a christmas quiz

[calimac]

Here be Jon Carroll's Christmas quiz. Here be today's answers. Here be my comments:

My one quibble is with question 17, an easy one for me once you mentally flip through the list of presidents. The quibble is that you have to specify legal name or use name in a question like that. He omitted footnoting John Calvin Coolidge, who did not use his first name. I wondered what Carroll would do about that when counting the presidents up, and I wondered what he'd do about Carter, who eschews his legal "James" no more firmly than Coolidge did his legal "John".

Questions 6 and 16 were easy to the point of being boring.

I knew the story behind 15, but I attributed it to the group of states, not Connecticut specifically, and "seriously consider seceding" is a vague phrase. Maybe that was chronologically trumped by Rhode Island's refusal to join in the first place until the feds whispered, "If you don't want to be part of our union, we'll impose tariffs on you." The word "tariffs" changed their minds real fast. But that's not technically seceding, though it was after the ratification of the Constitution.

Some questions I got partially right, and didn't know the rest: 2, 5, 8, 11, 12. I knew that the stratosphere and troposphere are up-and-down, not north-and-south, but couldn't remember which was on top. (If there were only the two layers of atmosphere, I'd have guessed, but there aren't, and it's been a very long time since I got out of physical geography class.) Nor did the name Srinagar ring a bell.

Question 1 nagged as something familiar, but I didn't guess what.

We had SpaghettiO's when I was a kid, but I never heard the names in question 4. Probably they were made up long afterwards.

I don't see how one is supposed to know all the data in question 7.

I ought to know 13 and 14, but I didn't.

Total blank on 3, 9, and 10.

Comments

[redbird]

I recognized them as kinds of pasta, but didn't know there'd ever been more than one kind of Spaghetti-O's, so suspected a trick question.

I agree that Carter counts as a James: he goes by "Jimmy," but back in the 1970s we knew that his full name was "James Earl Carter". His parents didn't name him Jimmy, nor did they give him a silly or unpronounceable family name of the sort that leads people to say "Call me Jimmy" to avoid being "Throckmorton Fangwarbler."

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I presume that by "four types of SpaghettiO's", he means the various sizes of O's, which have always been there.

[asimovberlioz.livejournal.com]

I agree that Carter counts as a James: he goes by "Jimmy," but back in the 1970s we knew that his full name was "James Earl Carter".

Jr.

[wild-irises.livejournal.com]

Our gang (which does this every year) did all right but not great. We missed 1 completely, got 2/3 of 2 (not Coots and not the bonus question); the first one in 3; 4; all of 5 (including the north/south trick on the atmosphere); 6; significant pieces of 7, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, and the 1890s (and I agree that no one could know it all unless they'd just been studying it). We blew 8 completely, got 9, missed 10. Got only the obvious first piece of 11 (and I could kick myself). Half of 12 (Stookey and Broadus). None of 13. Nailed 14 and 16, while missing 15 pretty completely. And we nailed 17, except none of us thought of (and I didn't know) John Calvin Coolidge.

Always fun, and a good year this year, I thought.

[n6tqs.livejournal.com]

I didn't get much, but quibble about two of his answers:
Geostationary satellites aren't usually weather satellites.
They're mostly communications satellites these days.

And the stratosphere is definitely north of the troposphere.
Most definitions of north aren't bound to the surface of the earth, and if you go north, parallel to the axis of the earth's rotation, from within or on the surface of the sphere of the earth, you'll get to the troposphere before you get to the stratosphere.

It is possible I've spent too much time looking at celestial navigation and satellite orbits, though.