Go Ogle 2011

Part Two

Sun Dries

19 questions which say nothing.

You explain everything.

Points vary;

50 points in all.

1. What’s happening? Who’s the fair-haired grinner? (1+1)

ANSWER

Lily Ledbetter, after whom the recent Ledbetter Act guaranteeing

fair pay for women is named. Barack Obama is seen affixing his

signature to the legislation.

2. A concatenation of circumstances. (1+1)

ANSWERTo quote Salon Magazine

“Air Force Lt. Col. David Hanson takes a phone call from a Florida child Friday at NORAD's Santa Tracking Operations Center near Colorado Springs, Colo., where operators take as many as 80,000 phone calls each year. The exercise began in 1955 when a Colorado Springs newspaper ad invited kids to talk to Santa on a hotline. The phone number had a typo, and dozens of kids wound up dialing the Continental Aerospace Defense Command in Colorado Springs, the predecessor to NORAD. The officers on duty played along and began passing along reports on Santa's progress. It's now a cherished and elaborate ritual, staffed by volunteers and supported by some of the nation's largest technology companies.”

3.

Give me a better half. (1+1)

ANSWER

Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong

The film Chungking Express takes its English title from the fact that one half of the film is shot here. The Express bit

comes from Midnight Express, the takeaway joint where the romance

between Faye Wong and Leslie Cheung takes off.

4. Reconstructed experiment. Where withal? (1+1)

ANSWER

Wormstone, at Down House, where Charles Darwin lived. Darwin used

changes in the level of this stone as a way of measuring the activity of

earthworms in the ground below. His son Horace was involved in the project and reconstructed the device in adult

life.

5. Who? Where did this go? What happened there? (3)

ANSWER

The Three Stooges riding a Cushman motor scooter. The Americans took these

scooters along to Italy in WW II in order to deal with a landscape where bombing had left roads and bridges unusable for heavier transport. Said to be a primary inspiration for Corradino D’Ascanio’s Vespa design.

Three linked questions ending at 6.d.

6a. Group and leader. (2)

ANSWER

Maia of the Pleiades

6b. Who put them there? (2)

ANSWER

Juno put the eyes of Argus on the

peacock.

6c. Who? 1 point

ANSWER

Symbol for Mars, God of War.

6.d. Look twice. Who’s missing? 2 points

Janus.

Mars, Maia, Juno have months of the calendar named after them. January is named after Janus.

ANSWER

7. Where did he come from? Where did he go? (2)

ANSWERIBM Selectric typing wheel.

ANSWERVincent Villafranca’s design for the Ray Bradbury Award for Excellence in Screenwriting alludes to his work as well as to the IBM Selectric typewriter on which he hammered out many of his books.

8. Who? (1)

ANSWER

The Japanese soldier-figure common in WW II posters was modelled on Hideki Tojo, Japanese PM

at the time.

9. Building may lead to pseudonym. (2)

ANSWERThis is the British Museum. The illustrator Joshua Armitage took the pseudonym Ionicus from the Ionic pillars in the first cartoon he ever submitted to Punch. Remembered in India for the delightful cover illustrations he provided for PG Wodehouse in paperback. Ionically, the British Museum figures here only because of its pillars.

10. What online rechristening did this inspire? (2)

ANSWER

Stephen Colbert proposed that all tweets should be renamed gurgles in tribute to the oil-soaked birds affected by the BP oil spill.

“in honor of oil-soaked birds, 'tweets' are now 'gurgles. http://bit.ly/cIhZNf “

11. Hidey-hole offering a shape metaphor. Whose head did it land on? (2)

ANSWER

Pill-boxes of the World War era, named because they resembled such objects. Pillbox Hats, popularised by Jackie Kennedy, owe their name to these thingies.

12. Before, after and location. (3)

ANSWER

Fort MacQuarie Tram Depot, Bennelong Point. Now the location of the

Sydney Opera House.

13. Inspiration and result. (2)

ANSWERThe Atomium monument in Brussels is an

Iron Crystal, blown up several billion times. The other pic is an inside view.

14. An August commemoration. (2)

ANSWERThe Twins Festival. It is held on the first full weekend of August each year (that's 7th-9th August for 2009) in the city of Twinsburg, Ohio, 30 miles south of Cleveland.

The town was named after identical twin brothers, Moses and Aaron Wilco, who settled there in 1819.

15.

Ritual from where. What small addition was incorporated in 2007? (3)

ANSWER

The Funeral of the Sardine, part of the Tenerife Carnaval. The papier-mache object is accompanied by a raucous crowd of cross-dressing men representing the widows of the sardine. Some residents protested and got the courts to ban the practice for noise pollution in 2006. In 2007, participants burned an effigy of the lawyer who represented those irate folk along with the sardine.

16. What record comprises Vietnam, Tajikistan, Russia, Pakistan, North Korea, Nepal, Myanmar, Mongolia, Laos, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, India, Bhutan and Afghanistan? Shared with whom?(2)

ANSWER

China, which shares borders with 14

countries. The only country with an equal

number is Russia.

17. The set W came up with X inspired by, according to differing accounts, the behaviour of drying shirts and scraps of paper. Tested using three non-humans. The set Y came up with Z (aided by their capacity to combine silk and rubber) a few weeks later. Z was perhaps more easy to use and won adopters in several countries.

ID W,X, Y and Z. (4)

ANSWER

W– The Montgolfier Brothers

X-- Hot-air Balloon

Y– Jacques Charles, Nicolas Robert

Z—Hydrogen Balloon

18.

Behead one attributed to the master and all you will have is/are a foot/feet?

Behead another rediscovered in 1904 and the remainder is science.

Behead a third to hold a thread

Put the heads together to arrive at a calendar guy’s contribution. Explain why there are only three. (5)

ANSWER1. Dhammapada, attributed to the Buddha.

2. Chanakya’s Arthashastra

3. Vatsyayana’s KamasutraBehead each work and you will be left with feet, science and thread, the

literal meanings of the Sanskrit terms in the titles.

Of the four Purusharthas, Dharma, Artha, Kama and Moksha, Tiruvalluvar chose to focus only on the first three in the Tirukkural in sections titled

Aram, Porul and Inbam. Tradition has it that he felt that right conduct in the first three would lead to Moksha—it didn’t need to be written about

separately. My own opinion is that he was a secular atheist and moderate hedonist who didn’t give a f—k about the afterlife.

The Sentamizh chaps have a calendar set before and after the birth of Tiruvalluvar, a few years ahead of the Christian one.

19. Identify R and thus a collaboration. (2)

ANSWERThe Rev. Chad Varah (L) set up a

suicide helpline called The Samaritans. The author Monica

Dickens set up the American chapter and even wrote a novel

about the organisation titled The Listeners.