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 29 January 2015
The world's tallest flagpole is in Tajikistan
Your targets this week:
We won this week, but could you have done even better? The attendees 1) The statistician 2) The doctor
The ones that got away
Question 5
1) Rank these five regimes in descending order of desirability according to Plato: Aristocracy, Democracy, Oligarchy, Timocracy, Tyranny. 2) 'Juche' is a fundamental principle of the ruling political ideology of North Korea - what does it mean? 3) In what year did South Korea have its first free elections? 4) "There is no subjection so perfect as that which keeps the appearance of freedom." is a quote from which work: Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler, The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Das Kapital by Karl Marx, or On Liberty by John Stuart Mill? 5) Name the party which uses this flag - be careful of the details! 6) What term describes Japanese erotic drawings from the Edo period? 7) What newspaper was embroiled in a major controversy in 2005 concerning cartoons depicting the Islamic prophet Muhammad? 8) The phrase 'back to the drawing board' was first coined in a cartoon in what publication?
1) Cripes. Were I not so bad at remembering past Only Connect questions, I'd say this would be a hard "what comes fourth?", let alone getting all five in order. It might have helped if either of us knew what a timocracy was (a system where only property owners can participate in government) but even then we were a long way off. Our ordering of Timocracy > Democracy > Oligarchy > Aristocracy > Tyranny was almost impressively wrong. 2) I (slightly) kicked myself on hearing the answer, as it did ring a bell, but our punt of 'loyalty' was little more than an educated guess. 3) Thanks to a previous encounter at this quiz we thought the date had something to do with the Seoul Olympics, putting 1988 to be agonizingly just one year out. 4) The doctor took point on this, and thought it was probably in the same book which featured the line "man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains". Impressively, he was right about this, but incorrectly thought that line appeared in On Liberty. 5) I'm blaming some pretty strict timekeeping on this one, as we barely had any time to even think about it before our sheet was taken in. The warning to 'be careful of the details' was an obvious clue to overlook Russia, but with mere seconds to think about it we couldn't come up with an alternative. 6) The doctor took charge again, and got sucked into thinking of Ukiyo-e ('floating world'), a general term for a genre of woodblock prints and paintings of which shunga are typically examples. 7) I assume the thinking behind this question was that the recent events in Paris would have seen us reading about this previous incident in the news, but we could only get as far as "that Danish newspaper?". 8) Mea culpa on this one, as facing a toss-up between Punch and the correct answer, I pushed for the former while the doctor favoured the latter.
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) There are five Platonic solids: objects whose faces are all the same shape. The cube is one example, as it consists of six faces, all of which are squares. What shape are the faces of the 12-faced dodecahedron? (If you're stumped, why not try drawing one?) 2) North Korea is the world's most militarized society with (as of July 2013) 9,495,000 active, reserve and paramilitary personnel. To within 5%, what percentage of North Korea's total population does this represent? 3) 'North Korea South Korea' inevitably leads us to that essential area of trivia: We Didn't Start the Fire by Billy Joel. Two people mentioned in the song were at one point married, name both of them. 4) Hitler began writing Mein Kampf in prison following his role in the Munich Putsch at the Bürgerbräukeller. How is the Munich Putsch more commonly/informally known?
Question 8
5) Along with China, four other countries are officially considered to be 'nuclear-weapon states' under the terms of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Name all four. 6) Shunga translates literally as 'picture of spring' (spring being a euphemism for sex), but what word for Japanese comics translates as 'whimsical drawings'? 7) In the magazine name Charlie Hebdo, 'Hebdo' is short for the word hebdomadaire, which means what in English? 8) Which artist's name is missing from this New Yorker cartoon caption?
The answers
1) Pentagons 2) 38% (so 33%-43% gets you the point) 3) Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio 4) The Beer Hall Putsch 5) France, Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom (while India, Pakistan and North Korea have purportedly conducted nuclear tests, they are not parties to the NPT) 6) Manga 7) Weekly (the 'Charlie' part apparently originally comes from Charlie Brown) 8)(M. C.) Escher
How did you do on my alternative questions? Have another poll!
Wow. I would have been /useless/ here. Worse than useless, given my tendency to buffalo poorly-reasoned answers onto answer sheets from time to time. :)
Had the same order as you for Plato with Tim/Dem swapped, because I figured it was like (everyone in charge > all people named tim in charge > a few cronies in charge > a few hemophiliacs in charge > a large dinosaur in charge) seemed like a descending order of bad choices. (note: only one of the above definitions was a joke, the other was the best guess I had for what it meant.)
