Only Connect Post Mortem: Series 10 Episode 23Nørdiphiles vs. QI Elves

After last week's adventure with no Question of the Week, we were pleased to be faced with a difficult decision for the honour on Monday's show. Ultimately though, it went to Outflows of world's longest rivers for taking some pretty boring, standard trivia and twisting it into a fun little challenge. Honourable mention to the element letters, too. Cracking show all round. As always, here's this week's poll. (After last week, someone pointed out I should really have a 'no question of the week' option, but as we're so close to the end of the series now I'm going to keep the same format. I'm fairly hopeful this is an episode where very few people would want to choose it, though!)

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Tom Cruise is an anagram of Costumier

Your targets this week:

1+ out of 10: Well done, you beat us!
3+ out of 10: We'd have won with you on our team!

The attendees
1) The statistician
2) The doctor
3) The left-fielder

The ones that got away

We're kicking things off this week with five questions of the form "name the movie". You're given the year a Best Picture Oscar-winning movie was released, and an actor who was in the movie (but not necessarily a main character).

1) 2006, Martin Sheen
2) 2001, Russell Crowe
3) 1998, Colin Firth
4) 1992, Morgan Freeman
5) 1988, Tom Cruise
6) Which shoe manufacturer sponsors Usain Bolt?
7) What nickname referred to American soldiers who served in Europe during the First World War?
8) Against which country did William of Orange lead the Dutch in the Eighty Years' War?
9) 2 point question: Excluding 2, what is the lowest jersey number a player for the New York Yankees can wear?

The answers

1) The Departed
2) A Beautiful Mind
3) Shakespeare in Love
4) Unforgiven
5) Rain Man
6) Puma
7) Doughboy
8) Spain
9) 11

Our excuses

1) An utterly dreadful round for us (these five questions made up half of it) on something a real quizzer would have memorized a long time ago. While I have spent more time than most looking at Oscar lists (mainly because so many quizmasters ask questions about them that inevitably wind up on the blog) my baseline movie knowledge is terrible. Add to this the sometimes confusing difference between when a movie came out and when it won an Oscar and we were always going to be in trouble. I thought Crash came out around 2006 (actually 2005 in the USA, 2004 elsewhere), which was the first of many guesses based on very vague ideas of release dates. I'll keep the rest of these answers brief.
2) I wonder if this was a deliberate trick, as Gladiator was an obvious guess for a Russell Crowe movie. That said, I was pretty sure Gladiator was 2000, not 2001, but we had nothing else to go with.
3) Guessing the year again, I thought The English Patient was a reasonable stab (turns out that was 1996, not 1998). We knew that starred Ralph Fiennes rather than Colin Firth, but "hey, it's a British dude, right?".
4) With few other ideas for a Morgan Freeman film from around that time we went with The Shawshank Redemption (1994).
5) Predictably, the further back we go the less accurate our guesses got. A Few Good Men this time did at least star Tom Cruise, but was a 1992 outing (and a nominee for that year's Best Picture, losing out to the previous question's answer).
6) After that movie marathon, you'd think a question about a sprinter would be a welcome change (eh? eh??). Alas, while I stuck down Puma as a first instinct, it was little more than a gut feeling, and we eventually talked ourselves into Adidas. This despite the left-fielder correctly remembering both Bolt and (Mario) Balotelli had even featured in an advert together, giving us a potential extra way into the question.
7) The left-fielder immediately said doughboy, the doctor and I both thought it was dogface. Turns out the latter, which we only vaguely knew from Countdown, refers to the Second World War, not the first. Lesson learned: trust the guy from the correct continent, not the guys guessing a word based on an anagram TV show they haven't watched in years.
8) It probably didn't help that 'William of Orange' makes one thing of William III, rather than the one in consideration here, but that's little excuse. I hadn't even heard of the Eighty Years' War, and it's particularly embarrassing to drop European history questions on quizzes here. France seemed the 'safety' play, with some brief deliberations about somewhere slightly further afield not fully pursued.
9) For the uninitiated, the Yankees (as is common in North American sports) periodically retire jersey numbers to honour particularly notable players. As can be inferred from the answer, the Yankees have retired numbers 1 through 10, with the exception of number 2 (which was worn by recently retired Yankees legend Derek Jeter). The left-fielder, as the name implies, likes his baseball, but even this was a tough ask. He narrowed it down to "higher than 6 because otherwise this question is lame, lower than 13 because Alex Rodriguez. Probably 7 or 9" which, while still wrong, is obviously a damn sight better than we'd have managed. (Although I was tempted to be That Guy and say '0', as I knew some players have taken that number.)

