Sunday, 23 June 2013

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


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

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