BH132: The things that haunt us
What has happened will happen again and again
Eagle-eyed BH quiz tacklers, quite a few of whom have copied and printed off this particular quiz series in its entirety, will have probably noticed a little sloppiness creeping into my question selections recently. BH quiz perusers will have no doubt recognised one or two questions being repeated, even if they were first posted in this blog's ancient history (the dark days of February 2006), though they have been slightly amended or drastically jiggled about enough to bypass my powers of recognition.
The archives are starting to bulge and my increasing ignorance of questions I set and posted myself a few months before is increasing exponentially. Er, unless I start to seriously use my "Search Blog" facility in a far more methodical manner, which I have done. Though admittedly on about three paranoid-driven occasions. So yes I could be more diligent. Especially when I look back at the typically murderously obscure questions I have laid at the feet of the world where they are no doubt ignored due their murderous obscurity (though my raison d'etre with many of the questions I set is that if you write a GK question about a hitherto shrouded topic and stick it on the internet, it becomes less obscure by dint of its exposure and, opens interested parties' eyes to the possibility of such a question being asked; the process resulting in the said impossible question hopefully entering mainstream quizzing events in, oh, about 25 years. I hope. Call it normalisation if you will.)
Nevertheless, I throw up my no doubt scurrilous setting hands and lift up my shame-shaded face in readiness for a modicum of mild ire displayed by BH devotees and willingly declare myself guilty as charged of self-plagiarism, (Really, I don't think you care about this concern of mine much, but you know it sure bugs me. The burden of a unwittingly unleashing potential Groundhog Day-style fusillades of repeat questions lies heavy on my creaking shoulders, reminding me of my written files and their tendency to throw up the exact same question I have written once every year for seven years without fail.)
Having said that even though I've really only been repeating questions a rare few times, each one stares out like a scarlet-shamed swollen thumb, reminding me that my mind is becoming an increasingly fickle box of mysteries. I realise the omens for committing further blunders multiple every time I come across them. This in itself is a classic question-compiler rule, one set in stone and one that must always be kept uppermost in one's thoughts. Never forget ground already trodden and, subsequently never repeat and steal from yourself. If you don't it makes you feel very silly and makes you consider what other perceptive devotees of your question output might think of you ("He's already written that! Idiot! Respect is no longer due"). Also, they might just think you are becoming one hell of a lazy arse.
Making a bold, hyperbolic statement, I love the "art" of original question-writing. For if you use quiz books you will surely have a place reserved in the ninth circle of Hell. Research, originality and an eye for either the universal or at least interesting, stand-out fact will stand every quizmaster in very good stead. That and an understanding of clauses and crucial grammar. It's just a pity that most numpty pub QMs asking the questions have about as much affinity with their material and understanding of their potential impact on the gathered punters as a Helen Keller would have had with a Rolls Royce Silver Phantom. Know your stuff inside and out. It is your only defence. When one 25-year-old twit, who at first everyone thought was actually a member of the Dalston Bicycle Thieves Club and was about to sell his latest "find", claimed that Carry On Up The Khyber was the first Carry On film because he "looked it up on a website", so outraged where the 60 or so gathered participants that nearly everyone jumped up in furious unison and screamed : "BOLLOCKS!" and then shouted the word again, until everyone in the pub appeared to be wearing facial expressions of simmering anger. (Did he back down? No way. He was the quizmaster and that was "the answer down on his sheet". Wax-haired git.)
Perhaps, there are mitigating factors for subconscious repetition. So here is another excuse or two. I do it differently. Writing thousands of one-line to gargantuan length questions - I often feel I must pack everything into the questions out of lunatic compulsion and a fear of ambiguity - at 75WPM speeds can bring most people who read them to the brink of despair, lovely despair, For writing so many and in such a manner scrambles my memory circuits.
The medium-to-long BH quizzes are all written in a couple of hours at the very most (except BH100 and the UN quiz ... I said I would never do it again, after 12 hours of strange, eclectic hell, but in hindsight it did cover the world and, as all quizzers know, the world, replete with countries and cultures, it is huge and fantastic place which will always yield more amusing and educational facts than this tiny island of ours. So yeah, a repeat may be on the cards before the EQC. Because I am mad me.)
