The highest distinction in the Soviet Union was the Hero of the Soviet Union

Your targets this week:

1+ out of 12: Well done, you beat us!
7+ out of 12: We'd have won with you on our team!

The attendees
1) The statistician
2) The doctor

The ones that got away
1) To within 25km, how far south-east of Newfoundland, Canada, did the Titanic sink? Hint: the answer is between 0 and 750km.
2) What name was Mickey Mouse originally going to be called?
3) Who was the first US president to live in the White House?
4) What was Ernest Hemingway's first published novel?
5) Which Frenchman was born seven months after his friend and colleague in the development of cubism, Pablo Picasso?
6) Which boxer, who won a gold medal in the 1992 Olympics, was nicknamed 'The Golden Boy'?
7) How did Virginia Woolf commit suicide?
8) Who was the first First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union?
9) What is O. J. Simpson's nickname?
10) In which US state was Oprah Winfrey born?
11) In Reservoir Dogs a number of characters use a pseudonym of 'mister' followed by a colour. What colour was used by Tim Roth's character?
12) How high an IQ score do you need to be classified a genius?

The answers

1) 640km (so 615km to 665km, or 383-413 miles gets you the point)
2) Mortimer
3) John Adams
4) The Sun Also Rises
5) (Georges) Braque
6) Oscar De La Hoya
7) Drowning (in the River Ouse)
8) (Nikita) Khrushchev
9) The Juice
10) Mississippi
11) Orange
12) 140

Our excuses

1) The quizmaster added the 'hint' seemingly as an afterthought, and I'm not sure it really helped us much. I was already thinking around 300km and then the hint, if anything, offered mild reassurance (my rationale was that it would likely be in the lower half of the range offered). On a more general note it seems odd to offer a range on a question like this; the degree of accuracy required should be enough of a hint to the (rough) size of the answer.
2) This one was painful as I knew I'd read the answer a few weeks previously (when another quiz threatened to have a Disney round). Alas, we couldn't drag the correct answer out of our brains, and while we resisted the urge to put Willie (Steamboat Willie refers to the song Steamboat Bill Mickey whistles) our "plausible names starting with M" left us with Maxwell.
3) Our discussion on this one was interrupted by a woman who recognized the doctor from University Challenge, and so our initial guess of Ulysses S. Grant ("he was the president in Wild Wild West, and I think they were doing something with the White House in that?") went uncorrected. Had we given it more thought I'd like to think we would at least have gone for one of the early presidents, as we knew it must have been around in the 1810s when the Canadians burned it down.
4) This one seemed strangely tough (although I know very little of Hemingway so this probably just reflects my ignorance) and we were left struggling to remember any Hemingway novels. All we could come up with was Death in the Afternoon which isn't even a novel (it's a non-fiction book about bullfighting).
5) Another one that wouldn't seem out of place on University Challenge. The doctor spent a long time trying to remember a French cubist before remembering, with considerable relief, Piet Mondrian at the last minute. Unfortunately he's not French (he's Dutch) and wasn't a cubist. Instead, "he evolved a non-representational form which he termed neoplasticism". As you do.
6) I'm not sure we've ever got a question about boxing correct on a quiz, but this name at least rang a bell. I struggle to find anything interesting to say about boxers, but Wikipedia reckons (at least as of a few years ago) that he's generated more money than any other boxer in the sport, so if true that's possibly exciting.
7) I can't help feel slightly uncomfortable when quizmasters set questions about the relatively morbid, and based on the reactions of other (more normal) participants I'm not the only one. We made a blind guess of sleeping pills.
8) A somewhat confusing question (not least because at first the quizmaster seemed to say "the first Secretary" rather than "the first First Secretary"). Part of the confusion arises because there have been five titles given to the leader of the Communist Party over the years (Technical Secretary, Chairman of the Secretariat, Responsible Secretary, and General Secretary being the other four). Thinking that the founder of the party at least seemed a reasonable bet, we went down the "if you don't know just put Lenin" route.
9) We were starting to despair a little by this point, and barely gave this any thought. I vaguely remembered the name 'Nugget', thus becoming the first person to ever confuse NFL superstar/convicted felon O.J. Simpson with Plumstead snooker player/cookbook author Steve Davis.
10) Like most people (I imagine) we could at least hear Oprah Winfrey's voice in our heads, but as she was just shouting "You Get a Car! You Get a Car! Everybody gets a Caaaaar!" this didn't help much.
11) What is it about pub quizzes and Reservoir Dogs? You'd think by now we'd have finally got the message and watched it, but no. Instead we managed to rule out Brown (he's played by Quentin Tarantino, which we learned at a pub quiz a month or two ago) and Pink (he's played by John Steve Buscemi, which I learned last week when researching P!nk), which still left Blue, Blonde, Orange and our eventual guess of White.
12) A question to which you know there won't be a definitive answer, and so it's a matter of guessing a number and hoping it matches whichever source the quizmaster happened to use. What's more, an IQ score is meaningless if you don't know what scale it's on (hence why if someone tells you their IQ but doesn't know on what scale, they're probably not as clever as they want you to believe). Surprisingly, the doctor immediately offered the correct answer, but I wasn't convinced. I knew that Mensa requires something around 130, but that seemed far too low to be a 'genius', whereas 150 seemed to me a more likely round number for that sort of cut-off.

