The Hoover Dam was once known as Boulder Dam

Your target this week:

1+ out of 10: Well done, you beat us and we'd have won with you on our team!

The attendees
1) The statistician
2) The doctor
3) The programmer

The ones that got away
1) What percentage of a human brain is fat?
2) The Hoover Dam lies on the border of which two US states?
3) Which planet in our solar system rotates on its axis in a different direction to all the others?
4) The Orient Express originally ran between which two cities?
5) As of the end of July, who is 2014's top earning actress according to Forbes magazine?
6) 'The Day the Music Died' is a reference to the deaths of which three musicians?
7) Where have geologists dubbed "the city waiting to die"?
8) In Harry Potter what do Ron and Hermione name their two children? As a hint, their names also start with R and H.
9) Which movie features the line "I'm flesh and blood, but not human"?
10) Which movie features the line "When you grow up, your heart dies"?

The answers

1) 60%
2) Arizona and Nevada
3) Venus
4) Paris and Istanbul
5) Sandra Bullock
6) Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and 'The Big Bopper' (J. P. Richardson)
7) Tokyo
8) Rose and Hugo
9) Interview with the Vampire
10) The Breakfast Club

Our excuses

1) The doctor's medical expertise once again coming to the fore in our pub quiz troubles. Unsure whether this was allowing for the brain's high water content he went with 30%, although some sources (such as this) put the brain's water content at 77-78% with just 10-12% fat. A bit of googling suggests the 60% figure is a relatively well-trodden trivium, but it's clearly one of those questions that requires some fairly careful definitions.
2) Having had a big fight on it in the video game Fallout: New Vegas, I knew the dam must be vaguely near Las Vegas giving us Nevada. Unfortunately the game's other primary location of California meant we missed out on the crucial second half of the answer.
3) One of those you know you've heard before (and probably more than once). We got a bit muddled and put Uranus which, along with Venus, orbits in a different direction to the other planets.
4) Like the Hoover Dam we had one half of this (the admittedly fairly obvious Paris). A look at the history of the various routes suggests that our instinct of Vienna for the other end wasn't too ridiculous, though.
5) Movie stars are never our strong suit, with Scarlett Johansson (inspired by her roles in Captain America and Lucy) letting us down.
6) We had the 'obvious' pair of Buddy Holly and The Big Bopper, but our third guess of the (still alive) Chuck Berry wasn't one of our best.
7) The doctor thought (slowly) sinking Venice seemed a plausible guess, while the programmer admitted after the answer was revealed that he'd had Tokyo in mind but was so convinced by Venice he didn't mention it.
8) It's fairly unusual for a Harry Potter question to evade us in a pub quiz and even with the hint we didn't get either name. Our guesses of Remus and Hagrid (both notable characters in the series) seemed quite good at the time.
9) Movie quote questions are a familiar sight on the blog, and while this clearly pointed at something supernatural going on that was as far as we could get. "Twilight is popular with the kids these days, right?" was the height of our discussion.
10) Another movie that is Very Famous which we're yet to see. Still, we capped off a night of 'wrong guesses we quite liked' with Peter Pan.

How did you do? Would you have beaten us (1 or more correct)? Let the world know with the poll below, then read on for my alternative questions (loosely) inspired by this week's Ones That Got Away!


My alternative questions
1) The 1939 musical The Wizard of Oz features three versions of the same song but with different titles and lyrics. First sung as "If I Only Had a Brain" by the Scarecrow, and then "If I Only Had a Heart" by the Tin Man, what two words complete the Lion's version: "If I Only Had..."?
2) Hoover, at least in the UK, is a classic example of a 'genericized' trademark - a trademark that has become an everyday word for a general item. Two further examples of this are the common names for the drugs acetylsalicylic acid and diacetylmorphine. Both originally trademarked by the German pharmaceutical company Bayer, how are these two drugs better known? (You need both for the point.)
3) Though their use is discouraged by the International Astronomical Union, symbols such as ♀ (for Venus) and ♂ (for Mars) are often used for the planets. The symbol for Mars represents a shield and spear, but what object does Venus' symbol reflect?
4) The original 'test' train for the Orient Express was named the "Train éclair de luxe". Reflecting the train's speed (as well as how quickly one might eat a particular pastry) what does the French word 'éclair' mean in English?
5) According to Oxford Dictionaries, what is a bullock?
6) To date there have (somehow) been eight American Pie movies, including four 'spin offs' along with the original and three sequels. Playing the character Noah Levenstein, who is the only major cast member to appear in all eight of these films?

