Bonus QuestionJamie's Birthday Connections Quiz!

I've been a bit busy of late doing statistician-y things, so no regular Ones That Got Away today, instead something from down the back of the sofa before normality resumes next week!

A few week's ago Jamie 'UCL Karran' Karran had a birthday, and to mark the occasion I put together a connections quiz for him and some friends to tackle. Now the dust has settled and the party hats are back in the cupboard I thought I'd tidy up the questions and stick them up here for your enjoyment.

What follows are ten sets of five questions, with the five answers in each set sharing some sort of connection for you to try and identify. After each set you can click a button to find out the answers, and then another button will reveal what connects them.

Before you start, a quick word of warning: this quiz was written with Jamie and friends in mind, and so some of the connections will seem pretty tough, if not downright unfair (unless you've been stalking him for 20-odd years, of course). I've tried to put the groups in an approximate order of how Jamie-centric they are, but if you're struggling with a connection I wouldn't recommend spending too much time on it: there's a strong chance when you check the answer you'll think "that's bloody ridiculous" and hate me forever. Seriously. Still, at the very least there are 50 questions to distract you from whatever it is you're supposed to be doing; if you get any of the connections then consider it a bonus. Good luck!

Round 1
1) Which musical is an adaptation of the 19th century novel whose subtitle is The Parish Boy's Progress?
2) What type of animal could be a Sloth, a Kermode, or a Gobi?
3) What small creature has been used in Christian culture as a symbol of the deadly sin of sloth?
4) What four-letter food item is spelled out by the symbols of the chemical elements with atomic numbers 6, 1, 53 and 15?
5) With a month named after him, who is the Roman god of beginnings and transitions?

Round 1 answers

1) Oliver!
2) Bear
3) Snail
4) Chip
5) Janus

Round 1 connection

They're all body parts with a letter in front.

Round 2
1) Which historical Israeli town supposedly takes its name from Japheth, one of the sons of Noah?
2) Which language uses a a Latin alphabet consisting of 28 letters of which eight are digraphs?
3) Marcel Duchamp's Fountain takes the form of what object signed “R. Mutt”?
4) Which song, a reference to Chris Martin's unrequited love, was Coldplay's first top 10 single, reaching number 4 in the UK charts in 2000?
5) Dunlop, Dovedale, and Beacon Blue are all examples of what foodstuff?

Round 2 answers

1) Jaffa
2) Welsh
3) Urinal
4) Yellow
5) Cheese

Round 2 connection

All can be followed by 'cake' (making things that you might not immediately think of as cake!).

Round 3
1) Which Polish mathematician and astronomer's name derives from consecutive elements of the periodic table, with atomic numbers 27 and 28?
2) What is the name of Doc Brown's dog in the Back to the Future movies (the 1985 version of Doc Brown, that is)?
3) In which US state is John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men set?
4) Which newspaper published a front page story under the headline “THE TRUTH” in 1989, later admitting that it was the “most terrible” blunder in the paper's history?
5) As any reader of the Internet's premier 'pub quiz wrong answers' blog will know, in which city were the equestrian events of the 1956 Olympic Games held, with all other events taking place in Melbourne, Australia?

Round 3 answers

1) Copernicus
2) Einstein
3) California
4) The Sun
5) Stockholm

Round 3 connection

They've all had chemical elements named after them: Copernicium, Einsteinium, Californium, Helium and Holmium.

Round 4
1) Picture: What animal (a general term for a pinniped) has been 'found' on the underground here?
2) What single word did Prince Philip offer as his opinion of Beijing during a 1986 tour of China?
3) Also a word meaning to discard one's cards in a game of poker, what is the name of the bulldozer-cum-dump truck in the Bob the Builder series?
4) Typically used in physics and engineering for the coefficient of friction, what is the twelth letter of the Greek alphabet?
5) Picture: This is the 'black' variety of what material?

Round 4 Questions 1 and 5

Round 4 answers

1) Seal
2) Ghastly
3) Muck
4) Mu
5) Onyx

Round 4 connection

Homophones of Pokemon: Seel, Gastly, Muk, Mew and Onix.

Round 5
1) Typically used in statistics to indicate degrees of freedom, what is the thirteenth letter of the Greek alphabet?
2) What is the top-level domain country code for the Netherlands?
3) What two letter abbreviation is commonly used for an Italian phrase meaning "note well"?
4) What post-nominals indicate a person has, informally, 'taken silk'?
5) Definitions of which word, according to dictionary.com, include “so as to be or remain supported by or suspended from” and “operating or in use”?

