General quiz

CW/CCW rounds

32 questionsInfinite pounce

In 1950s Soviet Russia, citizens craved Western popular music—everything from jazz to rock & roll. But smuggling vinyl was dangerous, and acquiring the scarce material to make copies of those records that did make it into the country was expensive. Pirating posed a particularly complex challenge, largely due to the need for vinyl. Some were printed on special coated paper, but these only lasted for a few plays.

This gave rise to Roentgenizdat (literally Z pressed ) - an idea that similar to sound-on-film recording prevalent in 1970s worldwide. However, instead of film, discarded Z were repurposed as baseline recording material. Just as vinyl has a distinctive sound quality, original Roentgenizdat is close to vinyl but with a generally more textured eerie sound, which is fitting- considering it is made on Z. Identify Z or the specific class of music this recording technique has led to.

This is a before-after of what controversial location ? ( Name X, no part points for funda )

BEFORE : X, Oregon, 1982 AFTER : Young Life Camp - Washington Family Ranch, Oregon, 2013

ID the company.

In Scotland in the 1640s, the Covenanters rejected rule by bishops, often signing manifestos using their own blood. Some wore red cloth items to signify their position, and were called X by the Scottish ruling class to denote that they were the rebels in The Bishop's War that preceded the rise of Cromwell. Eventually, the term began to mean simply "Presbyterian", especially in communities along the Scottish border.

Dictionaries document the earliest American citation of the term's use for Presbyterians in 1830, as "a name bestowed upon the Presbyterians of Fayetteville [North Carolina]".

In Northern England in the 19th and 20th centuries, Roman Catholics were also known as X.

The term X in the early 20th century was occasionally used in reference to American coal miner union members.

Thus, the modern day social connotations attached to X is recent - an early to mid 20th century development.

What connects the following (not exhaustive - hint : the answer is in plain sight) :

X is the main character of the eponymous anime X, loosely translated to Bean Bun Boy ( because X’s head is made of bread). It is one of the most popular anime series amongst young children in Japan and has been on air since 1988. Bandai’s research in 2011 found X to be the most popular fictional character among people of ages 0 to 12 in Japan for 10 consecutive years. In 2009, Guinness verified X to have the highest number of characters in an animated franchise with 1768 characters in the first 980 episodes of the TV series. X is a superhero and a symbol of justice for the town and his weaknesses are water & anything dirty. His super attacks are punch and kick ( with stronger variants of both ).

X is said to have inspired the design of Y - which is a play on the name X. Y is a viral webcomic (surpassing 7.9 million hits in 2012) and later, manga and anime. The series was nominated for an Eisner award in 2015. Y is also about a superhero, who is bored of his powers, in a world full of strange monsters that mysteriously appear and cause disaster.

Connect

The driving force behind the invention of the Ferris wheel is an amusing story. Ferris was a graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and had founded G.W.G. Ferris & Co. in Pittsburgh, a firm that tested metals for railroads and bridge builders. The original Ferris wheel was rolled out at the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago in 1893.

Ferris sketched his idea one evening during dinner & his initial plans were never substantially altered thanks to Daniel Burnham’s (the architect and Director of Works of the Expo) need for a competitor against _____ - the grand centerpiece of the previous World Expo in 1889. This centerpiece was so magnificent that the other ideas proposed to rival it in the Columbian Expo included a towering stack logs as tribute to Abraham Lincoln and a building so high that visitors would take an elevator to the top and take a slide all the way to San Francisco. Needless to say, people were being forced to think ridiculous.

In that respect, choosing the Ferris wheel was a humbler and yet daring decision, because it too, for its’ time, was a feat of engineering. Fill the blank - the backdrop that set the Expo to look for the next big engineering feat.

The origin of the word X is controversial. The name may be related to a Dutch word ____ , which is a water bird known in English as the Little Grebe or Dabchick. Not surprisingly, Little Grebes resemble the X due to similar feathers on its hind legs and waddling walking style. Whether the X was named after this bird is uncertain, but the Dutch are known to have called the bird the "walgvogel" ("ghastly bird") in reference to the way it tasted.

Adding to the mystery of where the X's name came from is the fact that "X" has been part of the English language since at least 1628, and the Dutch are not thought to have reached Mauritius before 1638. According to The Barnhart Concise Dictionary of Etymology, "X" comes from a Portuguese adjective meaning "crazy".

