No quiz this week :(

Sorry! Illness has got the better of me.

Pulitzer Prizes are awarded in 21 categories

Your targets this week:

We won this week, but can you do 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) What is the only movie to be based on a novel by Stephen King and to star Christopher Walken?
2) The term sesquibicentennial represents how many years?
3) What are the first names of the two main characters in the Neil Simon play The Odd Couple? You need both for the point.
4) Pro-wrestler Daniel Bryan, whose catchphrase is 'No! No! No!', once teamed up with another wrestler called Kane, who is the Undertaker's demon brother. What was the name of this tag team?
5) In what movie can you see a counter-terrorism agent played by Jean-Claude Van Damme team up with a weapons dealer played by Dennis Rodman?
6) 2 point question: Starting with a 1, add 0s until you have the (approximate) number of times the International Space Station has orbited the Earth.
7) Who wrote the (Pulitzer Prize-winning) novel All the King's Men?

The answers

1) The Dead Zone
2) 250
3) Felix and Oscar
4) Team Hell No
5) Double Team
6) 100,000
7) Robert Penn Warren

The doctor's excuses

1) I tend to prefer not to consume horror fiction directly, instead preferring to enjoy it in Wikipedia synopsis form. As a result I was able to tell the team the broad outline of the plot of The Dead Zone - about a dude with psychometric powers, but this was unable to alter the fact that nobody had seen the movie in question. We put "Thinner" which is either about AIDS or witchcraft, or both (or possibly neither... just so I've fully covered my back).
2) Sesquipedelian words, according to the Schott's Miscellany I had as a teen, were those which could be described as being "a foot and a half" long. So we had the 2 and a half component, and then we brainfarted and missed the centennial bit. NICE ONE, US.
3) I know The Odd Couple is a super famous thing, but it's currently in the same box as "Gone With The Wind" where it's basically "Media To Experience If I Run Out Of Literally Any Other Things To Do". So obviously, I didn't know about the names of the characters. Someone knew Oscar though, which was pretty good going, I thought.
4) "Find Out What The Deal Is With WWE And US Professional Wrestling" is yet another bullet point on my quest-log, which I suspect shall go uncompleted for my entire life. I sort of abstractly understand the appeal, but what little of it I've seen makes it clear that it's not really my cup of tea.
5) I think I've watched literally 2 movies in which the cast had been blessed by the divine presence of The Muscles From Brussels, but this was not one of them. Another close one though as our team went with Double Trouble (probably the sequel).
6) Our answer was 10,000 - making us out by a factor of ten. This was because we thought that it maybe orbited the Earth 1-2x a day. It seems pretty alarming that anyone's able to get anything done at all up there given how fast they're whizzing around, but that's space for you I guess.
7) According to Wikipedia, All The King's Men is a book that I can't easily summarise in one sentence as part of an excuse for why we didn't know who wrote it. It's like, about a politician who's a dick but people like him? Something like that. We suggested John Grisham because he is a noted writer of books.

How did you do? Would you have beaten us (1 or more point)? 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 5

1) Essential' trivia time: what two words follow "Rita Hayworth and" to complete a Stephen King novella. It was later adapted for a film that, despite regular citations as 'one of the greatest movies of all time', failed to win a single Academy Award.
2) Originally intended to be a 2 euro coin before the French blocked the plans, the Belgian commemorative 2.5 euro coin commemorates what event of 1815?
3) For 1 point each, give the first name of any former member of pop group Girls Aloud, and the surname of any member of Russian composer group The Mighty Handful. (Then imagine what beautiful music they'd make together.)
4) The story of Cain and Abel is a major theme in what 1952 John Steinbeck novel?

Question 6

5) Pictured is the poster from one of the greatest Jean-Claude Van Damme movies of all time. What video game series is it based on?
6) Pictured is a space version of something almost all of us use every day. What?
7) Humpty Dumpty is sometimes used to illustrate the second law of thermodynamics, which describes what 7-letter process? (Extra hint: it starts with 'e'.)