Round 5 answers

1) Nu
2) nl
3) NB
4) QC
5) On

Round 5 connection

Postal abbreviations of Canadian provinces and territories.

Round 6
1) Complete the title of a 2010 film by Banksy: Exit Through The...
2) Its proper name is 'moai', but what do we usually call a monolithic human figure carved by the Rapu Nui people?
3) While serving as the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire at the turn of the 19th century, a man named Thomas Bruce was granted a controversial permit to remove what?
4) Which mythical creature, with the body of a lion and a human head, is classically associated with riddles and treachery?
5) Which historical artefact is named after the Western name for the Egyptian city whose Arabic name is Rašīd (Rashid)?

Round 6 answers

1) Gift Shop
2) Easter Island statue
3) The Elgin Marbles
4) Sphinx
5) The Rosetta Stone

Round 6 connection

All can be found in the British Museum.

Round 7
1) According to the Laws of Cricket, what piece of equipment must be no more than 965mm long and 108mm wide?
2) The common name of which bird includes the species gos, sparrow and Sharp-shinned, among (many) others?
3) Stretched, dealt, gone out (9) [This is a cryptic crossword clue]
4) An excellent song by which pop group features the lyrics “You're my doll, rock'n'roll, feel the glamour in pink / Kiss me here, touch me there, hanky panky... / You can touch, you can play, if you say: "I'm always yours"”?
5) What does the singer in the previous question think it's 'fantastic' to live in?

Round 7 answers

1) Bat
2) Hawk
3) Elongated
4) Aqua
5) Plastic

Round 7 connection

Can be folloewd by 'man' to make superheros (specifically, superheros who have been members of the Justice League of America).

Round 8
1) Which 2013 film received criticism for its casting of Benedict Cumberbatch as a character who is of Indian descent in the franchise's canon?
2) In 2013 which author published a book under a pseudonym derived from Robert Kennedy (one of her heroes) and Ella Galbraith (a childhood fantasy name she had invented for herself)?
3) In 2012 students from LeHigh University, Pennsylvania, estimated that it would take 833,315 years to produce enough steel to begin work on which fictional installation?
4) Which chemical element's symbol is also the first name of the star of the first 'talking picture' The Jazz Singer?
5) While on his deathbed, who did Edward VI name as his successor?

Round 8 answers

1) Star Trek: Into Darkness
2) J K Rowling
3) The Death Star
4) Aluminium (the singer is Al Jolson)
5) Lady Jane Grey

Round 8 connection

These have all been subjects of Wikipedia's lamest edit wars.

Round 9

Round 9 Question 4

1) Despite the folklore surrounding him, about which real-life 14th century Englishman does Wikipedia observe “there is no compelling evidence that he owned a cat”?
2) Which Oxford college's full, official, name is “The Master and Fellows of the College of the Great Hall of the University of Oxford”?
3) What can be both tensioned cables to help keep your tent up, or effigies burnt on November 5th?
4) Picture: Name this historic, landlocked county from its flag, now mostly part of Greater London.
5) In the Simpsons, whose middle name (a major character) is 'Jojo'?

Round 9 answers

1) Dick Whittington
2) University College
3) Guys
4) Middlesex
5) Bart's

Round 9 connection

London hospitals (give or take some punctuation).

Round 10

1) Beginning with W, what word refers to the explosive and/or toxic material that is delivered by a missile, rocket or torpedo?
2) In Holst's The Planets, which planet is subtitled 'The Magician'?
3) Picture: Who painted this?
4) Picture: What bird is this?
5) Which skateboard trick begins like an ollie before the skater kicks the board so that it spins (at least) 180 degrees under their feet?

Round 10 Questions 3 and 4

Round 10 answers

1) Warhead
2) Uranus
3) Caravaggio
4) (Blue-footed) booby
5) Pop shove-it

Set 10 connection

They're all incorrect answers Jamie has offered on TV quizzes (I did warn you).

So there you have it! Hope it was at least passable fun, and that you weren't too put off by some fairly heavy subject biases. If you were keeping score a perfect game would be 60 (one point for each question and each connection), and I think anything over 30 constitutes a more than solid performance.

