The View From Lower Down

 Thank you for signing up to the Christmas Quiz 2024! The scoreboard will be available on the blog throughout December and will be updated daily (usually between 5 and 6pm as I work full time). Here's how everyone is doing: Raring to Snow  - 1830 Points Katzen Patatas  - 1730 Points The Eastside Avengers  - 1410 Points Socks and Crocs  - 1280 Points Platypodes in the Snow - 1240 Points Michael Bublé Bath  - 808 Points New Phone, who dis? - 690 Points Central Donner & Blitzen Office  - 640 Points TMcB  - 549 Points Merry Berry and Co  - 480 Points Let it Snow - 180 Points Slight Clown - 40 Points Last updated 23 December 

Struggling with a particular clue? Here's some tips: 1. Is there a person in one of the pictures you don't recognise? Ask around, ask your friends, your family, your co-workers. Most of them are reasonably well known celebrities, so chances are someone will know. 2. I am unlikely to include words such as and, the, a, of etc, so don't bother looking for those as part of the clue. 3. Most of the pictures used will be the first one on Google, so if you think you recognise it/them, look up what you think it is and see if that picture is the word which shows up. For example, the picture I used of Al Gore in the Guess The Theme picture is just the main picture on his Wikipedia page . 4. With that said, there are some words which appear multiple times. The word Christmas appears in 6 of the answers, but I have used a different picture for each. 5. If you think you know part (or multiple parts) of the clue, but not the whole clue, use what you have and try to fit in the rest, for e...

Congratulation s ! As most of you guessed, the theme this year is pictorial clues: ( Ice PICK - TORY party - AL Gore ) Some clues are easier tha n th a t; some are harder. The clues with people in are g ener a lly people you should have hea r d of, a lthough the person in Clue 16 (23 Dece m ber) is particularly hard. So here's the rules: 1. A pictorial clue similar to the one above, but denoting the name of a Christmas movie, will be sent out via email at 11:00 every weekday (Monday-Friday) up to and including Christmas Eve.  2. You have until midnight that day to send me the correct answer. 3. Every correct answer will receive a number of points which will decrease by ten points every time (so the first correct team will receive 150 points, the second 140 and so on). Be careful though; people have been known to be very fast in figuring out the clues in past years, as the below image demonstrates: In fairness, Die Hard was pretty easy last year 4. The overall scores will be on ...

It's November, which means it’s the perfect time of year to start thinking about Christmas Quizzes (For you; I’ve been thinking about them since February). That’s right, it’s signup time once again for the annual Christmas movie quiz! This year, the theme (chosen by last year’s winner Raring to Snow ) is: When you signup, include your guess for what this means. 20 points available if you get it right! Think you can figure out which movie goes with which clue? Sign up using the following instructions: 1.       S end an email to  xmasmoviequiz@gmail.com , saying you want to join the quiz. 2.         Include a team name (you can also play as an individual, but you will still need to give a team name). Your team name must adhere to the following rules: a.         Maximum four words long                       b.     ...

Good news! This review is going to be relatively spoiler free, and all spoilers are out of context. I thought about asking ChatGPT to write a review for me so we could compare the two, but unfortunately when I did it was actually pretty accurate. It even included the Easter Egg which appears in all my posts! I put it up on the blog for you to read anyway;  find it here . Of course, I know you actually came for some unrelated colour, so here it is. We saw the show at the Birmingham Rep, where we've seen several other shows. However, on this occasion, we weren't in the main auditorium at all, but in the secondary theatre The Door ("How many theatres are in this theatre anyway?" Fun fact: I just spelled weren't incorrectly twice before getting it right. The Door is a perfectly fine performance space, but it is a lot more intimate than the main auditorium. I was expecting this. what I was not expecting was for the theatre to be in darkness when we arrived. There were...

