The Ones That Got Away: March 2014

Friday 28 March 2014

It's 'just deserts', not 'just desserts' (unless you're naming a cake shop)

Your targets this week:

1+ out of 7: Well done, you beat us!
2+ out of 7: We'd have won with you on our team!

The attendees
1) The statistician
2) The doctor
3) The oceanographer

The ones that got away
1) What is Australia's most southerly state?
2) In what year was penicillin discovered? You can have three years either way.
3) What is the largest desert in the Americas?
4) Which sea lies between China and (the West coast of) South Korea?
5) What is the name of the Austin Powers sidekick played by Elizabeth Hurley? (First name suffices.)
6) In which year did Operation Desert Storm officially end? (The quizmaster went to great pains to emphasize the word 'officially'.)
7) In which city were over 8,000 Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) massacred in July 1995?

The answers

Poll results: 41 votes. 36 of you did better than us and 27 would have helped us win! The average voter scored a smidgen over 2/7.

The excuses

The alternative questions
1) Similar to Washington D.C. in the US, Canberra lies in an area independent of the nation's other states. Commonly abbreviated to ACT, what is the full name of this area?
2) In case you ever need to remember when penicillin was discovered, it might help to know that 1928 also saw suffrage granted to all women over what age in the United Kingdom?
3) Sounding a bit like Patagonia, you probably know it from the title of a Muse song, but where is the (modern-day) region of Cydonia? (As opposed to the ancient city-state on Crete.)
4) North Korea famously neighbours China and, er, South Korea. But with which other country does it share a tiny (17km) border?
5) Though unrelated to the Austin Powers actor, which series of slasher films features the character Michael Myers?
6) The Gulf War was fought in response to Iraq's annexation of which country?
7) Charged with war crimes in connection to the Bosnian War (amongst other conflicts), which former President of Yugoslavia - and the first President of Serbia - died in his cell at The Hague before the conclusion of his four-year trial?

The answers

Thursday 20 March 2014

Pretty Woman saw the highest number of ticket sales ever in the US for a romantic comedy

Your targets this week:

1+ out of 8: Well done, you beat us!
2+ out of 8: We'd have won with you on our team!

The attendees
1) The statistician
2) The doctor
3) The oceanographer
4) The chemical engineer

The ones that got away
1) What cocktail contains 2 parts vodka, 1 part peach schnapps, 2 parts orange juice and 2 parts cranberry juice?
2) What is the (full) name of Julia Roberts' character in Pretty Woman?
3) What is the oldest existing brand of rum in the world?
4) Which country held mock elections in 2007 to prepare its citizens for democracy?
5) Which island nation's government was overthrown in a 1979 revolution?
6) Which political philosopher is associated with the division of government into three branches?
7) What is the youngest legal voting age in the world?
8) Which country was Asia's first democracy?

The answers

Poll results: 22 votes. 14 of you did better than us of which 4 would have helped us win! A tough set this week: the average voter scored 1/8.

The excuses

1) Yes, I know cocktails are important trivia, no, I still can't be bothered to learn them. Although really I shouldn't have to when the doctor has read a lot of a manga about bartending. It turns out our semi-educated guess of Woo Woo was surprisingly close to the mark: that's got an extra two parts cranberry juice instead of the orange.
2) Like most incredibly famous films I should have seen, I haven't seen Pretty Woman. The doctor has though, but still couldn't remember. We spent a while debating that it was an 'old woman name' before unenthusiastically putting 'Elizabeth'.
3) Snigger. Apparently the doctor thought of the correct answer but didn't say it in case he couldn't help laughing like a ten year-old. An eventual toss-up between Bacardi (1862) and Havana Club (1878) were well off Mount Gay's 1703 record.
4) One of those where I felt like I knew the answer, but when it was revealed realized I didn't. Apparently the mock election featured parties called Druk followed by a colour, with Druk meaning 'thunder dragon' (as depicted on Bhutan's truly bodacious flag). I'm not ashamed to admit that if I had the option to put an X next to 'Liberal Thunder Dragon Democrats' I might be more likely to sort out my postal vote.
5) I'd never heard of this, which means I'm going to comfort myself with the idea that it's a bit of North American geographical bias.
6) A question as hard as the answer is to spell, or at least certainly one that wouldn't be out of place on University Challenge. I'm not at all qualified to comment on political philosophy, but the Wikipedia page on separation of powers is worth a read.
7) A bit of overthink here. 16 seemed too obvious (so we figured somewhere would have it lower) but in fact has only been adopted by a relatively small number of countries.
8) One of those questions where you strongly suspect the answer isn't as simple as the quizmaster would have you believe. I am precisely as qualified to comment on democracy in the Philippines as I am political philosophy, but the map of 'electoral democracies' here is pretty eye-opening.

