25/06/13: the blue triangle on the flag of the Czech Republic was added to distinguish it from that of Poland

Question 6

The attendees
1) The statistician
2) The doctor
3) The programmer

The ones that got away
1) In what year was the film Lost in Space released?
2) In Australian rules football there are two ways of scoring points. How many points are each of these two ways of scoring worth? (2 point question, 1 point for each)
3) Who said "Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted"?
4) Meadow, Sheep's Fescue, and Quaking are all types of what plant?
5) In what year did the Czech Republic come into existence?
6) Identify the company logo (pictured).
7) Identify the London station from this cryptic clue: "You designed your home yourself?".
8) On which Canary Island island is Santa Cruz?

The answers

1) 1998
2) 6 points (for a goal) and 1 point (for a behind)
3) Albert Einstein
4) Grass
5) 1993 (January 1st, to be precise)
6) Yamaha
7) Custom House
8) Tenerife

Update: Poll results! 7 votes with 1 scoring 5/9, 2 scoring 4/9, 1 scoring 2/9, and 3 scoring 1/9.

The average voter scored 2.5 out of 9.

The excuses
1) We went with 1999 - another lesson in "it's always longer ago than you think".
2) Thinking it may have similarities with rugby union, we went with 5 and 2. It turns out we'd have had better luck if we'd thought of American football instead, where a touchdown is worth 6 points, and a kicked 'conversion' 1.
3) A very recognizable quote but not one we could quite place - we dabbled with Gandhi before plumping for Nelson Mandela.
4) A very gettable miss, we were too focused on plant meaning flower and went for the 'safety' play of rose.
5) Knowing that the USSR collapsed in 1991, we thought it was a pretty good shout. Unfortunately the USSR didn't go quite so far west.
6) The doctor seemed reasonably confident that this was Suzuki, so presumably had motorcycles in mind. We briefly discussed that the logo was made up of tuning forks, but didn't take this idea as far as we should have done.
7) Not a bad little clue - we got as far as "something house" but couldn't manage the final step.
8) Bit of a crapshoot if you don't know the answer to this one, and sadly we zigged with Lanzarote. Had I known at the time that Tenerife is the largest of the Canaries (which is a pretty standard bit of trivia) we might have zagged instead.

The alternative questions

^{Question 1}

1) Which oft-parodied warning, issued by Robot B-9 (pictured) in the CBS series Lost in Space, was actually only ever spoken once on the show?
2) What shape is an Australian rules football field?
3) In Einstein's famous E = mc² equation, what constant does the c stand for?
4) What is the principal psychoactive constituent of marijuana? (Its common three letter abbreviation is enough for the point.)
5) Name the five post-Soviet states whose name ends in -stan. Clue: Afghanistan and Pakistan aren't on the list, and are the only two other such countries.
6) Name one of the two products Yamaha originally manufactured when it was established in 1887?
7) In the name of the Government department, what do the letters HMRC stand for?
8) What animal is the Canary Islands' name derived from?

The answers

1) Danger, Will Robinson! (Bonus fact: the show was an adaptation of the Johann Wyss novel Swiss Family Robinson)
2) Oval (often modified cricket grounds)
3) The speed of light (about 300 million metres per second)
4) Tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC
5) Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan
6) Pianos and reed organs
7) Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs
8) Dog (from the Latin Canariae Insulae, meaning "Island of the Dogs") - it has a ballin' flag

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18/06/13: George Michael was born Georgios Kyriacos Panagiòtou

Question 4                                  Question 7

The attendees
1) The statistician
2) The doctor
3) The programmer

The ones that got away
1) Brainteaser: What goes around the world but stays in the corner?
2) Identify the film from its tagline: "Guess who's coming to save the world again?"
3) What George Michael song features the lyrics "I'm never gonna dance again / Guilty feet have got no rhythm"?
4) Identify the company from its logo (pictured).
5) In which country is the Champions Trophy currently (as of 18/06/13) taking place?
6) Which post-war Prime Minster had the first names Robert Anthony?
7) Identify the celebrity from their caricature (pictured).
8) Identify the London station from this cryptic clue: "Some grassy fields in a line are doomed to die by fingers on my hand".

The answers

1) A stamp
2) Ghostbusters II
3) Careless Whisper
4) John Deere
5) England and Wales
6) Eden
7) Richard Attenborough
8) Heathrow Terminal 4 (or 5)

Update: Poll results! 10 votes with 2 scoring 3/10, 3 scoring 2/10, 3 scoring 1/10, and 2 joining us on zero.

The average reader scored 1.5 out of 10.