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One of Iron Man's armours once gained sentience as a result of the Y2K bug

Your targets this week:

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

The attendees
1) The statistician
2) The doctor
3) The Klingon
4) The game dev
5) The tourist (un)
6) The tourist (deux)

The ones that got away
1) 96% of the atmosphere of Mars is made up of which gas?
2) How long is the biking portion of a traditional Ironman triathlon? You can have 10% either way.
3) Which movie villain gives the order to "Scheiss dem Fenster!" before immediately translating to "Shoot the glass!"?
4) Which of these words is a medical term for the red part of the lips: crimson, scarlet or vermilion?
5) What is the current (on 21st May 2014) year in the Jewish calendar? You can have 20 years either way.
6) Which colour does the human eye notice fastest?
7) According to Wikipedia's list of highest paid film actors, who is the only actor to have earned over $30 million from three different films? This includes not just their base salary, but potentially money earned through 'profit participation' (taking a percentage of the film's gross).
8) The chief legislative body of which country is The Great Khural?
9) Which 'tough guy' actor was born Marion Robert Morrison?

The answers

1) Carbon dioxide
2) 112 miles (so 100.8-123.2 miles gets you the point, or 162.2-198.3 km if you're metrically-minded)
3) Hans Gruber (in Die Hard)
4) Vermilion
5) 5774 (so 5754-5794 gets you the point)
6) Yellow
7) Tom Cruise
8) Mongolia
9) John Wayne

How did you do? Would you have beaten us (1 or more correct)? Would you have helped us win (3 or more correct)? If Blogger have fixed their polling weidget then let us know with the poll on the right (or, if it's still broken, feel free to share in the comments or tweet me @statacake).

Our excuses

1) Extensive discussion of Total Recall (the original one, not the iffy remake) along with the observation that the planet is red because of oxidization, motivated us to put oxygen (albeit unbreathably little). I'd like to think if we'd thought about it slightly more (and made slightly fewer bad Schwarzenegger impersonations) we wouldn't have made that sort of mistake.
2) Despite one of my brothers being an Ironman enthusiast (the triathlon, not the superhero), and knowing that the running component was a marathon (and thus 26.2 miles), my guess of 70km was a long way off.
3) A lesson in "say every idea that comes into your head". Die Hard briefly occurred to me as a movie with a naughty German in it, but given my track record on films I didn't even think to mention it. Cue the classic "Why didn't you say something? I would have got it from that!".
4) As is typical for a 'medical term' quiz question, it's not something the resident doctor had heard of. He proposed scarlet via scarlet fever as 'better than nothing'.
5) A tough ask, but something most of us will at least be vaguely familiar with. We would have needed around 3000 years either way to have been close.
6) Apparently this is why yellow is such a common colour in product packaging. The doctor's attempt to use his knowledge of the eye (he suggested purple) proved as successful as I expected.
7) One of those where you'll almost certainly name most people on this list during your discussion. Our guess of Johnny Depp features twice, along with Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom hanks, featured twice, so if you went with one of that trio you can feel fractionally more frustrated.
8) A bit of meta-game gone wrong here, as while the 'kh' put is in mind of the Mongolian title Khan, we thought that was a) pretty tenuous, and b) would seem pretty damn hard. We thought Iran seemed a marginally more plausible punt.
9) Ouch. A truly classic bit of trivia evaded us all. Considering the frequency with which we seem to get questions about Clint Eastwood wrong I'm surprised I'm still yet to get around to adding John Wayne to my revision list.

My alternative questions
1) Mars has two moons named after the twin brothers in Greek mythology who accompanied their father Ares into battle. One is Deimos, the personification of terror, who is the other?
2) Which two British brothers have somewhat dominated the international triathlon circuit of late, most notably taking gold and bronze in the 2012 Olympics?
3) According to Die Hard with a Vengeance, how many were going to St Ives?
4) What term describes a puppetry technique most notably seen in Gerry and Sylvia Anderson-produced shows such as Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet? A portmanteau of three words, my childhood self spent a long time thinking it must be to do with a famous video game character instead.
5) Quiz staple the French Revolutionary Calendar had 12 months of exactly 30 days each. How many days, though, were in a French Revolutionary week?
6) Which superhero has traditionally suffered a rather implausible weakness to the colour yellow due to an 'impurity' in his power source?
7) TOMCRUISE could be a Countdown conundrum - what 9 letter word is it an anagram of?
8) Mongolia and China have a very long border, and while the USA and Canada share the world's longest land border between two countries, it comes primarily in two distinct parts (think Alaska). Which two countries share the world's longest single segment of land border?
9) Despite appearing in over 140 films, for which movie did John Wayne win his only Oscar for best actor in 1969?

