Phœnix 50p/£35

[Istenem]

eleven male-female transexuals have recently come into some government money. Had they still been men they'd have had to have waited for the money in 2011. why?

[Cardinal Sin]

Cos they have reached retirement age 5 years earlier cos they are now Dorises?

[Istenem]

spot on, especially the bit about the dorises . over to His Eminence grise.

[Cardinal Sin]

And to continue the backslapping, I've just noticed your thread title. Kudos!

Ok, to continue my fixation with islands. North Sentinel Island is home to a small tribe which has probably had less interaction with the outside world than any other. Nobody even knows what the tribe call the island, such is the lack of contact with them.

So what country does this island belong to?

[Weyland]

Yay! Phoenix, not had a decent one for a while...

Okay, for lack of anything else going on the name of the island, how about the US?

[Cardinal Sin]

THE PHOENIX HAS RISEN!!!!!!

Not the US. The island is reasonably close to the country in question. And the island is a member of a large group of islands with similarly unwesternised peoples.

[Weyland]

I've just spent 10 minutes trying to find a decent picture of the Phoenix from Battle of the Planets to celebrate the occasion, but all I got from Google was dead links. Bah.

Canada? I have this guessy feeling that this tribe might be Eskimo or similar...

[Istenem]

i'll go for papua new guinea on the guesswork that since they have 850 languages, maybe nobody can translate from the islanders' own language

[Cardinal Sin]

Nope. UP isn't a million miles (geographically) away, and I believe this country also has a zillion different languages.

[Istenem]

let's try indonesia, apparenly they have 670 languages.

[Weyland]

I believe I've found the same list as UP, but the next, Nigeria, is a touch far away from Papua New Guinea, so I'm going for the fourth, India.

[Cardinal Sin]

I see you've been studying at the Cardinal Richelieu School Of Quiz Guesswork.

India it is... if you can be arsed, this is a very interesting article about the islands.

http://www.andaman.org/BOOK/reprints/go ... dheart.htm

Over to you sir.

[Weyland]

Andaman? Wasn't that where the islander in The Sign of Four came from? Savage little git he was.

Anyway: In his youth, Charles Darwin was inspired by a work by William Paley, called Natural Theology (which would give Darwin the title to his own great work Natural Selection). The logic within Paley's work is now obviously fataly flawed, but what object was the main focus of his argument?

[Istenem]

tadpoles/pollywogs/frogs?

[Weyland]

Nope. It was an inanimate object. Paley was arguing for the existance of a creator.