The excuses
1) Our own proposals included a compass rose (usually found on the corner of maps) and, for similarly iffy reasons, page numbers in an atlas. Eventually we decided these were a bit rubbish and went with yo-yo, hoping there was some sort of trick we'd never heard of called 'staying in the corner'.
2) An inspired last minute change of heart saw us cross out the correct answer in favour of Men in Black 2 :(
3) Singing along I got as far as "do-do-do-do-do-do-doo-do-do I'm nobody's fool" which seemed a good, albeit wrong, guess. Turns out I was surprisingly close, with the next two lines unhelpfully being "Though it's easy to pretend / I know you're not a fool."
4) We spent a long time debating whether this was Jeep or Land Rover. Of course, it was neither (and none of us had ever heard of the correct answer - apparently they make agricultural machinery).
5) Initially sidetracked by thinking this might be an alternative name for the Confederations Cup we eventually decided it was something to do with cricket and went with Australia.
6) A bad miss, with us initially sticking down the correct answer only to over-think it and put Blair, who is of course Anthony Charles Lynton. (On retrospect it seems that 'post war' was supposed to be a clue to 'near war'.)
7) Our proposals ranged from Rowan Williams to Terry Pratchett and, somehow, Desmond Tutu.
8) As utterly torturous a clue as this was, we had to admit it was very gettable. Our own stab of Harrow and Wealdstone (because you might kill someone by, er, wielding a stone, or something?) was at least slightly more of a fit than usual.

The alternative questions

Question 2

1) What was the world's first adhesive (public) postage stamp, first issued in 1840?
2) Give the first (or, if you're feeling cocky, full) names of the three original Ghostbusters played by Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis (pictured).
3) Which song denied Wham!'s Last Christmas the 1984 UK Christmas number 1 spot?
4) What, especially in the United States and Canada, is a John Doe?
5) Cricket! South Africa qualified for the semi-finals at the expense of their West Indian opponents after a last-ball wicket and a lot of rain gave them an unlikely draw in their final Champions Trophy group match. What method, named after the two statisticians who devised it, was used to calculate this result? (With apologies for such a needlessly long question, but it's a pretty fun result.)
6) Since Arthur Balfour's election in 1902 there have been 21 different Prime Ministers. Of these, just two had surnames in the second half of the alphabet (that is, beginning with N-Z) - who?
7) In which 1993 film did Richard Attenborough play the role of "eccentric developer" John Hammond?
8) London Heathrow is, by passenger traffic, the world's third busiest airport. Name one of the two cities home to the two airports that beat it.

The answers

1) The Penny Black
2) Peter (Venkman), Ray (Stantz), and Egon (Spengler).
3) Do They Know It's Christmas? by Band Aid
4) A placeholder name, much like Joe Bloggs in the UK. (I wouldn't ask a 'definition' question like this in an actual quiz - too much scope for vague almost-answers.)
5) The Duckworth-Lewis method
6) Margaret Thatcher and Harold Wilson
7) Jurassic Park
8) Beijing (Capital International, 2nd) and Atlanta (Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International, 1st)

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1106/13: The 20 million rupees won in Slumdog Millionaire converted to about £200,000 at the time

Question 1                                   Question 4

The attendees
1) The statistician
2) The doctor
3) The programmer
4) The actuary
5) The gamedev

The ones that got away
1) Who is this chap (pictured)? He starred in the 2008 film Slumdog Millionaire.
2) In what year was Planet Terror released?
3) Which country's London embassy was besieged for six days in 1980?
4) What is this European country (pictured)?
5) Identify the film from this quote: "There's only two things I hate in this world. People who are intolerant of other people's cultures and the Dutch."
6) Identify the film from this quote: "For just one night let's not be co-workers. Let's be co-people."
7) Which African city's name means 'new flower'?

The answers

1) Dev Patel
2) 2007
3) Iran
4) Moldova
5) Austin Powers in Goldmember
6) Anchorman
7) Addis Ababa

I'm still not bored of asking how people have done on this week's questions. Let the world know with the poll on the right.

Update: Poll results! 7 votes with 4 scoring 3/7, 2 scoring 1/7, and 1 joining us on zero.

The average reader scored 2 out of 7.

The excuses
1) Two fun facts: according to our answer sheet we went with Amir Khan and the name Patel means 'landowner'.
2) One day there will be something interesting to say here. Maybe.
3) Half the team immediately thought Iran while one member (whose identity shall remain secret for his own sake) was reasonably confident about Libya. Unfortunately he was thinking about the shooting of Yvonne Fletcher.
4) Pretty brutal if you ask me, although gettable, especially when one member of your team once got a University Challenge starter about a Moldovan breakaway territory...
5) - 6) A couple more movie quotes for the album, although the record should note that the programmer did at least suggest the Austin Powers answer.
7) This rang a bell but we couldn't bring it to mind. We went with the not-too-implausible Nairobi but that roughly translates to 'cold water'.

