BH quiz #37
I'm leaving it late aren't I? I think the urge to get on with other business has struck me right between the eyes. I have taken it upon myself to set half of the Abbots Langsley GP individual questions (except the sport, that's for professionals, like), so you should all get ready for the full force of my quiz-conjuring powers. Don't worry, I am aware I have to put some gimmes in there, otherwise I may incite a Rite of Spring scenario or invoke floods of recriminatory tears and promises of revenge. I am setting it because sadly I will be missing the competition on account of some invasive surgery (the terrifying word 'flap' is in the name of the operation) at the end of the month, so here's some fair warning for the inevitable week-long hiatus and inability to sit down at all period.
But, hey! Buzzer quizzes litter the horizon, and promise fun fun fun. There's a possible Masoquizm in a few months time (we take American NAQT questions straight-up with no attempt to set right the obvious cultural bias - the first and last time we did so, in a shattering 12-match orgy, I sat out and watched our Bayley-Stainer-Clark-Cox team lose their unbeaten record in the most painful place of all: the semi-finals, and to a bunch of Oxonian young 'uns), then there's another mini-trash tourney and time for my Total Trash competition in autumn (yes, I am aware of the axiom that there is no better way of making the Lord above laugh than by announcing your plans). Of course, Total Trash will have been almost three years in the making by the time it comes around, so you just KNOW it's going to be good. At last, I will hear my babies born and said and etc.
I have noticed that I have been doing an absolute donkeyload of setting lately and have felt my brain stuffed and riveted by far more knowledge than I am used to (oh, I see the reason, it's all those questions I write for this blog). There was a point yesterday when I paraphrased a movie character (try and spot it) and wrote down the following: "This quiz-setting is making me more powerful than you could possibly imagine ... Bought The Proposition from my friendly mobile Traid DVD vendor and have been listening to it in the background while J. (my bro) watches it ... my back is to it, and all I noticed over the entire movie's duration was the sound of whipping, Biblical and salty language pronounced in boomy tones, gunshots, John Hurt death-groaning and sparse plinky-plonky piano music, courtesy of that degenerate genius Nick Cave, whose song Stagger Lee is my current fave of his".
Okay, so ignore the bit about The Proposition (I have to get my random pop culture ramblings in here somewhere) and concentrate on the first sentence. In the twilight of this smelly living room (er, my bro also seems to be turning into Howard Hughes, if you know what I mean), it certainly isn't true. A new tournament, or BoL or cup match is ready to inflict the harsh truth of quiz matters: that, yes, I'm getting better, in the same way that wounds, whether psychic or physical, heal over the marathon-stretch of time, but I'm not getting THAT good. Sure, years of learning train your brain in a certain way to absorb info ever more easily, but logging it in the long-term memory banks is a far more fickle and dispiriting prospect. How many times have I flicked through my copious files and glimpsed the same question three times (something Moby cited himself back at BoL qualifying)? Enough times to make me wonder why I never even remember I wrote them in the first place. It could be a case of information overload. It could be because I'm fated never to remember that particular nugget, unless I have it tattooed on the back of my hands, but that is a step too far. Tattoos? Crazy-bad! Too far being a relative term when considering these matters.
So, I think I'm merely making modest improvements that will hopefully bear glorious fruit sometime. Possibly in twenty years time. I dunno. I have noticed going back, for instance, to the 1996 book Best Pub Quiz Book in the World #1, that yes, I get more of them than I used to. A lot more, in fact. But I always said I was going to retire when I was 26, and you know I would have to travel back in time to persuade myself to do so if that was going to happen. Which it isn't. Seeing as I don't have a handy Delorean and a crazy-haired scientist mentor to right what once went wrong. Hang on that's Quantum Leap innit? Time to make the nightly journey to the land of nod (but obviously, not the one Cain was banished to). Hands ceasing typing ... now.
1 The wealthy Scottish socialite and widow Jane Apreece enjoyed a miserable and childless marriage with which esteemed chemist and physicist, and was renowned for treating his then assistant Michael Faraday badly?
2 Derived from the Medieval Latin for "powdered ore of antimony", what term in chemistry is applied to any organic compound in which a hydroxyl group (-OH) is bound to a carbon atom, which is in turn bound other hydrogen and/or carbon atoms?
3 The patent for what mixture of oxides of calcium, silicon and aluminium was issued to a British bricklayer called Joseph Aspdin in 1824?
