The band AC/DC are known colloquially in Australia as 'Acca Dacca'

The attendees
1) The statistician
2) The doctor

The ones that got away
1) The lyrics of 'Born to be Wild' by Steppenwolf feature the first example of which two-word musical term in a rock song?
2) Shinzon is an evil version of which fictional character?
3) What is the name of AC/DC's lead guitarist?
4) Prior to the development of the atomic bomb, in which city was the single largest man-made explosion?
5) Which Benedictine monk's legacy is defined more by booze than by the Bible?
6) Which appropriately named man is said to have revolutionized poker when he turned a $39 satellite tournament place into victory at the World Series of Poker (and $2.5 million) in 2003?
7) Name the song from the lyrics! "It's a cool place and they say it gets colder/ You're bundled up now but wait 'til you get older/But the media men beg to differ"
8) Which foreign beer brand has an anagram which is an activity commonly associated with drinking?

The answers

1) Heavy metal
2) Jean-Luc Picard (from the film Star Trek Nemesis)
3) Angus Young
4) Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
5) Dom Pérignon
6) Chris Moneymaker
7) All Star (by Smash Mouth)
8) Tsingtao (the anagram is 'toasting')

Poll results: 26 votes with the average voter scoring a smidgen over 2/8!

The excuses

1) On retrospect quite gettable, we went with 'hip hop', which I'm going to claim is a demonstration of us thinking outside the box rather than being idiots.
2) We got preoccupied with the name sounding a bit Chinese/Japanese but still had no idea. Eventually we opted for Ryu as it covers quite a number of possible characters (such as Street Fighter, Shenmue and Ninja Gaiden). (In case you're wondering: no, we haven't seen Star Trek Nemesis; Apparently it's terrible.)
3) AC/DC fall into that (admittedly vast) range of 'old' music that we are seemingly doomed to be terrible at forever.
4) A bit of a 'Canada special', methinks, but perhaps surprisingly unknown for something that killed more people than died on the Titanic. We spent a lot of time debating various war scenarios before ultimately plumping for boring old London.
5) We were a bit flummoxed by the phrasing of the question, but it was still a pretty bad miss to forget about the man often (but incorrectly) cited as the inventor of champagne.
6) I knew this name was hiding in my brain somewhere, but I couldn't drag it out. We figured we'd at least play the percentages with 'Luck' not seeming too implausible a surname.
7) For most of the quiz I incorrectly thought this was One Week by Barenaked Ladies before eventually correctly placing the lyrics on a track from the Shrek soundtrack album my 15-year-old self owned. I then promptly mis-remembered the chorus as "Hey now, you're a rock star"...
8) An absolutely brutal one, I thought. The only way into it we could see was that an activity could well end -ING which briefly got me excited about Guinness (first time for everything). Our fairly optimistic answer of "Amstell, an anagram of mallets, which is British slang for croquet which we play every Sunday. Wasted. Honest." was marked with an X and, curiously, a rough drawing of someone playing polo.

The alternative questions
1) Which letter in the name of parody heavy metal band Spinal Tap is written with an umlaut?
2) Give the full name (first name and surname) of Patrick Stewart's character in the X-Men series of films.
3) Named after a French mathematician and physicist, what is the SI unit for current?
4) Nova Scotia of course means New Scotland but which country's mainland used to be known as 'New Holland', the name being first applied in 1644?
5) 'Names for big champagne bottle sizes' are a tedious staple of quizzes everywhere, but what musical instrument - which means 'small' in Italian - refers to a quarter-sized bottle?
6) What jewellery item is awarded to every event winner at the annual World Series of Poker?
7) In 2001 Shrek won the first Oscar for Best Animated Feature. Of the 11 other winners since then, only four were not produced by Pixar Animation Studios. Name one of those four.
8) The Campaign for Real Ale, or CAMRA, have a lot to do with beer but pretty much nothing to do with camera obscuras. But what, roughly, does 'camera obscura' mean?

The answers

1) The n (the i is also tittle-less)
2) Charles Xavier (commonly referred to as simply Professor X)
3) Ampere
4) Australia
5) Piccolo
6) A bracelet
7) Spirited Away, Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Happy Feet, Rango. (And whoever wins this year will become the fifth.)
8) Dark room (feel free to credit yourself for anything along those lines)

Wizzard's festive hit I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday has never reached higher than number 4 on the UK singles chart

After a somewhat extended Christmas break, The Ones That Got Away is back! The doctor and I have safely returned to the Great White North - which has gotten rather more white (and a lot more chilly) in our absence - and with things settling down again it's time to return to our regularly scheduled blogular programming.

