Friday 9 January 2015

The westernmost point of the American mainland is Cape Prince of Wales

Your targets this week:

1+ out of 6: Well done, you beat us!
3+ out of 6: We'd have won with you on our team!

The attendees
1) The statistician
2) The doctor

The ones that got away
1) To within 10%, how long is a year on Mercury in Earth days?
2) Of the four main characters in the 2006 movie The Departed (Spoiler warning!), which actor plays the only one who isn't dead by the end?
3) The sauces Béchamel, velouté, espagnole, Hollandaise and tomato are collectively known as what?
4) Which tissue in the human body takes its name from the Latin for 'gristle'?
5) Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007, who was the original lead singer of Van Halen from 1974 to 1985? Surname suffices.
6) In the board game Risk, which is the only Asian territory that connects to North America by the Bering Strait?

The answers


Our excuses


How did you do? Would you have beaten us (1 point or more)? Would you have helped us win (3 points or more)? 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) Derived from Mercury Surface, Space, Geochemistry, and Ranging, what is the appropriate, albeit somewhat contrived, name given to the first spacecraft to orbit the planet?
2) Before quitting (he would later lead hip-hop group Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch), Mark Wahlberg was an original member of which boy band?
3) Though used for centuries in Tuscan cuisine, Béchamel sauce was renamed after the chief steward to which seventeenth Century King of France (also known as the Sun King)?
4) Also known as degenerative joint disease, loss of cartilage at a bone joint can give rise to what medical condition?
5) Despite being founded by brothers Alex and Eddie Van Halen, the band originally formed in 1972 under what Biblical name? They discovered it was already being used by a British group, who wouldn't top the US charts until 1986.
6) The standard Risk territories attempt to represent real-life geographical or political regions. This leads to a lot of compass points, including North Africa, Southern Europe, and Western United States. Which is the only standard Risk territory to end with a compass direction?

The answers


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

4 comments:

  1. I'm impressed with myself for getting the two Mercury questions correct. I was only two days out on the first one. I had a book on the solar system, by Patirck Moore, when I was a child, and managed to dredge up the memory from that, though Ihaven't seen it in over 30 years.

    I got asked which king of France was known as the Sun King during a tie break on my first Mastermind appearance. That was the one that me and the other person doing the tie-break both got right. I won because I got another point for working out that the larva of an insect regarded as a delicacy by Australian Aborigines was the Witchetty Grub - which I'd leaned from watching 'I'm A Celebrity...'. Life's odd, sometimes.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Awesome stuff :D I really like it when there's a slightly roundabout reason to know something.

      Delete
  2. On my version of risk, the answer to Q6 should be Kamchatka, not Yakutsk.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yep - if you check out the discussion below the answers I've clarified this :)

      Delete