Marlon Brando's real name is Marlon Brando

Your targets this week:

1+ out of 9: Well done, you beat us!
5+ out of 9: We'd have won with you on our team!

The attendees
1) The statistician
2) The doctor

The ones that got away

Question 1

1) Name the young leader pictured.
2) In which country would you be if you were watching the white bearded wilderbeest in Serengeti National Park?
3) Which of these is associated with Teddy Roosevelt's legacy? United Nations, Medicaid, Panama Canal, Alaska Purchase, Creation of Israel, Atomic Bomb
4) Which of these actors had a breakout role in the TV series Rawhide? William Shatner, David Hasselhoff, Clint Eastwood, John Wayne, Anthony Hopkins, James Garner
5) At which of these events is the presence of the Greek God Hymenaeus required for good luck? Wars, Sacrifices, Weddings, Births, Harvests, Funerals
6) Which of these was Marlon Brando's final completed film? The Delta Force, The Score, The Insider, The Legend of Bagger Vance, The Shootist, The Misfits

Question 9

7) Which of these female world leaders was the first to come to power? Margaret Thatcher, Angela Merkel, Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi, Corazon Aquino, Benazir Bhutto
8) Which Caribbean nation is the only country to have been founded following a successful slave revolt?
9) Name the artist behind the work pictured.

The answers

1) Saddam Hussein
2) Tanzania
3) Panama Canal
4) Clint Eastwood
5) Weddings
6) The Score (2000). A reader on Twitter pointed out to me that most of the options was someone's last film: Lee Marvin in Delta Force, Jack Lemmon in Bagger Vance, John Wayne in The Shootist, and Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe in The Misfits.
7) Indira Gandhi (1966). The others were: Meir (1969), Thatcher (1979) Aquino (1986), Bhutto (1988), Merkel (2005)
8) Haiti
9) Matisse (The Dance)

Poll results: 38 votes. 36 of you did better than us of which 11 would have helped us win! The average voter scored 3.4/9.

The excuses

1) Looking for an Arabic world leader, we knew we were in shaky territory, going for Yasser Arafat (who, Wikipedia tells me, is not to be confused with a Pakistani cricketer).
2) "Where's the Serengeti?" "Um...Africa?" "Helpful." "Actually, isn't that where the Lion King is set" "Oh yeah, so it's like, Kenya or Tanzania-ish?" "Let's put Kenya." (In our defence, while the Serengeti National Park is in Tanzania, the Serengeti itself does stretch into Kenya.)
3) The cardinal sin here - we forgot to answer. Almost immediately we narrowed it down to the Panama Canal, only for me to get a niggling idea about it maybe possibly being Medicaid, even though you'd think that was a super recent thing. After a bit of discussion we decided I was being silly and we should go with our initial answer, and then I forgot to actually tick the box. Sad times.
4) The doctor thought this rang a bell in the Shatner department. I had no idea as it involved movies. On retrospect it's perhaps the most 'obvious' one to guess if (as was clearly the case with us) you had no idea.
5) The 'hymen' stem pointed us towards weddings or births, but the doctor (correctly) pointed out that Hera is the goddess of marriage. An irritating miss.
6) The doctor told me that Marlon Brando played the main guy in The Legend of Bagger Vance. I've only just found out that this was supposed to be a joke.
7) One of the reasons I've never got on with multiple choice is because if you eliminate some, but not all, of the options you can still be outscored by someone guessing at random. Here we narrowed it down to Meir and Gandhi, but went the wrong way.
8) Good fact this, we were nowhere, eventually sticking down Grenada as our new 'go-to' Caribbean nation.
9) Poor work from the doctor here who very quickly and fairly confidently told me it was Picasso. I really wasn't convinced, but couldn't offer an alternative. This particular picture was on a poster at Archway Tube station for a while when I lived there, so it was horribly frustrating to not remember the answer.

The alternative questions
1) The Iraq War started on the 20th of March of which year? (If you're not sure, there's a clue in the question!)
2) The opening of the Lion King features the song Circle of Life, beginning with the words "Nants ingonyama bagithi Baba" meaning "Here comes a lion, Father". In what language?
3) 'Must-know' trivia time: which country do Panama hats originate from? It's not Panama - they took that name from their historical point of international sale.
4) David Hasselhoff's cultural icon status was largely founded on roles in Knight Rider and Baywatch - give the full name of his character in either.
5) In Greek mythology who is Hera's mother? Her name is shared with a large flightless South American bird, appropriately enough as it comes from the Greek for 'ground'.
6) The 1954 classic On The Waterfront won a whopping eight Oscars, including Best Actor for Marlon Brando himself. The record for 'most Oscars', however, is 11, with three films sharing this accolade: name two of the three.
7) Angela Merkel is the leader of the German political party known as the CDU - what do the letters CDU stand for?
8) 'Must-know' trivia time again: Haiti shares the island of Hispaniola with which other country?
9) Deriving from the French for 'the wild beasts', which artistic movement was led by Matisse (along with André Derain)?

The answers

1) 2003 - so the war started on 20/03/2003
2) Zulu (must-know trivia: 'Simba' is Swahili for lion)
3) Ecuador
4) Michael Knight and Mitch Buchannon
5) Rhea (which, helpfully, is also an anagram of Hera!)
6) Ben-Hur (1959), Titanic (1997), The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)
7) Christian Democratic Union
8) The Dominican Republic
9) Fauvism

Tweet