4 Which Welshman and Abertridwr native gave his name to a needle-type valve that has been used to inflate sports balls everywhere (according to this odd Welsh inventors site I came across)?
5 Natives of Barnsley, Rotherham and Chesterfield are known to call Sheffielders by what name, on account of their pronunciation of 'th' in certain dialectal words?
6 Combining a Latin-Romance vocabulary with a simplified Romance grammar, what constructed language was published in 1951 by the International Auxiliary Language Association and has been referred to as a modernised and simplified Latin?
7 What company was founded in 1983 as Racal Telecom?
8 What does the prefix Tober- signify in a British place name?
9 Which Pope selected Raphael to succeed Donato Bramante as architect of St Peter's in 1514?
10 What term describes one billion billion characters of information?
11 Designed by Charles Frey in 1889, what was the name of the first fruit machine?
12 Which 2006 inductees into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame were once called Earth?
13 What slang name for heroin is also the collective name for a group of jellyfish?
14 Sir Walter Scott's 1826 book Woodstock was a life of which major historical figure?
15 What 81-mile long footpath runs from Ilkley in West Yorkshire to Bowness-on-Windermere?
16 What rank in the Royal Artillery is the equivalent of corporal in other regiments?
17 What form would you get from a post office to get a vehicle licence?
18 The Armed Islamic Group (GIA) is engaging in a "national reconciliation" with which country's government?
19 Lord Howard, Queen Elizabeth I's cousin, commanded which ship during the time of the Spanish Armada?
20 Which country introduced its new national flag on March 12 with eight and not seven stars, and the coat of arms in the upper left corner?
21 Which island voted to keep its feudal system of governance on March 8?
22 The government of which African country has been controlled by Idriss Deby and his Patriotic Salvation Movement since 1990?
23 The Joseon Dynasty was the final ruling dynasty of which country, its rule ending in 1910?
24 Which East Prussian civil servant attempted to overthrow the Weimar Republic in a 1920 putsch?
25 Twinned with Birmingham (England) and Houston, Texas, what is the largest city in the federal state of Saxony and is situated at the confluence of the Pleisse, White Elster and Parthe rivers?
26 Which suburb of Lyon in France is located on "the hill that prays" and is the site of a highly decorated basilica, an Archbishop's palace, a funicular line and the TV tower, the Tour metallique?
27 Which organisation produced the 1980 McBride report (Many Voices One World), a controversial document that provoked ire in the UK and the US for its supposed attempt to destroy the freedom of the press?
28 A minor prince named Sang Nila Utama is believed to have given which country its name after sighting the first ever creature he saw on the island?
29 What arthropod with around 1,220 species, first studied by Charles Darwin, have two larval stages called the nauplius and cyprid and belong to the infraclass Cirrepedia?
30 What two-word name connects a tie that was popular in the UK during the early 1960s, a tool for picking car locks, a cocktail, a type of dipole radio antenna and a brand of beef jerky?
31 Which Scottish Football League team play at Raydale Park and are nicknamed The Black and Whites?
32 Now majority owned by Ford, which Hiroshima-based car manufacturers began as the Toyo Cork Kogyo Co. Ltd. in 1920, and has for its chief designer a Scotsman named Moray Callum?
33 In which Australian state is the Blue Mountains National Park?
34 Leicester Cheese becomes Red Leicester with the addition of what extract, a food colouring derived from the achiote tree, during its manufacture?
35 Dame Silvia Cartwright is the Governor-General of which country?
36 Established in 1852, Sir Henry Cole was the first director of which museum that is proposing to build a controversial £80 million Daniel Libeskind-designed extension called The Spiral?
