2016 has been designated as the International Year of Pulses by the sixty-eighth session of the United Nations General Assembly

Your targets this week:

1+ out of 12: Well done, you beat us!
3+ 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) What is the first name of (Canadian Prime Minister) Justin Trudeau's wife?
2) Who directed Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back? (Hint: it's not George Lucas)
3) By area, what is the second-largest lake in the world?
4) What song's second verse begins "It's always tease tease tease. You're happy when I'm on my knees."? (You just need the song, not the band.)
5) Harrison Ford's second-biggest grossing film is now Star Wars: The Force Awakens. What movie did it relegate to second?
6) Introduced in September, who is the current principal of South Park Elementary School?
7) What country did the Romans refer to as Hibernia?
8) As of December 30, 2015, which singer is the most-followed person on Twitter? They overtook Justin Bieber for the honour.
9) 2 point question: Which (American) football team plays at Lambeau Field?
10) 2 point question: The international airport serving Budapest, Hungary, is named after which composer?

The answers

1) Sophie
2) Irvin Kershner
3) Lake Superior
4) Should I Stay or Should I Go (by The Clash)
5) Star Wars: A New Hope ('Star Wars', or 'Star Wars Episode IV' are also fine)
6) PC Principal ('Principal' alone does not suffice)
7) Ireland (technically the island of Ireland, but Ireland was the expected answer)
8) Katy Perry
9) Green Bay Packers
10) Liszt

My excuses

1) The perils of Canadian quizzing. We briefly considered bargaining with the quizmaster for half points for knowing David Cameron's wife's name, but decided better of it. Instead, we tried to think of the most French lady name we could, coming up with the slightly close 'Marie'.
2) Despite having marathonned the entire series in preparation for seeing the newest installment, not to mention the doctor's predictably encyclopaedic knowledge of such things, he wasn't able to bring this name to mind. Sadtimes.
3) Canadian quizzes so seldom ask geography questions we've become quite bad at it. Here we tied ourselves in knots thinking the biggest lake was Lake Baikal, when (obviously) it's the deepest. On the plus side, we did correctly deduce that the largest lake that wasn't Lake Baikal was the Caspian Sea, but by that point that wasn't much help.
4) With no idea we decided to put Whip/Nae Nae by Silentó, a song neither of us has actually heard but is rapidly becoming our go-to for any music question here.
5) The second Star Wars question dropped of the night risked the doctor being sent over the edge. Luckily he decided this technically doesn't count as a Star Wars question so that's ok. We put Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull which is a tantalizingly close third.
6) Having no idea I speculated (fairly optimistically) that he might 'hilariously' be called something like Mr. Principal, so wrote down 'Principal'. I was (almost) outraged not to be given it.
7) Haha, oh dear again. Being tricked by the existence of Hibernian FC we went with Scotland. This in spite of the fact that we were both fairly sure we'd got a question about Caledonia being Scotland wrong on another quiz some years ago.
8) Incredibly, I'd written a question about this very topic about 2 weeks previously as part of a Christmas quiz I'd planned to administer to the doctor and some friends. Predictably I never actually got around to running the quiz, and couldn't remember the answer myself. We went with the old Twitter staple of Lady Gaga who now ranks at number 7.
9) The quizmaster described this as "a really easy one", which is always a good sign with North American sports questions. With things like this we usually just put whatever team comes to mind first, which in this case was the Baltimore Ravens (who play at the highly memorable M&T Bank Stadium).
10) A final embarrassment to round things off. We both immediately said Liszt and then second-guessed ourselves with Brahms because of his ludicrously famous Hungarian Dances. (We also have a strategy on 'high brow' questions here to always go for the most famous option.) Had we remembered his first name was Johannes we might have saved ourselves, but it was not to be.

How did you do? Would you have beaten us (1 or more point)? Would you have helped us win (3 or more points)? Let the world know with the poll below!



(No alternative questions this week as we've been too busy being festive, sorry!)

Tweet