Auntie's Quiz O' the Week

[AuntShecky]

Previous Quizzes:
Fall Classics Quiz
http://www.online-literature.com/for...ad.php?t=38309

Happy and Not So Happy Landings
http://www.online-literature.com/for...ad.php?t=38171

In the Beginning
http://www.online-literature.com/for...ad.php?t=38011


Labor Day Quiz
http://www.online-literature.com/for...ad.php?t=37667


Pseudonyms, Pen Names, and Aliases
http://www.online-literature.com/for...ad.php?t=37263


No, But I Saw the Movie
http://www.online-literature.com/for...ad.php?t=37476

Olympics Quiz
http://www.online-literature.com/for...ad.php?t=37113

Baseball quiz
http://www.online-literature.com/for...=Baseball+quiz

Here's this week's quiz:

The inspiration for this week's thingamajig comes from a NY Daily News article
http://www.nydailynews.com/entertain...inventors.html

about the new movie, Flash of Genius. That movie reportedly is about a real inventor of an actual device, as certain kind of windshield wiper.
This week's quizzz concerns fictional inventions, devices, and gizmos. Let's crank 'em up and see if they work:

1. The cloak of invisibility is just one of many useful items in the bag of tricks used by this young wizard/ contemporary cultural phenom. Name him.

2. Medieval Jewish folklore features this man-made walking mannikin shaped from clay. What's the term for him or it?

3. In the same vein as question #2, Karel Capek's play "R.U.R" brought which term for a mechanical man into the language?

4. First published in 1869, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea presented an submarine which actually came into existence and widespread military use decades later. Name the author.

5. Fred MacMurray played the title role of"the absent-minded professor" in the 1961 Disney movie. What comically volatile substance did he invent?

6. In some Arthurian legends, the future king comes his mighty weapon from a magical lady in a lake. In others, he acquires it by extracting it out of a huge rock. What's the name of this sword?

7. A time-traveling device appeared in an 1895 British novel by which visionary writer?

8. And speaking of time travel, in a wildly-popular movie trilogy, Doc Brown and his protege, Marty McFly, race back to the future in a device inside his souped-up DeLorean. What was it called?

9. This character, good or evil depending on how you look at him, used a musical instrument as part of a city-wide extermination business. Who was he?

10. "Ice Nine" was a scientific breakthrough with deadly results -- namely it could freeze every molecule of water on the planet, effectively ending Life As We Know It. Name the iconic American novelist who featured "ice nine" in Cat's Cradle He passed away in 2007.

Answers
1. Harry Potter 2. golem 3. robot 4. Jules Verne 5. flubber 6. Excalibur
7. H. G. Wells 8. flux capacitor 9. The Pied Piper 10. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

[DickZ]

Thanks for posting this, Auntie. I know it's a lot of work to put together.

I got several right this time: #s 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, and 8. I should have gotten #9 also, but didn't go to the trouble of giving it more thought. I refuse to read Harry Potter, so I drew a blank on #1, and I somehow missed the movie The Absent-Minded Professor. I haven't discovered Vonnegut yet.

See, thanks to your continuing to put out these quizzzes, I'm actually getting a lot smarter. This is the best I've done so far. Well, except for the baseball quiz because I sort of specialize in baseball.

[ntropyincarnate]

All i got were 1, 4, 6 and 9

[Il Penseroso]

I only missed number 2.

[Pendragon]

Missed 8. and 9. Danged DeLeorean time car!

[AuntShecky]

A Whole New World

Every question in this week’s voyage to obscurity concerns a certain Italian explorer honored in the USA every year on the Monday that falls around October 12. The answers could allude to his name, the “ocean blue” on which he traveled, the year in which the voyage began, and so forth. Ready to set sail? Let’s hope we don't fall off the edge of the earth.

1. Name the character in Winnie the Pooh whom the author, A.A. Milne, based on his son?

2. Ferdinand and Isabella, the co-ruling monarchs who financed the 1492 exploratory voyage, also spearheaded one of the most nefarious incidents in European history. What was it?

3. In recent years, many corporations have ballooned so large that they transcend national borders, with the result that exporting, importing, and capital have been inextricably linked. What is the word referring to the world-wide economy?

4. What was the birthplace of the great American humorist, James Thurber?

5. Name the movie studio whose logo was a statue of a woman holding a torch.

6. What was the primary reason for the dangerous 1492 voyage?

7. Founded as King’s College in 1754, it is one of the oldest institutions of higher learning in the United States. More than 60 Nobel Prize winners have been associated with it, and such luminaries as FDR, Lou Gehrig, Paul Robeson, and Jack Kerouac were students there. What’s its name?

8. Antonin Dvorak was Bohemian, but he composed his masterpiece exactly 400 years after the famous voyage in – of all places -- Spillville, Iowa. What’s the better-known title of Dvorak’s Symphony Number 9 in E minor?

9. The oldest continuously published periodical in the United States began in 1857. It printed the works of James Russell Lowell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, and it’s still going! Name this magazine.