The alternative questions
1) Which The Simpsons character's first (and only) album was titled Sax on the Beach?
2) Who played Vyvyan Basterd in the BBC's cult classic The Young Ones?
3) Which band, who to my surprise are apparently still together, reached number 5 in the UK Singles Chart in 2003 with the song Gay Bar?
4) According to the song by Peter, Paul and Mary, in what land did Puff the Magic Dragon live?
5) Although now often flavoured with blackcurrant, grenadine was originally made using the juice of which fruit?
6) Pictured below are three seals representing one individual, or group, from each of the executive, judicial and legislative branches of the United States government (but, in true University Challenge style helpful wording has been removed). You don't need to identify which is which, but can you name all three?

Question 6

7) To within 5% (above or below), what was the turnout at the 2010 UK General Election? As a clue, the Conservative Party received votes from a little over 23% of those eligible to do so.
8) The Philippines is the seventh most populated country in Asia, and the 12th most populated country in the world. Russia (most of whose population lives West of the Urals) is one of the five non-Asian countries that beat it; name three of the other four.

The answers

Thursday 13 March 2014

There are approximately 1.25 people per square mile in Alaska

Question 6

1) What did the 'Two Plus Four Agreement' concern?
2) In what year was the Sino-Indian War?
3) What was the capital of Portugal between 1808 and 1821?
4) How much (in US dollars) did the USA pay Russia for Alaska in 1867?
5) In the context of stock markets, in which year did Black Monday take place?
6) Which country previously used this flag (pictured)?
For questions 7 and 8, find two words of the given length that create a 'chain' from the first to the last. For example, if the puzzle read

PLAYING

_ _ _ _ _

MAT

Then the first missing word could be 'FIELD' and the next 'MOUSE' to create the chain PLAYING FIELD, FIELD MOUSE, MOUSE MAT. You need both for the point. Got it? Good. (Now imagine a quizmaster trying to explain this in the final round of the night...)
7)

FLANK

_ _ _ _ _

MUSIC

BABY

_ _ _ _ _

_ _ _ _ _ _ _

NIGHT

The answers

Poll results: 30 votes. 22 of you did better than us of which 13 would have helped us win! The average voter scored 1.4/8.

The excuses

1) This rang the very faintest of bells with me, but our American member suggested it might have been something to do with Canada acquiring land (perhaps two territories and four provinces at one point) which was the most plausible thing we could come up with. On retrospect one of those things that is falls right into the historical blind spot for our generation, being too recent to have studied in school, but not in living memory.
2) I was pretty sure this was somewhere between 1950 and 1970, but a teammate suggested it was much older. A wild guess of 1863 put us almost exactly 100 years out, which is kinda fun.
3) Oof. An absolute corker of a trivia chestnut and it completely passed me by. I've definitely heard this one before but it didn't even cross my mind.
4) Perhaps this seems fairer to a North American crowd, but with an American and a Canadian in our quartet we were still completely lost.
5) I immediately wrote down the Wall Street Crash year 1929 but was fairly confidently corrected by a teammate as that being Black Tuesday, not Monday. Instead he mooted a more recent date, before eventually landing on 2008 which, it turns out, is one of the few years not to have some sort of Black Monday.
6) Horrible miss from my perspective given how much time I've spent reading about flags (including historical ones). After discussing the colours and the presence of the Union Jack we eventually settled on India, with me mis-remembering an old University Challenge 'mistake' about the East India Company's flag and confusing it with the Dutch counterpart (because of the orange). In case you're wondering, the flags in the middle represent the former British colonies of Cape of Good Hope and Natal.
7-8) With these questions alongside similar puzzles in a regular round (rather than, as one might expect in a British quiz, on a picture sheet) time pressure played a big part, but I was still disappointed given my interest and experience in word games. I'll admit that 'flank steak' is not a phrase I remember encountering, while 'baby grand' seems tough to pull out of nowhere, but I don't doubt some of you will have spotted these immediately.

