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I have had my share of bad and sad quizzes, but once in a while along comes a real whopper.. I am talking about o'course, SCOE's very own Pinnacle '05 quiz.

It started off an hour late, which is the hallmark of every good quiz, but that's where things started going downwards.. For some reason the organisers insisted on having stupid pointless rules like validating all the payment receipts and giving out answers to the elims 3 days later. The official explanation given for this was that since the elims questions did not appear again in the main quiz, we had no need to know what the answers or even what the cut off was. While we failed to understand what the great national secret was, a look at eh answers reveals that it was better that they were not revealed. Officially the answers to the elims have still not been given out, I just managed to source them through some contacts.

To point out some of the finest examples I could find in there :

1. Internet Explorer has a Unix version. Wow, Microsoft has really changed since the last time I saw it. FYI, the quiz masters have asked people to see 'About Internet Explorer'. Apparently NCSA'a Mosaic and IE are the same software. Didn't know that, did ya ?

2. How many of you are aware that William Gibson did not coin the term Cyberspace in his book Neuromancer, he infact coined the term Neuromancer in his book Necromancer ?

3. The most popular game in the world in the 80's was not Tetris or Pacman, it was Asteroids.

4. NIN's 'The Fragile' is the only release to hit #1 on the BillBoard charts . No other release has ever #1. A quick Wikipedia search reveals that NIN infact has had two albums hit #1 on BillBoard.

5. Did you know Pietermaritzburg, capital of Kwazulu Natal, South Africa is now home to a church museum, one of the country’s national museums, with Colenso's tomb in front of the altar. Infact how many of you ever heard of Pietermaritzburg or Colenso?

Some thing other things the quiz makers dug which us stupid quizzers did not know. Shame on us :

1. The album Oye Bubbly though critically though critically ridiculed has really caught the attention of the people and has gone on to become quite a rage in India. It has 9 film and Indipop tracks.

What is wrong with us people ? Led Zeppelin albums aren't important, Oye Bubbly is important. Also, remember to note down the number of tracks in every single album you listen to henceforth.

2. Mark Burnett lives in the US because hismother told him too. He was an advisor to the British SAS in a "security operation".

How do continue to live without reading the autobiography of the man who gave us such classics as 'Survivor' & 'The Apperentice' ?

3. Kimberly Yeo of Singapore won the SingTel SMS Shootout organized by SingTel in 2004.

All of you fools who saw the Sania Mirza-Maria Sharapova match, now you know you should have been watching the SMS Shootout instead.

4. Susan Hockfield is currently the president of MIT, Boston.

Also read up on the current Deans and Presidents of Yale,Stanford,Harvard etc..
And yes o'course, remember that STES's President always has and always will be Mr. Navale.

5. Cate Blanchett who played Katherine Hepburn in 'The Aviator' was nominated for an 'Best Actress in a Supporting Role' Oscar while Katherine Hepburn herself won an Oscar.

Wow, talk about your freaky coincidences ! Can you imagine how interesting this question can get if someone ever plays Cate Blanchett in a moive ? For those of you how were ill-informed read Hepburn's autobiography 'Me: Stories of my Life'.

6.
Girl you make it feel, like the first time
Like there's never been another
Girl you make it real like the first time
Every time you lay down by my side

Are the lyrics of a song 'First Time' written by by Ronan Keating for his wife Yvonne Keating. Google actually came close to failing me when trying to find this one.

But their point is correct, Ronan Keating does come just after Jim Morrison when it comes to writing lyrics.

There was an acrostic question thrown in for just for the heck of it which was supposed to help us answer the elims, which no one got. Also the organisers were blissfully unaware of the actual answer.

The quiz started 4 hours late, with a lovely you've-come-here-for-the-money-bastards-so-wait-for-it attitude shown by the organisers. It had one of the most brlliant scoring systems I had ever seen, with teams getting as much as 100 points for a correct answer. Overall difficulty level of the questions seemed to fluctuate more than the weather nowadays, with the obscurity levels completely off the charts. Also, there was an awesome pictorial round whose details I dont want to go into.

More rants found on Siddharth's blog

On a passing note, I apologise for the tardiness in this particular post. It was lying as a draft for a long time, I just could not finish it. It has been hastily shoved out of the door as of now.

Secondly, we are currently trying for another SCOE quiz that shall be made by the regular quizzers and shall be of much better quality, I promise. Also, based on the feedback to my quiz; the Simpsons and H2G2 shal make no apprearances in it at all.

Thirdly, Aditya Udas, welcome to the Blogsphere and be so very glad that you didn't come to the Pinnacle quiz. Also, Sopan has written his first proper post, an event that few people though would ever happen.

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Name : Anish Bhatt
Location : Pune

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