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, 24 September 2015
Lacrosse takes its name for the French for 'the stick'
Your targets this week:
1+ out of 7: Well done, you beat us! 3+ out of 7: We'd have won with you on our team!
The attendees 1) The statistician 2) The doctor 3) The rich-person otherkin 4) The secret German 5) The metallurgist
The ones that got away 1) Brass is an alloy of which two metals? (1 point for getting both.) 2) How many players on a lacrosse team? 3) Which of these is not a real Steven Seagal movie? Hard to Kill; A Man Under Cover; The Asian Connection; Out for Justice; Fire Down Below. 4) In the musical Book of Mormon, to which country are the two main missionaries sent? 5) The musical Cats ran on Broadway from 1982 to 2000. To within 10%, how many shows in total were there? 6) In the musical Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Joseph has 11 brothers. One is called Reuben, for 1 point each, name any 2 others.
The answers
1) Copper and zinc 2) 10 3) A Man Under Cover 4) Uganda 5) 7,493 (so 6,744 to 8,242 gets you the point) 6) Simeon, Levi, Judah, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Issachar, Zebulun, and Benjamin
Our excuses
1) It's been a while since I've been so angry for getting a question wrong. I've mixed up brass (copper and zinc) with bronze (copper and tin) for years, and always seem to go the wrong way. (I actually thought this exact question was already on the blog, but currently can't find it.) My new plan? You can get a bronze tan, and tan sounds a bit like tin. Here's hoping it sticks. 2) A bigger game over here than back in the UK, perhaps, but my instinct was '10 or 11', but a teammate thought it was a little lower, so we went with 8. The history of lacrosse is pretty interesting, with Wikipedia offering "In the traditional aboriginal Canadian version, each team consisted of about 100 to 1,000 men on a field that stretched from about 500 meters to 3 kilometers long. These games lasted from sunup to sundown for two to three days straight." 3) Given that our guess of The Asian Connection hasn't been released yet, we felt a tiny bit hard done by, but still. 4) Spoilers: the quiz had a round on musicals, which is a common source of trivia trouble for us. Someone had a hunch on Ethiopia for this, which seemed good enough with nothing else to go on. 5) Having been forewarned of the theme, I'd spent a bit of time looking at the list of longest-running musicals, so was quite disappointed to not get this. Applying some maths I got as far as 6,570 assuming one a day, but was gradually talked upwards. At the last moment I switched from 8,000 to 8,500, putting the cherry on top of what was already a spectacularly frustrating cake of quizzing failure. 6) The doctor had been in a production of this, but could only play the 'pick random names' game, coming up with Aaron and Joshua.
How did you do? Would you have beaten us (1 or more correct)? Would you have helped us win (3 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) While most are in fact 'German', which member of an orchestral brass section is often (incorrectly) described by another nationality? 2) Which Canadian ice hockey star was presented with a Tottenham Hotspur shirt this week bearing a slightly mis-spelled version of his name? 3) Which Disney film features a seagull who advises the title character that a salvaged fork is used as a comb? (Seagull? Seagal? Geddit?) 4) Which (real-life) television pioneer (and Mormon) is canonically an ancestor of a (fictional) character from TV series Futurama? Surname suffices. 5) The only real villain in Cats, Macavity's name is a pun based on the names Macheath (of Mack the Knife fame), macuahuitl (an Aztec obsidian sword), and that of which 19th Century literary criminal mastermind, upon whom Macavity himself is supposedly based? 6) Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice shared the 1996 Academy Award for Best Original Song. For 1 point each, what was the song, and what Madonna-starring musical film was it from?
The answers
1) French horn (or, simply, 'horn') 2)Wayne Gretzky 3) The Little Mermaid (the seagull is called Scuttle, and calls a fork a 'dinglehopper') 4) (Philo) Farnsworth 5) (Arthur Conan Doyle's) Professor Moriarty 6) You Must Love Me from Evita
How did you do on my alternative questions? Have another poll!
I always seem to get the brass/bronze thing wrong too, and did again this time.
I knew that one was copper and tin, and that tin was one of the earliest metals mined, back in prehistory, but my brain fritzed and I chose brass instead of bronze.(Age).
I could have sworn there'd been a brass(/bronze) question on the blog, too! I have exactly the same problem as you, and likewise picked the wrong way.
ReplyDeleteI might have a more thorough look through my archives at some point; if someone else remembers it seems like it must be there somewhere...
DeleteI always seem to get the brass/bronze thing wrong too, and did again this time.
ReplyDeleteI knew that one was copper and tin, and that tin was one of the earliest metals mined, back in prehistory, but my brain fritzed and I chose brass instead of bronze.(Age).