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!)

Bonus Question: Christmas Advent Connection Quiz!

It's a Ones That Got Away Christmas special! The numbers have fallen off my advent calendar, can you match up the pictures with the answers to these 24 mildly festive questions? For bonus fun, the 24 answers form 6 connected groups of 4, like a slightly enlarged Only Connect connecting wall (phwoar).

The calendar is below the questions, and you can find a big PDF version of the whole thing here (and as a PNG here)! Don't forget you can click on images to make them bigger!

The Questions 

Question 5

1) What does a Cockney need to have a butcher's hook at something?
2) In A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, the third ghost to visit Scrooge is the Ghost of Christmas...what?
3) One Major League Baseball team contains the same word twice in its name: once in English and once in Spanish. What (English) word?
4) On what piece of equipment can you compete in Winter Olympic sports including parallel, cross, and slopestyle?
5) Pictured are the (slightly festivized) heads of the two main types of what animal?
6) A traditional term in the Royal Navy for the first lieutenant on board a ship, what two-word phrase is commonly used by Star Trek Captain Jean-Luc Picard to refer to his first officer William Riker?

Question 15

7) What is the Roman counterpart of the brother of the figure depicted on the Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain in Piccadilly Circus?
8) Despite eventually having almost nothing in common with the original, Disney's Frozen was first intended to be based on which Hans Christian Andersen story?
9) What is both Maverick's Radar Intercept Officer in Top Gun *and* a word, according to urbandictionary.com, meaning "A verb, which means to grab someone between their butt cheeks and to squeeze, almost with an intent to hurt, although it is often done in a joking, playful manner between friends"?
10) What three letters appear in the middle of five-letter words meaning a high temperature, a component of a video game, and the middle name of a Beckham?
11) What type of object may be described informally as an 'icy dirtball', 'deep fried ice cream', or a 'dirty snowball'?

Question 19

12) Familiar to many in the name of a high street sandwich chain, what is the French word for 'eat'?
13) What is the (English) name of the only Serbian football team to have won the European Cup?
14) Most famous for its three Olympic-class ocean liners, how was the Oceanic Steam Navigation Company better known?
15) Oh no! Someone has festivized some ladies. What first name do they all share?
16) Removing the last 2 letters of the third-oldest National Park in England and Wales gives the name of what mountain?
17) Two national flags consist solely of red and white and feature a crescent moon with a single star. One is Tunisia, what's the other?
18) What name links an Orwellian pig and 5 Simpsonian cats?
19) What food is being represented here?
20) Despite being predominantly a different colour, what is the name of the third-highest award for valo(u)r in the United States Armed Forces?

Question 23

21) What word describes Maid Marian in a 1973 Disney animated feature, Krystal from the Star Fox universe in video games, and the nickname of ITV's newest Chaser?
22) What term describes a kebab made of meat cooked on a vertical rotisserie?
23) What is the title of the upcoming album set to be released on this festivized singer's 69th birthday?
24) What name is shared by: a Russian leader widely regarded as responsible for millions of deaths, a prominent Nazi, and (at birth) Kevin Keegan?

The Calendar

(You may want to click on this to get a larger version.)

The Answers

You can find the full answers, with groups, here!

How did you do? Let the world know with the poll below! (1 point per correct answer - you don't need to worry about identifying all the groups, but it might help with solving.)

Swing states in the US are also known as 'purple states'

Your targets this week:

1+ out of 8: Well done, you beat us!
2+ out of 8: We'd have won with you on our team!

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 game Jenga takes its name from the Swahili word for what?
2) Which of these is not a real type of owl? Barking; Elf; Pole; Laughing; Powerful.
3) Which actress, who received her first Oscar nomination for her role in Rachel Getting Married, recently(ish) announced her pregnancy?
4) Which 2-word phrase, a metaphor for the early Internet, was designated the US Dialect Society's 'Word of the Year' in 1993?
5) What was the US Dialect Society's Word of the 20th Century? Hint: it contains 2 'z's.
6) The words 'cyber', 'e-', 'millennium bug', and 'web' were all US Dialect Society Words of the Year in the 1990s. Which was Word of the Year earliest?
7) ...and which was Word of the Year latest?
8) The words 'app', 'bailout', 'subprime', and 'tweet' were all US Dialect Society Words of the Year in the 2000s. Which was Word of the Year earliest?

The answers

1) Build (if you had something similar it's up to you if you think it's 'close enough')
2) Pole
3) Anne Hathaway
4) Information superhighway
5) Jazz
6) Cyber (in 1994)
7) e- (in 1998)
8) Subprime (in 2007)

My excuses

1) One of those questions where you wonder how you've never heard it before. Our discussions went nowhere near the correct answer, instead settling on 'wood'.
2) We misheard 'pole' as 'hole', but it wouldn't have made much difference. We went with 'barking' as it seemed very similar to 'laughing', but much less silly.
3) Haha. So far beyond our wheelhouse that we can't see the boat any more. (I had to actually google what a wheelhouse was, so that's something.) The other half of our team were at least familiar with the movie, but we couldn't get much further than "name an actress who is maybe sort of young but not that young???", which my notes tell me gave us someone called 'Rooney Mara'.
4) Pretty sad to miss this one, as I really enjoy phrases like this (the movie Hackers is easily in my top 5 of all time). We came up with 'dial up', which at least seemed pretty plausible.
5) Someone immediately said jazz, which struck me as an ok idea but hardly screamed 'word of the century'. Then someone said pizza, which the doctor thought was a great idea (I think because he likes pizza).
6-7) With so little separating the options (cyber, web, millennium bug, e- were from 1994, '95, '97 and '98, respectively) this was always going to be tough. We were one year out with both, picking web for earliest and millennium bug for the latest.
8) Subprime, bailout, tweet, app span the years 2007-2010, so another tough set, although our guess of tweet was the second-worst available for this one.

