That Sinking Feeling

It is somehow reassuring to know that large corporations don't always get things right. Take computer giant Microsoft for example. This week we learnt that after five years of marketing, they are to discontinue production of their less that market dominating mobile Mp3 player called the Zune. Billed at it's 2006 launch as a rival to the iPod, five years later the Zune has never appeared outside North America while Apple have 77% of world wide sales of mobile digital music devices. Then it emerged yesterday that Disney too are all too capable of miscalculation. Having brought in Oscar winning director Robert Zemeckis to helm their projected remake of The Beatles 1968 animated film 'Yellow Submarine', Disney pulled the plug on the movie which had a slated release date of next year. The usual spiralling budget went some way to unnerving the movie giant, but what caused a real difficulty was that they hadn't managed to secure the agreement of the surviving Beatles about the use of the band's music in the 3D remake. While nobody can get it right all the time, getting on board Paul and Ringo as the surviving Beatles, and John and George's heirs, seemed like a common sense first port of call. Anyway, such tales have prompted the Highly Questionable team to take submarines as the theme of today's quiz.                 

 Submarine Quiz 

 1  What was the name of the Russian nuclear powered submarine which sank in the year 2000 and was the subject of ultimately unsuccessful attempts to rescue its crew? 

 2  What was the name of the 1981 critically acclaimed German language film set in a WWII submarine and widely regarded as one of the best European movies ever made?

 3  Which Italian painter and all round Renaissance man, whose life spanned the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, is often credited as the inventor of the submarine because of drawings of underwater craft discovered in his note books? 

 4  What was the history making journey made in 1960 by the US submarine The Tritin?

 5  What was the name of the music-hating creatures in the Beatles' 'Yellow Submarine' film?

Answers will be published along with the next Highly Questionable quiz and associated blog post.

 Nuns Quiz Answers 

The answers to the previous Highly Questionable quiz which took nuns as its theme are:-

 1  Debbie Reynolds was the American actress who starred in the Hollywood film 'The Singing Nun'.

 2  Ophelia is the Shakespearean character Hamlet addresses with the line 'get thee to a nunnery'.

 3  Macedonia* is the modern day country whose capital Skopje was the birthplace of Mother Teresa, the nun who was awarded the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize.

 4  'The Canterbury Tales' is the name of the medieval collection of stories that 'The Nun's Priest's Tale' appears in.

 5  A wimple is the name of the form of traditional headgear associated with nuns' outfits? 

* (At the time of her birth Macedonia was part of a province of the Ottoman Empire, becoming in turn part of Serbia and then Yugoslavia before emerging as the Republic of Macedonia in the 1990s).

The author of the Highly Questionable? quiz and trivia blog, Harry Reid, is a freelance question setter, writer and blogger. He can be contacted at harryreid@btinternet.com.