02/04/13: The word 'bouillabaisse' comes from a compound of 'to boil' and 'to simmer'

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

The ones that got away
1) In what year was The Shawshank Redemption released?
2) In which county is Lord's cricket ground?
3) Which singer's real name is Stuart Goddard?
4) Which country was known to the Romans as Lusitania?
5) Which musical is based on the life of a survivor of the Titanic?
6) Bouillabaisse is a fish stew originating from which vibrant French port city?

The answers

1) 1994
2) Middlesex
3) Adam Ant
4) Portugal
5) The Unsinkable Molly Brown
6) Marseilles

The excuses
1) 'When was this released?' questions are always a pain, but one good strategy is to know the years for a few films - perhaps one for each decade - and work from them as reference points. Unfortunately, the only example I can ever reliably remember is The Lion King (also released in 1994), which is not spectacularly useful in this regard. Obligatory fun fact: the film is based on a novella by Stephen King. (The Shawshank Redemption, I mean, not the Lion King.)
2) A deadly (for us) cocktail of cricket and British geography. We knew it was somewhere south-ish, so went with Kent. It turns out that the 'correct' answer wasn't even up to scratch anyway: while Middlesex County Cricket Club play at Lord's, Middlesex as a county was abolished in 1965. Along with much of the former county, Lord's itself lies in Greater London.
3) Celebrity's real names are another goldmine if you ever want to set us an impossible quiz. That said, we were all rather confident with our answer of Sting, whose real name bears almost no resemblance to that in the question.
4) A 50-50 gone bad, with the Iberian peninsula at our disposal we went with Spain.
5) This won the prize for 'most time wasted on a question we were never going to get right' of the evening. Theories ranged from South Pacific ("it definitely had something to do with boats"), to Raise the Titanic ("it definitely had something to do with the Titanic"), and even The Sound of Music ("maybe the Nazis were actually just a metaphor for icebergs?").
6) My first thought on hearing 'vibrant French port' was, frustratingly, the correct answer. Unfortunately, none of us were even sure it was a port (I was mainly going from the 'vibrant' part, admittedly), so we went with Nice, which did not work out nicely for us (geddit???). (Apparently there is some debate over whether this is where the biscuits get their name.)

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