Nintendo originally sold playing cards

Your targets this week:

1+ out of 10: Well done, you beat us!
6+ out of 10: We'd have won with you on our team!

The attendees
1) The statistician
2) The doctor

The ones that got away

N.B. This quiz began with five picture questions for which we were given ten minutes during which smartphones were permitted. As such for questions 1, 2 and 3 only you should/can allow yourself around four minutes in total to try and use Google (or similar) to work out the answers. The only restriction is to limit yourself to what you could reasonably expect to do with the pictures on a physical piece of paper in a dark pub - in other words, things like copying the images into a reverse image search website is probably not in the spirit of The Ones That Got Away! As always, if an image is a bit small you can click on it for a slightly bigger version.

Questions 1-3

1) Googling allowed: What is this object used for?
2) Googling allowed: What movie is this still from?
3) Googling allowed: What plant is this?
4) No more googling! Which musical features the songs Too Darn Hot, Wunderbar, and Why Can't You Behave?
5) If I'm spending lev and can see the Nevsky Cathedral, which country am I in?
6) If I'm spending rupiah and can see the Candi Sewu Temple, which country am I in?
7) If I'm spending balboa and can see the Bridge of the Americas, which country am I in?
8) If I'm spending lira and can see the Blue Mosque, which country am I in?
9) In the 1986 Nintendo game Pro Wrestling which one of the following characters could you not select to play as? A) King Slender B) Fighter Hayabusa C) The Amazon D) Great Puma E) Marty the Magnificent
10) In the early Super Mario games Princess Peach was known by what other name?

The answers

1) Sealing tins/cans
2) The Quiet Man
3) Aloe
4) Kiss Me, Kate
5) Bulgaria
6) Indonesia
7) Panama
8) Turkey
9) Both Marty the Magnificent and Great Puma were accepted (see excuses below)
10) Princess Toadstool

Our excuses

1) Having experienced this round format once before we felt better prepared for it but ultimately got the same score as we would have were googling not allowed. We suspected this was an old-fashioned tin opener but we could neither confirm nor refute this idea.
2) This is probably one where googling helped a number of teams; since if you could recognize John Wayne it provided a strong starting-point. We couldn't so were left searching for descriptions of the scene with predictably little success.
3) The doctor suggested 'spiral cactus' and a quick google image search for this term returned a number of very similar looking pictures. However, the aloe in question seems to be aloe polyphylla (also known as 'Spiral Aloe'), which as far as I can tell is unrelated to the cactus.
4) Musicals are a topic we tend to dread in quizzes but we almost managed a perfect round this time. This one slipped through via a guess of Cabaret due to it being set in Germany (hence Wunderbar) and featuring an American character (hence 'Darn'). Impeccable logic, I'm sure you'll agree.
5) Another round we'd encountered before at this quiz and a fairly brutal reminder that I should probably do some studying. Currencies are one of those quizzing staples I have never had the motivation to learn (and beyond a few basics don't tend to come up too much in day-to-day life). Levs got us as far as Eastern Europe, and while the doctor knew a little about the Alexander Nevsky in question we were still going to be making an educated guess. (Not least because there are predictably several cathedrals named after him scattered around that part of the world.) We couldn't remember what the currency of Ukraine was (it's hryvnia, apparently), but thought "Ukrainian lev" sounded familiar, so we went with that.
6) Given rupees we were thinking vaguely Asia-y, and stuck down Cambodia because "the've got Angkor Wat on their flag, they probably like temples, that'll do". (Cambodia actually uses the riel.)
7) On retrospect this was arguably an obvious one to guess given the landmark, but for whatever reason we were convinced Bolivians used balboas (they don't, they use the rather easy to remember bolivianos). At least we correctly remembered that it's Venezuela which uses the bolívar.
8) I imagine a number of readers will have been shaking their heads at us for missing this one. In my defence I did suggest Turkey, but without much certainty, and the doctor thought they were one of the many countries that used the dinar. Instead we looked for an Islamic country close to Italy whose currency we didn't know. This led us to Tunisia who, of course, do use the dinar.
9) While Marty the Magnificent was the intended answer, Great Puma was also accepted as it was the final boss and not one a player could select at the start of the game (or something like that; the bar was very noisy). While neither of us had played this game I've since discovered it is where the fairly famous Internet meme A Winner is You originates, so we must accept some nerd shame for this one. We thought The Amazon, as a presumably female character, seemed an unlikely inclusion in a game from so long ago. (Turns out they're a half-piranha, half-man. Obviously.)
10) I'm going to try and sell this as 'too much knowledge is a dangerous thing', as while we obviously knew Princess Peach is also referred to as Princess Toadstool, we thought this might simply be her official royal title and so not be what the quizmaster was looking for. The doctor had a memory of her being called Daisy in the early games (while acknowledging that there is another princess with that name) and despite the pressure of "you know how bad this will look on the blog if we're wrong and it is just Princess Toadstool, right?" it was Daisy we wrote down.

How did you do? Would you have beaten us (1 or more correct)? Would you have helped us win (6 or more correct)? Let the world know with the poll below, then read on for my alternative questions (loosely) inspired by this week's Ones That Got Away!



My alternative questions
1) Which cartoon character, whose surname is Rodríguez, has an almost pathological fear of can openers?
2) Drawing on his experiences as a war correspondent for The Times and Le Figaro newspapers, who wrote the novel The Quiet American?
3) Which BBC sitcom was a parody of the BBC drama Secret Army?
4) Kiss Me, Kate is based on Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. Which 1999 movie (starring a teenage Heath Ledger in the role of Petruchio) was also based on the play?
5) Ukraine is one of four (UN member) countries whose flag is comprised entirely of the colours blue and yellow. Name two of the three others.
6) What theory, particularly notable for its relevance to US involvement in Vietnam, held that a communist victory in one country would start a chain reaction of communist takeovers in neighbouring states?
7) Panama is one of rather more than four (UN member) countries whose name is made up of alternating vowels and consonants. Shorter examples include Oman, Gabon and Benin, but which 18-letter country name is the longest with this property?
8) Pre-decimal British currency would typically be written using the symbols £, s and d for pounds, shillings and pence respectively. These symbols derive from three Latin currency denominations with £ coming from libra and d from denarius. Which Roman coin gave rise to the letter s in this system? (And no, it's not 'shilling'.)
9) Which video game series features a Russian boxer originally known as Vodka Drunkenski? His name was changed to Soda Popinksi to avoid controversy.
10) In terms of total copies sold (across all platforms) what is the best selling video game of all time?

The answers

1) Bender (from Futurama, full name Bender Bending Rodríguez)
2) Graham Greene
3) 'Allo 'Allo (if you got this thanks to it corresponding to the 'Aloe' question above then I commend your attention span)
4) 10 Things I Hate About You
5) Kazakhstan, Palau and Sweden
6) The domino theory
7) United Arab Emirates
8) Solidus
9) Punch-Out!!
10) Tetris

How did you do on my alternative questions? Have another poll!

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