The alternative questions
1) A boring, but essential piece of trivia: what was the capital city of West Germany?
2) Which two countries are bordered only by India and China?
3) Rio de Janeiro's Christ the Redeemer statue was considered the largest Art Deco statue in the world until 2010, when Christ the King was built in which European country?

Question 4

4) The flag of Alaska (pictured), designed by 13-year-old Benny Benson for a 1927 competition, features the North Star and which asterism in the constellation Ursa Major?
5) While The Wolf of Wall Street didn't pick up the Best Picture award at this years Oscars, it did mark the seventh film starring Leonardo DiCaprio to be nominated for the prize. Name three of the others.
6) The flag of South Africa was previously notable as the only national flag with six colours (ignoring those with fiddly little crests and whatnot that always spoil these sorts of questions). But since 2011 which other African country also has a flag with (approximately) the same six colours?
7) House music traces its origins to which American city, also notable for its Willis Tower (though you may know it by another name)?
8) Another trivia classic to finish: how many keys on a standard grand piano? (And if that's too easy, you can nab a bonus point if you can tell me how many of them are white.)

The answers

Friday 7 March 2014

Ones That Got Away First Anniversary(ish) Mega Quiz Spectacular!

It's (just over) a year since the birth of The Ones That Got Away, and what a year it's been! Since I first decided to share my regular pub quiz failings with the Internet I've moved to Canada, won a series of Only Connect, and written lots (and lots) of questions. To mark the occasion regular reader and occasional team-mate 'the programmer' has looked back over 12 months of pub quiz failure and selected 50 questions that he thought stood out. There's a mixture of Ones That Got Away - those factoids that evaded our combined intellects - and my own alternate questions (which I started writing because so many of the ones we got wrong were bloody awful), so it's very much a mixed bag, but a fun mixed bag.

The quiz is split very roughly into four rounds, with answers after each to save you some valuable scrolling. But as interesting as it is to discuss the merits of preserving one's scroll wheel, let's get on with the quiz!

The programmer's preamble

Reading and now re-reading the entire archive of Ones That Got Away quickly lead me to one conclusion: there are a lot of bad questions out there. At least half of all the questions the teams missed in the last year were badly phrased, ill-defined, boring, arcane, or all of the above. Nevertheless, sorting the occasional grains of wheat from the oceans of chaff proved quite rewarding. I've assembled this list of my favourites from both the main questions and the famous bonus questions, although I had to be stricter with the latter because their general standard was much higher. Any list like this is subjective, but hopefully my justifications will be at least a bit illuminating.

Round 1: mass debate stimulators

I particularly enjoy questions which stimulate good debates within a team as people home in on the right answer. Here are a few likely to have that effect.

1) The Great Seal of the United States features an eagle holding an olive branch in its right talon, and 13 of what in its left?
2) Familiar to any bookworm, since 2007 how many digits are there in an ISBN (that is, an International Standard Book Number)?
3) Which cigarette brand sponsored the World Snooker Championship from 1976 until 2005 before advertising legislation halted the practice?
4) Which two countries sit either side of Ireland in the UN General Assembly? (You need both for the point.)
5) In which city is Dirty Harry set?
6) Name the four UK number ones from the 1980s with the word 'Town' in the title. (A whole quarter of a point for each.)
7) In which country is the northernmost point of South America?
8) What links The Great Escape and the winner of the 1999 Turner Prize?
9) Since Arthur Balfour's election in 1902 there have been 21 different Prime Ministers. Of these, just two had surnames in the second half of the alphabet (that is, beginning with N-Z) - who? (You need both for the point.)
10) How many US States begin with the same letter as their capital?
11) 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?
12) What is the most northerly station on the London Underground network?
13) What word is spelled Tungsten Indium Darmstadtium Uranium Rutherfordium Erbium?

Round 1 answers

Round 2: Things that make you go hmmm

It has been said that a quiz question should make you go "ooh, I know that" or "ooh, I didn't know that". Here are a few that fit the latter for me.