The answers

1) Phobos (the personification of fear)
2) (Alistair and Jonathan) Brownlee
3) 1 (there are, of course, various possibilities depending on how the rhyme is interpreted)
4) Supermarionation (from 'super', 'marionette' and 'animation', and nothing to do with Super Mario...)
5) 10 (as part of an attempt at decimalization, and instead of saints, each day had an associated animal, tool, plant or mineral - super fun)
6) Green Lantern
7) Costumier
8) Kazakhstan and Russia
9) True Grit

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Olympic gold medals must be at least 92.5% silver

Your targets this week:

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

The attendees
1) The statistician
2) The doctor

The ones that got away

Question 8

1) Summer Olympic sports are divided into categories based on their popularity and revenue generating potential. Three sports are currently Category A, meaning they are the most popular: athletics, aquatics and which other?
2) Only one Asian athlete has ever won an Olympic medal in a sprint event: which country did they represent?
3) After the Summer Olympics and the Football World Cup, which sporting event sees the world's third-largest television audience?
4) Which year is significant for lovers of English poetry because it saw the publication of six odes by John Keats?
5) Which famous musician supposedly believed the US government deliberately infected people of African origin with AIDS to weaken them?
6) According to a conspiracy theory that first emerged in the late 60s, the death of which member of the Beatles was covered up by the use of a lookalike?
7) The Montauk Project is an alleged series of secret US government projects conducted for the purposes of developing what?
8) Who's this famous author?

The answers

1) Gymnastics
2) Sri Lanka (but this is mildly contentious; see below)
3) The Cricket World Cup
4) 1819
5) Kanye West
6) Paul McCartney
7) Time travel, mind control, 'psychological warfare' (or something along those lines)
8) Lewis Carroll

Poll results: 39 votes. 36 of you did better than us of which just 1 would have helped us win! The average voter scored 2.5/8.

The excuses

1) On retrospect, probably the obvious answer, but we didn't even think of it. We went with cycling (given the vast number of events and sell-out crowds), but suspect we were at least in part being influenced by Team GB's recent successes in that field.
2) Assuming that 110m hurdles counted as a 'sprint' event, I went with China as I knew of Liu Xiang's exploits. Apparently, however, it doesn't, with various sources suggesting this is limited to the 100m, 200m and 400m races. Grr.
3) A toss-up between the Super Bowl and the correct answer, we naively assumed cricket would seem an incredibly tough ask in a Canadian quiz. (It also seems a very tricky question to really justify, or indeed phrase accurately, but that's the authentic Ones That Got Away experience you've come to love!)
4) I can only assume this is some incredibly famous piece of trivia that completely escaped our combined minds. Indeed, the fact the doctor's guess was 1867, and mine was 1841, when Keats died in 1821, doesn't really suggest we're too hot on our Romantic poets.
5) This rang a bell but we couldn't place it.
6) Initially we thought it would make sense for it to be one of the two still extant Beatles and wrote down McCartney. Then we 'cleverly' worked out it would make even more sense if it was John Lennon.
7) We (apparently correctly) thought this had something to do with the Philadelphia Experiment, which we (also apparently correctly) thought was to do with invisibility. If this was our Quizzing GCSE we'd have at least got follow-through marks.
8) I strongly recognized the picture (although I've no idea why) but after drawing a blank we took the 'North American author' approach to quizzing and put F Scott Fitzgerald. (Although I was tempted by Alan Davies.)

The alternative questions
1) In the all around events at the Summer Olympics, female gymnasts compete across four disciplines (or pieces of apparatus) - name all four.
2) How many hurdles does a runner face in the Olympics 110m hurdles event?
3) Excluding aggregated figures from repeat showings, the 1996 Christmas episode of which sitcom is the most watched non-documentary programme of all time in the UK?
4) It's a well-established fact that people at most know the first or last two lines of famous poems. Which five words start the penultimate line of Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn, being followed by "that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know"?
5) The name first proposed in 1982 to describe cases of what is now known as AIDS was GRID. The I and D stood for 'immune deficiency', what do the G and R stand for?
6) For which Bond film did Paul McCartney and Wings record the (totally radical) theme song?
7) Known in her homeland as Princess Diana of Themyscira, which DC superhero is often seen flying an invisible aeroplane?
8) Before publishing as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the title of Lewis Carroll's original manuscript instead put her adventures where?

