The blue, white and orange tricolour of New York City reflects its Dutch history (and its former name of New Amsterdam)

The team name: The Raton Lovers (reception: suspiciously good for a French-for-raccoon based pun)

The attendees
1) The statistician
2) The doctor

The ones that got away
1) Which actor offered Demi Moore one million dollars to sleep with her in the 1993 film Indecent Proposal?
2) Kathmandu is the capital of which country?
3) In the name of the American broadcast network, what do the letters CBS stand for?
4) Name the three major airports serving New York City
5) From which country did Tunisia gain independence in 1956?

The answers

1) Robert Redford
2) Nepal
3) Columbia Broadcasting System
4) JFK, Newark Liberty and La Guardia
5) France

Poll results: 16 votes with 7 scoring 4/5, 4 scoring 3/5, 4 scoring 2/5, and 1 scoring 1/5. No-one joined us on zero :(

The average voter scored 3-and-a-bit/5!

The excuses

1) Movie questions are seldom our thing, with most of our combined knowledge on the subject coming from what the doctor picks up from seeing posters on the Tube (or the Metro as it's known over here). Not one we've seen, and nor is it one we're likey to now I've read its synopsis on Wikipedia.
2) Oops. Probably my worst miss in months, I got preoccupied thinking about Timbuktu and put down Mali.
3) A question I knew I had heard (and got wrong) before, but still couldn't quite pull it off. I managed to remember the C stood for Columbia, but completely forgot that the S was also something weird, sticking down 'Service' without very much thought.
4) Technically this one shouldn't be here, as on researching this post I discovered that the QM got it slightly wrong on the night, giving the answer 'Liberty' instead of 'Newark Liberty'. We had Newark but alas weren't sure enough to question it.
5) We came up with three different options for three different reasons. Our first thought was Turkey because of the similarities between the Tunisian and Turkish flags, but 1956 seemed rather late for the Ottoman Empire so we ruled that out. (The flag similarities aren't a coincidence; France took over Tunisia from the Ottoman Empire in the late 19th Century.) This left us a toss-up between France (who I knew had lost Algeria around a similar time) and Italy (primarily on geographical grounds). Obviously we plumped for the wrong one, and then the very next day I learnt that one of my (Francophone) colleagues was from Tunisia. Typical.

The alternative questions
1) Robert Redford founded which international film festival in 1978, which has been held annually in Utah ever since?
2) Nepal shares its borders only with India and China, a property shared by which other country?
3) Who hosts CBS's Late Show, a late night chat show that has been running since 1993?
4) Before being renamed in honour of the late president in 1963, what name - shared by a Scottish indie rock band - was previously used to refer to JFK airport?
5) Along with Tunisia and Turkey, six other UN member states have national flags featuring a crescent and (single) star symbol. Name four of them.

The answers

1) The Sundance Film Festival
2) Bhutan
3) David Letterman
4) Idlewild
5) Algeria, Azerbaijan, Libya, Malaysia, Mauritania, Pakistan

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