14) Ciabatta bread is named after which type of footwear?
15) In Futurama, what is Bender's full name?
16) What word derives from the Greek for 'sharp dull'?
17) Which god gave Midas the power to turn things into gold?
18) In January 1953 over 70% of US television sets were tuned in to watch Lucille Ball give birth in which TV show?
19) What does John Major only have one of when most men have two?
20) According to the novel, which city has 'A room with a view'?
21) What German football team are owned by the company that discovered asiprin and heroin?
22) To what does the 500 in Indy 500 refer?
23) Which African city's name means 'new flower'?

Round 2 answers

Round 3: OTGA's miscellany

And here are a few others which struck a miscellaneous chord with me.

24) Robert Redford founded which international film festival in 1978, which has been held annually in Utah ever since?
25) Malbec is a variety of which fruit?
26) Were sea levels to rise due to global warming, which country in the Indian Ocean is expected to be the first to be completely submerged?
27) Which US State is known as the Beef State?
28) What is the principal psychoactive constituent of marijuana? (Its common three letter abbreviation is enough for the point.)
29) What is the name of Channel 4's longest running sitcom? Airing during the 90s, it was set in a Peckham hairdresser.
30) Cardiff stands on which river?
31) What was the currency of the Netherlands prior to the Euro?
32) Which country produces 'blue mountain' coffee, one of the most expensive coffees in the world?

Question 33

33) Suffolk only boasts one professional football team, whose (slightly modified) badge is pictured. Can you name them?
34) Which 1972 novel was Dahl's sequel to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory?
35) Which country was formally known as British Honduras?
36) Which novel opens with the sentence "You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings."?
37) Identify the film from its tagline: "You won't believe your eye".
38) Which Dickens novel features a malicious moneylender named Quilp?
39) In what year did the Wright brothers take their first flight?
40) While currency questions are boring, it is nevertheless vital to know the ones that sound a tiny bit rude. If you wanted to spend dongs and colons, then, which two countries should you visit? (Half a point each.)
41) What is the term for animal pancreas when served as food?
42) What fruit comes from a blackthorn?
43) Which musical is based on the life of a survivor of the Titanic?

Round 3 answers

Round 4: So bad it's funny. And bad.

And finally, there's a certain kind of question that's so bad it becomes funny. This could easily have been the largest section, so these are just a few.

44) Identify the London station from this cryptic clue: "Bacon or pastries upon high."
45) Is John McEnroe left- or right-handed?
46) Brain teaser: What does an island and the letter T have in common?
47) Swansea City were formerly known as Swansea what? Town, Miners, Academicals or Athletics?
48) What was Kevin Keegan's birth name?
49) Meadow, Sheep's Fescue, and Quaking are all types of what plant?
50) Identify the London station from this cryptic clue: "Some grassy fields in a line are doomed to die by fingers on my hand".

Round 4 answers

Phew. Hope that wasn't too much of a slog. No poll to show off how you did this week, but feel free to Tweet at me @statacake if you can't fight those sharing urges. The Ones That Got Away will be back to normal next Friday!

Sunday 2 March 2014

Review: Revenge of the Egghead

The Ones That Got Away is changing schedule! The regular weekly review of questions we've missed in pub quizzes will now be appearing on Fridays - starting with a bumper One Year Anniversary Special later this week. Adjust your watches accordingly!

Like all cool dudes, little in life excites me more than a new quiz show, and few have been more hotly anticipated than Revenge of the Egghead, 12 Yard's latest BBC2 offering. Self-styled 'bad boy' of British quizzing CJ de Mooi takes on five normal folk in a slightly weird, but ultimately enjoyable, teatime trivia test.

The basics

Still waiting for that quiz-based Bond villain.

It's a story of the ages. Boy meets quiz, boy loses quiz, boy loses rag, boy becomes known as 'boy who loses quizzes and rags', boy becomes Egghead, boy stops being an Egghead, boy gets own quiz show (and becomes Egghead again). You know how it goes.

A team of five contestants tackle questions in turn to build up a cash pot with each correct answer putting £200 in the kitty. If someone gets one wrong and CJ knows the answer he can hit his Big Red Button and the unlucky soul is put on the 'hot spot' where a trickier (albeit multiple choice) question threatens to cost them a life. Lose two lives and it's bus fare home o'clock.