The ones I would have asked
1) The final question in the film Slumdog Millionaire concerns which book by Alexander Dumas?
2) Where did Quentin Tarantino work prior to becoming a film director, citing his experiences of the job as inspiration for his directorial career?
3) As the name of a British army regiment, what do the letters SAS stand for?
4) With the exception of its coat of arms, Moldova's flag is almost identical to that of which of its neighbours?
5) In Austin Powers in Goldmember which singer - then a member of Destiny's Child - played FBI agent Foxxy Cleopatra?
6) The Californian city in which Anchorman is set is an anagram of which eight-letter word meaning to identify a problem?
7) At 2,355m, Addis Ababa is the fifth highest capital city in the world. Name one of the four capitals which are higher.

The answers

1) The Three Musketeers
2) A video rental store (specifically Video Archives)
3) Special Air Service
4) Romania
5) Beyoncé Knowles
6) Diagnose (San Diego)
7) In (quite literally) ascending order: Bogotá (Colombia), Thimphu (Bhutan), Quito (Ecuador), La Paz (Bolivia).

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04/06/13: Now with 100% more quiz!

Now with bonus content!
Don't miss the extra question set at the bottom of this post!

The attendees
1) The statistician
2) The doctor
3) The programmer
4) The saxophonist

The ones that got away

Question 1!

1) Identify the film (pictured).
2) What year was this film released?
3) Which of these (British) army ranks is the highest: captain, colonel or major?
4) Identify the film from this quote: "Smiling is my favourite. You make me smile. That makes you my favourite."
5) Identify the film from this quote: "And all the while I feel like I'm standing in the middle of a crowded room, screaming at the top of my lungs, and no one even looks up."
6) Which English county is bordered by the rivers Stour to the south and Waveney to the north?

The answers

1) The Bone Collector
2) 1999
3) Colonel
4) Elf
5) Titanic
6) Suffolk

Don't forget! You can show off your prowess, or share in our failure, via the poll on the right. Results of the last poll are on the relevant post now.

Update: Poll closed, so it's time for results! 6 votes with 1 scoring 3/6, 3 scoring 2/6, and 2 joining us on zero.

The average reader scored 1.5 out of 6.

The excuses
1) The perils of doing a quiz too many times: we were pretty sure this film had come up before on the same question, so ruled it out. Turns out our memory is slightly better than the quizmaster's.
2) Yawn.
3) A lesson in always double checking if you can. The saxophonist assured us the answer was major, having not heard that colonel was an option. As the doctor and I have put far too many hours into Halo 3's multiplayer, we would have been able to work out the answer to this one, but didn't bother.
4)-5) Not much to say (we went for Forrest Gump for the first one, which at least seemed plausible). Amusingly the team we were marking - who eventually came second last - got both of these (along with the Bone Collector questions) correct.
6) A touch unfortunate on this one, as the saxophonist recalled the Stour being somewhere around Dorset of Wiltshire. Turned out he was bang on, but alas the question was referring to a different Stour.

The ones I would have asked

In another new venture for The ones that got away, and to try and break up the monotony of endless movie questions, I thought I'd have a go at taking the ones we got wrong and constructing vaguely related but moderately more interesting questions to ask. I'll try to stick to one of three types: fun facts I discovered when researching the answers above, something you can think about and hopefully work out, or 'classic trivia' that will regularly come up at your local quiz. At the very least they'll hopefully be slightly more interesting than the dregs of our own quizzing experiences.

Question 6!

1) What word, beginning with O, describes a place where one might keep a bone collection?
2) Which notable US television drama saw its first episode broadcast on January 10, 1999? It would go on to run for six seasons over the next eight years, winning 21 Emmys and five Golden Globes.
3) What is the full name (including rank) of the Catch-22 character played by Bob Newhart in the novel's 1970 film adaptation? (Remember, this relates to Question 3 above.)
4) In the Harry Potter novels, what do the letters S.P.E.W. stand for in the name of the activism group established by Hermione Grainger?
5) Which shipping company owned the Titanic?
6) Suffolk only boasts one professional football team, whose (slightly modified) badge is pictured. Can you name them?