Answers to BH #36
1 Landmine 2 Subaru 3 Sanyo 4 International Baby Food Action Network 5 Vevey 6 Tom Sharpe 7 Peggy Ashcroft 8 New English Art Club 9 Sixth Symphony or Pathetique 10 Tikhvin Cemetery 11 Saint Lawrence River 12 Craton 13 Stratigraphy 14 Lord 15 Bleak 16 Royal Caledonian Curling Club 17 Eddie Macken 18 Ariel Ordinary 19 A bump 20 Harry Benjamin 21 Durham Miner's Gala 22 Unicorn 23 Klaus 24 First Person Shooter 25 World's first internet cafe 26 Dahabeeyah 27 Ogham 28 The Cornishman 29 Andrew Jackson 30 Bristol Brabazon 31 Luxembourg 32 Parma 33 Sardinia ("regnum Sardiniae et Corsicae") 34 The Family International 35 Bistro 36 Brandy 37 Howard Fast 38 Barney (the extremely annoying purple dinosaur)
But, hey! Buzzer quizzes litter the horizon, and promise fun fun fun. There's a possible Masoquizm in a few months time (we take American NAQT questions straight-up with no attempt to set right the obvious cultural bias - the first and last time we did so, in a shattering 12-match orgy, I sat out and watched our Bayley-Stainer-Clark-Cox team lose their unbeaten record in the most painful place of all: the semi-finals, and to a bunch of Oxonian young 'uns), then there's another mini-trash tourney and time for my Total Trash competition in autumn (yes, I am aware of the axiom that there is no better way of making the Lord above laugh than by announcing your plans). Of course, Total Trash will have been almost three years in the making by the time it comes around, so you just KNOW it's going to be good. At last, I will hear my babies born and said and etc.
I have noticed that I have been doing an absolute donkeyload of setting lately and have felt my brain stuffed and riveted by far more knowledge than I am used to (oh, I see the reason, it's all those questions I write for this blog). There was a point yesterday when I paraphrased a movie character (try and spot it) and wrote down the following: "This quiz-setting is making me more powerful than you could possibly imagine ... Bought The Proposition from my friendly mobile Traid DVD vendor and have been listening to it in the background while J. (my bro) watches it ... my back is to it, and all I noticed over the entire movie's duration was the sound of whipping, Biblical and salty language pronounced in boomy tones, gunshots, John Hurt death-groaning and sparse plinky-plonky piano music, courtesy of that degenerate genius Nick Cave, whose song Stagger Lee is my current fave of his".
Okay, so ignore the bit about The Proposition (I have to get my random pop culture ramblings in here somewhere) and concentrate on the first sentence. In the twilight of this smelly living room (er, my bro also seems to be turning into Howard Hughes, if you know what I mean), it certainly isn't true. A new tournament, or BoL or cup match is ready to inflict the harsh truth of quiz matters: that, yes, I'm getting better, in the same way that wounds, whether psychic or physical, heal over the marathon-stretch of time, but I'm not getting THAT good. Sure, years of learning train your brain in a certain way to absorb info ever more easily, but logging it in the long-term memory banks is a far more fickle and dispiriting prospect. How many times have I flicked through my copious files and glimpsed the same question three times (something Moby cited himself back at BoL qualifying)? Enough times to make me wonder why I never even remember I wrote them in the first place. It could be a case of information overload. It could be because I'm fated never to remember that particular nugget, unless I have it tattooed on the back of my hands, but that is a step too far. Tattoos? Crazy-bad! Too far being a relative term when considering these matters.
So, I think I'm merely making modest improvements that will hopefully bear glorious fruit sometime. Possibly in twenty years time. I dunno. I have noticed going back, for instance, to the 1996 book Best Pub Quiz Book in the World #1, that yes, I get more of them than I used to. A lot more, in fact. But I always said I was going to retire when I was 26, and you know I would have to travel back in time to persuade myself to do so if that was going to happen. Which it isn't. Seeing as I don't have a handy Delorean and a crazy-haired scientist mentor to right what once went wrong. Hang on that's Quantum Leap innit? Time to make the nightly journey to the land of nod (but obviously, not the one Cain was banished to). Hands ceasing typing ... now.
1 The wealthy Scottish socialite and widow Jane Apreece enjoyed a miserable and childless marriage with which esteemed chemist and physicist, and was renowned for treating his then assistant Michael Faraday badly?
2 Derived from the Medieval Latin for "powdered ore of antimony", what term in chemistry is applied to any organic compound in which a hydroxyl group (-OH) is bound to a carbon atom, which is in turn bound other hydrogen and/or carbon atoms?
3 The patent for what mixture of oxides of calcium, silicon and aluminium was issued to a British bricklayer called Joseph Aspdin in 1824?
4 Which Welshman and Abertridwr native gave his name to a needle-type valve that has been used to inflate sports balls everywhere (according to this odd Welsh inventors site I came across)?
5 Natives of Barnsley, Rotherham and Chesterfield are known to call Sheffielders by what name, on account of their pronunciation of 'th' in certain dialectal words?
