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