Tuesday, November 14, 2006

Bric-a-Brac and Offcuts: BH106

Congratulations to the mighty Geoff Thomas on winning Mastermind 2007. A well deserved title for someone who has frightened me with his great general knowledge prowess ever since the first British Quiz Championship in which I competed in 1999. Getting twenty-one on the GK round is simply an awesome achievement that few competitors, if any, will manage in the entire history of the show. I managed to miss it because I was in the pub. Just typical, really.

And congratulations to Ken Jennings, who is the proud new father of a baby girl named Caitlin Elizabeth.

It also seems that instead of doing proper work I have been watching the cartoon Sealab 2021 on YouTube. This clip is quite possibly the funniest and most offensive thing I have seen in the past, oh, week. I love surreal non-sequiturs. They make me smile.

Oh yeah, we have a QLL match tonight against Animals. It seems I have forgotten to review our era-defining clash against the incumbent champions of the London universe. Well, it does happen sometimes.

These darn questions
These are basically surplus questions that have been separated from a pool of tidbits I have been entering into the Lulu book. Some were too British, some were too flimsy, some I don't know why in hell I wrote them. But they might as well be used somewhere, and what place could be better than here, where so many other questions of dubious interest reside. So apologies if you think they are more boring as usual.

1 Which Labour MP for Falkirk claimed the most in expenses during 2005-2006, spending more money on travel than any other (£44,985)?
2 What is Rajar the industry body for?
3 A blue plaque, recently unveiled at 34 Ridgmount Gardens, Bloomsbury, London, is the first to be erected in which musician's memory?
4 Nicknamed "Buster", which naval hero and Commander said to have been the inspiration for James Bond went missing during a dive off Portsmouth in 1956 after allegedly spying on Russian ships that were in British waters for a visit by Khruschev and Marshal Nikolai Bulganin?
5 The Belaruse opposition leader Alexander Milinkevich has been awarded which human rights prize by the European Parliament?
6 What is the largest producer of seafood in the UK?
7 Who wrote that "all art constantly aspires to the condition of music"?
8 Painted in 1657, which Velazquez work of 1657 is also known as The Fable of Arachne?
9 Also Finance Minister, Luisa Dias Diogo became the first female prime minister of which country in 2004?
10 Chairman of Abbey National, which seasoned troubleshooter was commissioned to perform a review of the Football Association's structure in 2005?
11 What kind of famous sporting institutions are Roach's Wildcat and Gleeson's in the US?
12 Great Britain is due to play which country in the Davis Cup in April (2007)?
13 Which virtual band have put out the autobiography Rise of The Ogre?
14 Used for the final round of this year's MotoGP World Championship, where is the Ricardo Tormo circuit?
15 Which Briton became in 1987 the first foreigner to run the length of the Great Wall of China, and has put together an exhibition of photographs entitled Great Wall Revisited at the Beijing Capital Museum in January 2007?
16 Which 39-year-old American has become the first native English-speaker to win the Grand Prix of the Academie Francaise for his 900-page novel Les Bienveillantes/The Kindly Ones?
17 Which member of the royal family celebrates his birthday on November 14?
18 The racehorse Desert Orchid's ashes have been scattered at which course, where he won the King George VI steeplechase four times?
19 Which £5,000 literary prize was founded by the widow of the eponymous young airman killed in the Battle of Britain?
20 Associated with the International Style, which Viennese architect declared that "ornament is a crime"?
21 First staged at the Nottingham Playhouse in 1975 where it was directed by Richard Eyre, which teacher turned dramatist wrote the play Comedians?
22 Anders Larsen's book Sharp Practice is subtitled "The real man's guide to" what?
23 Nolan Bushnell pioneered video games as the founder of which company in the 1970s?
24 Which company owns the James Bond film franchise?
25 The real life riverside home of Ratty, Mole and other characters in the Wind in the Willows is found on which Berkshire river?
26 In the title of a BBC2 series who is Charles Rangeley-Wilson?
27 In which county is the Camel Valley vineyard?
28 On October 31, 1941, which US photographer took a picture of a moonrise over the town of Hernandez, New Mexico, that would become one of the most famous images in the history of photography?
29 Juliette Gordon Low founded which organisation in the USA in 1912?
30 Which Italian composer, the first of the Neapolitan school to obtain a complete mastery over modern harmonic counterpoint, composed the comic opera Amor vuol sofferenze (1739) and was equally distinguished for his serious operas, including Demofoonte (1735), Parnace (1737) and L'Olimpiade (1737)?
31 Meaning "bay water", the Telok Ayer Market was a simple wooden building in the early 19th century that was converted into a Victorian iron structure. In which city is it located? Singapore
32 His first country number one, which US musician's first well known song If Tomorrow Never Comes came from his eponymous first album, released in 1989?
33 Born in Akron, Ohio in 1984, which US basketball small forward is nicknamed The Chosen One?
34 Tracing the international history of submarine development from the age of Alexander the Great to the present day, the Royal Navy Submarine Museum is located in which town?
35 Taking its name from the type-site (that of the first archaeological finds relating to this advanced culture) remnants of a cemetery found near Castenaso, 8km southeast of Bologna, what was the earliest Iron Age culture (1100BC to 700BC) of central and northern Italy, abruptly following the Bronze Age Terramare culture and giving way in the 7th century BC to an increasingly Orientalizing Greek trader-influenced culture, which was followed without a severe break by the Etruscan civilisation?