The answers

1) Ossuary
2) The Sopranos
3) (Major) Major Major Major
4) Society for the Promotion of Elfish Welfare
5) White Star Line
6) Ipswich Town

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21/05/13: Ontario, Canada boasts a city called London situated on a river called the Thames

The attendees
1) The statistician
2) The doctor
3) The programmer
4) The Turk
5) The anthropologist

The ones that got away
1) Who had an autobiography titled Moonwalk?
2) In what year was In Bruges released?
3) What river runs through Peterborough?
4) Identify the film from this quote: "Guns don't kill people, postal workers do."
5) Identify the London station from this cryptic clue: "There's no-one home in this mountainous entranceway"

The answers

1) Michael Jackson
2) 2008
3) The Nene
4) The Mexican
5) Notting Hill Gate

New! How did you do? Let the world know with the form on the right.

Update: Poll closed, so it's time for results! 6 votes (5 more than I was expecting) with 1 perfect score, 2 scoring 2/5, 2 scoring 1/5, and 1 joining us on zero.

The average reader scored 1 out of 5.

The excuses
1) A pretty brutal one to start with this week. Amusingly, and as is so often the case, we spent a long time debating which of two options to go for, both of which ultimately proving to be incorrect. Having dismissed Michael Jackson as 'too obvious' (a mistake we have made before in this quiz), our attention focused on whether it was more likely to be Neil Armstrong or Buzz Aldrin, ultimately opting for the former. I have since discovered that Armstrong never wrote an autobiography, while his biography is called First Man and that there is rather more of a history to his famous missing 'a' than I realized.

2) The crapshoot that is 'guess the year' hurts us again. (Although I should take some flak for not properly hearing out the Turk who had the correct answer just as we were about to hand over answer sheets for scoring.)

3) Pro-tip: never let your quizmaster know your weaknesses. In our case the penalty has been a near-weekly dose of British geography questions designed to trip us up. We can't really complain, everyone gets the same questions and all that, I just wish he'd chosen an area which would be worth us brushing up on: I don't expect many pub quiz questions about Peterborough when we move to Canada in two months. Oh wait.

4) We went with the admittedly rather optimistic The Postman and then had a fun discussion of the origins of the phrase 'going postal'.

5) In the last of a relatively small set of ones that got away - which still only saw us finish joint third - a fairly typical cryptic Tube station. At first I was a touch non-plussed by 'mountainous' clueing to 'hill', but this really is quite gettable as soon as you spot the 'not in' component, so I can't really complain. (By comparison, a couple of weeks ago we solved "Dark ninjas at the chicken shop": even the quizmaster couldn't tell us where the shinobi came into it.)

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14/05/13: the shoe brand Hush Puppies take their name from a dish of fried cornballs

That's right: pictures! See questions 9 and 10!

The attendees
1) The statistician
2) The doctor
3) The programmer

The ones that got away
1) In the story 101 Dalmatians, how many of the dalmatians were puppies?
2) In what year was Schindler's List released?
3) Ditloid: 1 H O A C
4) Identify the film from this quote: "I respect women! I respect them so much that I completely stay away from them!"
5) Identify the film from this quote: "I don't want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me."
6) Which tropic - Cancer or Capricorn - passes through Brazil?
7) The RAF squadron number 617 is better known as what?
8) Identify the London station from this cryptic clue: "The heaviest Albion of the midlands"
9) Identify company logo A in the picture. (Clue: "something you eat".)
10) Identify company logo B in the picture. (Clue: "something you eat".)

The answers

1) 97 (but see below for some controversy on this one)
2) 1993
3) 1 Handle on a Cup
4) The 40-Year-Old Virgin
5) The Departed
6) Capricorn
7) The Dambusters
8) West Brompton
9) Toblerone
10) Lindt

The excuses
1) Spectacularly frustrating. I anticipated that the quizmaster meant the Disney film, rather than the book, and so I asked him for clarification. "I'm asking about the story by Dodie Smith, but I don't think it matters, does it?". Uh-oh. We put down 97 knowing it was the correct answer, but as we suspected the answer given was 99 (the number of puppies in the film). Cue a lengthy 'discussion' with the quizmaster about it, who eventually said "I guess I'd better go and check this myself, hadn't I?". It seems he forgot to, however, and so what would have been a two-point swing for us against most teams went begging. We didn't force the issue - it's a charity quiz with little at stake beyond pride - but still a pretty frustrating outcome. Oh, and in case you're wondering, the adults in the book are Pongo, Missis, Perdita and Prince (who I distinctly remembered appearing as the 101st Dalmatian on the very last page).

2) Zagged the wrong way with 1991 (for some reason I was pretty sure it was an odd year in the early 90s thanks to my very occasional attempts to learn the Best Picture Oscar winners).