A trip to the UK obviously meant lots of quizzing, and what follows are dropped questions from not one, not two, but three nights of trivia funtimes. As you'll see, these form something of a Christmas Special, and what better time of year for one of them than most of the way through January? Only 338 days to go...

The attendees
1) Various, including the statistician, the doctor, the programmer, the misandrist, the saxophonist, and the publisher.

The ones that got away

Question 1!

1) Name the artist from a segment of one of their album covers (pictured).
2) In what year was the movie Home Alone released?
3) Which festive item was created by baker Tom Smith in London in 1847?
4) Which Christmas song is the best selling single of all time?
5) In what year was the first radio broadcast of the monarch's Christmas Message?
6) Very loosely related to Christmas, the predatory animal uncia uncia is better known by what name?
7) Other than Merry Xmas Everybody, how many UK number ones did Slade have?

One each of questions 8-10 contain 'elf', 'santa', or the name of one of Santa's reindeer. (These came from a larger connections round.)

8) Who plays Ahmed Ben Hassan in the 1921 silent movie The Sheik?
9) In what song does the singer request a light blue out of space convertible, a yacht, and the deed to a platinum mine?
10) Which TV series tells the story of 'mile-a-minute Harry' and his shopping empire?

The answers

1) Sheryl Crow
2) 1990
3) The Christmas cracker
4) White Christmas
5) 1932
6) Snow leopard
7) Five
8) Rudolph Valentino
9) Santa Baby
10) Mr Selfridge

Poll results: 16 votes with the average voter scoring just over 2/10!

The excuses

1) Suspecting it would be a Christmas album, a couple of us (myself included) suggested Mariah Carey, but were told that the woman pictured "isn't fat enough". Eventually, though, this was what we put, having failed to identify any other more plausible option.
2) As usually happens with movie questions, but is especially likely with older films, we guessed it was more recent with 1992. A tough one, I think.
3) Frustratingly, one of a couple of questions we'd definitely been asked during Christmas Quiz Week last year (and got wrong then, too). The 'baker' is, I presume, deliberate misdirection to put one in mind of Christmas puddings and mince pies. Having ruled out both of these (the latter because of Oliver Cromwell's apocryphal ban on them, the former because we couldn't believe something so boring would be such a recent invention) we went with the Yule Log, which is what I'm fairly sure we put 12 months previously.
4) The second question I could've sworn we'd been asked before, but nevertheless couldn't remember. Interestingly, along with his version of White Christmas, Bing Crosby also occupies third place with Silent Night (sandwiching Elton John's Princess Diana tribute Candle in the Wind).
5) Based mainly on Marconi, we went rather early on what seems a pretty tricky question. The main way into it seems to be that the first message was part of the introduction of the World Service (which was launched on December 19th that year). It was first televised in 1957, a rather more memorable 25 years later.
6) Everyone said snow leopard, the doctor said polecat (claiming that snow leopard must involve 'panthera' somewhere), everyone still said snow leopard, the doctor vetoed, and I am personally making sure he never forgets it.
7) Yawn. Only interesting (and only really gettable, I think) if the answer is zero.
8) The only thing I have ever known about movies in the 1920s is that 1927 saw the release of talkie The Jazz Singer (because we learnt about it in history at school, where I think all knowledge of 1920s movies should remain).
9) We had considered the correct answer here, but thought the lyrics pointed at a much more modern song than 1953 (which, on retrospect, really doesn't seem to make sense).
10) After considerable thought we eventually hit on Selfridges, but didn't find the magic words 'Mr Selfridge' to get the point.

The alternative questions
1) To which 1997 James Bond film did Cheryl Crow provide the theme song?
2) Spell the full name (forename and surname) of the child star of Home Alone.
3) Try and answer this suspiciously topical Christmas Cracker style joke (courtesy of the Telegraph's '50 best Christmas cracker jokes ever'): What does Miley Cyrus have at Christmas?
4) The 1943 movie This is the Army, based on White Christmas composer Irving Berlin's 1942 musical of the same name, featured which future politician as Corporal Johnny Jones?
5) How many different British monarchs have delivered the Christmas Message since its introduction in 1932?
6) What name is given to the domesticated form of the European polecat?
7) Which is the only band to have held the UK Christmas number one spot twice with the same song, topping the charts in 1975 and 1991?
8) The names for Santa's eight reindeer (notably, not including Rudolph) are often cited as originating from which 1823 poem? (If you don't know the poem's actual name, its first five words form an acceptable alternative title.)
9) In Michael Bublé's 2011 version of 'Santa Baby', he repeatedly refers to Santa not as his 'baby', but as what moderately more masculine word beginning with B?
10) Maths! If Harry Selfridge really did move at a mile a minute, roughly how many times faster would he be travelling than Usain Bolt averaged over his current 100m world record? 1.5 times, 2.5 times, or 3.5 times?