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

Question 3 (click for big!)

1) What do the letters RMS (as in, for example, RMS Titanic) stand for?
2) Mickey Mouse was originally created as a replacement for an earlier Disney cartoon character. Named Oswald, what type of animal was Mickey's predecessor?
3) Based on this image of the White House's West Wing, in which numbered office would you expect to find the Vice-President?
4) Death in the Afternoon is a cocktail invented by Hemingway for a 1935 cocktail book with contributions from famous authors. His instructions were: "Pour one jigger ______ into a Champagne glass. Add iced Champagne until it attains the proper opalescent milkiness. Drink three to five of these slowly". Can you fill in the missing (and highly alcoholic) ingredient?

Question 5

5) Pictured is a charcoal drawing by Picasso of which figure shortly after his death in 1953? Inexplicably, it was not met with universal acclaim.
6) The Golden Gloves is the name given to annual competitions for amateur boxing in the Untied States, but to a player in what position - and for what achievement - is the Golden Glove awarded in football's Premier League?
7) Virginia Woolf was a member of the Bloomsbury Set, a group of influential English writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists. Which of its more notable members had the initials JMK? (Surname alone will do.)
8) Since the position was established in 1991, how many different men have served as President of Russia?
9) Give the three words which complete the rhyming (catch)phrase from O. J. Simpson's trial, concerning a single leather glove: "If it doesn't fit, ...".
10) Since 1999 Forbes magazine has compiled an annual list of the most powerful celebrities of the year. Oprah Winfrey is the only person to appear in the top 10 of this list for each of the 16 years it has been running. Just two other people make more than ten appearances, one who works in the film industry and the other in sports. Name either.
11) Which orange Mr. Men character - the first in the Roger Hargreaves series of books - begins his story by eating a biscuit without getting out of bed?
12) What comes next in this sequence?

DENSWO

CWENSP

BSWENQ

__________

The answers

1) Royal Mail Ship ('Steam-ship' and 'Steamer' are acceptable alternatives)
2) A rabbit (his 'full name' is Oswald the Lucky Rabbit)
3) 9
4) Absinthe
5) (Joseph) Stalin
6) The goalkeeper with the most clean sheets (most games where no goals were conceded)
7) (John Maynard) Keynes
8) Three - Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin (twice) and Dmitry Medvedev
9) "you must acquit"
10) Tiger Woods (12 appearances) and Steven Spielberg (11 appearances)
11) Mr. Tickle
12) ANSWER (the first letters form the sequence DCBA the last letters form the sequence OPQR and the middle four are the letters NSWE being shifted forward one letter each time)

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

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