What unites the following authors?
Anita Bryant
John Steinbeck
William R. Fortschen
Bruce Catton
Lincoln Kirstein
Gerald N. Lund
All have works whose titles have been picked up from the words to Julia Ward Howe's "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.
Chorus: Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! (3x) His truth is marching on.
I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:
His day is marching on.
Chorus: Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! (3x) His day is marching on.
I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:
"As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal;
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,
Since God is marching on."
Chorus: Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! (3x) Since God is marching on.
He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat:
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on.
In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me:
As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on.
Chorus: Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! (3x) While God is marching on.
Anita Bryant - Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory
John Steinbeck - Grapes of Wrath
William R. Fortschen - Terrible Swift Sword (the third book in the Lost Regiment series)
Bruce Catton - Terrible Swift Sword, & Never Call Retreat (the second and third books in his Civil War Centennial trilogy)
Lincoln Kirstein - The movie Glory takes its title from the Chorus. The movie was originally called Lay This Laurel, a book by Lincoln Kirstein, and is based on this book as well as the books, One Gallant Rush: Robert Gould Shaw and His Brave Black Regiment by Peter Buchard, and Letters by Robert Gould Shaw.
Gerald N. Lund - The Coming of the Lord
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All have used a quotation from Battle Hymn of the Republic by Julia Ward Howe as a title for at least one of their works: Mine eyes have seen the glory (Bryant) of the coming of the Lord (Lund) He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath (Steinbeck) are stored, He has loosed the fateful lightning (Fortschen) of His terrible swift sword (Catton) His truth is marching on. Glory (Kirstein), glory, hallelujah ... (etc. etc.) In fact, that's not quite true. Kirstein didn't himself write anything called Glory; however, it's the title of a 1989 movie based in part on his Civil War essay Lay This Laurel (which is actually a quote from a poem by Emily Dickinson.) |
Alan
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Patrick
Explain. (Feel free to show off shamelessly while you do it.)
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The painting is Race For The Derby At Epsom by Theodore Gericault (1821); it measures 92x122.5cm and hangs in the Louvre. The container ship is plying the Panama Canal, possibly at Gaillard Cut, the narrowest portion of the canal, and is captained by Juan Pedro Alvarez whose father lost a leg in the Spanish Civil War of 1938. I made that last bit up. The athlete is Australian leg-spin bowler Shane Warne, currently serving a 12-month suspension imposed by the Australian Cricket Board Anti-Doping Committee after testing positive for certain diuretics in his urine. Derby, panama, and bowler are all styles of men's hat. |
Alan
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We're not worthy... To use a cricket metaphor anybody can understand that wasn't just a good shot by Alan, he's hit it over the flagpole on the main stand. Vicky managed a single, everybody else was clean bowled.
Explain the significance of these figures:
42195 — 7.22
10000 — 10.67
5000 — 12.53
1000 — 11.42
400 — 9.29
200 — 9.47
100 — 6.77
Distance
(metres)Men's Record
(seconds)Women's Record
(seconds)Difference as a percentage of the women's record
(Marathon)
(2:05:38)
(2:15:25)IAAF World Records, correct on the day the quiz was set.
Everybody resisted the temptation to say it was the measure of female inferiority. Except me of course.
I decided to avoid 800 and 1500 because it would be too much of a clue to athletics. On some of the less well contested distances the sex differences were further away from the typical 8 to 10% difference. It is interesting to see the sex difference widest in the middle, at 5,000 metres. Has anybody got any theories?
Who are these people, and what links them?
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They all have a name which is slang for, ahem, the one-eyed snake. On the left is Claudia Taylor "Lady Bird" Johnson; on the right is Willie Hugh Nelson. In the middle, "floppy" Dick Fosbury. |
Alan
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Nobody recognized Dick Fosbury, it isn't his face that is famous. Only Alan was shrewd enough to spot that the fact that the two others were Texans was probably a red herring, he knows how my mind works and was right onto the more likely slang connection, after that I suppose it is just a process of working through the list of possible candidates...
What announces its arrival by name in Morse code millions of times each day?
