What is their business?

Douglas Fairbanks (Senior) , Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin. Together with producer D W Griffith they formed United Artists Corporation in 1919.

Who is generally recognized as having written the first story involving space travel?

Quite a choice, but Lucian of Samasota is probably the best answer, a definite space fiction story by an identifiable author.

Julian

Who is depicted here?

Lord Krishna.

Krishna is regarded by Hindus as the 8th avatar of the god Vishnu.

Many conspiracy theorists have pointed out a suspicious degree of correlation between the story of Krishna and the later stories of Jesus, but then others have bent the story to make the correlation appear even greater than it is.

What has happened here?

A bulldog has had a fight with a porcupine. Does the bulldog think it won the fight?

Somehow this image makes me think of the activities of the USA (and allies) in Indochina. Sometimes the urge to keep on fighting a seemingly small and weak enemy at whatever cost can be a big mistake.

The natural defence mechanism evolved by porcupines and selective breeding of excessive fighting instinct in certain breeds of dog have conspired to make tragedies such as this relatively common in North America. Mongrels often get a few quills stuck in their muzzle and learn the lesson, dogs with a fighting pedigree don't know when they have met their match.

Bill has a sock drawer. It has 15 socks in it. He has three identical pairs of black socks, three identical pairs of grey socks, a pair of blue socks and a green sock.

In the dark he randomly grabs a handful of socks and dashes downstairs. He grabbed five socks, what are the odds of having a matched pair of any colour? Assume that the Universe is impartial and doesn't care either way that Bill is late for work again.

As there are only four colours of sock the fifth one has to be the same colour as one of the others, so there must be at least one pair in any handful of five socks taken from that drawer.

Who is this?

It has been reported to be Kate Bush, but some people have cast doubt on that. All I can say is I stole it in good faith.

What was Grogan to the hopeful romantic's romantic heroine?

The phase I was looking for was the man who killed my father, raped and murdered my sister, burned my ranch, shot my dog, and stole my Bible. That has to be one of the funniest movie lines ever.

What phrase suggesting imminent action or a call to arms derives from a sensible precursor to military action, especially in the nineteenth and early twentieth century?

The balloon's gone up. Several of the bloodiest battles of the American Civil War, the Boer War and World War One were preceded by a deployment of an observation balloon. The poor bloody infantry couldn't help but see them as a very ominous sign, rather like circling vultures.

Why would it not be wise to trust this man?

Touch your right ear to your right shoulder and look again, you should see that he is a liar, it's written all over his face.

Alan

What are the two English 4-letter words that signify the greatest and shortest distances (i.e., FOOT and YARD indicate distances - but these can be beaten...)

Regular words, no abbreviations or acronyms.

INCH and MILE are obvious.

SPAT is a term for a billion kilometres, says Demar, that's quite big, bigger than a KNOT, or nautical mile, or any other flavour of mile.

PICA is a unit of measure for printers and publishers, one sixth of an inch.

Alan claims LINE is a twelfth of an inch.

Demar claims that THIN is a very small printer's unit, a thirtieth of an inch.

BOHR is the mean distance between the proton and the electron in an unexcited hydrogen atom according to Peter, which sounds quite a short distance! I think it is usually called a Bohrradius.

There is also a THOU, common abbreviation or neologism? Whatever, it's a thousandth of an inch.

3iff

An old school dictionary falls open. Across a two page spread I can find a thick corded ribbon; an alloy; a self righteous hypocrite; a love potion; a discredited pseudo-science and an irregular black and white pattern.

Alan's answers always impress me, sometimes even the one he gets wrong, but this one is simply perfect.

My 1960 dictionary lists piccanniny as meaning negro child, remarks that it is of Spanish origin and leaves it at that. There is no mention of it being offensive.

piccaninny // n. & adj. (US pickaninny) n. (pl. -ies) often offens. a small black or Australian Aboriginal child.

adj. archaic very small.

[West Indian creole from Spanish pequeño or Portuguese pequeno 'little']

petersham // n. thick corded silk ribbon used for stiffening in dressmaking etc. [named after Lord Petersham, English army officer d. 1851]

pewter // n. 1 a grey alloy of tin with copper and antimony (formerly, tin and lead).

2 utensils made of this.

3 Brit. slang a tankard etc. as a prize.

pewterer n.

[Middle English via Old French peutre, peualtre from Romanic, of unknown origin]

Pharisee // n. 1 a member of an ancient Jewish sect, distinguished by strict observance of the traditional and written law, and commonly held to have pretensions to superior sanctity (cf. Sadducee). 2 a self-righteous person; a hypocrite.

Pharisaic // adj. Pharisaical // adj.

Pharisaism // n.

[Old English fariseus & Old French pharise, via ecclesiastical Latin pharisaeus and Greek Pharisaios from Aramaic p'risayyâ 'separated ones', from Hebrew parûs 'separated']

philtre // n. (US philter) a drink supposed to excite sexual love in the drinker.

[French philtre via Latin philtrum from Greek philtron, from phileo 'to love']

phrenology // n. hist. the study of the shape and size of the cranium as a supposed* indication of character and mental faculties.

phrenological / adj.

phrenologist n.

* Supposed: PC word meaning "this is bullshit but we don't have the balls to say so" see under, religions and irrational beliefs: other people's.

Piebald / adj. and n.

adj. 1 (usu. of an animal, esp. a horse) having irregular patches of two colours, esp. black and white.

2 motley; mongrel.

n. a piebald animal, esp. a horse.

Who is this?