The answers

1) Vault, uneven bars, balance beam, floor
2) Ten
3) Only Fools and Horses
4) Beauty is truth, truth beauty
5) Gay-related
6) Live and Let Die
7) Wonder Woman
8) Under Ground

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Some Second World War editions of Monopoly feature a spinner instead of dice to save materials

Your targets this week:

1+ out of 7: Well done, you beat us!
We won this time, so no 'winninger than you' target!

The attendees
1) The statistician
2) The doctor
3) The game dev
4) The klingon

The ones that got away
1) Which playground game was an Olympic sport between 1900 and 1920?
2) In the board game Monopoly what colour is the single property (not necessarily square) you're most likely to land on?
3) What term is used for a baby porcupine?
4) In 2010 which non-human fictional character testified before the US Congress in support of funding for music education programs?
5) The inventor of which clothing item said you can tell it apart from imitations because the real thing "could be pulled through a wedding ring"?
6) Which 1999 movie stars Vin Diesel, Jennifer Aniston and a kid called Hogarth?
7) In what year did the New York Stock Exchange stop trading in fractions, switching to decimals? You can have five years either way.

The answers

1) Tug of war
2) Red (Trafalgar Square)
3) Porcupette
4) Elmo
5) The bikini (the quote coming from inventor Louis Réard)
6) The Iron Giant
7) 2001 (so 1996 to 2006 gets you the point)

Poll results: 30 votes. 24 of you did better than us! The average voter scored 1.6/7.

The excuses

1) Horrible miss. Tug of war at the Olympics is covered spectacularly often in quizzing, but we were completely thrown by the 'playground' association, going for dodgeball.
2) Another embarrassing one. Even though Monopoly is terrible, I've still spent time playing with its probabilities, and so knew that the most frequently visited colour is orange, but forgot that the most frequently visited property is red. This is because the most popular square of all is jail making the orange and red groups the best to target (and that's as much as I will ever want to discuss the idea of Monopoly 'strategy' in one go).
3) I've never been particularly good at remembering the 'baby animal' area of trivia, so wasn't too surprised to see another one go begging. Google, meanwhile, informs me that it's also the name of a companion in World of Warcraft, so that's something.
4) The doctor seemed convinced there was a 'Watergate parrot', thus illustrating how sometimes, a guess isn't better than nothing.
5) A fun question, I thought, and sparked some fairly extensive debate among the team. I was quite pleased with our guess of mini skirt.
6) Absolutely nowhere on this, with the doctor's usual power of remembering every movie poster he's ever seen evading him.
7) The '5 years either side' 'hint' did the trick and had us thinking much, much earlier than we should've been. A nice little factoid to keep tucked away somewhere.

The alternative questions
1) Which sport will feature at the 2016 games, some 112 years after it was last an Olympic event?
2) In 2013 Monopoly manufacturers Hasbro launched an online poll to decide what token should replace the iron. Somewhat unsurprisingly, what animal did the Internet decide on?
3) Often confused with (though entirely unrelated to) porcupines, species of what egg-laying mammal join platypuses as the only extant monotremes?
4) Following landmark Supreme Court decisions regarding same sex partnerships in 2013, US magazine The New Yorker courted controversy with a cover seemingly depicting which two Sesame Street characters?
5) What type of 'sling swimsuit' was popularized by Sacha Baron Cohen in the film Borat?
6) The Iron Giant is (loosely) based on the 1968 novel The Iron Man by British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes, who was offered the laureateship after which other poet turned it down?
7) Numerous fictional characters have opened the day's trading at the New York Stock Exchange, including in 2009 when which rascal - whose name actually originates from that of a fictional diamond - rang the bells?

The answers

1) Golf
2) Cat
3) Echidna
4) Bert and Ernie (pictured)
5) The mankini
6) Philip Larkin
7) The Pink Panther (and here's incredibly awkward video evidence)

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Review: The Link

"This week, I 'ave been mostly
presenting a muggle gameshow."

I recently learned that Only Connect teammate Hywel Carver had cheated on me with another man. I say man, I mean quiz show. But it was a connections-based quiz show and so I still felt some betrayal. The Link (weekdays at 2.15pm on BBC 1) is based on the board game Linkee and pits three pairs of contestants against each other as they try to answer questions, spot connections, and maybe take home literally hundreds of pounds. Mark Williams, familiar to you from The Fast Show or Harry Potter (but probably not both), is on hosting duties: will he be putting the 'win' in Wingardium Leviosa? Or will he be getting his coat?

