The attendees
1) The statistician
2) The doctor
3) The programmer
4) The misandrist
The ones that got away
1) In Ireland, what is a 'boreen'?
2) Ditloid: 37 P O W S
3) Identify the film from this quote: "What business is it of yours where I come from, friendo?"
4) In science, liquefaction is the process of turning what into a liquid?
5) Which god gave Midas the power to turn things into gold?
6) Identify the London station from this cryptic clue: "The grave's stony block down the country road"
7) Identify the London station from this cryptic clue: "A green space next to a forest"
The answers
The excuses
1) I'm starting to wonder if we are destined to never answer a question about Ireland correctly. Usually it's counties (of which, thanks to University Challenge, I now know there are the same number as cantons of Switzerland and bones in the foot), or occasionally rugby, but this week it was 'Irish words you should have heard of'. We felt a touch hard done-by at the time, but it does feature on this Wikipedia page, so fair play.
2) Galling. Despite this particular 37 being a Very Important Number in trivia-land, none of us remembered it. We had a stab with "37 platforms on Waterloo Station", knowing that it has the most platforms of any UK station. Unfortunately, it turns out that number is still only 19.
3) Our obligatory film quote fail, mitigated at least slightly by the fact only one of us had actually seen it.
4) One of those questions that probably shouldn't have made it into a quiz. We initially had the 'correct' answer, but after asking for the question to be repeated were informed that it required a "quite specific" answer, so went for the process of dead bodies turning into liquid (thanks to one of our team being a fan of CSI) which is arguably a valid answer. It seems, however, that it's quite a general term, but serves as a good illustration of how careful you need to be if you want to set questions about scientific/technical terminology.
5) A bad miss. We considered the correct answer, but it didn't ring any bells so went with the damage limitation play of Zeus. Still, it's a good excuse to remind ourselves of some of the myths about King Midas, which are great fun (particularly his apparently mental barber).
6-7) Another poor week for crypitc Tube stations. We had something of a near miss with Tombstone Lane for the first, before going with the 'we know it's wrong but at least it's a real station' Green Park for the second.
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