Princess Peach Toadstool

"Peach was originally called 'Princess Toadstool' outside of Japan; while in Japan she was known as Peach. But this nickname stuck, and finally in Super Mario 64 she was known as Princess Peach Toadstool, and in all the games after this she has been known as Peach.

Princess Peach Toadstool is the helpless princess who always seems to get captured by Bowser in most of the Mario Games; and Mario has to charge off to save her, most of the time anyway (when he's not saving Pauline or Princess Daisy). Mario and Peach also have a bit of a close relationship, which to this day, remains a mystery. Even Luigi has even a slight admiration for her too."

Explains Neil

Argentina = 10

Botswana = 5

Cyprus = -5

Denmark = 0

Finland = 0

France = 2

United States of America = ?

28. Consonants are worth minus two, vowels are worth plus five.

Who concluded a treaty in Park Avenue, and what was the main term of that treaty?

Venky

What common image often used in hippy jewellery began as a visual pun based on a homophone?

ankh // n. a device consisting of a looped bar with a shorter crossbar, used in ancient Egypt as a symbol of life. [Egyptian, = life, soul]

The same sound was used for the word for sandal, so the hieroglyph for life was depicted as a stylized sandal, just as we might draw a bee to represent the undrawable word "be".

Some hippies knew what it meant, others just copied it anyway, no doubt some thought it was a variation of a Christian symbol, but most just copied it like sheep. In a similar way the logo of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, a group wanting to abolish the British nuclear capability got copied by hippies and misinterpreted and is now widely seen as “the peace symbol”.

As CND was not proposing an end to war and there was no war going on at the time I fail to see how the desire for one nation to give up one type of weapon without demanding that any other nation follow suit is synonymous with a universal desire for peace. Any image that is easy to copy and reproduce is ripe to be corrupted and divorced from its original meaning, especially when people are smoking grass and daubing images on their torsos and camper vans.

Another example of a simple-to-copy symbol being copied and given new meaning is the ancient symbol known throughout Europe and Asia by the Sanskrit derived word of swastika.

Who is this man?

Wernher Von Braun (with broken arm) surrendering to US Intelligence personnel in Europe April 1945.

Operation Paperclip was the means by which valued scientists were marked out as useful to the strategic interests of US.

Intelligence operators would insert a paperclip into their dossier, this would indicate to the detaining authorities that the prisoners were too valuable to be treated as ordinary prisoners of war, or war criminals.

Werner Von Braun developed the V2 rocket for Hitler and many rockets for the USA, including the Saturn V.

Gordon loved cats, in his own way, but out of deference to the feelings of the Tanners he didn't indulge his passion while in LA, well, not much. What was Gordon's favourite sport at High School?

What is happening here?

How many vegetables are there in a McDonalds hamburger?

Great fun. It all depends on your definition of vegetable.

This is one of those questions that gets a mark as long as the answer isn't obviously wrong. The regular hamburger is not sesame seeded and does not contain lettuce.

By Ronald Reagan's definition of nutrition ketchup is a vegetable.

Ketchup is made from tomatoes, that are a fruit.

Venky notes:

Botanically speaking, the tomato is a fruit. So is a watermelon, green pepper, eggplant, cucumber, and squash. Horticulturally speaking, the tomato is a vegetable plant. In 1893, the United States Supreme Court ruled the tomato was a "vegetable" and therefore subject to import taxes. The suit was brought by a consortium of growers who wanted it declared a vegetable to protect US crop development and prices. Fruits, at that time, were not subjected to import taxes and foreign countries could flood the market with lower priced produce. A hundred years really hasn't changed anything.

The pickle is a pickled gherkin or small cucumber heavily flavoured with dill, a herb, or vegetable. Cucumber, bearing the seeds of the cucumber plant, is of course a fruit.

A gherkin is a small variety of cucumber, or a young green cucumber, used for pickling. [Dutch gurkje, diminutive of gurk, from Slavonic, ultimately from medieval Greek aggourion] So now you know.

There is a small amount of finely diced onion. The onion bulb is a modified leaf structure, used as food (carbohydrate) storage for the plant, and so is a vegetable. The seeds of the onion plant grow on a flower stalk that gardeners and commercial growers remove unless they wish the onion to set seeds at the expense of growing a large edible bulb. Onion is one of the widest spread cultivated plants on Earth.

Mustard is of vegetable origin, a seed, or perhaps a cereal, again it is a question of definition.

Watch out in later quizzes for those ever popular questions How many beans make five? and how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?

Due to the well known phenomenon of parallel evolution the Rondulon people of Quarn use a hexadecimal number notation identical to our own, which is partly explained by their having eight digits on each hand.

Taxunoia was a lowly laboratory gimp given the task of observing a perplexing artefact recently picked up on a fact finding and leg pulling expedition to Earth. His task was to observe the two indicators on this primitive terran device and note down the time at which both pointed in precisely the same direction. Preliminary observations indicated that the device could be a crude form of time measuring device. Taxunoia adjusted the device until both indicators were pointing vertically straight up and then he inserted the primitive power supply module. He wrote on his notepad the time taken for the longer, faster indicator to reach the vertical straight down position as 1D3 zongs. He had been ordered to observe and note the time interval between eight consecutive alignments of the two indicators. Sod that. He hadn't taken up science to wait around all day, besides he had recently discovered a female with pseudopodia right up to her tentacles who was anybody's for a couple of Gynan tunyx. He decided to fake his results and get off down the pub.

Assuming he is smart enough to fake it accurately what should his results show? Give the time of all eight alignments, give your answer in zongs.

No two sets of answers were identical. These deserve a page on their own.

© 1999 - 2008 by Martin Willett.

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