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.
Thursday, 10 July 2014
Ticket to Ride is not only a Beatles song but also an award-winning board game!
Your targets this week:
We won this week (hooray), but as always a score of 1 or more means you knew something we didn't!
The attendees
1) The statistician
2) The doctor
3) The oceanographer
The ones that got away
1) Which was the only Four Tops single to top the UK charts?
2) Which band had an album cover featuring the members' faces on Mount Rushmore?
3) Who recorded the song Eye of the Tiger, the theme for Rocky III?
4) On which Beatles album did Ticket to Ride first appear?
5) Appearing in seven 007 movies, which actor has played Bond the most times?
6) Timothy Dalton played Bond in two movies, The Living Daylights (1987) and which other (released in 1989)? (And yes, just in case you were considering it, you can rule him out of the previous question!)
7) Which blue-veined cheese is named after an Italian village?
8) Which is the only Dickens novel with a female narrator?
9) Which is the highest mountain in Canada?
The answers
1) Reach Out I'll be there (VIDEO)
2) Deep Purple (the album is Deep Purple in Rock)
3) Survivor
4) Help!
5) Roger Moore (minor controversy as the question - as phrased on the night - was ambiguous; see our excuses below)
6) Licence to Kill
7) Gorgonzola
8) Bleak House
9) Mount Logan
The excuses
1) The doctor had this lurking in the back of his mind because, of course, someone once sang it at his school's eisteddfod. Very much not in our ballpark, although our guess of Build Me Up Buttercup (I now learn by The Foundations) was at least in a similar musical direction.
2) We were quite taken with the Dead Kennedys on this one (yes, I know he's not on Mount Rushmore, but still). Deep Purple are one of the (quite large set of) bands we've heard of, and appreciate are really quite famous, but are from an era and a genre none of us have ever felt particularly inclined towards. Also, there are five of them, making the Mount Rushmore link that extra bit trickier to spot.
3) A frustrating one; the doctor and I realized on retrospect we knew this, but somehow got it into our heads that the question was asking for a singer rather than a band. This was sufficient distraction to completely forget my sixth form school panto where I spent an unhealthy amount of time trying to source a copy of the song for a scene where a classmate playing David Hasselhoff had to pretend to punch a bear.
4) I'm pretty sure I've been asked more questions about the Beatles since moving to Canada than I ever was in the UK. The Internet tells me this song featured in the movie Help!, so perhaps that's a way into it if you're more familiar than us with the band's oeuvre. We successfully remembered (from a previous quiz, of course) that their ninth album is actually called The Beatles, and not the White Album as it is commonly known, but this came much later in their career. Don't forget the important fact that the Beatles aren't spelling out the letters HELP in semaphore on the cover!
5) For most people this is, I suspect, a toss-up between Roger Moore and Sean Connery, and since the doctor could remember more films featuring the latter than the former it's what we put down. The mild controversy here is that Connery has also starred in seven Bond films, it's just that one of them (Never Say never Again) was an independent production and so, along with the 1967 spoof Casino Royale, isn't usually counted. Nevertheless, the question doesn't make this relatively important distinction clear, so I apologize on the quizmaster's behalf for the oversight if it caught you out. As I always say, however, it's that authentic pub quiz experience this blog is all about.
6) You might have guessed there was a Bond round to go with the preceding music round. This is a topic which is wholly the doctor's domain, and his guess of On Her Majesty's Secret Service is notable both for being some 20 years too early, and also George Lazenby's only Bond role.
7) In what I think is quite a tough set of Ones That Got Away, this is the only one I'm particularly cheesed offannoyed about. We had a combined blank on blue-veined cheeses and could only put down Roquefort, despite it sounding incredibly French (presumably because it is).
8) Ah yes, Dickens, that quizzing staple which crops up far more often than the number of people who've actually read the damned things could ever warrant. As you can probably tell we're not exactly fans, but worked our way to a tossup between the correct answer and Little Dorrit. I have no idea how.