Yet another possibility, as author David Quammen noted in his book The Song of the X, is "that 'X' was an onomatopoeic approximation of the bird's own call, a two-note pigeony sound.

In the late 1800s, a young woman named Elizabeth Magie was introduced to the writings of Henry George by her father. She took on the task of trying to teach others what she had learned from studying Progress and Poverty and George's other works.Collaborating with friend, Elizabeth Magie created X ( Patent No. 748,626).

Elizabeth’s X had two sets of rules - one embodying George’s proposed single tax economy and the other that embodied the opposite - rules that incentivized ruthless capitalism. The goal was to show how the former would be a better economic model than the latter for society.

Though X was popular amongst college students by the late 1920s, several versions of the X spawned and grew throughout the country - some already known as Y. One such reached Charles Darrow - who cashed in on the evolution and popularity of the capitalist variant of X under the name Y. He even secured a copyright of the enhanced edition in 1933 and got it patented in in 1935 ( The patent office not appreciating the origins of Y). Elizabeth got a paltry $500 and no royalties ever - something she was okay with as long as “the Henry George single tax idea was spread to the people of the country." The irony is that by the 1940s, any version of the single tax version of X became rare while the much more competitive capitalist variant became widespread as Y. Name Y ( X for brownie points)

1999 – "...Baby One More Time"2000 – "It's Gonna Be Me" 2008 – "I Kissed a Girl" 2008 – "So What" 2009 – "My Life Would Suck Without You" 2009 – "3" 2010 – "California Gurls" 2010 – "Teenage Dream"2010 – "Raise Your Glass"2011 – "Hold It Against Me" 2011 – "E.T." 2011 – "Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)" 2012 – "Part of Me" 2012 – "One More Night"

2012 – "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together" 2013 – "Roar" 2014 – "Dark Horse" 2014 – "Shake it Off"2014 – "Blank Space"2015 – "Bad Blood" 2015 – "Can't Feel My Face"

What connects this list ( exhaustive till the making of this quiz ) to this picture :

One of the earliest stories is of the X being invented in 1938 by Carlos "Danny" Herrera at his restaurant Rancho La Gloria, halfway between Tijuana and Rosarito, Mexico, created for customer and former Ziegfeld dancer Marjorie King, who was allergic to many spirits, but not to tequila.

Another commonly accepted origin story is that it was invented in October 1941, at Hussong's Cantina in Ensenada, Mexico, by bartender Don Carlos Orozco. One afternoon, X Henkel, the daughter of the then German ambassador visited the cantina and Don Carlos who had been experimenting with spirits offered her one. Since she was the first to try it, he named it after her.The strongest invention claim is believed to be from 1942 by Francisco Morales - who migrated from Mexico to USA and worked as a milkman.

Others include invention by socialite X Sames in 1948 and the head of the legendary Balinese room in 1948 for singer Peggy Lee. The Esquire notedly was the first publication detailing X though there were similar ones in the Syracuse Herald as early as 1936.

What invention is described here ?

It was invented in 1998, became widely popular in the 2000s and was conceived by Gemmy Industries product development vice president Joe Pellettieri. It is an animatronic prop that looks like an innocuous inanimate display piece but on activation - turns its head towards a person, facing them, and then wiggles its tail and sings kitschy cover songs, such as "Don't Worry, Be Happy" by Bobby Mcferrin, and "Take Me To The River" by Al Green, who said he received more royalties from it than from any other recording of the song.

The singing mechanism was originally activated by a motion sensor and was originally intended to startle a passerby (due to which it has surprisingly foiled more than one burglaries). Eventually a button was added to activate it.

List of what ?

Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov (1890 – 8 November 1986) was a Soviet politician and diplomat, an Old

Bolshevik, and a leading figure in the Soviet government from the 1920s, when he rose to power as a protégé of

Joseph Stalin.

Molotov was the principal Soviet signatory of the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact of 1939, a non-aggression pact with

Nazi Germany, which led to the invasion of Poland and effectively marked the beginning of World War II in Europe.

You may have heard of the Molotov cocktail which is named after him.

What distinction does he supposedly have with respect to Stalin, Lenin, Hitler, Himmler, Göring, Roosevelt and

Churchill ?