36 Who is the senior Anglican bishop in Northern Ireland?
37 Held in the US, the ISEF is the largest annually held science fair in the world. What does ISEF stand for and who sponsors it?
38 Certified as a version of UNIX, the computer operating system Solaris was developed by which company?
39 What spirit, along with lemonade and a light splash of raspberry cordial, is the main ingredient of the Jellybean cocktail?
40 What is the rank of the butcher Jack Jones, as played by Clive Dunn, in Dad's Army?
41 Which Belgian literary critic, associated with the Geneva School, is best known for his four-volume work Studies in Human Time and for rejecting formalist approaches and advancing the theory that criticism requires the reader to open his or her mind to the consciousness of the author?
42 The Extraction of the Stone of Madness (The Cure of Folly), which was completed between 1475 and 1480 and depicts a sugical operation, and The Haywain Triptych, an oil painting on wood panels begun in 1485 and completed in 1490, are works by which artist?
43 In fluid mechanics, what term describes the contact between a fluid and a surface when the two are brought into contact?
44 Which man founded Charterhouse School in 1611?
45 What office is held by Alan Reid in the Royal Household of the Sovereign?
46 Known as Dracaena Palm in other countries, the ornamental plant Cordyline indivisia native to New Zealand is commonly known by what tree name in that country?
47 Introduced in 1937 and retired by the RAF in 1944, what Frank Barnwell-designed, high-speed light bomber and fighter was built by Bristol Aeroplane Company and was the first British aircraft to have all-metal stressed skin construction and one of the first to utilise retractable landing gear, flaps, powered gun turret and variable switch propellers?
48 In geometry, what is an n-dimensional analogue of a triangle?
49 Responsible for the saying "The simplest form is not always the best, but the best is always simple", which urban planner and architect is now best known through his student and one-time assistant Albert Speer and an eponymous medal periodically awarded for architectural excellene by the Alfred Toepfer Foundation of Hamburg since 1962?
50 As in the cocktail, margarita is the Spanish word for the daisy and the Latin word for what object?
51 What are the names of Ottawa and Vancouver's NHL teams?
52 Which US actor wrote the 2002 children's book, The Sissy Duckling, which was later made into an HBO special with him as the voice of Elmer the Duck?
53 Who, along with Michael Schumacher, is the only driver to have won world F1 titles racing for teams other than McLaren and Williams between 1980 and 2000?
54 Which US Marines military base in the Republic of Vietnam, located near the Laos border and just south of the border with the North, was attacked by the North Vietnamese in a battle that lasted from January 21 and April 8, 1968; the defense of the base being codenamed Operation Scotland?
55 What executive agency of the UK's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is known by the acronym SVS?
56 The Dominet Bank Ekstraliga (DBE) is the highest level of basketball league in which country?
57 Which Frenchman was top scorer at the 1995 rugby union World Cup with 112 points?
58 Easily recognised by its expanded anterior nostrils and said to resemble a brightly coloured party streamer, which species of saltwater eel is the only moral eel that is not gonochronistic and has the scientific name Rhinomuraena quaesita?
59 The Ananke group of retrograde irregular moons orbit which planet?
60 From the Greek for "nation leader", what term generally refers to political leadership over a common ethnic group or heterogenous kingdom; the best known probably being Archelaus, son of Herod the Great, who ruled the chief part of Samara Judea and Idumea, from the death of his father in 4BC to 6AD?
61 Which Florentine Renaissance sculptor, claimed by his pupil Vasari to be driven by jealousy of Benvenuto Cellini and Michelangelo, never matched the admiration given to the sculptures of the latter, especially the colossal (5.05m) marble group of Hercules and Cacus (completed in 1534) in the Piazza della Signoria, Florence, and Adam and Eve in the Bargello, which both stand within sight of some of Michelangelo's masterworks?
62 Sir John Wyndham Pope-Hennessy (1913-94) was a prominent academic in which field?
63 Which utilitarian and joint organiser of the Great Exhibition, who acquired some of the objects from the exhibition for the collection, was the first director of the Victoria and Albert Museum?
64 What Persian name for a Muslim cleric, common in Iran and Azerbaijan, also gave rise to the Chinese word for imam, as used by the Hui people?
65 The largest humanitarian organisation in Turkey, what was founded under the Ottoman Empire on June 11, 1868 and was named Hilal-i Ahmer Cemiyeti and was renamed Kızılay by Ataturk in 1935?
66 Which award-winning interior designer, nicknamed the Goddess of Garbage, is famed for using recycled materials in her home designs?
67 In which German POW camp was the TV series Hogan's Heroes set?
68 Which writer created Conan the Barbarian?
69 Thought to be descended from the medieval Jewish communities of the Rhineland, which group of Jews today make up 80 per cent of Jews worldwide?
70 Hakka is a language spoken in which country?
71 Old Faithful is a club chant of which rugby league club, made popular in the earlu 1930s when it had a full back called Joe Oliver?
72 Boris Badenov, Natasha Fatale and Fearless Leader were the sworn enemies of which cartoon characters?
73 Who became the first Nepali woman to climb the summit of Mount Everest on April 22, 1993?
74 Found in Spain, the Philippines and Latin America, what sort of food is an embutido?
75 Which Ukrainian Impressionist artist and pedagogue, who studied at Paris in the studio of Matisse (1910-11), painted landscapes to his country's themes, including Morning on the Dnieper (1934), Apple Trees in Bloom (1936) and The Broad Dnieper Roars and Moans (1941)?
76 Sir Roy Anderson holds what position in the Ministry of Defence?

