Stupidly hard quiz

[ApocalypseNowt]

Quizzers assemble!

@rosegoldwatcher
@SoupDragon
@minou123
@GoldenCupidon

It's back. My stupidly hard Xmas work quiz is live. As per usual I've done round one and now I'm stuck on the answer for round 2.

I've actually identified all the pictures, found the clue but the answer isn't working 😭

Sorry for crappy pictures but if you use the first letter of each of the album names it spells out "album ones singers" so I thought it must be the singers on the Arctic Monkeys album 'AM'....but whichever way I put the names in it doesn't work.

Then I thought as the clue at the top is "Artistless" maybe I had to remove Alex Turner (as Turner is a famous artist) but I'm still striking out!

As always, any help appreciated & if I've missed any of the amazing quizzers who usually play along (I know I have) please feel free to tag them

Zenit is a Russian football team that won the UEFA League Cup for the Soviet Union (their only winning team in that competition). Again, not sure that moves us anywhere useful. Spain has Villa Real and Valencia. But the US is so unlikely to have multiple winning football teams, and I doubt Japan and China are anywhere either!

If it is alphabetical then the missing letters are A F M N O P Q W X Y.

Although A could be in USA.

Note the long string in the middle of mnopq

I've got alphabets on the brain now. Watch it be something totally irrelevant!

I thought that but did some more digging on the other countries and can't make football league winners work.

Have you tried Hamza, Yassin? Just wondering why the comma and space are in there…

Just crossword convention presumably?

I thought I was onto something with the flags - league is an old measurement of distance but I couldn’t get all the country/letter combinations to work.

Is it to do with the flags changing? Eg initials of names of head of state when flag was altered? I think all of these countries had new flags, right?

Bloody Nora. Hamza Yassin with a space is correct. Sorry, there's never usually spaces.

India's flag changed under Nehru, so I don't think so.

Hallelujah!

So it’s just the frustrating flags left for this round?

Sadly, yes.

That was one of my lines of thinking, but couldn't make it work.

Ok. Flag recap:

• countries are in alphabetical order
• initial letters are in alphabetical order till USA then starts again
• USSR flag used rather than Russian flag
• new Brazil flag with 27 stars used
• Things we have considered and don't think it is: presidents, currencies, capitals, Olympic cities, hosts of the World Cup, football leagues or formula 1,or assassinated leaders, airports, currency, food, sport, who has ever been in the LoN, national animals, national flowers, national anthems, public holidays, roman numerals, measures of distance, heads of state during flag changes
• we now all hate flags

I do hate flag questions! Not only am I shit at geography, it also could be just about anything.

But if someone on here can get the Stark family dogs they can get anything!

I was intrigued by the League of Nations tab - Google says that the US was never part of it, and the Soviet Union was expelled from it.

I've also looked at country codes for vehicle registration, and that's T or TH.

I also ended up going down a wormhole of VPN/ISP stuff, as one search showed that BGK is an acronym for Border Gate Keeper

... just in case any of that sparks off another line of thinking

KGB was the main security agency for the Soviet Union from 1954 until 1991.. of course I don't know if that means anything in terms of this quiz.

I'm just googling random things at this point and decided to mix up the "B G K"

I have a feeling that BGK are completely separate words from each other, which is why they are in different lines. EH for Japan would be one word or one set of words, and R being another for Japan...

Also the letters are in alphabetical order but they could be in another order e.g. Kingdom of Great Britain.....

.......I've been looking up Nobel Peace Prize winners

Yep. That's how far the rabbit hole I've gone.

Forgot about that! I ended up on Kyoto university website for a stupidly long time lol

I was going down a rabbithole about sports thinking maybe it was what they'd got most medals in at the olympics or something.

Ha ha ha ha ha 😂

Thing us, someone will come along with a stupidly obvious answer and we will all be kicking ourselves for not seeing it.

I thought that maybe the answer for Thailand would have to be out of the letters W, X, Y, Z & A in alpha order.

I tried WXY, WXZ, WYZ, XYZ, WXA, WYA, WZA, XYA, XZA to no avail..

I can't even see if i've missed any combos now. My brain is melting out of my ears.

and YZA