How did you do? Would you have beaten us (1 or more points)? 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!


My alternative questions
1) Deriving (loosely) from the Japanese for 'Sulfur Island', which island's name features in a 2006 Best Picture nominated Clint Eastwood-directed movie?
2) Named after its inventor (upon whose life A Beautiful Mind is based) what two-word term describes a situation in a non-cooperative game where no player can improve their position by changing their strategy?
3) Judi Dench won the Oscar for her (brief) portrayal of Elizabeth I in Shakespeare in Love. Which actress also notably portrayed the Virgin Queen that year, in the title role of another film nominated for Best Picture?
4) Which journalist and television personality's name is, somewhat appropriately, an anagram of 'Smearing Pro'?
5) Autism is one of three recognized disorders in the autistic spectrum. Another is the rather descriptive 'pervasive developmental disorder, not otherwise specified', what's the third?
6) In theory, what is the shortest distance a runner could spend holding the baton in a 4x100m relay without being disqualified?

Question 7

7) How is Poppin' Fresh (pictured), the mascot of a baking products company, better known?
8) Which country enjoys a 'special relationship' with the Netherlands thanks to actions during the Second World War? Its forces led the liberation of the Netherlands, the country hosted the Dutch Royal Family in exile, and they even temporarily declared a hospital ward as extraterritorial to ensure a Princess born there would hold Dutch citizenship.
9) National Football League teams play 16 games in the regular season (that is, excluding the post-season playoffs). National Basketball Association and National Hockey League teams, meanwhile, play 82 games, but how many games do teams play in the regular season of Major League Baseball? Spot on gets you 2 points, within 10% gets you 1 point.

The answers

1) Iwo Jima (the movie being Letters from Iwo Jima)
2) Nash equilibrium
3) Cate Blanchett
4) Piers Morgan
5) Asperger syndrome
6) 80 metres (possible for the second or third runner; the changeover box is 20 metres, extending 10 metres either side of the 100 metre marks)
7) Pillsbury Doughboy
8) Canada
9) 162 (so 146-178 gets you 1 point)

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

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The 'USS' in Star Trek was said to stand for both United Space Ship and United Star Ship

Your targets this week:

1+ out of 11: Well done, you beat us!
2+ out of 11: We'd have won with you on our team!

The attendees
1) The statistician
2) The doctor

The ones that got away
1) Until 1995, scientists thought the giant panda was genetically closer to what animal than bears?
2) Which of these is not a real species of bear? Cave, Cinnamon, Glacier, Mexican Grizzly, or Naked?
3) Louis Jourdan, who died on Valentine's Day, played which Bond villain in the movie Octopussy?
4) The Cricket World Cup began last weekend at the Hagley Oval, a ground in which country?
5) 7 years ago Toshiba announced they would no longer produce what storage format?
6) What was Geordi La Forge's rank in Star Trek: The Next Generation?

Each of the next three answers rhymes with 'bear' or 'bears'.

7) Which actress wore prosthetic breasts in the movie A Dirty Shame?
8) The USA has 492, China has 152, Canada has 32. What?
9) In the New Testament, what would find in Matthew, Chapter 9, Verses 9-13?

No more rhyming!

10) 2 point question: 'Old Orchard' (which is also a chain of pubs of Montreal) is cowboy slang for what?

The answers

1) Raccoon
2) Naked (it's an hilarious 'Barenaked Ladies' joke, because Canada)
3) Kamal Khan
4) New Zealand
5) The HD DVD
6) 3 possible answers: Lieutenant (Junior Grade), Lieutenant, or Lieutenant Commander (he was promoted during the series)
7) Selma Blair
8) Billionaires
9) The Lord's Prayer
10) Whiskey

