What a very kind offer by Arnold! This is the sort of generous, selfless co-operation that restores one’s faith in humanity.
Thank you for your very kind offer, Arnold Winkelried. I am looking for big money for this answer! Nothing less than $100 will get it from me.
Except I will PM a clue to the two I have deals with already. Must keep to promises. PMs coming, guys.
Q2 solved! YES! That has been driving me insane for days!
Have qus 2, 6, 7, 9 & 10. Halfway there!
Now onto Q1 after getting nowhere, even with bells ringing, with Q8. Not getting very far and already frustrated…
PM clues welcome! HELP!! 
I have Q8, and I can tell you that it is Googlable if you go about it the right way, as that’s how I found it. (I had never heard of the album, although the artist is reasonably well known.)
Updated list of Qs claimed solved:
Q1: No
Q2: Yes
Q3: Yes
Q4: No
Q5: Yes
Q6: Yes
Q7: Yes
Q8: Yes
Q9: Yes
Q10: Yes
Thanks for the update, Colophon.
One player has claimed, via PM, to have the answer to Q1, but since it was a PM I can’t give any more info here.
Yeah, I have:
Q1: Yes
Q2: Yes
Q3: Yes
Q4: Maybe
Q5: Yes
Q6: Yes
Q7: Yes
Q8: No
Q9: Yes
Q10: Yes
Hi Colophon. At some stage, perhaps via PM, I’d like to know more about this ‘right way’. As I said before, I tested the quiz to desctruction among an international panel, no less, of smart friends, and we thought we had eliminated all the ones that were Google-solvable. So I, and they, would be interested in how you achieved it. Well done!
(Of course, it’s your prerogative not to share this info, and to keep your ultra-strong Google-fu to yourself!)
Bump.
Antechinus, do you think you have Q4 now? If so I’ll swap it for Q8 and we’d have the lot between us.
So have you worked out Q1? I definitely have Q1, but not sure of Q4. I have *an *answer to Q4, but it is not an elegant solution. This leaves me in a fair bit of doubt, despite it being true. So I don’t want to trade you a dud, unless you want to take a risk. I should have traded you Q1 for Q8 before you worked it out yourself.
lynne-42 gave me Q1, and I’m kicking myself for not getting it (it relates to a subject I know a lot about!)
Maybe we should compare notes on Q4?
Hey guys, I am happily dealing with all of you! Only worked out a few by myself. Good luck with number 4 - I really think a combined entry from the two of you should be the winner! If I get any ideas I’ll let you know.
An interesting exercise in game theory.
Lynne-42, you got Q2; Colophon, you got Q8; and I got Q1. These were the 3 tough ones.
All three of us worked out the easy ones, except Q4, which I have an answer for, though maybe not the correct answer.
Maybe go thirds before someone else (e.g. a well traveled theologian) works it out.
I think you two should go halves. I have really swapped for most of them and do not consider myself really eligible. My interest is in someone claiming it so all the answers become public and I can get my life back. If I find one more <firstname> Tin or Tin <surname> whose written something, I will scream!
So over to you two!
Here’s an update for everyone.
Antechinus has submitted a list of ten answers, apparently on behalf of himself and one other player. He is the only person to have done so. He didn’t get all the answers right, but he came pretty darn close. Specifically:
7 correct answers (that match my answers)
1 correct answer that isn’t what I had in mind, but is just as good if not better
1 answer that is correct-ish, but just missing a delightful specific detail
1 answer that is wrong
I think this thread has more or less run its course, so here’s what I propose. If anyone else wants to submit a list of answers and claim the fabulous wealth, I’ll give them until Friday 3pm, London time. At that time, in lieu of any better set of answers, I’ll award the fabulous wealth to Antechinus and also publish the answers here.
I am that other player, and I think I have corrected the 1 totally wrong answer.
Go Colophon and Antechinus!
Yep. So this very impressive entry is now pretty much perfect:
8 correct answers (that match my answers)
1 correct answer that isn’t what I had in mind, but is just as good if not better
1 answer that is correct-ish, but just missing a delightful specific detail
I’ll let it run until Friday, because (a) I said I would, (b) there’s no rush (Lynne-42 doesn’t need her life back just yet), and (c) because it is theoretically possible someone could yet steal the Fabulous Wealth from Antechinus by submitting a set of answers that includes the missing ‘delightfully specific detail’. This isn’t at all likely, but it is possible.
