Derby Field Airport, Nevada, has the airport code LOL

Your targets this week:

1+ out of 11: Well done, you beat us!
7+ out of 11: We'd have won with you on our team!

Note that a couple of questions this week are worth more than 1 point so be sure to keep that in mind when totting up your scores!

The attendees
1) The statistician
2) The doctor
3) The game dev
4) The Klingon
5) The chef

The ones that got away

Yep.

1) Based on passenger traffic, three of the four busiest airports in the world are in Atlanta (USA), Beijing (China) and London (UK). Also in Asia, give either the airport code or the city of the fourth busiest airport in the world.
2) Alcia Beth Moore is the real name of which singer: Lady Gaga, Lorde, P!nk, or Rihanna?
3) Which title character's name from a children's movie comes from the Yiddish word for fear or fright?
4) In South Park what is the supervillain alter ego of the character Leopold "Butters" Scotch?
5) Identify the movie from the last line of one its characters: "Lucius is safe."
6) Along the New York highway system signs for 'Rest Stops' are being replaced, instead now advertising the same locations as '____ Stops' - what four letter verb fills in the blank?
7) 2 Point Question! Which is the only US state to have a royal palace, once used as an official residence of a reigning monarch?
8) 3 Point Question! Which everyday liquid did the Romans use to whiten their teeth?

The answers

1) Dubai (code DXB or OMDB)
2) P!nk (Lady Gaga is Stefani Germanotta, Lorde is Ella Yelich O'Connor, and Rihanna is Robyn Fenty - Rihanna is her middle name)
3) Shrek
4) Professor Chaos (note: you need the 'professor' bit)
5) Gladiator (spoken by the main character Maximus)
6) Text (in an attempt to discourage texting while driving)
7) Hawaii (ʻIolani Palace in Honolulu was the residence of the reigning Hawaiian sovereign)
8) Urine

Our excuses

1) The question on the night asked for all four (with the additional clue that two were in Asia, one in North America and one in Europe) and the three listed in the question above were the three we got. I was a tad frustrated not to get all four, as I'd read up a little on this list after an incident on Channel 4's Five Minutes to a Fortune last year. There a couple were asked to name five of the top ten 'cities with the busiest airports' but went away with nothing. On the show this was supposed to mean 'cities which have one of the world's 10 busiest airports', but after broadcast the contestants claimed that the phrasing was ambiguous. They argued that an answer of New York City (ruled out as incorrect at the time) should have counted as it would be in the top 10 list of cities with the busiest airports combined. New York, of course, has numerous airports which between them add up to a huge number of passengers, but busiest JFK alone only ranks as 18th in the world. Nevertheless the ambiguity meant the contestants went away with £26,000 after all. Dubai seems a very hard get here, although our guess of Shanghai (19th in the world) was still some way off.
2) Celebrity real names are quizzing bread and butter, but not something we've ever been particularly good at. We could at least narrow it down to three (knowing Lady Gaga's real name) but otherwise this was just a one in three guess.
3) We really should have got this, but almost didn't even manage a guess until the doctor hit upon Fieval Mousekewtiz from An American Tail: Fieval Goes West. I'll confess we were quietly quite confident of this (it begins with an F, at least), but were really kicking ourselves when the correct answer was revealed.
4) So near and yet so far. The doctor got halfway with this but put down Doctor Chaos instead of the all important Professor.
5) The name 'Lucius' had us thinking of either Lucius Malfoy from the Harry Potter franchise or Lucius Fox from Batman comics (and played by Morgan Freeman in the recent movies). The quote didn't really make sense for what we knew of either, however, and we went with a fairly unconvincing guess of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1. This seems a very tough question to me, so well done if you managed this tricky bit of movie trivia.
6) Another tough one, but we were on the right lines thinking it would be some sort of safety message. Unfortunately we couldn't think of a four letter word for 'sleep' (the only reason we'd though of for why you may be encouraged to take a break) and ended up going for 'fuel stops' as at least fitting the rules of the question and vaguely making sense.
7) We were kicking ourselves again here, as having theorized the word 'monarch' may not necessarily mean a British one, we nevertheless didn't even think about Hawaii. I remembered that Maryland is the only state whose flag is based on English heraldry, and that its capital Annapolis is named after Queen Anne, which seemed better than nothing.
8) Sometimes you can infer a great deal from how a question is phrased, and I'm typically my team's biggest proponent of this bit of 'meta' game. I wasn't persuasive enough here, however, as after narrowing down our options to vinegar and urine, my argument of "every day liquid would be an odd way to phrase it if the answer was vinegar" ultimately went unheeded.

How did you do? Would you have beaten us (1 or more correct)? Would you have helped us win (7 points or more)? 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

Question 2

1) In which country can you find airports with the codes NUE, HAM, MUC and CGN?
2) P!nk is one of many artists to include punctuation in her name. Which similarly inclined individual is associated with the 'insignia' pictured?
3) One scene in Shrek references which classic Disney movie with the line "You might have seen a house fly, maybe even a super fly, but I bet you ain't never seen a donkey fly"?
4) The primary ingredients of butterscotch are butter and brown sugar. What substance in brown sugar - a by-product of refining sugarcane into sugar - makes it brown?
5) One of the Gladiators in the classic UK TV series was called Saracen, a European medieval term for members of which religion?
6) Back in the day Nokia mobile phones had a standard text message alert of three short beeps followed by two long beeps and then another three short beeps. What appropriate initialism does this spell out in Morse code?
7) 4 point question! The current official Hawaiian alphabet contains just seven consonants (along with the 'okina - a glottal stop). Three of these consonants - H, N and W - appear in the word Hawaiian. For one point each, name the other four.
8) First name Roman, spell (correctly!) the last name of the Russian businessman and owner of Chelsea Football Club.

The answers

1) Germany (NUE = Nuremberg, HAM = Hamburg, MUC = Munich and CGN = Cologne)
2) will.i.am (the insignia was used as a promotional tool for his #willpower album)
3) Dumbo ('Did you ever see an elephant fly?')
4) Treacle (or molasses)
5) Islam
6) SMS (which stands for Short Message Service)
7) K, L, M and P
8) Abramovich

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

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