9) Did I mention we live in Canada? I've been a touch remiss with my Canadian trivia revision, but suspect even the odd Brit might know this one. (It does, however, provide an interesting perspective on the UK pub quiz scene, where "what's the highest mountain in the UK?" might even merit the odd guffaw for its easiness.)
How did you do? Would you have beaten us (1 or more correct)? Let the world know with the poll below, then read on for my alternative questions inspired by this week's Ones That Got Away!
My alternative questions
1) Essential trivia time: which US city is also known as Motown, from which the music genre and record label get their name?
2) During which US President's tenure did the construction of the Mount Rushmore sculpture end?
3) To date (July 2014) how many feature-length movies are there in the Sylvester Stallone Rocky series?
4) The album Help! includes an exclamation mark in its title and so sometimes makes writing about it feel a touch awkward. Which long-running US game show's name also ends with an exclamation mark? (Legendary contestant Ken Jennings once commented that the exclamation mark was pronounced "paid for my house".)
5) The one piece of James Bond trivia I can remember: which 1968 musical was loosely based by an Ian Fleming novel?
6) Licence to Kill was the first Eon Productions Bond film not to use the title of an Ian Fleming story. Since then only two Bond films have shared titles with an Ian Fleming novel or short story - name both.
7) About whose imprisonment did Émile Zola protest with his famous open letter "J'accuse ...!"? (Surname only suffices.)
8) Which three-letter pseudonym did Dickens employ for many years, supposedly inspired by hearing the name Moses spoken by someone with a cold?
9) My new way for remembering that the highest mountain in Canada is Mount Logan is because it is also the name adopted by a Canadian superhero. Born James Howlett, which X-Man is named after the animal whose fierce temper he is supposed to possess?
The answers
1) Detroit
2) Franklin Roosevelt (not to be confused with Theodore Roosevelt who appears in the sculpture, where construction ended in 1941)
3) Six (the most recent being the un-numbered Rocky Balboa in 2006)
4) Jeopardy!
5) Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
6) Casino Royale (the first Bond novel) and Quantum of Solace (the latter in the collection of short stories For Your Eyes Only). Several others have since been novelized by Bond continuation authors.
7) (Alfred) Dreyfus
8) Boz (a shortening of 'Boses')
9) Wolverine
I've had Deep Purple in Rock in my possesion, in one format or another, since 'borrowing' my elder brother's lp back in the early 80's, so didn't even have to think about that. And Survivor - Eye of the Tiger is something I know about as simply as I know my own name - still have my 7" single. I've only read a couple of Dickens novels, but Bleak House is one of them (thanks to my crush on Denis Lawson, who was in the TV series), so I remembered that Esther narrates part of the book.
Very nice :) It's always fun when questions hit those bits of knowledge. I've never read a single Dickens novel myself, which comes back to haunt me at quizzes with alarming regularity.
Well you of course have our sympathies on that one - and yes, I think TTR was the second 'proper' board game I was exposed to (after Settlers of Catan).
This is a fantastic site. I scored 7 & 8 but accidentally voted two 8s. I'm a huge fan of quizzing and shall be on Mastermind this series.
ReplyDeleteThanks very much! And well done with those scores, I'll be sure to keep an eye out for you on the show.
DeleteI've had Deep Purple in Rock in my possesion, in one format or another, since 'borrowing' my elder brother's lp back in the early 80's, so didn't even have to think about that. And Survivor - Eye of the Tiger is something I know about as simply as I know my own name - still have my 7" single. I've only read a couple of Dickens novels, but Bleak House is one of them (thanks to my crush on Denis Lawson, who was in the TV series), so I remembered that Esther narrates part of the book.
ReplyDeleteVery nice :) It's always fun when questions hit those bits of knowledge. I've never read a single Dickens novel myself, which comes back to haunt me at quizzes with alarming regularity.
DeleteOh, and Ticket To Ride (Europe) is in my board games collection. I won a game just a couple of weeks ago.
ReplyDeleteJust missed on the Bleak House question - went for Little Dorrit too. TTR is a great game.
ReplyDeleteWell you of course have our sympathies on that one - and yes, I think TTR was the second 'proper' board game I was exposed to (after Settlers of Catan).
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