Each week, quiz obsessives and Only Connect champions
Jamie Karran (@NoDrNo) and Michael Wallace (@statacake) take on the pub quizzes of the world.
Find out every Friday if you could have helped with the questions they got wrong.
Sunday 19 January 2014
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 thanMerry 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.
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).
In his defence, there is some controversy over whether the snow leopard should be in its own genus or whether it should be stuck in Panthera with the rest of the big cats.
Interesting! (Although he hasn't tried that excuse yet.)
Also, belated well done for last week's UC - if it weren't enough fun to see my alma mater triumph (in some style, at that), it was extra special fun to see the evil Manchester lose >:D
Obviously it only goes so far as an excuse, because tautonyms are awesome and therefore Uncia uncia is preferable by default. But still.
And thanks. :D Manchester were actually quite nice and I found it very hard to remember that they were pure evil. But then they told us that UCL had lost last year's final and all was well.
In his defence, there is some controversy over whether the snow leopard should be in its own genus or whether it should be stuck in Panthera with the rest of the big cats.
ReplyDeleteInteresting! (Although he hasn't tried that excuse yet.)
DeleteAlso, belated well done for last week's UC - if it weren't enough fun to see my alma mater triumph (in some style, at that), it was extra special fun to see the evil Manchester lose >:D
Obviously it only goes so far as an excuse, because tautonyms are awesome and therefore Uncia uncia is preferable by default. But still.
DeleteAnd thanks. :D Manchester were actually quite nice and I found it very hard to remember that they were pure evil. But then they told us that UCL had lost last year's final and all was well.