Question 7

7) Who painted this (pictured)? The artist's work is often easy to identify because his name, like his paintings, puts one in mind of waterways.
8) With write-ups appearing on the Harry Potter website Pottermore during the (real world) 2014 FIFA World Cup, the 2014 Quidditch World Cup took place in which desert in Argentina? (As I'm sure we all know, Bulgaria beat Brazil in the final by 170 points to 60.)
9) Who wrote the 1976 novel Interview with the Vampire on which the 1994 movie is based? As a hint (or just a great way to remember) you can put a model of car in the middle of the author's name and get an iconic 1980s British television presenter.
10) Core members of Hollywood's 'Brat Pack' are typically considered to be those who have appeared in either The Breakfast Club or which other 1985 movie? Its name is also a term for a plasma-based weather phenomenon.

The answers

1) The Nerve
2) Aspirin and heroin
3) A hand mirror ('reflect', geddit???)
4) Lightning
5) A male domestic bovine animal that has been castrated and is raised for beef (you can be fairly generous here; if you said something like 'castrated bull' that's good enough for me) - in US English 'bullock' is another word for 'steer'
6) Eugene Levy
7) Canaletto (real name Giovanni Antonio Canal)
8) The Patagonian Desert
9) Anne Rice (and if you put a Ka in the middle, you get Anneka Rice!)
10) St. Elmo's Fire

How did you do on my alternative questions? Have another poll!

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On holiday!

Just a placeholder post to let you know there won't be my weekly Ones That Got Away this week as I'm off on holiday (with no Internet, of all things). If you're still desperate to share in our ignorance, why not go back to my very first post? Even if you've been with the blog since day one you may be surprised by a) what we didn't know, and b) whether you can remember some of these answers.

Normal service will resume next week!

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Review: Two Tribes

The front of Richard Osman's head.

Everyone's Pointless friend Richard is all grown up with a show of his own. He's taken off the stabilizers (read: Alexander Armstrong) and bought himself a brand new bicycle. It's a little bland, and certainly no 18-speed racer, but Two Tribes still goes at a bit of a lick and offers a perfectly watchable half hour of quizzing fun. (I don't know where this bicycle metaphor came from but I'm going on holiday tomorrow so I've decided it's fine.)

Like most shows, Two Tribes has its own simple shtick. Each round sees contestants placed into tribes (i.e. teams) based on their yes or no responses to personality-based questions. One round might see karaoke lovers against those who can't stand it, while the next could mix them up based on sunbathing preferences. Beyond this you're watching a fairly straight question-and-answer show, with each round's winning team progressing while the losers fight it out among themselves for survival. Once whittled down to two the tribalism is dropped altogether for a final head to head where the winner, in a curious twist, gets not cash but £1,000 in vouchers (such as for travel, 'gadgets', or sofas). The individual games aren't particularly inspiring; the only newish trick is that when working as a team individual contestants can pass on a question in the hope a team-mate knows it. Otherwise you're watching straight buzzer races or, in the case of the final, a 'chess clock quiz' where a player's timer ticks down until they successfully answer a question. (If you think that last one sounds familiar, there are several possible reasons why.)

First impressions, then, are that though not the most original this is still a perfectly serviceable show. It's a half hour format in a half hour slot (take note, The 21st Question), and even the more 'grumpy old quizzers' out there should be satisfied with the number of questions they get through. Beyond that, though, the basic Two Tribes premise adds very little.

The back of Richard Osman's head.

The obvious selling point of the format is to encourage the viewer to root for one of the teams in each round. For this to work, however, you need to look for things a bit more divisive than whether or not people think they can dance. The third show provided the first hints of this idea, when the contestants were split based on whether they were royalists (and Richard made a few attempts to remind us that we were supposed to follow suit), but the subsequent banter had an inevitable air of tension. A general uneasiness between contestant and present pervades the show, with questions about whether someone lies about their age, or if they've ever been dumped creating an atmosphere rather at odds with a friendly teatime quiz aesthetic. (One chap who found himself in the "I'd make a good Prime Minister" tribe, cheerfully announced he'd stop anyone from using the NHS who hadn't paid into it; if I wanted that sort of ill-thought out political debate I'd watch Prime Minister's Questions, not "that new Richard Osman thing that's on before Eggheads".)

