Tuesday, August 12, 2008

I Try Tous Les Jours

Ooh bad luck

I watched the Clayheads vs. Ashford Road Club/Milhous Warriors clash on BOTB tonight. You can too thanks to the expedient magic of iPlayer. Since my team was in the building waiting for our chance to shine or sink, we had heard all the whispers/rumours about Pat getting the Foreign Secretary killer and, after we had recorded, how Booker Prize winners had been switched for Blue Peter presenters at the last minute when it came to Mark's turn - was it 'Sockeye Salmon'? - on the list-based battle, and I have to say the latter team were a trifle unlucky. If one or two questions had gone right for Milhous, then there might have been a bit more of a Rorke's Drift scenario. However, I don't mean to denigrate the Clayheads' excellent achievement in besting them.

It certainly instilled a far more sturdy respect, or quivering trepidation dare I say, in us due to the calibre of opponent they had just, let's be honest, completely obliterated. But that's the nature of the haphazard format. But then again, all quiz shows are afflicted by the haphazard gene on account of the questions being plucked out of the randomness of infinity. Man, I really do hate the randomness of it all. Let everyone get the same 1000 questions and then we might then better know the content of all our quiz brains, even if such a thing is impossible and insane. Unless you're wearing Adidas kit, then Impossible is Nuttin'.

Anyway, it was nice to see an hour of quiz on BBC2 which gave the general populace the opportunity to watch three bona fide world quiz champions - 3/4 of the England team no less - appear on TV and compete, albeit in less than optimum conditions for all concerned.

FE: XXIV
1 Which Italian architect and scene designer built the Basilica of Superga from 1717 to 1731 for Victor Amadeus II of Savoy at the top of the eponymous hill in Turin, and in 1735 was invited to Madrid by the King of Spain, Felipe V, for whom he executed the projects for the Royal Palace, Granja de San Ildefonso and Palacio Real de Aranjuez?
2 What formulation, created by Werner Heisenberg, Max Born, and Pascual Jordan in 1925, was the first complete and correct definition of quantum mechanics and extended the Bohr Model by describing how quantum jumps occur?
3 Born in North Africa in present-day Tunisia on May 27, 1332 AD/732 AH, which historian, scholar, theologian, and statesman born is considered the forerunner of several social scientific disciplines: demography, cultural history, historiography, the philosophy of history, sociology, and modern economics and is sometimes considered to be a 'father' of these disciplines, or even the social sciences in general, for anticipating many elements of these disciplines centuries before they were founded? He is best known for his Muqaddimah (known as Prolegomenon in Greek), the first volume of his book on universal history, Kitab al-Ibar?
4 Bongo Flava, taking its name from the Swahili word 'ubongo' meaning “brains”, is a nickname for hip hop music from which country?
5 Composed of the last segments fused together with the telson, the tail section of the extinct trilobite was given what name that also describes the posterior body part or shield of living crustaceans and some arthropods?

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Answers to FE:XXIV
1 Filippo Juvarra 2 Matrix mechanics 3 Ibn Khaldūn or Ibn Khaldoun (full name in Arabic: Arabic: Abū Zayd ‘Abdu r-Raḥman bin Muḥammad bin Khaldūn Al-Hadrami) 4 Tanzania 5 Pygidium

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