Wednesday, April 13, 2011

The Wednesday Quiz leads the Volscians against Rome, seeking revenge!

It's:


The weekly game of knowledge, intuition, inductive reasoning, and willingness to risk public embarrassment in a friendly and moderately supportive environment!!

Answers come out Fridayish, or when somebody reminds me.

1. The first naval battle where neither side's ships saw or fired on each other resulted in the sinking of the Shōhō, the Lexington, and numerous smaller ships. What was it called?

2. What Mozart opera features a pair of buddies trying to hook up with each other's girlfriends while disguised as outrageous Albanians?

3. What's the island country in yon red circle?


4. What were the names for pre-industrial craftsmen who made, respectively, shoes, barrels, and candles?

5. She was Spain's ambassador to England, the first female ambassador in European history. She was regent of England for half a year. And, she was Queen of England from 1509 to 1533, until she was dumped in favor of somebody named Anne Boleyn. Who was this remarkable woman?

6. His Wiki entry says that he was
the foremost painter of the Parma school of the Italian Renaissance, who was responsible for some of the most vigorous and sensuous works of the 16th century. In his use of dynamic composition, illusionistic perspective and dramatic foreshortening, [he] prefigured the Rococo art of the 18th century. 
Who was this remarkable fellow, who painted stuff like this?



7. Who wrote -- in a graphically distinctive poem, which I quote here without the graphical distinctiveness -- that Buffalo Bill's defunct who used to ride a watersmooth-silver stallionand break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat.

8. Not Shakespeare's most popular play, it is about a proud Roman patrician who first defeats the Volscians, then -- after he's been exiled -- leads the Volscians against Rome, seeking revenge.   In the end, the Volscians do him in because he doesn't follow through on his betrayal. What's the name of both the play and its protagonist?

9. What's this famous New York City structure called?




10. You can call him Charles I of France or Karl der GroBe of Germany. Pope Leo III called him Imperator Augustus. He is often called the "Father of Europe" these days, but Pepin the Short called him "son." What is this chap's most common name?

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The tie-breaker: Twelve chemical elements have a symbol that begin with this week's letter. List as many as you can.

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Put your answers in the comments in a graphically distinctive poem.  

17 comments:

Elizabeth said...

1. Can't think of it.
2. Cosi fan tutte.
3. Camoros?
4. Cobblers, coopers, and chandlers.
5. Catherine .... Parr?
6. Caravaggio?
7. cummings, e.e.
8. Coriolanus.
9. Chrysler Building.
10. Charlemagne, Carlus Magnus.

In southern Californium
the calcium-white snowtop mountains
peer down at cobalt rectangles -
chlorine tablets, medicine for cold
(the carbon-based life forms
never caesium to astonish them)
- there is no curium for that. Copernicium should have looked in
not out; no cerium exists to heal
the wounds, copper bleeding liquid
from torn earth. Chromium-Magnon
man would not recognize the place.
Homo sapiens is a cadmium, a boor.
The mountains sigh,
and settle down to wait.

(caveat: table of elements referenced for this last)

gS49 said...

1. Coral Sea
2. Cosi fan Tutti
3. Comoros
4. Cobblers and Coopers and Chandlers, oh my!
5. Catherine
6. Canaletto? (prob not)
7. cummings, e.e.
8. Coriolanus
9. Chrysler Building
10. Charlemagne

In no particular order:
Carbon, Chromium, Chlorine, Curium, Cobalt, Californium, Cadmium, Copper, Cesium,
and three others.
That makes 12.

Michael5000 said...

Wow, this one's really hard...

Elaine said...

1. The Coral Sea
2. Cosi Fan Tutti
3. C....something...Ceylon no longer exists...all the names have changed
4. cobbler, cooper, chandler (or (candler)
5. Catherine of Aragon
6. Caravaggio
7. C someone
8. Cymbeline
9. The Empire State Building..Cool? I didn't know it had another name!
10. Charlemagne

Carbon, Cesium, Chloride (is that the same as chlorine?), Clorox, Cohlrabi, Carotene, and Cubism

Elaine said...

If you rolled us all together we might get all of the answers right...
Damn! I can never come up with those elements when I need them.

I do know the wives of Henry VIII, and Katherine/Catherine Parr was the last wife, who outlived him; Catherine/Katherine of Aragon married Arthur, Henry's older brother, who died--and as Arthur had never consummated the marriage, Henry was permitted to wed her himself. However, she was older than he and failed to bear a male heir who survived infancy--only Mary was robust enough to live...and I think you know the rest. (There was also a Catherine there in the middle, Catherine Howard; she was beheaded for being a naughty little minx.)

Ben said...

