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

1) Tasmania
2) 1928 (so 1925-1931 gets you the point)
3) The Patagonian Desert
4) The Yellow Sea
5) Vanessa Kensington
6) 1995
7) Srebrenica

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

1) A horrible start. I immediately thought Tasmania, but when the quizmaster followed up the question with "at least everyone will get one question right tonight" I began to second-guess myself. For some reason I thought Canadians would be more likely to guess New South Wales than Tasmania, and so spent a while convincing myself that Tasmania must somehow not be a state. (And even then, Victoria is more southerly than New South Wales, so...) Yet another lesson in quiz-ville: learn your Australian geography!
2) One of those questions where it would really help to have someone with a degree in history of medicine on the team. Oh wait. We were miles out, with the whole team thinking the 50s sounded 'about right'.
3) First Australian states, now extreme deserts, it was turning into a night of the sort of trivia we really should know. All we could drag up (from a previous quiz, in fact) was that the driest desert in the world was the Atacama.
4) A really tricky one, I think. I suggested the Sea of Japan, while the oceanographer thought it was the East China Sea. Both of these, however, lie to the east of the Korean peninsula.
5) Frustratingly, the doctor could remember Felicity Shagwell (Austin's sidekick from the second movie) and Alotta Fagina (a baddie from the first), but in a classic "I know I know it" frustration he couldn't quite find the correct answer in time.
6) We couldn't remember if the Gulf War ended in 1991 or 1992 (erroneously going for the latter in the end), but the emphasis on 'officially' made us wonder if we'd be better off just guessing a random year much later. It's a moderately fun fact, but this felt a touch like a trick question.
7) A name that rang a bell when we heard it, but all we could guess was Sarajevo (Bosnia's capital).

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

1) Australian Capital Territory
2) 21 years (the same as men at the time - the voting age was lowered to 18 in 1969)
3) Mars
4) Russia
5) Halloween
6) Kuwait
7) Slobodan Milošević

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