![]() There’s a lot I don’t know about pop music – I never listened to it growing up, and I’ve been trying to follow it more in recent years but it’s hard to catch up! And famous musicians can entirely pass me by, so I sometimes use the number of YouTube views an act has as a very rough estimate of how well-known they are. I tend to use a Google search along the lines of “site:en. intitle:treasure”, subsituting the Guardian or the BBC if things get too American on Wikipedia. If I need a question for the answer “treasure”, for instance, I search “intitle:treasure” on Wikipedia and the results at the top are usually the most well-known, though the correlation is not reliable. Owing to the fact that I use hidden messages and other concealed tricks within a round of questions, I usually think up answers to quiz rounds before devising questions to match them. I use Wikipedia a lot, though I factcheck obsessively afterwards. While a straightforward question where you either know the answer or you don’t can be enjoyable in itself (especially if you do know the answer and suspect that others won’t), I prefer multilayered questions, and secreting a well-hidden clue is a very pleasurable thing indeed.ĭo you use any tricks to confirm that some piece of information is something people are likely to have heard of? I might search to check that some TV show is not one that only I remember. Yes, the penny-dropping moments are what I find most satisfying to experience as a solver and to plan for as a compiler. Do you, like me, take satisfaction in making a clue sound erudite while sneaking in something that makes it easier than it seems? You often give a solver multiple ways in to a word. I get very excited when I think up a new idea for a round, as it sometimes seems that I’ve exhausted every avenue of wordplay. Apparently people were initially confused but it ended up going down really well. He kept it as a surprise that each had two answers, then repeated all the questions from the first half in the second half. Someone presented a round of these questions I’d written for a pub quiz, presumably warning contestants beforehand that they couldn’t write the same answer to more than one question. It is the signature song of a man with the surname Martin, though he is not among the song’s authors. The first word of the title of this song is in English and contains an apostrophe, while the rest of the title is in a southern European language. I also came up with a round – not found in the book – where I give contestants a series of apparently very specific descriptions which apply to two different answers. I would be happy! Although palindromes are a familiar device in wordplay, a quiz where the answers combine to form a giant palindrome is, I believe, my own invention, and a couple of people have written palindromic rounds in tribute, which I was very flattered by! Would you be happy if others adopted them? I think 12 Quizzes contains most of the devices I’d hope to encounter, such as palindromes and rebuses. Sadly, the list that includes Seagal keeps growing. But the more I read about him, the more traumatically awful his behaviour seemed to be and I couldn’t in good conscience write a round about him. I thought it would be fun to have Seagal as the answer where you had to guess his identity in as few clues as possible. They knew something bad was happening or about to happen” and “A pack of four-legged coyotes ran past John’s vehicle”. There’s a novel co-written by Steven Seagal called The Way of the Shadow Wolves, with quotations including “A long wailing woman’s scream came from the house. I wouldn’t consign a whole area of knowledge as off limits, but I avoid poor taste. I enjoy questions that require knowledge of diverse areas, partly because there’s humour in connecting things that are worlds apart. I make the areas of knowledge required as varied as possible. Your canvas is more modern and you’ve also got more to play with. Their problem is that they often demand that the solver be familiar with, say, the nickname of a Victorian chancellor of the exchequer. Now, your puzzles remind me of ones from the forgotten past, where you work out the rules as you go. It’s a shame, as the sequels would probably have followed suit. ![]() I enjoyed it very much, but was surprised that the words “die hard” were never spoken in the film. I immensely enjoyed writing the Sherlock Holmes pastiche, as I have loved those stories for many years, but I watched Die Hard for the first time to prepare for compiling the quiz inspired by it. ![]() The other themes vary in terms of how much the source material means to me. Genghis, the equivalent of Kevin in my Home Alone-themed quiz, is probably the book’s most sadistic and merciless character and I suspect this is down to guilt at how I caused such alarming chaos. The Twelve Quizzes of Christmas is available in the Guardian Bookshop.
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