Round one: Cut the rope(s)

The first round sees six money amounts held aloft by at least one (£125) and at most six (£2,000) 'links' (geddit?). To bank the cash contestants need to cut those links,which they do by answering questions and spotting what 'links' (still geddit?)

A round one question with all
the links waiting to be cut.

the answers. Questions come in groups of (up to) four, and buzzing in first with the correct answer gives the pair the opportunity to think out loud (and some of them really do) as they try and guess the connection. Work it out when only one answer has been revealed and you can cut four links, if you've seen all of them you'll just get to take out one. Cutting the last link on a money amount puts it in a team's bank. Whoever has the least money at the end of the round is eliminated from the show.


Round two: Do you feel linky, punk?

After all that effort getting the money down some rascal has strung it back up! This time the teams' respective kitties are dangling by seven threads and again they need to spot connections to cut them. The first pair to cut all seven take themselves - and their cash - through to the final.

No questions this time, except for "Who, what, or where am I?". The team is asked how many links they'd like to try and cut and are given the corresponding number of clues. Get it right and the jackpot round is a little closer, get it wrong and the remaining clues are thrown over to the opposition who can steal a single bonus cut. This round is less about 'connections' and more about clues to a specific answer - think the final round of Going for Gold - so it has a fairly distinct feel from the first.

The final: Link ladder

The final round in action.

Those six cash amounts from round one are back in the form of a fairly standard money ladder, with the £2,000 topped up by whatever the winning team brought through with them from round two. They're given 60 seconds to solve six 'super links': a set of up to 10 related clues which reveal themselves about 1.5 seconds at a time. The pair take it in turns, buzzing in as soon as they think they know the connection. Get it right and they move up the ladder, get it wrong and they'll face a new set having wasted some precious seconds. After each correct answer they're given the option to take the money and run; if they run out of time they lose everything.

The verdict: Linked in

On balance I think The Link has legs. The biggest mistake probably comes in the structure of round one where they've tried to give the illusion of strategy when really there is (virtually) none. While this isn't the most disastrous of quiz show crimes, it does start to grate when for the fifth or sixth time in a show you're subjected to contestants debating out loud which links to cut when it simply doesn't matter. We're consequently subjected to a relatively large number of questions that are irrelevant; if there aren't enough links on offer to bank some money then you may as well give your buzzer finger a rest. A token bit of cash for every correct answer or perhaps the option to 'bank' links to spend later could ameliorate at least some of this.

The show features some nice visual effects.
Here money is 'whooshing' into Hywel's bank.

Similarly, the first round feels rather bloated and slow, whereas the second feels rather threadbare and, well, slow. For instance, after banking most of the money in round one on his show, our board gaming friend Hywel was knocked out in round two after facing just three questions - he was understandably a touch frustrated. A related concern is the variation in question difficulty: sometimes the first clue will at least uniquely define the answer (you just might not know it), at others you've no hope. When you're asking people to decide how many clues they're going to see in advance it's pretty tough if the first clue could be as meagre as "I'm from Brooklyn, New York".

Despite these problems there are still enough positives to keep me watching for a few more episodes. It won't surprise many to learn I'm quite a fan of connection quizzes, and round one in particular presents a fairly novel take on it. The fact that you might know the connection thanks to others' answers means you can start trying to anticipate the questions introducing a fun element of metagame. I was pleased to see a couple of contestants demonstrate this in only the second episode of the series so I'm hopeful it will be a semi-regular feature. The final round is also perfectly competent, and seems fairly winnable (albeit with a bit of nerve). Mark Williams, meanwhile, though not entirely comfortable in a quiz host role, does at least seem to be having fun.

I've seen plenty of people comment that this is "Only Connect for idiots" (and that's one of the kinder remarks), and while I appreciate it's an obvious comparison to draw, I'm not sure it's a particularly fair one. It has good playalongability and not (too) much chatter, and while the question difficulty (and quality) may seem a touch low it's fairly standard for a lightweight daytime quiz. Not a must-see by any stretch, but definitely one for an iPlayer rainy day.

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Ones That Got Away Guest Special!

It's a guest episode of The Ones That Got Away!