3) I'm starting to wonder if these 'ditloids starting with 1' are just becoming a weekly attempt by the quizmaster to troll us. We came up with at least half a dozen plausible suggestions, as did most other teams by the sound of it, but our eventual pick of '1 hook on a coathanger' fell on unsympathetic ears.

4)-5) Fortunately none of us had seen either film, so our traditional film quote fail was fractionally less frustrating than normal. We had, however, seen Infernal Affairs, the Hong Kong thriller upon which The Departed is based. (It's pretty good, too.)

6) An embarrassing miss, and one that was entirely my fault for being inexplicably sure of the (wrong) answer. The question obviously just amounts to "which one is below the equator?" and at least now is something I won't forget in a hurry. Nothing like an excruciating quizzing error to imprint something on the memory. (See also: my thinking Sachin Tendulkar once took 10 wickets when I was on University Challenge.) If you need an aide memoire for this, a friend has furnished me with this beauty: "Cancer is near Canada. Like, can-can, geddit?".

7) A good overthink on this one: we all thought Dambusters immediately (which, given the highly publicized anniversary of the mission, we really should have known for sure), but then someone suggested it was the Red Arrows, which seemed to make much more sense. Unfortunately they're merely known as the Royal Air Force Aerobatic Team.

8) Having done this quiz near-weekly for around 9 months now we're finally getting the hang of our quizmaster's particular 'style' of cryptic clue. Here we had all the components: Albion of the Midlands can only mean the area most famous for its football team, and while it doesn't really make sense we could see how 'heaviest' could clue to the common suffix '-ton'. As is often the case, however, we'd never heard of the answer, so putting the parts together proved just beyond us.

9)-10) In an exciting new feature of The Ones That Got Away, I'll now include picture clues we missed. We went with Fox's Glacier Mints for the first (who at least have a polar bear on their logo) and, with the rather tenuous Prince of Wales link, Duchy Originals for the second (not even close).

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Bonus QuestionPredicting Eurovision finalists: would you beat a monkey?

If this isn't the sort of monkey who would
like Eurovision, I don't know what is

For many, Eurovision remains a one-night stand with all the sequins Europe has to offer. The hardcore, meanwhile, know different. Saturday's final will always be the main course of this annual European feast, but the preceding week with its two semi-finals, serves as a delicious starter (complete with the odd really weird canapé that nobody likes).

What's more, with no British interest to worry about, UK fans can sit back and enjoy the delightfully difficult game of guessing who will make it to the main event. After the first semi-final on Tuesday social media (well, the media I socialize with, at any rate) was awash with people proudly declaring how many of the 10 finalists they correctly predicted, with 7 out of 10 widely considered a 'good' performance. But is it really?

On face value 70% does sound pretty respectable: that's a first class degree at most universities, after all. Reframing the problem, however, can change our perspective. Predicting who will go through is equivalent to predicting who will crash out, and with only 16 countries competing on Tuesday, spotting 7 out of 10 qualifiers is the same as getting just 3 of 6 losers correct. All of a sudden things aren't quite so impressive.

Score	Monkey %
10	0.01
9+	0.8
8+	9
7+	39
6+	78
5+	97
4+	100

I thought I'd put my lifetime of statistical training to good use and see how well someone picking at random (a monkey being the traditional example) would do at predicting Eurovision finalists. I've written up the mathematical details over on my stats blog, in case that's your thing, but most of you are probably just interested in the final numbers. The table on the right, then, summarizes how well my hypothetical Eurovision loving monkeys would have fared at predicting Tuesday's success stories. The Monkey % indicates how many monkeys would score at least that well (so you may notice that 100% of monkeys would manage at least 4 out of 10 - the lowest possible score).

Overall, the monkeys would get on surprisingly well. Around 40% of them would, for example, manage that 7 out of 10 many people seemed quite proud of. Even my own performance of 9 out of 10, which I was really rather happy with (despite my copy book being blotted by the Netherlands, of all things), only puts me in the top 1% of monkeys. Not so impressive after all.

Score	Monkey %
10	0.005
9+	0.4
8+	5
7+	27
6+	65
5+	92
4+	99
3+	100

The semi-final fun isn't over, of course, so what would be a good score for Thursdays's second heat? With 17 countries to consider, things are slightly different, and this table summarizes our updated monkey performances.

Unsurprisingly, with an extra country in contention, prediction gets a *lot* harder. As such, I think 7 out of 10, placing you in the top quarter of monkeys, could be considered a reasonable performance. 8 out of 10 would get a statistician interested, while 9 or 10 would suggest you should spend less time reading this and more time at the bookies (or maybe just outdoors). Or you could just sit back, relax, and succumb to Eurosong Fever.

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