Each week, quiz obsessives and Only Connect champions
Jamie Karran (@NoDrNo) and Michael Wallace (@statacake) take on the pub quizzes of the world.
Find out every Friday if you could have helped with the questions they got wrong.
Friday, 20 June 2014
There is an oceanographer superhero called Stingray
New poll options should now be up and running - things are a bit ugly right now but you can hopefully not only tell the world how you scored on the Ones That Got Away, but also on my own alternative questions!
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 oceanographer
The ones that got away
1) Two of the countries in this year's World Cup Finals have never won a World Cup Finals match. For one of these countries it is their first year appearing in the Finals, which is the other?
2) Which country will become the first to play 100 World Cup Finals matches in this year's tournament?
3) A Roman mixture of vinegar, honey and salt is the first known example of what?
4) Complete this quote from a TV show whose season finale aired (in the US) on Sunday night: "The night is dark..."
5) Two African countries have a capital city that means the same thing, one in English, the other in French. Name the two countries and the two capital cities. (You need all four for the point.)
6) Which company recently announced that it would allow its tech patents to be freely used worldwide "in the spirit of the open source movement"?
7) Film quotes! Name the movie and the character (or actor) who spoke it: "I'll be down in 2 shakes of a lamb's tail."
8) Film quotes again! Name the movie and the character (or actor) who spoke it: "Please get out of my Van Halen T-shirt before you jinx the band and they break up."
9) Which country is the world's biggest oil and gas producer?
The answers
1) Honduras (Bosnia and Herzegovina are this year's newbies)
2) Germany
3) Toothpaste
4) "...and full of terrors" (from Game of Thrones)
5) Libreville, Gabon, and Freetown, Sierra Leone
6) Tesla Motors
7) Mia Wallace (played by Uma Thurman) in Pulp Fiction. You need the movie and either the actor or character for the point.
8) Robbie Hart (played by Adam Sandler) in The Wedding Singer. You need the movie and either the actor or character for the point.
9) The USA
How did you do? Would you have beaten us (1 or more correct)? Would you have helped us win (3 or more correct)? Let us know with the poll below, and then check out my alternative questions inspired by this week's Ones That Got Away!
The excuses
1) We correctly identified Bosnia and Herzegovina as the new team, but went with Iran who I should have remembered beat the USA in a group game in 1998.
2) Brazil, being the only team to have featured at every World Cup, was the 'obvious' answer, but I should have paid more attention to my niggling doubt about Germany.
3) A bit of a chestnut, but it completely slipped all of our minds. The doctor had a vague memory of Pliny the Elder concocting a cure for baldness (but it turns out that was something to do with sea urchins), which was eventually what we went with after what transpired to be a great deal of wasted time considering it being a hangover cure instead.
4) While we got as far as working out it was something to do with Game of Thrones, none of us have watched (or indeed, read) anything to do with it. The doctor offered "and Winter is coming" as being 'something to do with the show'.
5) I know, country capitals should be bread and butter, but I've got lazy with them. It was the doctor who managed three-quarters of the set, with Libreville, Freetown, and Sierra Leone, but I couldn't finish it off with Gabon. We went with Liberia (despite it seeming a bit on the nose), and naturally I remembered its capital (Monrovia) moments after handing in our sheet.
6) I had somehow picked up from Twitter that this was something to do with Elon Musk, but the only thing we knew about him was that he has something to do with PayPal.
7) Film quotes are seldom our forte, and there seemed very little way into this fairly unremarkable one.
8) This one we had slightly more of a feel for, with a toss-up between Wayne's World and School of Rock predictably proving fruitless.
9) I'm always a bit sceptical of questions like this, as what 'largest producer' means strikes me as something that needs a little more clarification. For example, Wikipedia lists the USA top for gas production, but only third for oil, with our answer (Russia) taking first and second spots respectively. A bit of googling suggests that a number of sources cite USA as "the largest producer of oil and gas", but I'll admit I'm still a little unsure as to how precisely this is defined.
My alternative questions
1) Honduras has historically (occasionally) been referred to as Spanish Honduras to differentiate it from British Honduras, the former name of which modern-day country?
2) What is the product of the number of stars on Germany's football shirt and the number of stars on Brazil's football shirt?
3) Toothpaste played a role in another classic piece of trivia when, on September 22, 1955, it was the subject of the UK's first what?
4) Give any one of the four 'R' middle names in authors George R. R. Martin and John R. R. Tolkien's names.
5) Gabon lies on the Equator - hooray! But, along with Cameroon, which country does it border to its north which sadly - and perhaps surprisingly - doesn't lie on the Equator?
6) Nikola Tesla also lends his name to the SI unit for the strength of what?
7) An iconic mural by graffiti artist Banksy - since painted over by Transport for London workers - depicted a scene form Pulp Fiction with Samuel L Jackson and John Travolta clutching what instead of guns?
8) Which acting award has Adam Sandler won three times (the most recent coming in 2012 for That's My Boy), with only Sylvester Stallone ahead of him on four?
9) Some more classic/essential/boring trivia to finish: what do the letters in international organization OPEC stand for?
The answers
1) Belize
2) 15 (via 3 times 5; the stars represent the number of World Cups the teams have won)
3) Television advert (specifically, for S. R. Toothpaste)
4) Raymond Richard and Ronald Reuel (for Martin and Tolkien, respectively)
5) Equatorial Guinea (which does, however, straddle the Equator thanks to its island of Annobón which lies 155 kilometres south of the Equator while the rest of the country lies to the north)
6) Magnetic fields
7) Bananas (there is something of a story as to what happened next; it's probably easiest to search for 'Pulp Fiction' on Banksy's Wikipedia page)
8) Golden Raspberry (for Worst Actor, 'Razzie' also acceptable)
9) Organization (of the) Petroleum Exporting Countries
New! You can now tell the world how you did on my alternative questions too using the poll below!
A lacklustre two from me this week. I swithered between toothpaste and topical wound dressing before settling on the latter. I knew "...and full of terrors" and Tesla, and I also said Russia for oil and gas.
Solid work. Belize is one of those weird ones which I'd never heard of but then it came up in quizzes a couple of times in quick succession so has really stuck in my head.
A lacklustre two from me this week. I swithered between toothpaste and topical wound dressing before settling on the latter. I knew "...and full of terrors" and Tesla, and I also said Russia for oil and gas.
ReplyDelete...and six out of nine on your questions. I tripped over Belize, Equatorial Guinea and Banksy.
ReplyDeleteSolid work. Belize is one of those weird ones which I'd never heard of but then it came up in quizzes a couple of times in quick succession so has really stuck in my head.
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