Israel’s military attaché to India reciting prayers at a very solemn moment. What’s happened ?

[Current affairs - last one month]

Where would you have seen this image ?

Google trend for what keyword ?

This is what he has to say about himself on his website:“Hey there. I’m X. I get really passionate about things. At some time in my life, I’ve been obsessed or borderline-obsessed with saltwater aquariums, the baritone euphonium, reading, piano, filming, financial markets, New York City, and photography. I studied History at the University of Georgia. During my senior year of college, I took out $3,000 in student loans and bet it on Barack Obama to win the presidency. A friend heard about this bet and got me a job trading bonds on the Chicago Board of Trade. I traded for three years. It went really well for awhile. But then it went really bad. Whoops.”

After this he changed cities and started doing something that his mom wasn’t initially very happy about, though it has turned out pretty well.

What’s this guy’s claim to fame ?

[Hint: Zoom out and just see how he describes himself]

Identify the Vocalisthttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iV4L_OHGpyo

Floriography is an unconventional language or means of cryptological communication that has sprung up in several parts of the world. Victorian floriography was particularly advanced and fairly complicated sentiments were conveyed through the means of flowers/plants (Eg if you received a fews leaves off a fern - it could mean shelter and security or under a different context, confident). Japanese floriography ascribes X to mean “single”.

Victorian floriography ascribes X with meanings of affection as well as difficulties - usually because it would be sent between lovers who had been separated to faraway places like India. Culturally, X was a plant of peace through Babylonian and Norse folklore - Vikings would infact incorporate X into ceremonies, marriages and when making alliances/pact forming. Despite this, X was banned in Western regions for a long time in history due to its’ connections with druids and pagans.

Who is the Stan Lee behind these comics ?

X literally means logical language. In an interview in 2010 with the New York Times, Arika Okrent, the author of In the Land of Invented Languages,stated: "The constructed language with the most complete grammar is probably X—a language created to reflect the principles of logic."

The phonetic form of X gismu (root words) was created algorithmically by searching for sound patterns in words with similar meanings in world languages and by multiplying those sound patterns by the number of speakers of those languages.

X was developed initially as a means to test the influence of language on thought process. The active X community recognizes additional applications for the language, including but not limited to:

● Improved human-human communication, due to the logical and unambiguous structure and greater means of expression (use as a speakable language)

● Eliminating ambiguity in language● Use as an educational tool● Research in artificial intelligence and machine understanding● Improved human-computer communication, storage ontologies, and computer translation of

natural language text

Connect ( all have atleast one common omission )

A British Duke had received a shipment of a certain eponymous item (from Mauritius) in 1834 courtesy of the chaplain of Alton Towers (then

the seat of the Earls of Shrewsbury). These then began to be ‘cloned’ in his stately estate and exported to countries in the Pacific around

the 1850s.

This variety of the product entered mass commercial production in 1903 and became popular after the 1950s due to a global epidemic.

Today they are the most widely traded variety, though there are fears that the same epidemic may disrupt the industry again.

Which variety and which product are we discussing about ?

Connect ( think aliases )

What is common in between these iconic matches ?

This real life ad and the controversy around it was an integral element of what biographical movie ?

The X is one of the 4 Great Classical Novels in Chinese literature. In English-speaking countries, the work is widely known as Monkey, the title of Arthur Waley's popular abridged translation.

The novel is an extended account of the legendary pilgrimage of the Tang dynasty Buddhist monk Xuanzang who traveled to Central Asia and India, to obtain sacred texts (sūtras) and returned after many trials and much suffering. Building on the true historical accounts - it adds elements of folklore and philosophy by including the characters - Sun Wukong, Zhu Wuneng and Sha Wujing.

In the novel, Sun Wukong is a monkey born from a stone who acquires supernatural powers through Taoist practices. After rebelling against heaven and being imprisoned under a mountain by the Buddha, he later accompanies Xuanzang on the mission to retrieve Buddhist sutras from India.

What immensely popular contemporary work do we know is inspired from Sun Wukong’s role in X ? Also give X.

Part points

A recent marketing video for this company claims that it exists in a place where X and Y come together. While X was christened some 70 years ago (though the concept is a few hundred years old), Y has been around a few billions years.

What are X and Y ?

Name this rather strange wildlife sanctuary.