Two Tribes consequently finds itself in a slightly awkward position. On the one hand their USP is to create teams we might actually care about, but on the other the topics that are most likely to invite viewer engagement are necessarily the divisive, controversial issues that have no real place at 6pm on BBC Two. This reduces its function to that of 'banter butter'; greasing the wheels of getting to know the contestants by using their personality prompts as a starting point. To its credit, the show works quite well in that regard, but this feels more of a clever side-effect than a format-selling feature.

When it comes to quizzes there are good formats, and there are good shows, and for me Two Tribes is more of the latter than the former. There's a healthy number of questions, which though not the hardest are well-compiled, and the contestant chatter is spread out and well-motivated by the game's structure. Everything else is at best fine, and there's very little that actively detracts from the viewing experience. One minor exception is Osman's hosting which, having previously served as Alexander Armstrong's straight man, can be a touch uncomfortable. His wry sense of humour is often directed at contestants unsure of how to react, and there's no charismatic co-host to step into the subsequent awkward silence.

Otherwise, Two Tribes works well enough to warrant a half hour of your day, with its pace and light-heartedness providing a refreshing change in the current quizzing landscape. Though by no means a classic, it's certainly not 'bad', and at the moment that alone can set a new quiz apart.

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The author of Charlotte's Web also wrote Stuart Little

Your targets this week:

1+ out of 8: Well done, you beat us!
4+ out of 8: We'd have won with you on our team!

The attendees
1) The statistician
2) The doctor
3) The programmer

The ones that got away
1) In The Simpsons, what is the name of the pig mascot of the Springfield A&M football team?
2) In Charlotte's Web what is the name of the pig?
3) In Charlotte's Web what is the first name of the girl?
4) What disease is caused by eating raw or undercooked pork or game infected with roundworm?
5) The term 'hog' for a motorcycle is actually an acronym - what do the letters HOG stand for?
6) Who directed the 1988 movie Twins?
7) In which league (note: not division) of Major League Baseball do the Minnesota Twins play?
8) Named after their grandmothers, who were the first twins to live in the White House? Surname only suffices.

The answers

1) Sir Oinks-A-Lot
2) Wilbur
3) Fern (Arable)
4) Trichinosis
5) Harley Owners Group
6) Ivan Reitman
7) American League
8) (Barbara and Jenna) Bush

Our excuses

1) Yep, this week we had rounds on pigs and twins, not the hottest topics on my quiz revision list. I haven't regularly watched The Simpsons in about 15 years, but given that the episode in question was first aired in 1993 this isn't much of an excuse. We went with Spider-Pig as the only Simpsons pig character we could think of (who, it turns out, is really called Plopper).
2-3) While this is of course an exceptionally famous book across the world, this felt like one of those literature questions where everyone in North America has read it, whereas most of the British have merely heard of it. We had no idea on the pig front, but the doctor fished out an almost-but-not-really good guess of 'Annabel' for the girl's name.
4) Once again the doctor had to deal with our incredulity as he failed to know about a relatively rare disease.
5) On further reading it seems this is actually more of a backronym, with Wikipedia providing the details, but still a neat enough trivium.
6) I'd never heard of this guy, but it turns out he's directed or produced a number of notable films from the classic Ghostbusters and the not-quite-so-classic Ghostbusters II, to the love-it or hate-it Kindergarten Cop and the hate-it or hate-it Junior.
7) Baseball fans will know this is a toss-up between the National League and the American League. Despite having (admittedly somewhat half-hearted) fans of the Giants and the Blue Jays on the team we didn't land on the correct choice.
8) My instinct proved correct on this, not least because Bush gives you two chances for the price of one, but we were fairly sure George W. only had one daughter. Reagan, then, was our less-than-educated guess.

How did you do? Would you have beaten us (1 or more correct)? Would you have helped us win (4 or more correct)? Let the world know with the poll below, then read on for my alternative questions (loosely) inspired by this week's Ones That Got Away!