Stocking up on coming BH quizzes, I seem to have written 350 questions today for blog publishing (word lengths 8 to 40), as well as proofed three or four quizzes I am preparing for non-Quiz Blogger purposes. Shhh, who knows where they will end up?
Anyway, it's only a blog and I am most certainly making a mountain out of a molehill all in the name of serving my trivia-loving readership. Thank whichever of the gods that look over us, that the best blogs are on the whole either a) waystations with links to far more interesting sites and webpages a) moaning and opinionated gits c) Photogenic women who have ingeniously exploited their social calendar/sex life/helter skelter career and men's sexual proclivities to garner book deals d) Arts/films/music/football team obsessives e) Celebrity-obsessed gossip vampires or f) people with lives or jobs which force confrontation with the baffling and beautiful panoply of mankind. And they all serve their loyal and tiny-to-giant readerships by often making mountain ranges out of mole fortresses. Many ramble, but rambling, in many cases the self-centred indulgent kind (me? pot and kettle and you know what), is what the finest bloggers do and are rewarded for, if their tidbits, diatribes and opinions are written well enough (though I'm not sure where I stand in the whole category thing: the fact-obsessed, quiz addict, questions galore niche perhaps?)
But then one welcome side-effect to my incipient repetitive weakness (forgetting my hackneyed writing style tics "innit" being one recent inexcusable example). If you didn't learn the question last time, then you get another bite at the apple, or blueberry, or whatever lovely reduced punnet of fruit you have come across at your local M&S. And if I forget it, there is hope for everyone surely? (I'm already thinking that statement is the culinary raw tripe served on a bed of bull's testicles).
And yet I say, twas was just another Bastard Hard quiz: I aim for the supramundane aspects of quiz knowledge to which only the most devoted triviaholics pay homage. The harder you play, the better your results become. And to paraphrase Gary Player in a far less smug fashion, the more you practice, the luckier you become. Work, work, work and give up all semblance of a well-rounded life. Give yourself to the geek side.
One more thing. Keep in mind that the BH quizzes have always been written in the HST Gonzo-style: prone to excess, improvised, overblown, with nary a thought as to rhyme or reason (except in special cases) linked only by a primal devotion to hardcore randomness and a guarantee of new discovery. And I would never find them so fun were an editor or proofreader happen to peak over my shoulder. After all, this is my domain and mine alone. Always remember that.
BH132
1 An inspiration for Aesop's fables, which collection of Buddhist legends collected before 400AD contains 547 stories in its oldest and most complete version?
2 Destroyed c.1520, Majapahit was the last Hindu kingdom of which island?
3 Chief minister to several popes before his election to the papacy in 1073, which Pope had the monastic name Hildebrand and was driven from Rome before his death in exile in 1085?
4 Which director's lesser known films include Broken Blossoms (1919), Orphans of the Storm (1921) and The Struggle (1931)?
5 What plateau is known as Jawlan in Arabic?
6 Chiefly active in Ghent, which Flemish painter (c.1440-1482) most notably produced the Portinari Altarpiece (c.1475, on display in the Uffizi) that he executed for the agent of the Medici at Bruges, Tommaso Portinari?
7 Which ballet extravaganza, from which US vaudeville and musical comedy developed, began its run of 474 performances in New York in 1866?
8 The town of Darlington lies on which river near its junction with the Tees?
9 In 1924, which Australian-born South African palaeontologist and anthropologist discovered the first fossil remains of the australopithicenes, early hominids, near Taungs in Botswana, that he named Australopithecus africanus?
10 Containing the painting known as the "Black Madonna", which basilica in the Polish city of Czestochowa is a centre for Catholic pilgrims?
11 Which singer-songwriter gave Marcia Murphey, a former television production assistant, £75m at the end of their 25-year marriage in 1994?
12 Which naturalised British citizen won the 1981 Nobel Prize for Literature for work "marked by a broad outlook, a wealth of ideas, [and] artistic power"?