The answers

1) Shawshank Redemption
2) Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo (Battle of Waterloo, or similar answers, also acceptable)
3) Nadine, Cheryl, Sarah, Nicola, Kimberley and Balakirev, Cui, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korskakov, Borodin (I'll let you work out which list is which)
4) East of Eden
5) Street Fighter
6) A toilet
7) Entropy

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

The most-watched YouTube that isn't a song is a collection of nursery rhymes

Your targets this week:

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

The attendees
1) The statistician
2) The doctor

The ones that got away

Question 6!

1) In Friends, how many categories of towel does Monica have?
2) YouTube co-founders Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim met while working for what e-commerce company?
3) Easybird, rise, and toaster are (in a social media context) examples of what?
4) In what year was Pluto demoted to 'dwarf planet' status by the International Astronomical Union?
5) Name all the planets in the Solar System which have rings. (You need all of them for the point.)
6) This is a picture of a moon in the solar system. For 1 point, name the moon and the planet it orbits.
7) Which is the densest planet in the solar system?
8) Which company beat SpaceX to become the first to launch and land the same rocket twice?

The answers

1) 11
2) PayPal
3) Instagram filters
4) 2006
5) Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune
6) Io, Jupiter
7) Earth
8) Blue Origin

The doctor's excuses

1) ahahahahahaha, what a cracker of a question. This is basically "do you remember this one specific episode of Friends?" and the answer is either a) "no, I am a normal person", or b) "yes, what do you think Rachel smells like?"
2) We'll totally cop to the fact that we were wrong, but this question *is* muddied by the fact that (I believe) PayPal was *owned* by eBay at the time :3
3) This is actually probably a fair-ish question, like... I wouldn't think a question about Twitter was dumb and this was the social media round (I think). I just don't like/am not good at taking photos so I've never used Insta (as the kids call it... don't check that, I didn't actually ask any kids).
4) The Statistician's father was actually part of the group of astronomy people who were all like "yeah, F Pluto tbh", so we should have probably known this. Questions where it's just like "what year was this" are pretty much the worst. It's either like, "this is something *ridiculously* famous like the moon landing (or like, the date the Illuminati lizard-people faked the moon landing, if you like) OR it's like, nobody knows and nobody cares. These are the only two options. Also I don't know when the moon landing was because I am rubbish, sorry.
5) Jupiter has rings. God dammit. I bloody knew that. (We had the others, obvs.)
6) We're not *great* on moons, but I thought the image looked like a moon covered in ice... and the only one I know that's like that is Europa... turns out that was completely wrong, but that was the thought process at least.
7) Ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, there's really not much in it, I don't think this is a good question.... we put Mercury because like, maybe the sun baked it or something. We didn't have any strong feelings other than "it's probably not a gas planet", really.
8) Huh, apparently Blue Origin is the rocket project of Amazon, that's kinda crazy! Who are they gonna deliver parcels to up there? Unless... does this mean there are BEINGS!?! LIVING ON THE MOOOON!? ORDERING BIRTHDAY PRESENTS!?!?!!! ... the answer is "yes, probably, what else would they be doing?".

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, then read on for my alternative questions (loosely) inspired by this week's Ones That Got Away!


Our alternative questions
1) Towel Day, celebrated on 25 May, is a tribute to which author?
2) In summer 2010, YouTube added a button which would add the sound of what to 'enhance' watching videos?
3) What two words is 'instagram' a portmanteau of?
4) The debate surrounding Pluto involved the creation of a formal definition of a 'planet'. This definition states that in the Solar System, a planet is a celestial body that has 'cleared the neighbourhood' around its orbit, has sufficient mass to assume a nearly round shape, and what other property?
5) Excluding moons of Jupiter, name any of the other 3 moons in the Solar System with a larger volume than Pluto.
6) .io is the Internet country code top-level domain for what British overseas territory?
7) It's a bit of a quizzing 'chestnut' that osmium is the densest element. What element is the least dense?
8) Talk of relaunching rockets inevitably makes me think of Thunderbirds, and since I already asked one portmanteau, here's another. Made famous by Thunderbirds, the 'Supermarionation' puppetry technique is a portmanteau of what three words?

The answers

1) Douglas Adams
2) Vuvuzelas
3) Instant telegram
4) It orbits the Sun
5) (In decreasing order of size): Titan, Earth's moon, Triton
6) British Indian Ocean Territory
7) Hydrogen
8) Super marionette animation

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