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.
Thursday 12 November 2015
No-one knows exactly why Babe Ruth is called Babe Ruth
Your targets this week:
1+ out of 6: Well done, you beat us! 3+ out of 6: We'd have won with you on our team!
The attendees 1) The statistician 2) The doctor 3) The rich-person otherkin 4) The secret German 5) The metallurgist
The ones that got away 1) How tall was Robert Wadlow, the world's tallest ever man? (Margin of error of +/-3in or +/-10cm) 2) How many walking legs does a lobster have? 3) Not counting movies explicitly about/focused around swearing, such as Swearnet (it's Canadian, don't worry about it, but you get the idea - The Editor), which Scorsese movie posesses the highest "fuck count", i.e. most uses of the word? 4) Spot the fake from this list of historic Major League Baseball teams: Brooklyn Bridegrooms, Chicago Orphans, Houston Colt 45s, NY Highlanders, Philadelphia Widowers 5)2 point question! What does the ancient Greek letter "eta" look like in upper case?
The answers
1) 2.72m or 8ft 11.1in (so 2.62m to 2.82m, or 8ft 8.1in to 9ft 2.1in gets you the point) 2) 10 3) The Wolf of Wall Street 4) Philadelphia Widowers 5) H
The doctor's excuses
1) In reading up on this it turns out that Wikipedia describes him as "the tallest person in recorded history for whom there is irrefutable evidence"... I assume this is to rule out allegations that Galactus, Michael Jordan, or God were the *actually* tallest person. 2) I tend to try not to think about lobsters because i find the whole human-lobster relationship a bit sad, thus i am recusing myself from continuing with this excuse 3) We watched this movie recently (well, I watched all of this movie and the statistician watched half of it and then fell asleep... it is a very long movie mainly about being on drugs, with some bits which are like The Apprentice a bit, I guess.... in common with this sentence I thought it was *overly* long and didn't really go anywhere, so I think this was a pretty legit choice). 4) We tend to check-out pretty early on these sorts of "spot the fake" questions but on this occasion we thought there was meta-gaming to be done. With 3 teams having a connection to familial relationships (Bridegrooms, Orphans, Widowers), it seemed the odd one out would be somehow work-outable from which seemed most "constructed" of the three. Half the team argued that Orphans and Widowers both seemed like things there might be charity teams constructed for. The other half of the team argued that widowers were arguably the conceptual confluence of orphans and bridegrooms and thus more likely made up. The latter was correct, but not gone with, much to the chagrin of the pro-widower camp. 5) The statistician wrestled with this for a long time, writing out almost all of the Greek letters in both their upper and lower case forms, but eventually got it down to 3 and zagged the wrong way. He has told me to point out that there's not much use knowing about upper case Greek letters that look identical to Roman letters, which is probably an excuse or something.
How did you do? Would you have beaten us (1 point or more)? Would you have helped us win (3 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 1) The tallest (note: not necessarily highest) statue in the world depicts which person or deity? 2) The oxygen-containing organic compound in lobster blood is haemocyanin rather than haemoglobin. Haemoglobin contains iron, making human blood red, haemocyanin contains what metallic element, giving lobster blood its distinctive blue colour? 3) Gadzooks is a somewhat archaic example of a "minced oath" (like saying "sugar" instead of "shit"... everyone knows what you meant and now everyone thinks you're a loser as well as short-tempered). The phrase it's trying to obscure is "God's Hooks". But to what biblical items did this refer? 4) Meaning "a convenient way of resolving a plot issue" (especially in a theatrical context) give an alternate translation of the phrase Apò mēkhanês Theós in either English or Latin. 5) The nicknames of two current Major League Baseball teams contain words from the NATO phonetic alphabet. For one point each, name the word (or the team).
The answers
1) Buddha 2) Copper 3) The nails supposedly stuck into Jesus when he was crucified (I say supposedly because apparently it was pretty common to just tie people up there rather than using nails, but it doesn't make for such a sexy gory story, I assume). 4) "Deus ex machina" or "God from the machine" 5) Yankee and India (New York Yankees and Cleveland Indians)
How did you do on my alternative questions? Have another poll!
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