair and avoided any form of human contact as my team discussed who should be the clowns. I did everything in my power to occupy a tear in the spacetime continuum. Thank Christ, there were a couple of young gals on our team who took up the challenge, and we all started making jolly hats/bowties/clownfeet/balloon animals from the paper/carboard/scissors/sticky tape/balloons provided.
Tina, I can't thank you enough for volunteering
I then had to sit through AN HOUR AND A HALF of various teams' clowns performing a series of unspeakably embarrassing acts, which were judged by the other teams according to a points system devised by Mein Host, that was so complex it made Godel's Incompleteness Theorem sound like a Lidl shopping list.
...so that's 3.1415 marks for artistic impression then...
I have to say, our team's "turn" which consisted of the two clowns miming to a spirited reading of french poetry in French, raised the tone of the whole evening, and lowered the sleep threshold, if that were possible.
Suffice to say, the bastard quizmeister continued with further rounds until the whole audience was in a soporific torpor.
"OK are you ready to rock? I said ARE YOU READY TO ROOOCK??? In this round, we need each team to create a tableau vivant re-enacting the signing of the 1474 treaty of Utrecht, dressed up as seahorses"
Look at me!! I'm the hanseatic city of Lubeck!!
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