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.
Friday 12 June 2015
The Canadian Navy's motto is 'Ready Aye Ready'
Your targets this week:
We won this week, but could you have done even better? The attendees 1) The statistician 2) The doctor 3) The secret German 4) The metallurgist 5) The rich-person otherkin
The ones that got away 1) In the Canadian navy, what rank is immediately below rear admiral? 2) Despite its 'Peach State' nickname, Georgia's peach production is lower than which of its neighbouring states? 3) In which country did George Foreman fight Muhammad Ali in the Rumble in the Jungle? You can give either the current name or its name at the time of the fight. 4) What do the letters of the US TV channel 'CNN' stand for? 5) Which Russian wrote the existentialist novel Notes from Underground? 6) Which company was behind the first FIFA World Cup football to be made with the now iconic black-and-white design of hexagons and pentagons? 7) And in which year was that World Cup? 8) Where in the body would you find the 'IT band'?
The answers
1) Commodore 2) South Carolina 3) Zaïre (now Democratic Republic of the Congo) 4) Cable News Network 5) (Fyodor) Dostoyevsky 6) Adidas 7) 1970 8)The leg
Our excuses
1) We (correctly) guessed this would be the same as the Royal Navy, but couldn't remember how they worked, so instead hoped it was the same as in Starfleet, recalling Captain Kirk's demotion from Admiral to Captain in Star Trek IV. Unfortunately, despite the Commodore rank also existing in Starfleet, it's seldom mentioned (and apparently was dropped altogether in the year 2364), so I think that's a pretty good excuse. 2) The team's combined knowledge of South-East US geography was good enough to identify the valid options, before going for Alabama over South Carolina in something of a coin toss. 3) After some brain-wracking, some of the team had Congo while the doctor dug up Zaire, and none of us were sure enough which Congo Zaire became (or indeed, whether Zaire was right in the first place). 4) I suspect for most this comes down to getting the C, and many of those will be kicking themselves - as we did - for putting 'Central'. 5) The classic pub quiz game of 'pick one of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Pushkin or Solzhenitsyn' and hope you're right. Except for some reason we ended up with Kafka. Hmm. 6) A fun fact which I was surprised to discover I didn't know. Adidas was tempting me, but seemed a bit too 'obvious' (famous last words, especially when they've been making them for the last 40 years...), and in hindsight I should have realized Umbro was a bit too anglo-centric for a Montreal quiz. 7) We were a bit closer on this one, as while we obviously knew it wasn't 1966, I then pushed one World Cup too late with 1974. 8) IT is short for 'iliotibial', and it seems 'IT band syndrome' is a common sporting injury. The doctor claims "it can't kill you so I don't care". Reassuring as ever.
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 (loosely) inspired by this week's Ones That Got Away!
My alternative questions
Question 4
1) The highest-selling single computer model of all time, how much RAM does the Commodore 64 have? 2) Having granted a patent for the land to Robert Heath in 1629, North and South Carolina are named after which monarch? 3) What term for a type of punch derives from the arm's motion mimicking the action of swinging a scythe? 4) Which television network's logo is this? Its name translates to 'island' or 'peninsula'. 5) Give a year in which Dostoyevsky was alive. 6) The 2006 FIFA World Cup ball was the Adidas +Teamgeist, with the plus sign included so the name could be trademarked as the regular German word Teamgeist could not. What does Teamgeist translate to in English? 7) The 1970 World Cup was the last time the Jules Rimet trophy was awarded, as Jules Rimet himself had stated it could be kept by the first team to win the tournament how many times? 8) Z'roa, a lamb shankbone appears on the Seder Plate, part of what religious festival?
The answers
1) 64 kilobytes 2) Charles I (of England, Carolus is Latin for 'Charles') 3) Haymaker 4) Al Jazeera 5) 1821-1881 6) Team spirit (à la, for example, zeitgeist) 7) Three (with Brazil the 1970 champions) 8) Passover
How did you do on my alternative questions? Have another poll!
I liked the peach question. Usually I hate questions about crop production or whatever, but this one felt a bit like a hidden pop culture question - South Carolina's peaches being at one stage a plot point in House of Cards.
I liked the peach question. Usually I hate questions about crop production or whatever, but this one felt a bit like a hidden pop culture question - South Carolina's peaches being at one stage a plot point in House of Cards.
ReplyDeleteThat's a pretty great route to an answer.
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