Only two national flags feature a crescent moon but no star: Maldives and Brunei

Your targets this week:

1+ out of 7: 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) The croissant was invented in which country noted for its pastries?
2) Taxi-app company Uber launched a rental service for what type of vehicle in May?
3) In what month is Patriots' Day celebrated in the United States?
4) There have been at least two movies called The Patriot released over the years. Name the actor who stars in the 1998 movie The Patriot and the actor who stars in the 2000 movie The Patriot. (You don't need to match up the actors to the specific years, but you do need both for the point.)
5) Which of the following is not a real flavour of Doritos? a) Butter and Soy Sauce; b) Coconut Curry; c) Italian Seafood; d) Roasted Turkey; e) Spicy Kimchi
6) 2 point question: In what city was the Titanic built?

The answers

1) Austria
2) Helicopter
3) April
4) Steven Seagal (1998) and Mel Gibson (2000)
5) Spicy Kimchi
6) Belfast

Our excuses

1) 'Notable for its pastries' seemed to hint fairly heavily towards Denmark, and despite me sharing the fascinating fact that the Danish call Danish Pastries weinerbrød (meaning 'bread from Vienna') and us briefly contemplating the Austrian option, we trusted our first instinct.
2) This news had obviously passed the whole team by and we went with the fairly uninspired guess of rickshaw (albeit via a Katie Melua-inspired dalliance with bicycles). I was interested to discover while writing this that the vehicle I had previously identified as a tuk-tuk is in fact more generally know as an 'auto rickshaw'.
3) A tricky one, this, with little to really hang a guess on (the closest Canada has is National Patriots' Day, which is a holiday observed in the province of Quebec while most of the rest of the country is celebrating Victoria Day). Had I known the Boston Marathon is run on Patriots' Day we may have had more of an idea, but with 12 options to choose from we picked July.
4) The team (i.e. not me) knew Gibson starred in one of them, but for the other we were left picking at random from the set of actors who might plausibly appear in that sort of film, eventually putting down Liam Neeson. Missing Seagal is perhaps forgivable, as it was apparently his first direct-to-video film (although it was based on a book called The Last Canadian, so make of that what you will).
5) These types of questions can often be incredibly tricky. Here we dismissed the correct answer as a bit too boring to have been made up, whereas Italian Seafood sounded too horrendous to be true.
6) A question I'm very glad didn't come close to costing us the win, as it should really have been bread and butter for us. We tied ourselves in knots a bit, knowing it sailed from Southampton but that that shipbuilding pointed at Ireland and our answer of Liverpool. (I must confess that part of my rationale for deciding against Belfast was that it seemed too hard for a Canadian crowd.) It seems this wasn't too terrible an idea, as the Titanic was registered at Liverpool, but with the construction taking place in Belfast.

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
1) Commonly mis-attributed to Marie Antoinette, the quote 'let them eat cake' is in fact referring to which rich, bread-like foodstuff?
2) While we're thinking of the French, the word 'cab' (as in taxicab) is a contraction of what longer word for a type of horse-drawn carriage?
3) The Patriot missile takes its name via a bacronym (a reverse-engineered acronym). Beginning 'Phased Array Tracking Radar to Intercept On ______', what word completes it?
4) In the 1992 movie Patriot Games, Harrison Ford plays a character also played by Alec Baldwin in a 1990 movie. For 1 point each, name the movie and the character.
5) The original product that would go on to become Doritos today were first made at the delightfully named 'Casa de Fritos' in which California theme park? (They were made by taking surplus tortillas, cutting them up and frying.)
6) Infamously, the Titanic did not have enough lifeboats to save all of those on board. To within 10%, what proportion of the estimated 2,224 people on board could theoretically have been saved if all of its lifeboats been sent out at full capacity?

The answers

1) Brioche
2) Cabriolet
3) Target
4) The Hunt for Red October and Jack Ryan)
5) Disneyland
6) 53% (so 43%-63% gets you the point; lifeboat capacity was 1,178)

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

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