After a semi-arbitrary amount of time (usually about 15 minutes) the surviving contestants combine their brains - and their remaining lives - to take on the Egghead for the money. Here, CJ gets 10 questions with which to set a target for the challengers to beat. All they have to do is outscore him before incorrect answers cost them their pooled lives and whatever they've banked is shared between them. Lose, and all they get is a nicely hammed up smirk.

The good

The fundamentals, then, are fairly solid. Questions are of a good difficulty and largely fast-paced, with relatively little of the 'I think it's London because it's not another city and because that's the answer' banality that plagues many a modern quiz show. Even the hot spot element, which has considerable potential for tedious, time-wasting kerfuffle, is incorporated fairly seamlessly. Host Jeremy Vine is, well, Jeremy Vine, so at least you know where you are (even if he often seems unsure himself).

The not-so-good

The show is apparently set in de Mooi's
(very shiny) alien spaceship.

Inevitably, of course, parallels have been drawn with ITV's The Chase, with many decrying Revenge of the Egghead as a pale imitation of what is now an international format. While allegations of plagiarism seem a touch misguided (Eggheads, after all, is the granddad of the 'professional quizzer' genre), I do think it will struggle to win over fans of the Beast et al. given its lower-stakes and lower-tension gameplay. The jackpots, for example, are tiny by comparison, with those who make it to the money round - which can never compete with the frantic drama of a Final Chase - typically playing for under £1,000 each.

It is tough, however, to see a way out of what are clearly some quite tight financial constraints. A basic difficulty is that unlike some similarly budgeted shows (such as Eggheads and Pointless) we're not being presented with a team per se, but a group of strangers. If a couple win £1,000 on Pointless you can at least pretend they go off and spend the money together, whereas here you know they're all just thinking about their (fairly small) share. The tactic of rolling over unwon money, meanwhile, doesn't sit with the central idea of a team building a jackpot. Instead, then, you're looking for an in-game mechanic which really narrows down the options. Perhaps if the team could 'buy' money with remaining lives (or as a reward for beating CJ with lives to spare) they could bump up the total on offer without too much extra risk, but it's obviously hard to judge from an outsider's perspective.

CJ looking bored. Or possibly sleepy.

I can't help suspect that the show hopes the (pantomine) villainous form of CJ will distract viewers from the rather meagre winnings on offer, but for me that whole charade is the only real weakness of the programme. At it's most basic is the question everyone has been asking: just what is the Egghead getting revenge for? Why is he so desperate to take these common-or-garden quizzers down a peg or two? Just what does he find so interesting about his fingernails? For a quiz, it leaves a lot of questions unanswered.

It doesn't help that CJ hasn't really grown into his role yet. He's quite good at looking bored, and rolling his eyes, and looking bored again, but otherwise it's a fairly obvious act which nobody is truly buying. By comparison, The Chasers are much less one-dimensional, often tailoring their attitude to individual contestants and the general state of a game. CJ is afforded neither the time nor the opportunity to establish anything near that level of personalization, leaving us instead to wonder why this rather thin man is so angry with Dave from Stevenage and Louise from Manchester.

The conclusion

These are, however, the mere window-dressings of what is still a perfectly watchable show. From a quizzer's perspective I care far more about the quality - and quantity - of questions than whether CJ can pull off the tricky single-raised-eyebrow-smirk combo, and on the former it performs better than most. The format itself is interesting and, although its implementation doesn't do anything for me, I don't doubt there are plenty who boo and cheer in all the right places. I do wonder, however, whether you could replace CJ with another (carefully chosen) contestant also fighting for some cash and do away with the whole 'revenge' angle altogether. While a good quizzer, CJ is not a particularly great one, and I suspect enough non-professional quizzers of a similar calibre could be found to fill a series this way (although admittedly without CJ's personality the host would need to pick up a lot of slack).

Still, Revenge of the Egghead will be part of my regularly scheduled programming for the time being, and for the questions alone I'd recommend it to most moderate-level quizzers. I'm also keeping an eye out for the appearance one Lisa Thiel who, if you haven't heard, is the latest addition to the regular cast of Eggheads. Apparently her performance against CJ helped her get that particular gig, so I'm anticipating fireworks.