My alternative questions
1) Appearing in the names of a number of colleges and universities in the United States, the initials A&M traditionally stand for Agricultural and Mechanical. An exception to this is Texas A&M University who, in 1963, adopted their current name with the now symbolic A and M explicitly not standing for anything. Which London institution adopted a similar strategy in 2005, where new corporate branding saw its name replaced by an initialism in all external communications?
2) Name any year during which anti-slavery campaigner William Wilberforce was alive.
3) A two-parter (you need both for the point, and don't forget this relates to question 3 above):
a) spell the first name of the British TV presenter who rose to fame hosting Ready Steady Cook in the 1990s
b) spell the first name of the British TV and radio presenter who was the first regular female presenter of the Radio 1 Chart Show and has also been a regular team captain on ITV2's Celebrity Juice.
4) Essential (but boring) trivia: what word, also beginning 'trich...', is an impulse disorder characterized by the urge to pull out one's own hair? The name derives from the Greek for 'hair', 'to pull', and 'madness'.
5) Which Olympic sport features two hog lines?
6) Which two Ghostbusters also wrote the two Ghostbusters movies? You can give me either the full names of the actors or the characters (or even one of each).
7) The Minnesota Twins are named after the Twin Cities of - you guessed it - Minneapolis and which other (also the state capital)?
8) What is the name of the current 'First Dog' of the United States? The name is also the 'signature' by which Tweets made by the President - rather than his staff - on his official feed are identified.

The answers

1) UCL
2) 1759-1833
3) a) Fern and b) Fearne
4) Trichotillomania
5) Curling - at one end it's the line you must release the stone before, at the other it's the line the stone must pass to remain in play
6) Dan Aykroyd/Raymond Stantz, and Harold Ramis/Egon Spengler
7) Saint Paul
8) Bo

How did you do on my alternative questions? Have another poll!

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Review: The 21st Question

"I've got 21 questions to go..."

It's the summer! No really, you can tell because ITV are doing their thing of taking The Chase off air for a few weeks while they trial some new shows. Gethin Jones (equally famous for his roles on Blue Peter and Welsh language rugby-themed quiz Cwis Meediant) spends an hour asking 21 questions to 11 contestants, one of whom could be walking away with thousands of pounds. It sounds, and is, a bit slow, but with 2000% more questions than Deal or No Deal it's not always quantity that counts.
The show has a simple premise - Gethin has 21 questions and whoever's in control of the game when he asks the final one gets the chance to win a Big Cash Prize. Regular quiz viewers will know, however, that a simple premise alone does not necessarily a simple show make, and in its implementation various complications arise.

We start by being launched headfirst into the 'Race to Five' where the contestants are asked to find five correct answers to a question from a set of ten options ("Which five of these ten are Coronation Street characters?", for example). As Gethin explains while they answer (apparently oblivious to those of us trying to tackle the question ourselves) this will decide who stands where at the start of the game. We still don't know what any of this really means, however, and so Gethin is left to inject some intrigue on our behalf "Oh, you've chosen position number 9? Interesting! Position number 3? That's brave!". A first time viewer may as well be watching Numberwang, and if you're more interested in my thoughts as a whole than a summary of the rules, skip down to Easy when you know how.

You've got the touch, you've got the power (spot)

Once everyone's in position someone will be on the 'Power Spot' and we now get a grip on the actual mechanics. The game is split into 'battles' of up to three questions where the Power Spot player tries to see off whoever is next in line. Crucially, the challenger can only succeed and take over the Power Spot by answering a question correctly that the Power Spot player gets wrong; if both contestants match each other across the three questions then the challenger is eliminated. In the meantime, correct answers from the Power Spot player builds up the show's jackpot (but no-one really pays any attention to that).

Gethin to know you.

Play continues with either the Power Spot player holding on, or a challenger replacing them, gradually working down the queue of contestants as the question number ticks up. As there are a fixed number of questions some players may not get to play at all (unless some battles end quickly) and we'll occasionally hear a strange noise and a challenger at the back of the queue will be told they're out. Similarly, a player in the 'danger zone' and at risk of the same fate may find themselves guaranteed to play. As a final bit of gameplay contestants may sometimes 'double up': doubling the difficulty and monetary value of the questions in a battle. After the 20th question whoever is in control of the Power Spot has, effectively, won the show, and gets to face the titular question for the cash. Anyone left in line toddles off (but, as long as it's not Friday, will be back tomorrow - hooray!).