Our excuses

1) Considering the doctor's usual reliability on animal taxonomy, and raccoons being my favourite animal, this was something of a devastating miss. The doctor at least got this wrong in style: knowing the giant panda's genus is Ailuropoda and that 'ailuro' comes from the Greek for domestic cat, we suggested that scientists thought giant pandas were related to cats.
2) This was an amusing question to be asked, as when the doctor and I were on Pointless we faced a multiple choice round with a list of bears, some of which were fake. (More on that in the alternative question below.) Thanks to our memories of the show we knew there was a cinnamon bear, but the rest were a mystery. We went with glacier thinking that either this was a reference to the brand of mints, or at least that a glacier-specific species of bears would seem a bit odd. Alas, we had not reckoned for some good old-fashioned Canadian humour.
3) Bond trivia is firmly the doctor's domain, but as it's one of those subjects where a spectacular depth of knowledge is expected we seldom do particularly well. He knew Blofeld had been portrayed by multiple actors, however, so it seemed a better guess than nothing.
4) A testament to how little time I've had to procrastinate lately, it was to my horror that I realized I didn't know what was a very basic question for someone from England. I got as far as remembering seeing one or two people live-Tweeting, and did some maths to work out the approximate time zone, but from there it was always going to be a toss-up between Australia and New Zealand.
5) Unlike the previous question, our toss-up here was always going to miss as we contemplated either VHS cassettes or floppy disks.
6) Considering we went on to lose by such a slim margin, dropping a question like this was horrible. We've watched the entire series (obviously) and spent most of the round trying to work out whether "Lieutenant Commander La Forge" or "Commander La Forge" sounded more familiar. We were further persuaded of the latter by being fairly sure Data was a Lieutenant Commander (which, it transpires, he is), but there really is no excuse.
7) We hadn't heard of the movie, or the actress, and our strategy of "name an actress who rhymes with bear" led to Claire Danes who is not, it would seem, the same person.
8) This was a fun one to think about, but unfortunately we devoted most of our thinking time to the next question. As such, when the doctor suggested airports it seemed 'good enough', when really I should have been a touch more certain that Canada has more than just 32 of them.
9) Brutal. Another 'on another night, we'd've won' contribution. The phrasing indicated something fairly specific, but we didn't stumble in the right direction. A less-than-optimistic "Mary Magdalene washing Jesus' feet with her hair".
10) Not, as the question may have suggested, a case of local knowledge helping here. We went the fairly direct (i.e. unimaginative) route and went with 'bar/saloon'.

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


My alternative questions
1) The name of which web browser is another name for the red panda?
2) As explained above, when the doctor and I were on Pointless, one round was on types of bear. But to within 10%, how many of the 100 people surveyed on that episode (when given 100 seconds to name as many types of bear as they could) named the giant panda? (Note that 'within 10%' means 'plus or minus 10% of the actual answer', not 'within 10 people'.)
3) According to oxforddictionaries.com what is the standard English plural of the word octopus?
4) Of the five teams to have won the Cricket World Cup which one does not represent a member of the United Nations?
5) Essential (boring) trivia: the HD in HD DVD stands for high definition (or density), but what does the V in DVD stand for? (The Ds stand for Digital and Disc.)
6) What links a five-time Wimbledon champion with an alien race from the Star Trek series?
7) A now-global boycott of which mulinational corporation began in the United States over 30 years ago in protest over their marketing of breast milk substitutes?
8) Who is North America's only black billionaire?
9) The penultimate UK number one single of 1999, Cliff Richard's The Millennium Prayer featured the Lord's Prayer sung to what tune?
10) The 'Old Fashioned' is often described as the world's first cocktail. Primarily comprised of whiskey, according to the International Bartenders Association there are three other ingredients. For one point each, name two of them.

The answers

1) Firefox
2) 44 (so 40-48 gets you the point)
3) Octopuses
4) West Indies
5) Versatile (although I should also accept 'video' or, indeed, 'it doesn't stand for anything - although your local quizmaster might not)
6) Borg
7) Nestlé
8) Oprah Winfrey
9) Auld Lang Syne
10) (Angostura) bitters, sugar, and water (fancy!)

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

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Only Connect Post Mortem: Series 10 Episode 22Orienteers vs. Gamesmasters

Alas, our beloved Gamesmasters are no more, and while I wish I had time for a more fitting obituary, I must instead keep things brief. We will not be awarding Question of the Week, whether this is in mourning for our fallen quizzing comrades, or because we thought none of them particularly stood out, is up to you. (Spoilers: it's the latter.) Nevertheless, I hunger for quizzing opinions, so do let us know which ones tickled your proverbial with the poll below.

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The M&M's masocts are called 'spokescandies'

Your targets this week:

We won this week (qualifying for some exciting 'playoffs' fun!) but could you have done even better?

