Sunday 19 May 2013

14/05/13: the shoe brand Hush Puppies take their name from a dish of fried cornballs

That's right: pictures! See questions 9 and 10!
The attendees
1) The statistician
2) The doctor
3) The programmer

The ones that got away
1) In the story 101 Dalmatians, how many of the dalmatians were puppies?
2) In what year was Schindler's List released?
3) Ditloid: 1 H O A C
4) Identify the film from this quote: "I respect women! I respect them so much that I completely stay away from them!"
5) Identify the film from this quote: "I don't want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me."
6) Which tropic - Cancer or Capricorn - passes through Brazil?
7) The RAF squadron number 617 is better known as what?
8) Identify the London station from this cryptic clue: "The heaviest Albion of the midlands"
9) Identify company logo A in the picture. (Clue: "something you eat".)
10) Identify company logo B in the picture. (Clue: "something you eat".)

The answers


The excuses
1) Spectacularly frustrating. I anticipated that the quizmaster meant the Disney film, rather than the book, and so I asked him for clarification. "I'm asking about the story by Dodie Smith, but I don't think it matters, does it?". Uh-oh. We put down 97 knowing it was the correct answer, but as we suspected the answer given was 99 (the number of puppies in the film). Cue a lengthy 'discussion' with the quizmaster about it, who eventually said "I guess I'd better go and check this myself, hadn't I?". It seems he forgot to, however, and so what would have been a two-point swing for us against most teams went begging. We didn't force the issue - it's a charity quiz with little at stake beyond pride - but still a pretty frustrating outcome. Oh, and in case you're wondering, the adults in the book are Pongo, Missis, Perdita and Prince (who I distinctly remembered appearing as the 101st Dalmatian on the very last page).

2) Zagged the wrong way with 1991 (for some reason I was pretty sure it was an odd year in the early 90s thanks to my very occasional attempts to learn the Best Picture Oscar winners).

3) I'm starting to wonder if these 'ditloids starting with 1' are just becoming a weekly attempt by the quizmaster to troll us. We came up with at least half a dozen plausible suggestions, as did most other teams by the sound of it, but our eventual pick of '1 hook on a coathanger' fell on unsympathetic ears.

4)-5) Fortunately none of us had seen either film, so our traditional film quote fail was fractionally less frustrating than normal. We had, however, seen Infernal Affairs, the Hong Kong thriller upon which The Departed is based. (It's pretty good, too.)

6) An embarrassing miss, and one that was entirely my fault for being inexplicably sure of the (wrong) answer. The question obviously just amounts to "which one is below the equator?" and at least now is something I won't forget in a hurry. Nothing like an excruciating quizzing error to imprint something on the memory. (See also: my thinking Sachin Tendulkar once took 10 wickets when I was on University Challenge.) If you need an aide memoire for this, a friend has furnished me with this beauty: "Cancer is near Canada. Like, can-can, geddit?".

7) A good overthink on this one: we all thought Dambusters immediately (which, given the highly publicized anniversary of the mission, we really should have known for sure), but then someone suggested it was the Red Arrows, which seemed to make much more sense. Unfortunately they're merely known as the Royal Air Force Aerobatic Team.

8) Having done this quiz near-weekly for around 9 months now we're finally getting the hang of our quizmaster's particular 'style' of cryptic clue. Here we had all the components: Albion of the Midlands can only mean the area most famous for its football team, and while it doesn't really make sense we could see how 'heaviest' could clue to the common suffix '-ton'. As is often the case, however, we'd never heard of the answer, so putting the parts together proved just beyond us.

9)-10) In an exciting new feature of The Ones That Got Away, I'll now include picture clues we missed. We went with Fox's Glacier Mints for the first (who at least have a polar bear on their logo) and, with the rather tenuous Prince of Wales link, Duchy Originals for the second (not even close).

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