10. What was Phillip Roth’s 1959 breakthrough novella?


Answers
1. Christopher Robin. 2. The Spanish Inquisition 3. Globalization. 4. Columbus, Ohio 5. Columbia Pictures. 6. Columbus believed in Ptolemy’s theory that the world was not flat but spherical and thus he sought a trade route to China and India by sailing west. 7. Columbia University
8.“From the New World” 9. The Atlantic Monthly 10. Goodbye, Columbus

[Niamh]

I got five.

[djy78usa]

Only missed #8 and #10... woo-hoo!

[DickZ]

Thanks again, Auntie. You put a lot more time and effort into these quizzes than lots of people put into what they call stories.

The trend continues - I get smarter the more quizzes you put out!

This time I only missed #9 The Atlantic Monthly, as I said Saturday Evening Post. I probably should have known better than to think it was the Saturday Evening Post.

[Pendragon]

Bleeping bleep of a bleep!! Only 3

[qimissung]

I got 1, 3, 4, 6, and 10

[AuntShecky]

Body Parts

The answers for this week’s corporal punishment all allude to an aspect of the human body. So keep a head on your shoulders (as opposed to elsewhere) and stay on your toes:

1. What was the 1968 Broadway “hippie musical”?

2. The script was by Budd Schulberg, the director was Elia Kazan, and the stars were Andy Griffith and Patricia Neal. What was this 1957 movie about a country singer who becomes a political demagogue?

3. Who was the culinary guru (1903-1985) who was known as “the father of American gastronomy?

4. Thornton Wilder won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1940 drama with two body parts in the title. Can you name it?

5. In 1970, Toni Morrison (who later won the Nobel Prize for literature) wrote this novel centering around a little girl who worries about being beautiful. What’s the title?

6. Frank Sinatra starred in a film version of what 1949 Nelson Algren novel about a drug-addicted drummer and card dealer?

7. Speaking of movies, remember the line “What we have here is a failure to communicate” ? The late Paul Newman didn't say that line, but he dominated that 1967 film. What was it?

8. Dr. Seuss wrote the script. Tommy Rettig appeared in it year before the “Lassie” TV series. Hans Conreid played the title character. Name this 1953 movie about a little boy who hated practicing his piano lessons.

9. He was a character in folk tales, the title of a Henry Fielding burlesque, and a locomotive circa 1829 on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. Name him.

10. What was the 1912 Jean Webster novel about a young lady’s mysterious benefactor? (The answer is also the alternative term for the arachnid known as a “harvestman.”)

BONUS: Both Academy Awards won by Daniel Day-Lewis were for movies that contained a part of the human body in their titles. Name them.



Answers
1. Hair. 2. A Face in the Crowd. 3. James Beard 4. The Skin of Our Teeth.
5. The Bluest Eye. 6. The Man With the Golden Arm. 7. Cool Hand Luke.
8. The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. 9. Tom Thumb 10. Daddy Long Legs
Bonus: My Left Foot and There Will Be Blood.

[DickZ]

Thanks, Auntie for all your thought and effort on these quizzzes. My trend of getting more and more correct answers as the weeks progress has just been reversed. I only got #1 and #7.

[Pendragon]

Likewise. 1 and 7 were all I knew...

[AuntShecky]

Where Do They All Come From?

My earliest memory of the UN was way, way back in the day when I was a little girl and TV was all new. The 15-minute news broadcast on NBC, the only channel that we could pull in on our Crosley television set, showed sessions of the UN. All I can remember were seeing the dignitaries donned with their headphones, and that most of those guys of were asleep! (Sort of reminds you of these quizz-zzes, doesn't it?)

So this week’s quiz-zzz is in honor of United Nations Day, October 24. All you have to do with the questions below is identify the writers’ countries. (Specific answers may or may not be actual member countries of the U.N., but now that the General Assembly has 192 members, the odds are pretty good that they are.) So, let’s run them up the flagpole and see who salutes:

1. With what nation or nations do we associate novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez?

2. Margaret Atwood, Robertson Davies, and Brian Moore come from the same land in which Saul Bellow was born. Name this large country.

3. What is the homeland of Wole Soyinka, the 1986 winner of the Nobel Prize, and Chinua Achebe, the author of Things Fall Apart?

4. What is the nationality of Isak Dinesen (Out of Africa) ?

5. What country is the setting for Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls?

6. Which nation can boast of geothermal energy, The Edda, and Halidor K. Laxness, who won the 1955 Nobel Prize for Literature?

7. And speaking of Nobelists, where does the poet Derek Walcott come from?

8. What is the homeland of Pablo Neruda and Isabel Allende?

9. Samuel Beckett wrote most of his works in French, but his country of origin is . . .?

10. Lafcadio Hearn, an American journalist of Irish and Greek descent, wrote fantastic tales and non-fiction books about a place in the Far East with which he fell in love. What was his adopted homeland?

11. In what country was 1973 Nobel Laureate Patrick White a citizen?

12. What nation forms the settings for The Plague and The Stranger by Albert Camus?


Answers:
1. Colombia (Some sources list him as “Colombian-Mexican” as well.) 2. Canada 3. Nigeria 4. Danish 5. Spain 6. Iceland 7. West Indies (St. Lucia)
8. Chile 9. Ireland 10. Japan 11. Australia 12. Algeria