Thanks again to all who have taken part and joined in the fun.
Who says I don’t need my life back? And which question is missing the delightful detail? Someone - please?! I’ve almost forgotten what my thesis topic is.
And just to amuse those of you in the know - I have now asked at least twenty young things about album covers with priced nuts on them and they invariably say something like “oh yeah, I know that one. I can see it but… Hang on, it’s coming…nope, just can’t remember it.”
This quiz is now officially closed, and Antechinus is the winner. I will arrange to send him the $50 or equivalent via Paypal.
Congratulations to him and his collaborators, and thanks to all who took part and supported the thread. Lynne-42 is hereby now allowed to offically have her life back.
Answers and comments follow.
To hark back to the OP, the point was to try and devise questions that share an interesting property: you can use Google to confirm the answer easily, but not to find the answer. I tried to explore many different ways of doing this, and I found it quite an interesting exercise. On the one hand it is surprising just how much info Google can dig up. However, this makes it all the more interesting to think of things that it just can’t help with.
1. Where would you go to see CONI, OSIR and GAGE?
A. On the periodic table. I know some will think it’s a slight cheat, because you have to look at consecutive ‘squares’ on the table and read them as words. But several people got this right, including when I did a ‘beta test’ of the quiz before posting it here, so I knew it wasn’t ‘un-solvable’. Google can’t help when the answer relies on visually eliding two separate terms.
**2. **What links Jesus and 694?
A. We are told that Jesus was a carpenter, and 694 is the Dewey Decimal System classification for carpentry. Trivia point: when I visited Jerusalem last year, the official Guide pointed out how unlikely this claim is. There are hardly any trees in the region, they don’t grow easily in what is essentially a desert land, and wood is hardly ever used as a construction material. Everything in New Testament times was built from stone, and it’s far more likely that Jesus was a stone mason, and the ‘job title’ simply got corrupted in translation.
3. ‘DOWNFALL ATHLETE FELL HINT’ is an anagram of the title of which novel by a well-known 19th century author?
A. 'The Tenant of Wildfell Hall’ by Anne Bronte. Google can’t help directly with anagrams.
**4. **What have people called Young, Tin, Miles, Christian and Pepper all written?
A. Antechinus gave the answer that they are all names of composers. He missed just one cute detail: they are all composers who have written national anthems !
5. Which well-known movie (in the IMDB Top 150) features a listed character whose name is also the title of another movie made seven years later?
A. This was interesting because one or two people came up with answers different to mine, but that still work. My answer was that ‘Metropolis’ made in 1927 features a character listed as ‘The Thin Man’, which was also the title of a movie made in 1934. However, Antechinus offered ‘The Sixth Sense’ (1999) and ‘Bobby’ (2006). His answer is better, in my opinion, because ‘Bobby’ was a well-known movie in its own right, whereas the later film in my solution, ‘The Thin Man’, was much more obscure.
I wanted to include a question based on movies because movies are a popular subject here on the Dope. However, it is VERY hard to devise movie questions that Google can’t crack fairly easily. It took me a long while to think of an angle that Google can’t help with, and I eventually settled on this ‘character/later movie’ link.
6. A man and a woman looking out over separate balconies, two men climbing a ladder, one man looking through bars and a man sitting on a bench. Where can you see all of these together at the same time?
A. ‘Belvedere’ by MC Escher. This was the one that I felt would be answered most easily by the average Doper, and this turned out to be the case.
7. Here are three different anagrams: ‘AT AORTA WALL’, ‘A VARIANT ANON’ and ‘ARIA MAP ORB’. Where would you find the solutions to these three anagrams?
A. In an atlas or on a map. They are all anagrams of capital cities. Kiribati - Tarawa Atoll. Madagascar - Antananarivo. Suriname - Paramaribo. Another anagram-based question, but I restricted myself to just two.
**8. **Which album cover features the price of roasted peanuts and chestnuts?
A. ‘Pretzel Logic’, by Steely Dan.
9. Where does sound come before silence, and improbability come before certainty?
A. They are categories in Roget’s Thesaurus. At least they are according to this source.
**10. **When would IBM and SFX look like mirror images?
A. When using semaphore. Thanks to AJ (one of my beta testers) for improving this question and devising a more elegant solution than my original version.