The Linux mascot is a penguin called Tux

Your targets this week:

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

The attendees
1) The statistician
2) The doctor
3) The left-fielder

The ones that got away
1) Which country in the southern hemisphere has more penguin species than any other?
2) Which armed conflict was the deadliest in US history, with an estimated 750,000 American military deaths?
3) In Star Wars what is Luke Skywalker's callsign during the first attack on the Death Star?
4) In a standard pack of playing cards, what weapon does the king of diamonds hold that no other king does?
5) What common six letter word, often used to describe wealthy industrialists, derives from a Japanese word meaning 'great prince'?
6) 2 point question: what novel opens with "progris riport 1-martch 5, 1965"?
7) 3 point question: which body of water was turned to blood as one of the plagues in Exodus?

The answers

1) New Zealand
2) The US Civil War
3) Red Five
4) An axe
5) Tycoon
6) Flowers for Algernon
7) The Nile

Our excuses

1) Having remembered photos of penguins in the Falklands, I thought Argentina was as good a guess as any, and with Chile our only alternative thought we never got (geographically) close to the correct answer. Personally I'm sceptical; I don't think there are any in Lord of the Rings.
2) The left-fielder suggested Vietnam, and while I had a Civil War hunch it seemed to make less sense (for one thing, the US population was obviously much smaller back then). Just too late the doctor and I remembered visiting the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, and that it didn't look like anywhere near that many names (it's closer to 60,000), but by then our answer sheet was being marked.
3) Not much to say on this, other than that the left-fielder and the doctor had a toss-up between red two and red three.
4) We all immediately thought the answer was sword, which is of course what the other kings tend to carry.
5) Our initial guess was 'shogun', which I wasn't too happy with, but we didn't find the time to revisit it for another think.
6) The clue (apparently) was in the bad spelling, but while we got into sci-fi territory we eventually could only come up with P. K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly.
7) Considering this question alone would have won the quiz for us, it was a horrible miss. The doctor initially wrote down the correct answer, only for the left-fielder and me to push for the Red Sea instead (partly swayed by the phrasing 'body of water'). Agonizingly, shortly after we handed in the doctor remembered that the plague made the water undrinkable, which would have won us around to a river, rather than a sea.

How did you do? Would you have beaten us (1 or more points)? Would you have helped us win (3 or more points)? Don't forget the 2- and 3-point questions! 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) Whose autobiography - controversially published under the Penguin Classics imprint - is not divided into chapters and has an opening paragraph which lasts four-and-a-half pages?
2) Also the surname of a US president, in which theatre was Abraham Lincoln shot by John Wilkes Booth?
3) On what date is Star Wars Day (unofficially) celebrated?
4) Give the name of the poker hand formed of - in playing-card slang - a hockey stick, a snowman, a neener, a sawbuck and a hook.
5) A number of 'business simulation' video games feature the word Tycoon in their title. Which series (first released in 1999) involved building structures with the properties 'Excitement', 'Intensity' and 'Nausea'?
6) IQ is modelled on a statistical distribution informally referred to as the 'bell curve'. There are two other (more formal) names for this distribution, one beginning with N, the other with G. For 1 point each, name them.
7) Below I have rendered one of the Plagues of Egypt in picture clue form. Name the two men and the plague I'm cluing to (one point for each for a total of three).

The answers

1) Morrissey
2) Ford's theatre (in Washington, DC)
3) May 4th ("May the fourth be with you", geddit?)
4) A straight (from 7 to Jack)
5) RollerCoaster Tycoon
6) Normal and Gaussian
7) Frankie Boyle, Danny Boyle, and 'boils'!

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

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