13 Which car company's latest models include the Auris TR, Verso SR and RAV4 XT-R?
14 Which creatures have the highest population of any animals on earth?
15 Which person has held the Order of Merit longer than anyone else having been awarded it in June 1968?
16 Which 15th century Italian artist painted the towering Assumption of the Virgin altarpiece (c.1474) of the Church of St Agostino in Asciano, recently reunited and reconstructed to form the highlight of a new National Gallery exhibition?
17 Descended from the residents of ancient Urartu, Armenia became the first Christian nation in 301AD when which king converted it from paganism?
18 Which former dentist, known as Burma's Charlie Chaplin, was seized after supporting his countrymen's recent protests against the military junta?
19 Which stadium is home to the Los Angeles Lakers basketball team?
20 The "LA Live" Los Angeles building plan is the brainchild of which reclusive Colorado-based billionaire, who owns the AEG entertainment group?
21 Born in Russia in 1905, whose collection of essays The Virtue of Selfishness has been described as the extreme capitalist's handbook?
22 Said to be one of his most moving works, who wrote the play Love Letters on Blue Paper (1977) at the age of 45?
23 At the age of 47, the former Egyptian Irrigation Service employee Constantine Cavafy wrote which sad but persuasive poem on the impossibility of changing one's life?
24 James McNeill Whistler's Nocturne in Blue and Gold is a painting of which London construction?
25 Which statistician invented the product-moment correlation coefficient in 1897, and also made the first use of the terms "standard deviation" and "chi-square"?
26 Author of Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family, which then railroad business lawyer accidentally hit on the subject of examining kinship terms (equivalent of our "uncle" or "aunt") in native American tribes in 1858?
27 Which cleric published Hymns Ancient and Modern in 1861?
28 Which architect's Pavillon de l'Esprit Nouveau (1925) was virtually his first project to be built?
29 In a famous 20th century novel, which 37-year-old moves into 342 Lawn Street, somewhere in New England, where he fatefully meets a mother and daughter?
30 Which "younger" architect designed London's Newgate Prison in 1768?
31 Lee de Forest invented what device in 1906, making the tube/valve into an amplifier?
32 The 16th and last of the Ming Emperors, who wrote the message "I, feeble and of small virtue, have offended against Heaven ... Ashamed to face my ancestors, I die" and committed suicide by strangling himself as the Manchus entered Peking in 1644?
33 In 1979, Alan Reeter broke which distance record, by travelling 67 miles in Nevada?
34 The war correspondent JA McGahan famously reported Turkish atrocities in which country in 1876, leading to its liberation?
35 Regnier de Graaf first used which widely known anatomical term in 1673?
36 Whose 1918 design for a chair - made of timber without any joints and painted in primary colours - is seen as the definitive De Stijl chair?
37 Which famous car pioneer was killed in a plane crash in June 1910?
38 Which Latin-named Leonardo Fibonacci work of 1202 caused the switch from Roman to Arabic numerals?
39 In which year did William Bradford and other members of the Plymouth colony have the first Thanksgiving dinner?
40 As worn by a Highlander, what is a "dirk"?
W
E
A
R
E
S
T
I
L
L
W
I
N
N
I
N
G
Answers to BH132
1 Jataka 2 Java 3 Gregory VII 4 DW Griffith 5 Golan Heights 6 Hugo van der Goes 7 The Black Crook 8 Skerne 9 Raymond Dart 10 Jasna Gora 11 Neil Diamond 12 Elias Canetti 13 Toyota 14 Ants 15 Duke of Edinburgh 16 Matteo di Giovanni 17 King Drtad 18 Zarganar 19 Staples Center 20 Philio Anschutz 21 Ayn Rand 22 Arnold Wesker 23 The City 24 "Old Battersea Bridge" 25 Karl Pearson 26 Lewis Henry Morgan 27 Rev. HW Baker 28 Le Corbusier 29 Humbert Humbert (in Lolita) 30 George Dance 31 Triode 32 Ch'ung-chen 33 Hang-gliding 34 Bulgaria 35 Ovary 36 Gerrit Rietveld 37 Charles S Rolls 38 Liber Abaci 39 1621 40 Dagger
Eagle-eyed BH quiz tacklers, quite a few of whom have copied and printed off this particular quiz series in its entirety, will have probably noticed a little sloppiness creeping into my question selections recently. BH quiz perusers will have no doubt recognised one or two questions being repeated, even if they were first posted in this blog's ancient history (the dark days of February 2006), though they have been slightly amended or drastically jiggled about enough to bypass my powers of recognition.
