The Crizz

To misquote Bill Shankley, ship's quizzes are not a matter of life and death, they're more important than that. 4pm each day sees the Smith/Spence/Curran team in action striving to achieve the elusive (laminated) winner's certificate. The team is a finely honed quizzing machine. Each member has special skills, history, music, mine is listening to adjoining tables to see if anybody mouths the right answer.
Yesterday's quiz was unusual mainly becuase the quizperson was Phillipino. English was not her first, second, or probably third language. She knew all the words, but not the subtleties of pronunciation.
The giggles started with the question about which star won his only Oscar for the film 'Two Griss' (a - John Wayne, True Grit). We got worse with Who did 'Hard Kill' play in Annie Get your Gun? (a - Wild Bill Hickock, Howard Keele). Our efforts and score collapsed into hysterics when we heard the question 'Hon what part of dee body do you find dee muff'. Maybe it was just us. We were surprised on marking the adjoining team's paper to see they'd answered 'hands', and they seemed rather shocked at our answer.
The climax of the 'crizz' was a tie breaker between the two highest scoring teams. The question was about the role of opera in Information Technology* which did not make sense in English, let alone Phillipino. Our quizperson repeated it 4 times to blank stares from the competitors. Finally in exasperation a member of the audience came forward and snatched the paper out of the poor girl's hand. Without a trace of irony he read out the question in a thick impenetrable Scouse accent. Blank stares, shared prize, pure joy.
* Opera was actually the name of an early Internet browser.

Dave C