For Juche I got lazy and went with "filial piety" because I know nothing about Korea, apparently. I also went with 1954 for the election because I figured the war's end had something to do with the answer.
I got the book wrong too, opting for Marx's "whoa isn't your mind blown" style, but ironically if I had heard the doctor's "...in chains" pondering I may have recognized that it was Rousseau and combined to a correct answer. Then again, probably not. Because pints and guessing and books. And the flag... well I guess I didn't give myself time, either, because I wrote "Communist party of Russia," erased "of Russia," and moved on.
6 was maddening because I'd definitely read about it in the past few months, I gave up and wrote an answer I knew was wrong (sumi-e) -- poor form.
I realized I didn't know what the Danish paper was called, either, so I frustratedly wrote Charlie Hebdo. And by the time I saw the last one, I was so defeated that I wrote it again.
Did much better on yours -- although I should really listen to that Billy Joel song, because it comes up a LOT. Hmm... on second thought, I'm going to not listen to Billy Joel & enjoy life.
Also, yay! A quiz I neither wrote nor attended! :)
Dude, Billy Joel is both amazing *and* useful for quizzing. Blasphemy.
I'm trying to decide how a system where people called Tim are in charge would fit into my ranking of regimes. I don't know very many people called Tim.
I scored zilch on the first set of questions too - and I didn't know what a timocracy was either.
I did get seven of your questions though, and was only 1% out on question two, in spite of making a guess on North Korea's population size based on nothing more than the facts in the question, a rough idea of how big it looks on the map and some luck,
A solid enough three on the first set (I really need to get round to reading The Social Contract...), and five on your set (I somehow managed to remember that India has nuclear weapons while forgetting about Russia - not my finest hour).
Nice work :) Sorry about the nuclear weaopns question; I felt like it was *verging* on being a trick (as other countries have them), but I thought it was interesting that there are these distinctions between 'official' and 'unofficial' ones.
Wow. I would have been /useless/ here. Worse than useless, given my tendency to buffalo poorly-reasoned answers onto answer sheets from time to time. :)
ReplyDeleteHad the same order as you for Plato with Tim/Dem swapped, because I figured it was like (everyone in charge > all people named tim in charge > a few cronies in charge > a few hemophiliacs in charge > a large dinosaur in charge) seemed like a descending order of bad choices. (note: only one of the above definitions was a joke, the other was the best guess I had for what it meant.)
For Juche I got lazy and went with "filial piety" because I know nothing about Korea, apparently. I also went with 1954 for the election because I figured the war's end had something to do with the answer.
I got the book wrong too, opting for Marx's "whoa isn't your mind blown" style, but ironically if I had heard the doctor's "...in chains" pondering I may have recognized that it was Rousseau and combined to a correct answer. Then again, probably not. Because pints and guessing and books. And the flag... well I guess I didn't give myself time, either, because I wrote "Communist party of Russia," erased "of Russia," and moved on.
6 was maddening because I'd definitely read about it in the past few months, I gave up and wrote an answer I knew was wrong (sumi-e) -- poor form.
I realized I didn't know what the Danish paper was called, either, so I frustratedly wrote Charlie Hebdo. And by the time I saw the last one, I was so defeated that I wrote it again.
Did much better on yours -- although I should really listen to that Billy Joel song, because it comes up a LOT. Hmm... on second thought, I'm going to not listen to Billy Joel & enjoy life.
Also, yay! A quiz I neither wrote nor attended! :)
Dude, Billy Joel is both amazing *and* useful for quizzing. Blasphemy.
DeleteI'm trying to decide how a system where people called Tim are in charge would fit into my ranking of regimes. I don't know very many people called Tim.
I scored zilch on the first set of questions too - and I didn't know what a timocracy was either.
ReplyDeleteI did get seven of your questions though, and was only 1% out on question two, in spite of making a guess on North Korea's population size based on nothing more than the facts in the question, a rough idea of how big it looks on the map and some luck,
Oof, bad luck - and sorry the first set were so horrendous this week - it's from one of the more...interesting quizzes we do here.
DeleteA solid enough three on the first set (I really need to get round to reading The Social Contract...), and five on your set (I somehow managed to remember that India has nuclear weapons while forgetting about Russia - not my finest hour).
ReplyDeleteNice work :) Sorry about the nuclear weaopns question; I felt like it was *verging* on being a trick (as other countries have them), but I thought it was interesting that there are these distinctions between 'official' and 'unofficial' ones.
Delete