R
E
A
L
L
Y

S
O
R
E

E
Y
E
S

Answers to BH106
1 Eric Joyce 2 Radio (figures) 3 Bob Marley 4 Lionel Crabb 5 Sakharov prize 6 Young's Bluecrest 7 Walter Pater 8 The Tread Spinners 9 Mozambique 10 Lord Burns 11 Boxing training centres/gyms 12 Netherlands 13 Gorillaz 14 Valencia 15 William Lindesay 16 Jonathan Littell 17 Prince Charles 18 Kempton Park 19 John Llewellyn Rhys prize 20 Adolf Loos 21 Trevor Griffiths 22 Shaving 23 Atari 24 Eon Productions 25 Pang 26 The Accidental Angler 27 Cornwall 28 Ansel Adams 29 Girl Scouts of the USA 30 Leonardo Leo 31 Singapore 32 Garth Crooks 33 LeBron Raymone James 34 Gosport 35 The Villanovan culture as in Villanova 36 Archbishop of Armagh (currently Lord Eames) 37 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair 38 Sun Microsystems 39 Ouzo 40 Lance Corporal 41 Georges Poulet 42 Hieronymus Bosch 43 Wetting 44 Thomas Sutton 45 Keeper of the Privy Purse and Treasurer to the Queen 46 Mountain cabbage tree 47 Bristol Blenheim 48 Simplex or n-simplex 49 Heinrich Tessenow 50 Pearl 51 Senators, Canucks 52 Harvey Fierstein 53 Nelson Piquet (1981, '83, '87) 54 Khe Sanh 55 State Veterinary Service 56 Poland 57 Thierry Lacroix 58 Ribbon eel 59 Jupiter 60 Ethnarch 61 Bartolommeo Bandinelli (actually Brandini) 62 Art history 63 Sir Henry Cole 64 Akhoond or akhund 65 Turkish Red Crescent 66 Carol Tanzi 67 Stalag 68 Robert E Howard 69 Ashkenazi 70 China 71 Hull FC 72 Rocky and Bullwinkle 73 Pasang Lhamu Sherpa 74 Sausage 75 Mykola Burachek 76 Chief Scientific Adviser

2 Comments:

Blogger That Quiz Guy said...

32 is obviously Garth Brooks. I mean, Garth Crooks. He just makes me want to punch him in the head.

6:49 PM  
Blogger That Quiz Guy said...

And 67 is Stalag 13

6:51 PM  

Post a Comment

<< Home