It was ubiquitous team-mate and (almost) everyone's favourite quiz show team captain Jamie 'UCL Karran' Karran's birthday this week, and shockingly we didn't do a pub quiz to celebrate. (I did, however, write a quiz for his birthday, which will hopefully be appearing on these pages in the near future.) Fortunately, previous comrade-in-quiz and blog contributor The Programmer has put together a set of ones that got away from his latest endeavours back in blighty. What's more, the team features Hywel 'the normal one' Carver from our Only Connect team, so you can still feel super-smug if you get any right.

Your targets this week:

The doctor and I took this set on ourselves and managed a satisfying 4/8, so that's your top target this week.

1+ out of 8: Well done, you beat the team!
5+ out of 8: Well done, you beat us!

The attendees
1) The programmer
2) The saxophonist
3) The misandrist
4) The publisher

The ones that got away
1) What song wakes Bill Murray up every morning in Groundhog Day? (Only the title required.)
2) Name the song and artist from the lyrics: "Strike the match, play it loud, giving love to the world / We'll be raising our hands, shining up to the sky / Cause we got the fire, fire, fire. Yeah, we got the fire fire fire."
3) By what nickname were aubergines known when they were first brought to Europe?
4) In what decade did Alexander Graham Bell make the first phone call?
5) Literally speaking, what does "croissant" mean?
6) In the US Postal System, what does ZIP stand for?
7) What is the last book of the Old Testament?
8) True or false: a person will shed about 10 pounds of skin through their life.

The answers

1) I Got You Babe (by Sonny and Cher)
2) Burn by Ellie Goulding
3) Mad apples
4) 1870s (10 March 1876 to be precise.)
5) Crescent-shaped
6) Zone Improvement Plan
7) Malachi
8) False

Poll results: 25 votes. 22 of you beat the guest team of which 2 would have beaten us! The average voter scored just under 3/8.

The excuses

The excuses (and alternate questions) are all courtesy of the programmer, but I've added one or two of my own comments in italics.

1) Despite all having seen this film many times, we somehow couldn't bring this to mind. This exact question came up on the blog way back in July - reassuringly I managed to remember the answer.
2) None of us are familiar with Ms Goulding's oeuvre so we were nowhere near this. For once my habit of listening to BBC Radio 1 to keep abreast of what the kids of today listen to paid off for me here.
3) Not sure how anyone would know this, although the etymology is intriguing (according to Wikipedia): the Italian term "melanzana" was reinterpreted as "mela insana", and then translated into English as "mad apple".
4) We narrowed it down to 1880s or 1890s, which (as usual) meant we'd eliminated the right answer even before guessing.
5) Some foolish member of the team immediately said "cross-shaped" and, as we knew it was something to do with the Crusades, that slipped through our collective nonsense filter unchecked.
6) A fun question to concoct guesses for (we went rather nerdily with Zonal Information Protocol), but pretty impossible to get right unless you know it. The name was a prompt to the public that mail addressed with a correct ZIP code would arrive more quickly.
7) We knew it was one of Micah and Malachi and zagged with the first. There are various differences between the books included in the Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox Old Testaments, but luckily (or skilfully) for the quizmaster, Malachi is the last in all three traditions.
8) This seemed like a strangely specific amount so we went with true without enough consideration. It's considerably more than 10 pounds.

The alternative questions
1) The 1995 film Babe is an adaptation of whose 1983 novel The Sheep Pig?
2) Another (unrelated) song called Burn was a worldwide hit for which R&B superstar in 2004, from his album Confessions?
3) The English word "lynx" was translated into French, misinterpreted, and then adopted back into English to give which alternative name for the same animal? (To further confuse matters, the term now more often refers to the snow leopard instead.)
4) Another debut of the 1870s was the three-act play A Doll's House, probably the best-known work by which dramatist?
5) The Fertile Crescent, an important region in the early development of human civilization, is usually taken to encompass the Nile and which other two major rivers?
6) The first and last character of a UK post code must always be a letter; which other character must also always be a letter?
7) Malachite, or copper carbonate hydroxide, is a mineral of which colour?
8) In invertebrates, shedding of the outer layer is known as ecdysis, but amongst humans what is an ecdysiast?

The answers

1) Dick King-Smith
2) Usher (We would of course accept his full name, Usher Raymond IV!)
3) Ounce (via the French approximation "lonce", misinterpreted as "l'once").
4) Henrik Ibsen
5) The Tigris and the Euphrates
6) The second-to-last
7) Green
8) A strip-tease performer

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