The archives are starting to bulge and my increasing ignorance of questions I set and posted myself a few months before is increasing exponentially. Er, unless I start to seriously use my "Search Blog" facility in a far more methodical manner, which I have done. Though admittedly on about three paranoid-driven occasions. So yes I could be more diligent. Especially when I look back at the typically murderously obscure questions I have laid at the feet of the world where they are no doubt ignored due their murderous obscurity (though my raison d'etre with many of the questions I set is that if you write a GK question about a hitherto shrouded topic and stick it on the internet, it becomes less obscure by dint of its exposure and, opens interested parties' eyes to the possibility of such a question being asked; the process resulting in the said impossible question hopefully entering mainstream quizzing events in, oh, about 25 years. I hope. Call it normalisation if you will.)
Nevertheless, I throw up my no doubt scurrilous setting hands and lift up my shame-shaded face in readiness for a modicum of mild ire displayed by BH devotees and willingly declare myself guilty as charged of self-plagiarism, (Really, I don't think you care about this concern of mine much, but you know it sure bugs me. The burden of a unwittingly unleashing potential Groundhog Day-style fusillades of repeat questions lies heavy on my creaking shoulders, reminding me of my written files and their tendency to throw up the exact same question I have written once every year for seven years without fail.)
Having said that even though I've really only been repeating questions a rare few times, each one stares out like a scarlet-shamed swollen thumb, reminding me that my mind is becoming an increasingly fickle box of mysteries. I realise the omens for committing further blunders multiple every time I come across them. This in itself is a classic question-compiler rule, one set in stone and one that must always be kept uppermost in one's thoughts. Never forget ground already trodden and, subsequently never repeat and steal from yourself. If you don't it makes you feel very silly and makes you consider what other perceptive devotees of your question output might think of you ("He's already written that! Idiot! Respect is no longer due"). Also, they might just think you are becoming one hell of a lazy arse.
Making a bold, hyperbolic statement, I love the "art" of original question-writing. For if you use quiz books you will surely have a place reserved in the ninth circle of Hell. Research, originality and an eye for either the universal or at least interesting, stand-out fact will stand every quizmaster in very good stead. That and an understanding of clauses and crucial grammar. It's just a pity that most numpty pub QMs asking the questions have about as much affinity with their material and understanding of their potential impact on the gathered punters as a Helen Keller would have had with a Rolls Royce Silver Phantom. Know your stuff inside and out. It is your only defence. When one 25-year-old twit, who at first everyone thought was actually a member of the Dalston Bicycle Thieves Club and was about to sell his latest "find", claimed that Carry On Up The Khyber was the first Carry On film because he "looked it up on a website", so outraged where the 60 or so gathered participants that nearly everyone jumped up in furious unison and screamed : "BOLLOCKS!" and then shouted the word again, until everyone in the pub appeared to be wearing facial expressions of simmering anger. (Did he back down? No way. He was the quizmaster and that was "the answer down on his sheet". Wax-haired git.)
Perhaps, there are mitigating factors for subconscious repetition. So here is another excuse or two. I do it differently. Writing thousands of one-line to gargantuan length questions - I often feel I must pack everything into the questions out of lunatic compulsion and a fear of ambiguity - at 75WPM speeds can bring most people who read them to the brink of despair, lovely despair, For writing so many and in such a manner scrambles my memory circuits.
The medium-to-long BH quizzes are all written in a couple of hours at the very most (except BH100 and the UN quiz ... I said I would never do it again, after 12 hours of strange, eclectic hell, but in hindsight it did cover the world and, as all quizzers know, the world, replete with countries and cultures, it is huge and fantastic place which will always yield more amusing and educational facts than this tiny island of ours. So yeah, a repeat may be on the cards before the EQC. Because I am mad me.)