How did you do? Would you have beaten us (1 point or more)? Would you have helped us win (2 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

Question 2

1) The Disney character 'Simba' takes his name from the Swahili word for what?
2) In comics, the Court of Owls is an organized crime group - specializing in the kidnap of child circus performers - based in which fictional city?
3) Like many quizzers, I only really know about Anne Hathaway (the actress) because of questions about Anne Hathaway (the wife of William Shakespeare). With that in mind, the stage name of which actress, known for her roles in Live and Let Die and Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, is shared with that of the third wife of another famous 16th Century figure?
4) What 8-letter, German-inspired alternative to 'information superhighway' was coined around the same time?

Question 7

5) Commonly encountered in jazz, what colour describes a note that is sung or played at a slightly different pitch than standard?
6) Word of the Year questions are fun, so here's another. What puzzle was Oxford Dictionaries UK Word of the Year in 2005?
7) Earlier this year, the Royal Mail produced a stamp set to celebrate British innovations. What invention does this (slightly censored) stamp commemorate?
8) Let's pretend that the word 'subprime' means 'whole numbers that are equal to a prime number minus 1'. So for example, since 17 is prime, 16 is 'subprime'. Defined this way, how many subprimes are also prime?

The answers

1) Lion (of The Lion King fame)
2) Gotham City
3) Jane Seymour
4) Infobahn
5) Blue
6) Sudoku
7) Cat's eyes
8) 1 (as every prime number except 2 is odd, every subprime except for 1 must be even, so 2 is the only prime subprime)

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

In Japan, Ronald McDonald is called Donald McDonald

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
6) The meteorologist

Question 4

The ones that got away
1) The highest ranked food services company on the Fortune 500 is McDonald's. What's the second?
2) What word, co-opted by JK Rowling, was originally slang for a marijuana cigarette?
3) In cents, how much money is '2 bits'?
4) Who is being played by Sigourney Weaver here?
5) Which 3 of the following 8 animals are nocturnal? Honey badger, Koala, Lynx, Moose, Red fox, Komodo Dragon, Ostrich, Tortoise. You need all 3 for the point.

The answers

1) Starbucks
2) Muggle
3) 25
4) Dian Fossey (in Gorillas in the Mist)
5) Honey badger, Koala and Red fox

The doctor's excuses

1) Moderately difficult and interesting question. Yum Brands was suggested on account of their ownership of KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell, which seemed to me to be a sufficiently strong trifecta to make them a decent competitor to Maccy D's. Turns out that Starbucks is 187 and Yum is 228.
2) We immediately discarded "muggle" as being way too obvious to be the real answer and then spent quite a while wracking our brains about it. In the end someone remembered the term "squib" (a child born of magical parents but without magical abilities). Since a squib is a thing you light, and so is wacky tobaccy we thought it seemed like a good shout.
3) In googling something interesting to say about this question, I was reminded that "Shave and a haircut. Two bits" is a well known musical sting. The highlight of that Wikipedia page is the fact that "In Mexico, the tune is highly offensive, as it is commonly used to stand in for the vulgar phrase 'chinga tu madre, cabrón'". I shan't translate that though, as it is jolly rude.
4) I have, on multiple occasions, mistaken Fossey for Goodall, which is weird because I don' t really know much about either person other than "they both did ape research stuff". It turns out they're both rather interesting people. Worth reading up on.
5) I'm not really sure why we put "lynx" here. I think someone had a theory about koalas being definitely diurnal or something? I'm not 100% sure I think I'd been drinking, which makes sense, it is a pub quiz after all.

How did you do? Would you have beaten us? 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!


Our alternative questions

Question 1

1) In 2012 a Nebraska woman sold a Chicken McNugget (pictured) for over $8,000. Why was it so expensive?
2) We asked a question about Harry Potter last week, so here's an HP question instead. According to Heinz.co.uk, what is the most prevalent ingredient in a bottle of HP (brown) sauce? (Hint: it's not vinegar.)
3) In Disney's Tron, 'programs' are associated with 'bits' which are capable of saying only two words: which two?
4) Along with her research on gorillas, Fossey undertook many anti-poaching efforts. But what (pictured below) is, according to the International Fund for Animal Welfare, the world's most illegally traded animal?
5) Have another animal question. What is the common name of the only marsupial native to the USA? One of these creatures was voiced by William Shatner in the movie Over the Hedge, bringing his unique style to a rather overacted 'death' scene.

Question 4

The answers

1) It (supposedly) resembles George Washington
2) Tomatoes
3) 'Yes' and 'No'
4) The pangolin
5) Possom (more formally, the Virginia opossum)

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