29/07/13: Off holiday!

The preamble

We have now successfully moved to Canda, home of maple syrup, moose and (eventually, I'm told) snow. They also have quizzes, although not as many as old blighty. There will be a Bonus Question about what Canadian quizzing is like in due course but for now I thought it was time to get back in the saddle of missed questions. Here, then, are the ones that got away from our first Canadian quiz.

The attendees
1) The statistician
2) The (retired) doctor

The ones that got away
1) What does UNESCO stand for?
2) Who co-founded Microsoft with Bill Gates?
3) In which year was the first Godfather movie released?
4) To which order did Mother Teresa belong?
5) How many US States begin with the same letter as their capital?
6) In which year did Elvis Presley die?
7) Which is the largest desert in the world?
8) Which country established the first permanent 'dark-sky preserve' - an area kept free of artificial light to promote astronomy?
9) In the TV series Dallas, who shot JR?

The answers

1) The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization
2) Paul Allen
3) 1972
4) Sisters of Loreto
5) Four (Dover, Delaware; Honolulu, Hawaii; Indianapolis, Indiana; Oklahoma City, Oklahoma)
6) 1977
7) The Antarctic Desert
8) Canada
9) Kristin Shepherd

Poll results! 7 votes with 1 scoring 6/9, 1 scoring 4/9, 2 scoring 3/9, 2 scoring 1/9 and 1 scoring 0/9.

The average voter scored 2.5 out of 9!

The excuses
1) The first of many trivia chestnuts that you will see from our Canadian quizzing caper. A question I'm pretty sure we've missed before (but can't seem to find it in this blog's archives) and certainly an inauspicious start. We made the same mistake I think we've made more than once before of thinking the E stood for 'environmental'.
2) Another one we really should have known (but equally would never have got with a week to think about it). We went straight for CEO Steve Ballmer, largely (in)famous for this particularly amusing video.
3) Another classic bit of trivia (although I've never understood the expectation that quizzers would know, let alone care, what year movies came out). I think we were asked something relating to this twice in one week vaguely recently in the UK, so another frustrating miss. Especially as we were one year out with 1973.
4) This one seemed bizarrely hard compared to the other questions we were getting wrong, but still perfectly fair game from a trivia perspective, I think.
5) The standard list question 'strategy' of "work out as many as you can and then add one for the one you've probably missed" cost us here; we identified the four and assumed we'd missed one. Fun question, though.
6) Yet another chestnut. I'm pretty sure we've been asked this on a UK quiz before but many, many years ago.
7) Oops. Worst miss of the night. It has been a long time since a QM has asked a question about deserts without prefacing it with "excluding the Antarctic/Arctic" so I really should have noticed the lack of this qualifier here. We of course went for the Sahara, the largest (non-ice) desert.
8) A first example of how quizzing abroad affects one's judgment. Had we been playing in any other country I would have guessed Canada, but assumed that were that correct it would seem a pretty strange/easy question to ask so went for somewhere in Scandinavia.
9) The fifth (and mercifully final) question of the night where we got it wrong despite having been asked it at previous quizzes. For some reason I'd got it into my head that no-one shot JR and it was all a dream, but it seems that was an entirely different Dallas storyline (see the 'live-action TV' section here).

The alternative questions
1) Which country has the most UNESCO World Heritage sites, with 49?
2) Which two words are abbreviated to form the name Microsoft?
3) Marlon Brando (awarded the Best Actor Oscar) and Al Pacino (nominated for Best Supporting Actor Oscar) both refused to attend that year's Academy Awards ceremony. One point for each actor's reason for not attending.
4) In what modern day country was Mother Teresa born?
5) How many US State capitals have hosted the Olympics (summer or winter)?
6) Who achieved a UK number one single with a remix of Presley's 1968 A Little Less Conversation in 2002?
7) What name was given to a 169,000 square mile section of Antarctica by the British government in December 2012?
8) According to a 2013 study, which city had the worst light pollution in the world?
9) Which UK soap opera's 2001-2003 revival ended with the revelation that the entire series had been the dream of a supermarket worker?

The answers

1) Italy (China is second with 45, Spain third with 44)
2) Microcomputer and software
3) Brando turned down the Oscar in protest at the depiction of native Americans in Hollywood and television. Pacino claimed he had more screen time than Brando and so should have received a Best Actor nomination.
4) Republic of Macedeonia. She is usually described as Albanian, but was born in Skopje when it was part of the Ottoman Empire, but which is now the Macedonian capital. Some cursory Wikipediaing suggests that 'Albanian' can refer both to the country as well as an ethnic group, a fact to which I was previously ignorant.
5) Two: Atlanta (Georgia, summer 1996) and Salt Lake City (Utah, winter 2002).
6) JXL
7) Queen Elizabeth Land (and I'd be pretty strict on the answer here)
8) Hong Kong
9) Crossroads