Stocking up on coming BH quizzes, I seem to have written 350 questions today for blog publishing (word lengths 8 to 40), as well as proofed three or four quizzes I am preparing for non-Quiz Blogger purposes. Shhh, who knows where they will end up?
Anyway, it's only a blog and I am most certainly making a mountain out of a molehill all in the name of serving my trivia-loving readership. Thank whichever of the gods that look over us, that the best blogs are on the whole either a) waystations with links to far more interesting sites and webpages a) moaning and opinionated gits c) Photogenic women who have ingeniously exploited their social calendar/sex life/helter skelter career and men's sexual proclivities to garner book deals d) Arts/films/music/football team obsessives e) Celebrity-obsessed gossip vampires or f) people with lives or jobs which force confrontation with the baffling and beautiful panoply of mankind. And they all serve their loyal and tiny-to-giant readerships by often making mountain ranges out of mole fortresses. Many ramble, but rambling, in many cases the self-centred indulgent kind (me? pot and kettle and you know what), is what the finest bloggers do and are rewarded for, if their tidbits, diatribes and opinions are written well enough (though I'm not sure where I stand in the whole category thing: the fact-obsessed, quiz addict, questions galore niche perhaps?)
But then one welcome side-effect to my incipient repetitive weakness (forgetting my hackneyed writing style tics "innit" being one recent inexcusable example). If you didn't learn the question last time, then you get another bite at the apple, or blueberry, or whatever lovely reduced punnet of fruit you have come across at your local M&S. And if I forget it, there is hope for everyone surely? (I'm already thinking that statement is the culinary raw tripe served on a bed of bull's testicles).
And yet I say, twas was just another Bastard Hard quiz: I aim for the supramundane aspects of quiz knowledge to which only the most devoted triviaholics pay homage. The harder you play, the better your results become. And to paraphrase Gary Player in a far less smug fashion, the more you practice, the luckier you become. Work, work, work and give up all semblance of a well-rounded life. Give yourself to the geek side.
One more thing. Keep in mind that the BH quizzes have always been written in the HST Gonzo-style: prone to excess, improvised, overblown, with nary a thought as to rhyme or reason (except in special cases) linked only by a primal devotion to hardcore randomness and a guarantee of new discovery. And I would never find them so fun were an editor or proofreader happen to peak over my shoulder. After all, this is my domain and mine alone. Always remember that.
BH132
1 An inspiration for Aesop's fables, which collection of Buddhist legends collected before 400AD contains 547 stories in its oldest and most complete version?
2 Destroyed c.1520, Majapahit was the last Hindu kingdom of which island?
3 Chief minister to several popes before his election to the papacy in 1073, which Pope had the monastic name Hildebrand and was driven from Rome before his death in exile in 1085?
4 Which director's lesser known films include Broken Blossoms (1919), Orphans of the Storm (1921) and The Struggle (1931)?
5 What plateau is known as Jawlan in Arabic?
6 Chiefly active in Ghent, which Flemish painter (c.1440-1482) most notably produced the Portinari Altarpiece (c.1475, on display in the Uffizi) that he executed for the agent of the Medici at Bruges, Tommaso Portinari?
7 Which ballet extravaganza, from which US vaudeville and musical comedy developed, began its run of 474 performances in New York in 1866?
8 The town of Darlington lies on which river near its junction with the Tees?
9 In 1924, which Australian-born South African palaeontologist and anthropologist discovered the first fossil remains of the australopithicenes, early hominids, near Taungs in Botswana, that he named Australopithecus africanus?
10 Containing the painting known as the "Black Madonna", which basilica in the Polish city of Czestochowa is a centre for Catholic pilgrims?
11 Which singer-songwriter gave Marcia Murphey, a former television production assistant, £75m at the end of their 25-year marriage in 1994?
12 Which naturalised British citizen won the 1981 Nobel Prize for Literature for work "marked by a broad outlook, a wealth of ideas, [and] artistic power"?