The jackpot question is a fairly standard list format, such as the 10 most populous US cities, or the 10 biggest grossing Leonardo di Caprio movies. The contestant is first asked for three answers that appear on the list, and if they're all there they win half the jackpot. They can then gamble to offer a further two that will net them the full jackpot, and then gamble one last time to offer a sixth answer for the chance to double it. Win or lose they're the one contestant who won't be coming back tomorrow (and with nary a coveted trophy to dry their tears).

Easy when you know how

A simple premise it may be then but, as that explanation illustrates, there's a lot more going on than just 21 questions. Much of this becomes clear after a few episodes but for a brand new show testing the waters with a ten-game run it asks rather a lot of its necessarily new viewers. While some of these complications are largely unavoidable, there are still things the show could really do without. A fixed jackpot for example, rather than one that builds, would remove an element that adds approximately nothing to the experience. (While in theory a player lasting a long time on the Power Spot yields a bigger jackpot, this detail is generally lost in the broader 'survival' narrative.) The double up, meanwhile, feels like something very much tacked on and doesn't offer as much tactical depth as the show would like us to think (a Power Spot player should almost never use it, a challenger almost always should).

There are, however, more fundamental problems, with the show's 'basic' premise the most significant. In an era where to save money quiz shows try to desperately string out as few questions over as long a period as possible, advertising up front that you're going to spend an hour asking just 21 of them is remarkably brazen. The Chase can ask that many in a couple of minutes, while the similar-ish Eggheads usually manages around 30 in half the time. What's more, the general difficulty level is so low that several of those 21 are often pointlessly easy, with the knock-on effect whereby contestants will often be eliminated despite answering all of their questions correctly. (While this of course rewards players who start on the Power Spot for their bravado, it still leaves an unsatisfying taste in the mouth.)

"If you're in green you will be seen" is one of
several rejected catchphrases for the show.

Beyond gameplay the presentation of the show can be characterized as 'okay'. Gethin's hosting is serviceable, but with the hallmarks of a man who cut his teeth in children's television, while the general aesthetics are the now-typical 'dark and moody' affair which inspires nobody. It says a great deal that for me the studio highlight is a moving walkway that swings around to the next contestant after each elimination.

Overall, however, this is not as bad a quiz as it sounds. Once you're broadly familiar with the idea of "someone's in control and has to answer questions to stay in control until the end" the various intricacies can be safely ignored. At that point it becomes a fairly unremarkable hour of questions that could at least serve as a backdrop while you're making dinner. The jackpot round is fun enough (even if they do commit the quizzing cardinal sin of sometimes not revealing missing answers), and seeing someone last a long time on the Power Spot has the potential to be quite engaging. Beyond that, though, I don't buy into the various forced narratives ("ooh, you faced Steve on Tuesday and he won!"), but I'm sure there are plenty of potential viewers to whom that would appeal.

On a first viewing, though, things are at best overwhelming and at worst incomprehensible, and so it's understandable that the show has received the customary bashing on social media platforms. Given a couple of weeks for viewers to get to grips with it's conceivable this could do enough to merit another run, and with a few tweaks (or at least a better approach to how the rules are presented) it could and should be far less intimidating. Even then, though, the lack of questions (and consequent pacing) makes this a tough sell to even the most casual quizzer.

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Warwick Davis' Ewok character in Star Wars is called Wicket Wystri Warrick

Your targets this week:

We won this week (hooray), but as always a score of 1 or more means you knew something we didn't!

The attendees
1) The statistician
2) The doctor
3) The oceanographer

The ones that got away
1) Which President does Forrest Gump 'moon'?
2) In Star Wars who leads the army of clones to save the remaining Jedi in the colosseum?
3) In Star Wars what is the secret weapon the Geonosians planned to make?
4) In Star Wars how old is Yoda when he dies?
5) Which is the largest capital city in the world in terms of population?