 DISCLAIMER: MOST OF THIS POST WAS WRITTEN BY AI. ALL BITS I WROTE ARE IN NORMAL TEXT; ALL AI COPY IS ITALICISED. I originally wanted to ask ChatGPT to do a review in my style so we could see how laughingly inaccurate it was, but when I did, it actually wrote quite a decent review, and although it lacked the some of my trademark humour™ You can't trademark common English words - Ed. See? Although it lacked the some of my trademark humour I use in my posts, you could see the influence there. But first, I'll show you ChatGPT's first attempt. Prompt:  Write a review of the man who thought he knew too much in the style of The View From Lower Down ChatGPT: Review of The Man Who Thought He Knew Too Much As Seen from the Ground Up In the quiet tradition of storytelling that tends to slip underfoot rather than stride boldly across the stage, The Man Who Thought He Knew Too Much offers up an underwhelming protagonist whose self-assurance becomes his unraveling. It’s the story of Hub...

The Door  Darkness  Headlights  Piano  Hitchcock  Roger   Routine  Newspapers Magic cup Glasses  Red hat  200 to 1 Bullet Doctor Who  Three...Two...Be... Continued  Recap Red hat blew off  Why does the Boss have a hat  Speech 

  Want to join the quiz but can't think of a suitable team name? Common tricks employed are to use a Christmas based pun (for example, We Three Things ), or to use a name associated with you in some way (I might use Lower Viewpoint ). Of course, you can't use your real name, but nicknames are fine. If you can't come up with a decent pun, just Google "Christmas quiz team names", or if you want something a bit more personal, ask ChatGPT, e.g. "Christmas quiz team names for wheelchair users" (this came up with several suggestions; my personal favourite was Wheely Merry Christmas ) If you're a fan of sharks (or Moore era Bond movies), you could combine both and call your team Santa Jaws ! To remind you, the rules are: 1. No real names 2. No offensive language 3. Names must be four words or less Outside of those rules, pretty much anything goes, although I reserve the right to ask you to change it if I think it is inappropriate. Of course, you could go ba...

 So I had an idea. Have you ever watched a trailer and thought "I have no idea what the plot of that movie is" ? Then you watched the movie and then watched the trailer again and thought: "Oh, that makes perfect sense now. I can't believe I didn't see it before!" Or is that just me? Anyway, I thought I'd try to reverse engineer a movie from the trailer. But the question was what? I could have done a Marvel movie, but the problem with those is that they often put in fake scenes, mostly to confuse Tom Holland with what he can and can't spoil . At this point I think it would be easiest if they just wrote the movies after Tom wraps filming. A movie which is coming out this year is the newest Wallace and Gromit movie. Let's start by making this a bit easier for ourselves by using the official synopsis: "Gromit’s concern that Wallace is becoming too dependent on his inventions proves justified, when Wallace invents a “smart” gnome that seems to de...

I haven't seen anyone else use that pun before. Then again, I've been struggling with the internet recently, so it might be the most common word out there for all I know. DISCLAIMER: I WROTE A LOT OF THIS ON A BUS SO I APOLOGIZE FOR ANY TYPOS  As you may have gathered, I have seen the play Cluedo 2 . In order to talk about Cluedo 1  though, we first need to talk about Clue. Clue was a movie released in 1985, loosely based on the American board game Clue, which was itself based on the English board game Clue do . Clue do is a portmanteau (ooh, big word) of the word clue, referring to the murder mystery element, and Ludo, referring to the board game element. Ludo is the game known in America as Parcheesi, but if you called it Cluecheesi you would look like a crazy person. You probably already know the basic concept of the game, but just in case you don't, here it is: Dr Black has just been murdered. Players play as one of the six murder suspects, Miss Scarlett; Colonel Mustar...

 O nce again, I find myself reviewing another Mischief show (fun fact: this is the first time I have ever spelled Mischief correctly first time).   This time, we’re talking about Mind Mangler: Member of the Tragic Circle , a spinoff show featuring two characters from Magic Goes Wrong . These are the two characters you’ve seen in all the previews, such as Comic Relief, which actually went wrong!   Unlike my other reviews, this one will only contain spoilers for the bits unique to the show I saw, not the plot in general (although it is mostly just a series of tricks, there is an underlying story happening between the two main characters). This way, you can watch the show without it being spoiled for you.   The characters included are The Mind Mangler AKA Keith (Henry Lewis), and his stooge Clive AKA Brian AKA Stephen AKA Steven AKA Mike AKA Mickey AKA Audience Member AKA Different Audience Member AKA The Stooge (Jonathan Sayer)   Magical Glossary ...