13 Which car company's latest models include the Auris TR, Verso SR and RAV4 XT-R?
14 Which creatures have the highest population of any animals on earth?
15 Which person has held the Order of Merit longer than anyone else having been awarded it in June 1968?
16 Which 15th century Italian artist painted the towering Assumption of the Virgin altarpiece (c.1474) of the Church of St Agostino in Asciano, recently reunited and reconstructed to form the highlight of a new National Gallery exhibition?
17 Descended from the residents of ancient Urartu, Armenia became the first Christian nation in 301AD when which king converted it from paganism?
18 Which former dentist, known as Burma's Charlie Chaplin, was seized after supporting his countrymen's recent protests against the military junta?
19 Which stadium is home to the Los Angeles Lakers basketball team?
20 The "LA Live" Los Angeles building plan is the brainchild of which reclusive Colorado-based billionaire, who owns the AEG entertainment group?
21 Born in Russia in 1905, whose collection of essays The Virtue of Selfishness has been described as the extreme capitalist's handbook?
22 Said to be one of his most moving works, who wrote the play Love Letters on Blue Paper (1977) at the age of 45?
23 At the age of 47, the former Egyptian Irrigation Service employee Constantine Cavafy wrote which sad but persuasive poem on the impossibility of changing one's life?
24 James McNeill Whistler's Nocturne in Blue and Gold is a painting of which London construction?
25 Which statistician invented the product-moment correlation coefficient in 1897, and also made the first use of the terms "standard deviation" and "chi-square"?
26 Author of Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family, which then railroad business lawyer accidentally hit on the subject of examining kinship terms (equivalent of our "uncle" or "aunt") in native American tribes in 1858?
27 Which cleric published Hymns Ancient and Modern in 1861?
28 Which architect's Pavillon de l'Esprit Nouveau (1925) was virtually his first project to be built?
29 In a famous 20th century novel, which 37-year-old moves into 342 Lawn Street, somewhere in New England, where he fatefully meets a mother and daughter?
30 Which "younger" architect designed London's Newgate Prison in 1768?
31 Lee de Forest invented what device in 1906, making the tube/valve into an amplifier?
32 The 16th and last of the Ming Emperors, who wrote the message "I, feeble and of small virtue, have offended against Heaven ... Ashamed to face my ancestors, I die" and committed suicide by strangling himself as the Manchus entered Peking in 1644?
33 In 1979, Alan Reeter broke which distance record, by travelling 67 miles in Nevada?
34 The war correspondent JA McGahan famously reported Turkish atrocities in which country in 1876, leading to its liberation?
35 Regnier de Graaf first used which widely known anatomical term in 1673?
36 Whose 1918 design for a chair - made of timber without any joints and painted in primary colours - is seen as the definitive De Stijl chair?
37 Which famous car pioneer was killed in a plane crash in June 1910?
38 Which Latin-named Leonardo Fibonacci work of 1202 caused the switch from Roman to Arabic numerals?
39 In which year did William Bradford and other members of the Plymouth colony have the first Thanksgiving dinner?
40 As worn by a Highlander, what is a "dirk"?
W
E
A
R
E
S
T
I
L
L
W
I
N
N
I
N
G
Answers to BH132
1 Jataka 2 Java 3 Gregory VII 4 DW Griffith 5 Golan Heights 6 Hugo van der Goes 7 The Black Crook 8 Skerne 9 Raymond Dart 10 Jasna Gora 11 Neil Diamond 12 Elias Canetti 13 Toyota 14 Ants 15 Duke of Edinburgh 16 Matteo di Giovanni 17 King Drtad 18 Zarganar 19 Staples Center 20 Philio Anschutz 21 Ayn Rand 22 Arnold Wesker 23 The City 24 "Old Battersea Bridge" 25 Karl Pearson 26 Lewis Henry Morgan 27 Rev. HW Baker 28 Le Corbusier 29 Humbert Humbert (in Lolita) 30 George Dance 31 Triode 32 Ch'ung-chen 33 Hang-gliding 34 Bulgaria 35 Ovary 36 Gerrit Rietveld 37 Charles S Rolls 38 Liber Abaci 39 1621 40 Dagger
posted by That Quiz Guy at 4:35 PM
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