1. Something in the Pacific theater during WWII...
2. Cosi fan Tutti
3. Capri
4. cobbler, coopers, and chandlers
5. Catherine the Great (or was she Russian?)
6. Caravaggio
7. George Carlin
8. I can't even guess
9. The Chrysler Building
10. Charlemagne

Aviatrix said...

1. The Lexington might be an American vessel but the Shōhō's phonology and diacritical marks suggest that it is Japanese. The first and only battle I can name in which American ships were sunk in confrontation with the Japanese starts with P. So I revise my first theory and decide that the Lexington is British. Now how are numerous ships sunk in a naval battle without seeing or firing on one another? Aerial bombardment, mines, mutant termites, controlled tsunamis (if they're ordinary tsunamis then it's just a disaster at sea, not a battle), trained whales, saboteurs, telekinesis, poor construction ... Oh I give up. The China War.

2. Carmen
3. Canary Islands
4. cobbler, cooper, candlestick maker - at least that is what the last was in the nursery rhyme.
5. Catherine of Aragon - Not Aragorn, that was LotR
6. Cezanne - Or is that a sort of wine?
7. e e cummings - but you said 'graphical' distinctiveness, not 'orthographic' and there are capital letters in the quotation. But who am I kidding? Like I can name another modern poet whose name begins with c.
8. Cleopatra & Cressida are C protagonists in titles, but they each have partners, and are not 'he' people. There's Julius Caesar, and he is Roman, but that's a pretty popular play. Everyone quotes from it, and besides he gets killed off at the beginning. Cyrano? No, wrong author, century and plot. Ccccc. I'll call him Conquistarius.

9. Ckyscraper? Cempire Ctate Building? If you want me to keep close track of New York structures, you're setting yourself up for jokes in very bad taste. How about Columbia Tower.

10. Charlemagne - just seems kind of royal and important.

carbon, chlorine, calcium, chromium, cobalt, copper, cesium, cadmium, californium, curium, columbium, cerium.

The last two have a "did I make those up?" feeling, but I'm really secure in m fantasy world where they have the respective symbols Cb and Ce.

Aviatrix said...

Elizabeth deserves extra points for her story, and I think Elaine is right: as a team we could solve these no problem.

Aviatrix said...

Oh, I missed the instruction about the poem. Yeah, Michael, this one is too hard.

Michael5000 said...

I was kind of puzzled by what Elizabeth was up to, but I figured it eventually. But if she's going to take the little tags I put on the "submit your comments" line seriously, I believe she owes me a dash of soda from last week.

Elizabeth said...

I'll put it in your Campari.

And it's a *poem*, as specified. Though the comment-box gods didn't put in the line break before "Copernicium" as they should have.

mrs.5000 said...

1 I'm thinkin' Coral Sea.
2 Cosi fan tutte
3 um...uh...Cayman Islands
4 cobbler, cooper, chandler. Mmmmmm...apple chandler...
5 Catherine of Aragon
6 Caravaggio?
7 E.E.Cummings
8 Coriolanus
9 the Chrysler Building
10 Charlemagne

chromium! cobalt, chlorine, carbon, copper, calcium, cadmium?,
cesium?

Aviatrix said...

Oh and Elaine, a chloride ion is a chlorine atom with an extra electron. It's happier like that, because otherwise it has one electron that has no friends. The other way to make it happy is to stick two chlorine atoms together, and then the two lonely ones form a bond and can hang out together. That gives you a molecule of chlorine gas.

Aviatrix said...

Also, while I AM old enough to have learned the periodic table back when copernicium was called ununbium, and didn't exist yet, I am not so old to have learned it before columbium became niobium. So when I ran out of Cs before I ran out of elements, I accepted that columbium could be a newly-named transuranic.

Michael5000 said...

And here we go!

1. Battle of the Coral Sea
2. Cosi fan Tutti (Michael5000's titular Favorite Opera!)
3. Comoros
4. Cobblers, Coopers, and Chandlers
5. Catherine of Aragon
6. Caravaggio
7. E.E. Cummings
8. Coriolanus
9. the Chrysler Building
10. Charlemagne

Michael5000 said...

As for the elements: (1) Columbium has been, over the ages, a name that didn't stick for a couple of elements and a name for elements that had to withdraw in disgrace when it was realized that they were compounds in drag. (2) A periodic table more than a year old will likely have element 112 as Ununbium, Uub. Now it has a for-reals name, Copernicium, and in it's many common compounds (little irony there) it is denoted by the symbol Cn.

Elaine said...

Am I the only one to say 'Caravaggio' without a question mark, I claim victory (and retire the field quickly.) Mrs.5000 and me, we're mild-melding!

That year of art history was priceless, I swear.