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An SMS short message on a mobile phone. The default announcement signal on most phones is dit-dit-dit dah-dah dit-dit-dit, Morse code for "SMS". |
Alan
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Isn't “SMS short message” even worse than DVD disk? On a par with “personal PIN number”. SMS stands for short message service, in Britain it is mostly called simply a text message, with texting being a new vogue verb and the reason why teenagers have well developed thumbs (although why they wear rings on them is another mystery). It has also spawned a lot of bad language habits, particularly not capitalizing letters, on some phones it is really complicated to switch case, so people tend to stick to lowercase all the time. I can accept that capitalizing SMS text can be complicated, but that is no excuse to use the same style on emails, or worse, in letters and homework essays. It's not a casual time saving habit, it's an annoying affectation.
The mathematical product (a-x)(b-x) can be represented without parentheses by multiplying it out as follows: ab - ax - bx + x2.
Similarly for three factors, (a-x)(b-x)(c-x)
can be represented as
abc - abx - acx + ax2 - bcx + bx2 + cx2 - x3
Multiply the following twenty-six factors and display the result without the use of parentheses: (a-x)(b-x)(c-x)(d-x)...(z-x)
The answer is of course zero, as one of the factors, (x - x) yields zero and anything, no matter how long it takes you to write out (snigger), multiplied by zero yields zero.
Pete Mitchell
Which Renault line from wartime reappeared after 53 years?
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In 1942, in the movie "Casablanca", Capitaine Louis Renault (Claude Rains) had a running line that went "... round up the usual suspects." 53 years on, in 1995, the line was the inspiration for the title of the movie "The Usual Suspects". |
Venky
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Alan
In the 1660s a scientist made a rather daunting looking To do list for himself which included investigating theories of optics, gravity, magnetism, and combustion. He went on to make significant contributions in all these fields and many others, including working on the development of accurate timepieces, vacuum pumps, barometers, and telescope lenses. Despite all of this, he is remembered today almost exclusively only for the discovery of one relatively uninteresting law of physics. Who was he and how do schoolchildren today demonstrate his law experimentally?
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Robert Hooke, famous for Hooke's Law of elasticity. His statement "The power of any springy body is in the same proportion with the extension." Announced the birth of elasticity. Hooke's statement expressed mathematically is, F = k.u where F is the applied force (and not the power, as Hooke mistakenly suggested), u is the deformation of the elastic body subjected to the force F, and k is the spring constant (i.e. the ratio of previous two parameters). (Or simply stated, "In an elastic material strain is proportional to stress") School children demonstrate this law experimentally by suspending weights from a spring and measuring its extension for different weights. |
Venky
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Robert Hooke. Hooke's law states that "stress = modulus * strain" up to the elastic limit of the material; in layman's terms, the amount a spring or piece of elastic will stretch is directly proportional to the amount of force applied to it, until it stretches beyond the point of no return. Schoolchildren carry out experiments by hanging different weights on the ends of springs and measuring the extension, or by pinging girls' bra straps :-) |
Vicky
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Vicky
In my trusty dictionary between a bog and stifling warm weather I find the dead centre of a hospital, tanned goatskin, the god of dreams, a grotesque dance in fancy dress, a small quantity, a ballistic missile launcher, parti-coloured dress, a boastful pretender, a homeless child and plain clothes.
I also find a suggested solution for a British Royal dilemma.
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Between morass and muggy: morgue morocco morpheus morris (harrumph! "Grotesque", indeed!) morsel mortar motley mountebank mudlark mufti and morganatic marriage. |
Sgt
Dudfoot |
A lot of people have no idea what ballistic means, a ballisic missile is one that follows a ballistic trajectory, like an arrow or a cannonball.
Grotesque means fantastic, distorted and absurd. That seems about right for Morris Dancing.
What would I be giving you advice about if I told you about something popular in Plzen, part of haggis, number 29, coffee, and diatoms?
Slugs and snails. Copper (atomic number 29) strips, diatomaceous earth and coffee grounds deter slugs from passing over them. A saucer of flat beer is commonly used to lure slugs and snails to drown/drink themselves to death (nobody would suggest using fresh beer would they? Sacrilege!) And poison baits for slugs and snails are often based on oatmeal, which is the vegetarian part of a haggis.