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)

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