The answers

1) Tomorrow Never Dies
2) Macaulay Culkin
3) Twerky!
4) Ronald Reagan
5) Three: George V, George VI and Elizabeth II (Edward VIII abdicated two weeks before Christmas)
6) Ferret
7) Queen (with Bohemian Rhapsody, which returned to the top spot following Freddie Mercury's death)
8) A Visit from St. Nicholas (also known as 'Twas the Night Before Christmas, or even just The Night Before Christmas)
9) Buddy (he also dabbles with 'pally', which somehow sounds even more ridiculous)
10) 2.6 times. Bolt's current record is 9.58s giving an average speed of 23.35mph (compared with Harry's presumably hypothetical 60mph).

Review: The QuizUp App!

A tiny handful of the topics available.

The Ones That Got Away's jet-setting lifestyle has kept it a bit busy of late, so no weekly pub quiz fails to talk about today. Instead I thought I'd stick up a quick mention/review of one of the reasons I've not had time to write blog posts: QuizUp!

QuizUp is an app (currently exclusive to iOS devices but supposedly coming to Android by the end of the month) on which, you'll be surprised to hear, you can play quizzes. There are of course plenty of apps which let you play quizzes, but this is one of the best I've encountered. It's well implemented, slickly designed, and boasts a colossal number of questions across a truly heroic range of subjects. There are the basics, from simple General Knowledge through Geography, History, Science, etc., to more specific offerings such as Mixed Martial Arts, Woody Allen, and Sex and the City. (Thank heavens for the Oxford comma.) If you fancy mixing a bit of brain training into your quizzing, then you can even dabble in mental arithmetic and word puzzles to keep things fresh.

"If"? Or "When"???

The real selling point, though, is the ease - and speed - with which you can challenge your friends to a test of quizzing mettle. Meanwhile, if your quiz-obsessed lifestyle somehow doesn't leave you time for friends, there are always people from all over the world online to take you on instead. Who knows, maybe there's a hollywood blockbuster waiting to be written about love blossoming from a shared love of Fruits and Vegetables trivia.


The mechanics of the game itself are straightforward. Both players are faced with a series of seven questions, each of which has four possible answers. You get ten seconds to answer and a correct response is worth ten points plus however many seconds you had left (rounded up) on your clock. So if you recognize the flag of the Seychelles in under a second, you'll score the full 20 points, while if you're a bit slower you may drop a point or two that could prove crucial later on. The final question is worth double points, in fairly transparent deference to the quiz show trope of weighting later rounds to minimize the risk of the game being decided early.

Post-game statistics allow for quiet
contemplation (also crying).

I've already alluded to several positives of the app, but on the mechanics of gameplay itself a lovely aspect is that you can see when your opponent 'buzzes in' and whether they've got the question right while you're trying to think. This allows for some mild meta-gaming as you can either put pressure on your opponent with a quick correct answer, or completely eliminate it with a wrong one. A further option is asynchronous play, so if someone isn't online when you want to test their Desperate Housewives knowledge you can do the quiz immediately yourself and they can play the same questions later.

Other more minor features include achievements/challenges (such as attaining a perfect score of 160, or coming back to win after a bad start) and 'titles' you can unlock by levelling up in the various categories. These don't particularly interest me (and the levelling up seems to be a matter of how much time you want to put into the game rather than any sort of ranking system, which is a shame) but are ultimately so peripheral to the game itself that they don't get in the way. The app is constantly updating its repository of questions, too, so if you somehow exhaust the current corpus of questions (spoilers: you won't), new content will likely be just around the corner.

One of my favourite questions in the
history of pretty much everything.

There are, however, some downsides, and for me the biggest one is the fixed game length. Seven multiple choice questions is probably a good number for your typical random game against someone, but among friends I'd really like the option to play much longer rounds. All too often a game is decided by one player's blind guess (a possibility made more likely by the final question's doubled value) which inevitably feels somewhat anticlimactic. A 'custom challenge' mode would, for me, take it from an excellent distraction to a serious quizzing tool. Another limitation is the occasional question whose answer is simply wrong, which is a touch sloppy, but nevertheless forgivable given the game's scale and price.

Otherwise, this is an excellent app, and for the princely sum of £0.00 you really can't go wrong. If you do pick it up, and fancy a challenge, I can be found on there under the name 'Raccoon', while my fellow Only Connect champions exist under the rather more obvious (i.e. boring) Hywel Carver and Jamie Karran. Don't worry if you find yourself addicted though, just call it an investment for future trivia glory (or at least the occasional bit of beer money at your local pub quiz).