Monday morning quiz quarterbacking

[calimac]

Jon Carroll's Christmas quiz.

His answers.

This year's quiz was grizzly; just miserable for me. No wonder I found something else more cheerful to offer.

Questions I got part of: 5, 11, 17. The general location of the Jewish Autonomous Region and what "Santa Cruz" means are the only questions on the entire quiz I could answer without hesitation. I knew who "John the Posthumous" was, but I'd never heard him called that. I had not heard that his uncle murdered him, nor need he have; infant mortality was very high in those days. (Interesting fact about John the Posthumous: he was the 13th king of the Capetian dynasty and the last in an unbroken father-to-son succession that had lasted 13 generations, so far as I know the longest such in European royal history.)

Question I got part of, but should have gotten all of: 9. Hell 'n Maria, I forgot about Charles G. Dawes!

Question I got, but wasn't entirely sure I had: 13.

Question I sort of vaguely got: 6. I'd have said "he was a local farmer or something."

Question I got wrong: 10. I knew Reagan had never won an acting award, but really, exactly who got the Oscar for "An Inconvenient Truth" is an Oscar question, not a Vice President question.

Questions I didn't get at all, but should have: 1, 3, 12.

Question I didn't get at all, but knew in what field of knowledge the answer lay: 4.

Question I didn't get at all, but at least knew that I knew nothing about the subject: 2. I never watched that show.

Question I didn't get at all, and am stunned that anybody would: 7.

Other questions I didn't get at all: 14, 15, 16.

Question I still don't get, even after reading the answer: 8.

Comments

[jpmassar.livejournal.com]

Between Kristin and I we were only able to get three, and part of one other.
IIRC, last year's was as bad or worse. An incredibly difficult quiz.

We're doing far, far better on the travel quiz in yesterday's paper.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Last year's had 3 geography questions which were dead easy for me, and 3 other questions I got quickly, but only another 3 which were absolute stumpers.

Thanks for the reference to the geography quiz. Many of these were easy, most of the challenging ones were answerable after thought, and a lot of them were fun. I independently invented no. 42 years ago.

[(Anonymous)]

Surely you mean "grisly"?

(The only one I got was #13, which was really a lucky guess; I vaguely wondered if the directors in #16 were all blind, which turns out to be, as it were, doubly wrong.)

Don Keller

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Oh, that too.

[wild-irises.livejournal.com]

"cobbler": type of dessert made with fruit and pastry, not as organized as a pie. See Eileen Gunn's "ideologically labile fruit crisp" in the first Tiptree cookbook, The Bakery Men Don't See.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Yes, thank you, I have heard of that kind of cobbler. I have also heard of people who work on shoes, and "Grunt, Slump, Buckle and Sonker" (which sounds like the name of a law firm of trolls) offers me no clue as to which kind of cobbler it might be. "Buckle" indeed is a part of some footwear, and for all I know the others are too, so Jon's answer really didn't help.

[anderyn.livejournal.com]

I've seen a "blackberry buckle" in some old cookbooks, and I think I've maybe seen a reference to a "slump", but the other names were totally non-meaningful to me. So on that basis, I would not have gotten that question.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

You're still way ahead of me there. I can't recall ever having seen reference to either "buckle" or "slump" in any cookbooks. Now if what Eileen made was called a "crisp", if that had been in the list, it might have helped a little.