A Quickie Seasonal Post …

Literally, I’m going to try and make this quick.

I’m not usually THAT premature.

Not with quizzes, anyway.

Strange?

Possibly not …

I do know I’ve had Councillor Chilvers, one of the local councillors for our ward, ask me about writing a Christmas quiz, for their local party Christmas do.

He says, desperately trying to avoid repeating himself …

But, having done them for so long — and not written one in quite some time — I’ve got to admit, it was a pleasure to be able to get back in action and get one written up.

And it’s times like this I’m kinda grateful for the amount of work I’d put in. Not necessarily to the quizzes themselves.

But the spreadsheet of questions I put together, over the years I was running quizzes.

One thing that NeoOffice, OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office all have in common, is that they all have a spreadsheet programme as part of the suite.

Now, usually, these are used for doing basic accounts and book-keeping; either household, or small business ones.

But, as a non-programmer and one who’s unfamiliar with creating databases, ideal for creating a (very primitive) way of filing questions. And filing them into pre-sorted themed areas; television, music, films, what-have-you.

And something that — combined with the templates I mentioned the other week — allowed me to write at least one quiz a week, for quite a while.

Including — once I’d had enough source questions — Christmas, Valentines and — my personal favourite — Halloween.

Actually, that’s possibly a whole other story, sourcing question, but I digress …

At any rate, having the spreadsheet and templates allowed to take about an hour and a half to put something together for Councillor Chilvers.

Rather than the 3 to 4 weeks or so it used to take.

Actually, daft as it sounds, that was also a point of pride, for me; the fact I’d having something prepped up something like a month in advance. It meant that I had a good few weeks to double check the actual questions — vital, considering how knowledgeable pub quiz audiences are — and had time to prepare a poster. At one point, I had Vix doing what I also felt was some pretty darn good stuff for the actual posters.

But I also made use of some of the images on DeviantART.

Ranging from the fairly innocuous, to the downright kinky.

I’ve added a link to DeviantART, in this post. Please, make sure — if you’ve got kids — you keep an eye peeled, if they click it. Most of the material isn’t exactly what I’d call pornographic. But one or two pieces are fairly explicit, and you probably want them to not see them ’til they’re older.

In their forties, at least.

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