The attendees
1) The statistician
2) The doctor

The ones that got away
1) Which actor, who has appeared in the Spiderman movies and Whiplash, also provides the voice of the yellow M&M?
2) Debuting last weekend, what is the name of the spin-off to Breaking Bad?
3) In February last year Shia LaBeouf appeared at the premiere of which movie sporting a brown bag labelled "I am not famous anymore"?
4) 2 point question: Demarchy is the selection of leaders by what method?
5) 2 point question: The rapper Christopher Wallace is better known by what name?
6) 2 point question: Spell the capital of Cambodia

The answers

1) (J. K.) Simmons
2) Better Call Saul
3) Nymphomaniac
4) Random selection from the people ('random' is the key component here)
5) The Notorious B.I.G. (or Biggie, or Biggie Smalls)
6) Phnom Penh

Our excuses

1) This was all on the doctor, who apparently would have got this if he'd known slightly better what the yellow M&M sounds like. Unfortunately, while I did know what the yellow M&M sounds like, I didn't do a good enough impression and we were stuck with Alfred Molina as a better-than-nothing guess (he played Doc Ock in the second movie).
2) Without too much optimism we put down Albuquerque, knowing it was where Breaking Bad was set, and maybe could have been the name of a TV show. Maybe.
3) We only knew about this incident from watching one of Channel 4's Big Fat Quizzes, and we could only identify the Transformers movies from Mr LaBeouf's respected oeuvre. Fun fact: thanks to living in Montreal I keep spelling his name LaBoeuf.
4) We were possibly a little bit drunk by this point, and while I thought our answer of "from the people" seemed far too vague (and a superset of 'democracy'), I didn't push hard enough to add my extra idea of 'randomly'.
5) While we're not terrible at rapper names, we are nevertheless nowhere near the standard required for North American quizzing. Our strategy was to think of a rapper whose real name we didn't know, and that landed us on the (mildly topical) Kanye West. (Real name: Kanye West.)
6) We were definitely a little bit drunk by this point and, before I could think, the doctor had written down Phnomh Pen allowing me to 'correct' it to Phnomh Penh. Oops.

How did you do? Would you have beaten us (1 point 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) Standard milk chocolate M&M's come in six colours: red, yellow and blue are three. Name the other three for a point.
2) Behold the Breaking Bad title card. Name either of the two elements cunningly highlighted in the name of the show.
3) Prior to his paper bag moment, LaBeouf walked out of a press conference saying "When the seagulls follow the trawler, it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea.", thereby quoting the words, and mimicking the actions, of which French footballer?
4) If the next Prime Minister of the UK was picked at random from the current makeup of the House of Commons (as of Friday 13th February, 2015), to the nearest 1% what is the probability that they would be a Liberal Democrat? You get 1 point if you're within 3%, 2 points if you're within 1%.
5) The B.I.G. supposedly stood for 'Business Instead of Game', but following the rapper's death his memorial foundation, which raises money for school equipment and supplies, has changed the acronym's meaning to what instead of what? (1 point for each word.)
6) For one point each, name the country whose national capital comes first alphabetically, and the country whose national capital comes last alphabetically. (Usual Pointless definitions of 'country' apply.)

The answers

1) Orange, Green and Brown
2) Bromine and Barium
3) Eric Cantona
4) 9% (so 1 point if you said 6-12%, 2 points if you said 8%-10% - the actual figure is 56/650, which works out to 8.615%, in case you're interested)
5) Books (instead of) Guns
6) United Arab Emirates (Abu Dhabi) and Croatia (Zagreb)

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

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Only Connect Post Mortem: Series 10 Episode 21History Boys vs. Linguists

Only Connect is getting serious, and so are the questions. Here's this week's poll, now completely devoid of any pretense that I may ever find time to express much opinion about the show beyond our favourite question. This week that honour falls to 6 seconds, 7 minutes, 8 hours, 9 days. While Piphilological Mnemonics gets an honourable mention for being deliciously work-outable, I appreciate I may be in a slight minority when it comes to maths-themed questions, so have deferred to the doctor's judgement. We were also particularly impressed with the Linguists not only picking up the bonus on this, but coming up with the excellent Lady Jane Grey answer to fit it perfectly (the doctor, ever the decisive captain, went with "a very long poo").

What did you think? Let us know!

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Only Connect Post Mortem: Series 10 Episode 20QI Elves vs. Coders

After almost a week of not being able to get hold of an episode, the Internet came to the rescue and I can at least get up the all important Only Connect question poll. Our Question of the Week was an easy one for once, and while our love for sequences based on auditing firms is well-known, it had to go to Did it Themslves. Only slightly due to the doctor managing a good bit of quizzing to get this for 3 points, it's a question with fun penny dropping and fun trivia. Tasty.

Have at this poll to share your opinion (assuming you can remember a week ago - I've added some extra info to help jog those memories...).

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