Each week, quiz obsessives and Only Connect champions
Jamie Karran (@NoDrNo) and Michael Wallace (@statacake) take on the pub quizzes of the world.
Find out every Friday if you could have helped with the questions they got wrong.
Thursday, 27 November 2014
Wilbury is derived from "we'll bury"
Your targets this week:
1+ out of 7: Well done, you beat us! 4+ out of 7: We'd have won with you on our team!
The attendees 1) The statistician 2) The doctor 3) The oceanographer
The ones that got away 1) Which member of the Traveling Wilburys sung the line "I don't believe you, you're not the truth"? 2) In 2011 who was named Sexiest Man Alive by People magazine? Was it Bradley Cooper, Matthew McConaughey or Brad Pitt? 3) Which of these are teenagers not soaking in vodka: socks, their eyeballs, tampons, or Q-tips (cotton buds)? 4) What were the last two letters added to the English alphabet? (You need both for the point.) 5) Which restaurant was originally known as Pete's Super Submarines? 6) Who was the first member of the Beatles to have a solo UK number one album? 7) Which country absorbed Albania in April 1939?
The answers
1) Roy Orbison (in Oh, Pretty Woman) 2) Bradley Cooper 3) Q-tips 4) J and U 5) Subway 6) George Harrison 7)Italy
Our excuses
1) The Traveling Wilburys hint admittedly through us off slightly, as we assumed we were looking for the singer of a song by that group, rather than a song by one of its members. That said, given we apparently thought Neil Young was in the group, this slight confusion probably didn't make much difference. 2) Regular readers may recall that not so long ago I had cause to look up People's Sexiest Man Alive list due to not guessing that Sean Connery won it in 1989. I even wrote my own question on it, but nevertheless couldn't recall who had won in 2011. While we correctly ruled out Brad Pitt (one of four two-time winners) I was a little too swayed by the quizmaster stressing that spelling wouldn't matter, which seemed to rather hint at McConaughey over Cooper. 3) A ridiculous question, with predictably little conclusive evidence to back it up online. You can of course find tales of all of these things happening, while we managed to remember that the rumour-quashing website Snopes (as recently as 2012) said that the vodka-soaked tampons story is false. 4) I was similarly sceptical of this question, and while it's quite hard to google various links do seem to suggest J and U were the last two to be added. While we had J, it seems that our other guess of W was the third last. 5) I suspect many of my UK readers may have got this one right simply by it being the only major submarine sandwich chain in the country. While we did consider it we ultimately went with Quiznos (the second-largest such chain in North America) deciding that Subway was just too obvious. 6) I've complained about this before, but I really did hope one benefit of moving to Canada would be an end to us getting questions about the Beatles wrong on pub quizzes. After ruling out Ringo (who has perhaps unsurprisingly never had a UK number one album) we made a half-educated guess at Lennon. Predictably it's very close between the remaining three, with Lennon and McCartney getting their first number ones in 1971, while Harrison pipped them with All Things Must Pass in 1970. 7) It's rare for us to miss a European history question on this side of the Atlantic, but this was something that apparently passed us by. Instead, we went with Yugoslavia, which seemed a not too ridiculous bet based on geography alone.
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) Featuring in the 1990 romantic comedy Pretty Woman, which Verdi opera features a wealthy man tragically falling in love with a courtesan? (The opera is based on La dame aux Camélias, a play adapted from a novel by Alexandre Dumas, fils.) 2) In the 2014 movie Guardians of the Galaxy, Bradley Cooper provides the voice of Rocket, a character inspired by a Beatles song and similar in appearance to which animal? 3) What two-word term describes a drink of lager mixed with a lemonade-based alcopop (such as Smirnoff Ice) sometimes fortified with a shot of vodka? 4) An English Scrabble set features two Ws, each worth four points. Which language Scrabble set features five Ws, each worth a measly one point? Other one-point tiles include Y (of which there are seven) and DD (of which there are four). 5) Subway's biggest-selling sandwich, the Italian B.M.T., was originally named after Brooklyn Manhattan Transit (subway, geddit?). Give any one of the words the letters B.M.T. now supposedly stand for. 6) George Harrison was a member of the Traveling Wilburys supergroup, but which British rock group are widely recognized as the first supergroup, being credited as such by Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner in 1969? 7) Along with Kosovo (which is currently only partially recognized) there are six present-day countries which were formerly part of Yugoslavia before its breakup in 1992. Name four of them.
There were some poor questions in the set you tackled. Re the Albania one, I too first thought of Yugoslavia, but then had doubts as to whether it existed as a country at the time (it did) and ruled it out. At least I knew who was the first Beatle to have a No1 album. - yay for playing Mapominoes. It's a good game and if you play it often enough, you can end up learning some useful geography quiz answers where you want to or not !
I got four of the six former Yugoslavian countries
Oh, I'd wondered about Mapominoes, I remember seeing the UK version in a shop at some point and contemplated getting it to improve our (terrible) UK geography (but then moving to Canada somewhat reduced my motivation on that front).
There were some poor questions in the set you tackled. Re the Albania one, I too first thought of Yugoslavia, but then had doubts as to whether it existed as a country at the time (it did) and ruled it out. At least I knew who was the first Beatle to have a No1 album. - yay for playing Mapominoes. It's a good game and if you play it often enough, you can end up learning some useful geography quiz answers where you want to or not !
ReplyDeleteI got four of the six former Yugoslavian countries
Oh, I'd wondered about Mapominoes, I remember seeing the UK version in a shop at some point and contemplated getting it to improve our (terrible) UK geography (but then moving to Canada somewhat reduced my motivation on that front).
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