Thursday 15 January 2015

Fajitagate was a thing

Your targets this week:

We won this week, but could you have done even better?

The attendees
1) The statistician
2) The doctor
3) The left-fielder

The ones that got away
1) From what country was explorer Alexander Mackenzie?
2) From what country was explorer Edmund Hillary?
3) On 30th September, 1927, which legend make history by hitting his 60th?
4) In what month of 1974 did Richard Nixon resign?
5) What adjective could describe a cow that's had its horns removed, but not its opinion?
6) In which 1966 Billy Wilder movie did Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon become embroiled in an extravagant insurance scam?

The answers


Our excuses


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
Question 6
1) The Hudson's Bay Company is a Canadian retail business group and the oldest company in North America. It takes its name from the Hudson Bay in North-Eastern Canada, the world's second largest bay behind which other?
2) Where would you find the mountain Mauna Kea which, at over 10,200m, is the tallest mountain in the world when measured from its base? (By comparison, Everest is 8,848m from base to summit.)
3) What two-word term describes an award in Major League Baseball earned by a player leading the league in three specific statistical categories of performance? The term is used in numerous sports, although perhaps most notably in horse racing.
4) Wikipedia has a long (and fascinating) list of scandals given "-gate" suffix names, but who was the perpetrator of 2010's 'bigotgate'?
5) If you polled 100 sheep asking them what their favourite day of the week was, what is the minimum number of votes any one day could receive and still win outright (i.e. by at least one vote)? (Assuming every sheep picks a day.)
6) Before portraying Keith Lemon, comedian Leigh Francis created Channel 4's Bo' Selecta. Which English singer-songwriter is this Bo' Selecta mask depicting?

The answers


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

6 comments:

  1. The thing to remember about Watergate is that the actual break in took place in 1972. It took two years for the whole thing to be unearthed.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That's just what they want you to think!

      (But yes, good point. I actually missed that entirely.)

      Delete
    2. I knew the resignation was a couple of years after the breakin, but had no idea which month it was. I had a 1 in 12 chance with May, but no luck.

      Delete
  2. I knew that de-horned cattle are referred to as polled, but your sheep question wasn't trivia - it was maths !

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Pfft. The debate about 'what is trivia' is a complicated one :p I'll admit I'm somewhat biased when it comes to maths, though!

      Delete
  3. For the record, left-fielder is not merely a reference to my weird collection of mind trivia, but is my position in baseball as well. Double meanings are fun!

    Really kicking myself on the Mackenzie one, because in retrospect I knew Mackenzie had explored in Canada, which almost certainly means he would not be Canadian (the Brits and the French had explored most of this place by the time Canadians became "A Thing").

    Of course I'm really REALLY kicking myself over Maris/Ruth... I realized it was home runs pretty quickly, but in my mind Ruth hit 58 and Maris hit 60. In fact I remember listening to an interview with Chris Davis in 2013, who was on track to beat 62 (but not Barry Bonds' 73 (a number I had to look up to confirm, because apparently, I cannot remember numbers of home runs)) and said publicly that he thought 62 was the only record that stood due to PED allegations against Bonds. Of course, his season fell off the rails, he hit "only" 53, and he became far less good at baseball in 2014 (in a season ending with -- and this is true -- a PED charge).

    I didn't have a curveball's chance in Cuba on the other four, of course.

    ReplyDelete