6 Combining a Latin-Romance vocabulary with a simplified Romance grammar, what constructed language was published in 1951 by the International Auxiliary Language Association and has been referred to as a modernised and simplified Latin?
7 What company was founded in 1983 as Racal Telecom?
8 What does the prefix Tober- signify in a British place name?
9 Which Pope selected Raphael to succeed Donato Bramante as architect of St Peter's in 1514?
10 What term describes one billion billion characters of information?
11 Designed by Charles Frey in 1889, what was the name of the first fruit machine?
12 Which 2006 inductees into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame were once called Earth?
13 What slang name for heroin is also the collective name for a group of jellyfish?
14 Sir Walter Scott's 1826 book Woodstock was a life of which major historical figure?
15 What 81-mile long footpath runs from Ilkley in West Yorkshire to Bowness-on-Windermere?
16 What rank in the Royal Artillery is the equivalent of corporal in other regiments?
17 What form would you get from a post office to get a vehicle licence?
18 The Armed Islamic Group (GIA) is engaging in a "national reconciliation" with which country's government?
19 Lord Howard, Queen Elizabeth I's cousin, commanded which ship during the time of the Spanish Armada?
20 Which country introduced its new national flag on March 12 with eight and not seven stars, and the coat of arms in the upper left corner?
21 Which island voted to keep its feudal system of governance on March 8?
22 The government of which African country has been controlled by Idriss Deby and his Patriotic Salvation Movement since 1990?
23 The Joseon Dynasty was the final ruling dynasty of which country, its rule ending in 1910?
24 Which East Prussian civil servant attempted to overthrow the Weimar Republic in a 1920 putsch?
25 Twinned with Birmingham (England) and Houston, Texas, what is the largest city in the federal state of Saxony and is situated at the confluence of the Pleisse, White Elster and Parthe rivers?
26 Which suburb of Lyon in France is located on "the hill that prays" and is the site of a highly decorated basilica, an Archbishop's palace, a funicular line and the TV tower, the Tour metallique?
27 Which organisation produced the 1980 McBride report (Many Voices One World), a controversial document that provoked ire in the UK and the US for its supposed attempt to destroy the freedom of the press?
28 A minor prince named Sang Nila Utama is believed to have given which country its name after sighting the first ever creature he saw on the island?
29 What arthropod with around 1,220 species, first studied by Charles Darwin, have two larval stages called the nauplius and cyprid and belong to the infraclass Cirrepedia?
30 What two-word name connects a tie that was popular in the UK during the early 1960s, a tool for picking car locks, a cocktail, a type of dipole radio antenna and a brand of beef jerky?
31 Which Scottish Football League team play at Raydale Park and are nicknamed The Black and Whites?
32 Now majority owned by Ford, which Hiroshima-based car manufacturers began as the Toyo Cork Kogyo Co. Ltd. in 1920, and has for its chief designer a Scotsman named Moray Callum?
33 In which Australian state is the Blue Mountains National Park?
34 Leicester Cheese becomes Red Leicester with the addition of what extract, a food colouring derived from the achiote tree, during its manufacture?
35 Dame Silvia Cartwright is the Governor-General of which country?
36 Established in 1852, Sir Henry Cole was the first director of which museum that is proposing to build a controversial £80 million Daniel Libeskind-designed extension called The Spiral?
Answers to BH #36
1 Landmine 2 Subaru 3 Sanyo 4 International Baby Food Action Network 5 Vevey 6 Tom Sharpe 7 Peggy Ashcroft 8 New English Art Club 9 Sixth Symphony or Pathetique 10 Tikhvin Cemetery 11 Saint Lawrence River 12 Craton 13 Stratigraphy 14 Lord 15 Bleak 16 Royal Caledonian Curling Club 17 Eddie Macken 18 Ariel Ordinary 19 A bump 20 Harry Benjamin 21 Durham Miner's Gala 22 Unicorn 23 Klaus 24 First Person Shooter 25 World's first internet cafe 26 Dahabeeyah 27 Ogham 28 The Cornishman 29 Andrew Jackson 30 Bristol Brabazon 31 Luxembourg 32 Parma 33 Sardinia ("regnum Sardiniae et Corsicae") 34 The Family International 35 Bistro 36 Brandy 37 Howard Fast 38 Barney (the extremely annoying purple dinosaur)
posted by That Quiz Guy at 3:58 PM
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