The answers

1) Lyndon B Johnson
2) Yoda
3) The Death Star
4) 900 years
5) Tokyo (I'll discuss this in more detail below, but as many of you will appreciate this is a somewhat iffy question - I queried this when it was asked and the quizmaster, to his credit, admitted he wasn't sure about the various ways 'city' can be defined, and said that "if you can show me with google your answer is a valid one, I'll try to be fair" - our answer of Beijing was marked wrong, but as we'd won anyway we didn't challenge; I leave it up to your judgement/conscience whether you award yourself the point! For future reference, quizzers would be well-served to familiarize themselves with this Wikipedia page, which is a good summary of the various definitions.)

Our excuses

1) Recalling the scene related to Forrest's actions in the Vietnam War we narrowed down our options to LBJ or Nixon. To me, Nixon seemed the more plausible option: in my mind he is more strongly associated with the war and would seem the more likely candidate for a 'funny' scene like that. The doctor, meanwhile, had a "really vague inkling" it was LBJ, but was feeling a bit unwell and didn't push for it.
2) Yep, there was a Star Wars round and we really flubbed it. This is the only one of the movies I haven't seen, while the doctor hadn't seen it in many, many years, but vaguely remembered Mace Windu leading a group in that particular scene. It turns out his memory was pretty close: Windu arrived at the Petranaki arena leading a Jedi strike team, but it was Yoda who arrived shortly later leading the clones.
3) Knowing relatively little of Star Wars I suggested the obvious answer of the Death Star, but the doctor was wholly unconvinced. Instead, we went a bit lateral and suggested they planned to create the clone army of the previous question. I would suggest the truth about whether or not they 'planned' to create the Death Star is somewhat debatable, with Wookieepedia suggesting it was originally envisioned by the human Raith Sienar. This is perhaps getting a little caught up in semantics, however.
4) We could remember the quote "When ... hundred years old you reach, look as good you will not", but obviously not the all-important number. Our guess of 200 was almost embarrassingly far off.
5) As alluded to above, these sorts of questions are very tricky to phrase accurately. I had been reading the relevant Wikipedia page just the other day so suspected this was going to prove frustrating one way or the other, so asked the quizmaster if he could be clearer about what definition of 'city' he was using. He said he'd always try to be fair and that if I could show him that my answer was valid he'd give me the point (which rather impressed me - your typical quizmaster will just waffle about how 'their answer is final' or similar). He then asked me what I was thinking and I said "well, I know that Tokyo is the largest city in the world in terms of metropolitan area but..." at which point he interrupted to say "don't overthink it". On retrospect I realize that this was him trying to be helpful by reassuring me that I was thinking along the right lines, but for whatever reason I interpreted this as him saying that that was wrong and there was a more 'obvious' answer. With that in mind I switched to Beijing, which I recalled being the second largest 'city proper' in the world (behind Shanghai), and at the time at least seemed the more natural way to interpret the question. Suffice to say I'm very glad this particular question didn't affect the outcome!

How did you do? Would you have beaten us (1 or more correct)? Let the world know with the poll below, then read on for my alternative questions (loosely) inspired by this week's Ones That Got Away!


My alternative questions
1) Franklin D Roosevelt is one of two men to have taken the oath of office of the President of the United States four times: who's the other?
2) The 'console wars' of the late 80s and early 90s (described in Blake Harris's book of the same name as "the battle that defined a generation") concerned which two video game companies?
3) In Mel Brooks' Star Wars parody Spaceballs, what is the food-inspired name of the character based on Jabba the Hutt?
4) Also a performer of the Muppet characters Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, Cookie Monster and Bert (among others), who provided the voice of Yoda in the original Star Wars trilogy?
5) In 2020 Tokyo will become the first Asian city to host the Olympic Games for a second time. Name all four of the other Asian cities to have hosted the (summer or winter) Olympics. (And to avoid ambiguity: I'm not counting Moscow or Sochi as Asian cities.)

The answers

1) Barack Obama (his first inauguration featured a wording mishap so the oath was retaken at a private ceremony, while his second Inauguration Day fell on a Sunday, meaning a private ceremony that day was followed by a public one the next)
2) Nintendo and Sega
3) Pizza the Hutt
4) Frank Oz
5) Sapporo (Winter 1972), Seoul (Summer 1988), Nagano (Winter 1998), Beijing (Summer 2008) - Pyeongchang will add to this list with the 2018 Winter Games

How did you do on my alternative questions? Have another poll!

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