The LitNet Forum Game Quiz o' the Week

[Wilde woman]

I got 8/13 correct: #1-3, 8, 10-13. Not bad, considering I guessed on a bunch.

#6 is a fascinating fact...I had no idea! And I've never heard of #12...I thought it was going to be something about the peanut gallery. And I completely guessed on #11 because it totally sounded like something WCW would write.

[AuntShecky]

You know that the proverbial inmates are running the asylum when the news media devote more ink, bandwidth, and air time to pseudoscience rather than the real thing. A case in point was the recent disclosure that Everything You Always Thought About the Zodiac (and were too busy to ask) Was Wrong! More about this earth-shattering news here:

http://www.online-literature.com/for...98#post1001298

Meanwhile, since Jupiter is aligned with Saturn, as Mercury getting its brakes re-aligned, and Venus is in the seventh house, putting roaming spouses in the dog house, but mainly because I can't come up with a better topic, here’s the current quiz, which we like to call

Hey, Baby, What’s Your Sign?

1. Which erstwhile Broadway musical featured the song “The Age of Aquarius”?
(A.) Grease (B.) Hair ( C.) Godspell (D.) Hairspray

2. The constellation and namesake sign “Pisces” means “The Fish.” Regardless of the birth dates and consequent “signs” of the following winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature, which one wrote a pro-feminist novel titled The Flounder?
(A.) J.M. Coetzee (B.) Gunther Grass (C.) Isaac Bashevis Singer (D.) Patrick White

3. In his prologue to The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer alludes to which particular sign of the Zodiac?
(A.) Aries (B.) Capricorn (C.) Cancer (D.) Virgo

4. According to ancient wisdom, each sign of the Zodiac corresponds with one of the four elements: earth, air, fire, and water. By the Middle Ages, when people still took astrology seriously, astrologers attributed certain human characteristics to the influence of specific astrological signs, while the medieval forefathers of pop psychologists delegated the substances phlegm, choler, blood, and black bile as governing certain human personality traits. When all 4 were in "balance," the person was assumed to be ok, but if one of the four substances dominated the other three, than the person would be thought to be phlegmatic, choleric, sanguine, or melancholic. These traits were thus grouped under what general term?:

(A.) The Ages of Man (B.) The Four Seasons (C.) The Four Humours (D.) The Four Tops

5. In what year did the Ford auto company begin producing one of their most popular models, the Taurus?
(A.) 1959 (B.) 1968 (C.) 1986 (D.) 1997

6. Both the constellation and its namesake Zodiac sign were named after what famous mythological twosome?
(A.) Romulus and Remus (B.) Castor and Pollux (C.) Pantagruel and Gargantua (D.) Scylla and Charybdis

7. Name the exquisitely literate yet expressively down-to-earth novelist who created the steamy
The Tropic of Cancer and the satiric The Tropic of Capricorn?
(A.) Henry Miller (B.) D. H. Lawrence (C.) William S. Burroughs (D.) Vladimir Nabokov

8. To date, for which of the following has there been a total of thirteen named “Leo”?:
(A.) Newborn cubs in the Bronx Zoo (B.) Go-to guys for Martin Scorsese’s casting director (C.) Models for the MGM logo (D.) Popes

9. Which astrological sign, concurrent with the autumnal equinox, correlates with a constellation roughly resembling a scale, evidently symbolizing the equal “weight” of day and night?
(A.) Virgo (B.) Scorpio (C.) Aries (D) Libra

10. Up until the recent declaration by astrologists, what would be your sign if you were born on Halloween?
(A.) Libra (B.) Virgo (C.) Scorpio (D) Sagittarius

11. The constellation and astrological sign named Sagittarius derives from a Latin root word which means what?
(A) arrow (B) hunter (C.) bear (D) drinking gourd

12. It is unknown whether aficionados of astrology are in the same group as conspiracy theorists, but folks who are convinced that the Apollo 11 mission was fake and that the alleged moon landing occurred on a soundstage might champion a 1978 movie entitled what?
(A.) Scorpio Rising (B) Capricorn One (C.) Under Capricorn (D) The 40 Year Old Virgo

13. And finally, the newest and 13th sign of the Zodiac is called Ophiuchus, a constellation that is supposed to look like a man wrestling a bunch of snakes. Allusions to serpents can be found in the Bible and various ancient mythologies, including an episode in The Aeneid, also depicted in a Roman sculpture exhumed in the sixteenth century. The tale told of a hero who after expressing his misgivings about accepting The Trojan Horse, was subsequently punished by the gods. Name this poor soul who was strangled by sea serpents.

(A.) Lamia ( B.) Laocoon (C.) Kraken (D.) Cecil




Answers
1.B 2.B 3.A (“The Ram”) 4.C 5.C 6.B 7.A 8.D
9.D 10.C 11.A 12.B 13. B

[DickZ]

Thanks, Auntie. I got 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 13.

[Wilde woman]

WHAT? There's a new zodiac sign??!! WHY? My sign has changed and I'm now no longer comfortable with my identity.

But I got 11/13 right on the quiz. I guess I'll have to console myself with that.

[AuntShecky]

Thank you Dick and Wilde Woman for taking the quiz and commenting.

Among all the thousands of popular songs over the years, nearly every last one of them is about the same subject – Love: looking for it, finding it, enjoying (or suffering) through it, praising it, losing it, and damning it. Yet of all of these ditties, only one well-known song mentions the word “valentine.” We talking of course about “My Funny Valentine,” composed way, way back in 1937 by Richard Rodgers and his first -- some say his best – lyricist, Lorenz Hart.

One of the lyrics in that song asks the musical question: “Is your figure less than Greek?” Unlike the Greeks, I've never been seen bearing gifts. But I do have a quiz. More about gifts in the
anti-humor thread, but right now it’s time for our romantic encounter in which we ixnay on the foreplay and skip the um, "details" in-between and go right to the falling asleep part with this lovely little quiz which we like to call:

The Four Letter “L” Word


1. Ah Love, your magic spell is everywhere, including in these lines: “Hail, Bishop Valentine whose day this is,/ All the air is thy Diocese.” Who wrote them?
A. Plutarch
B. Dante
C. Shakespeare
D. Donne

2. Adam, who was a “first dude” in a literal sense of the term, candidly confesses his feelings: “After all these years, I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning; it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her.” Which American author created Adam’s Diary?
A. Sherwood Anderson
B. Frank Sullivan
C. Mark Twain
D. James Thurber

3. Literally translated the word means “little loves.” What are amoretti?

A. Miniature chocolates given to schoolchildren in Venice on St. Valentine’s Day
B. Itinerant troubadours in Italy in the 16th and 17th centuries
C. Small glasses of an orange and hazelnut flavored liqueur served as an after-dinner cordial.
D. A cycle of 88 sonnets written by Edmund Spenser and presented to his bride-to-be.

4. Speaking of sonnets, name the poet who wrote the one which begins:
“Love is not all: it is not meat or drink/ Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;”
A. Swinburne
B. Shakespeare
C. Edna St. Vincent Millay
D. Elizabeth Barrett Browning

5. Who defined love as “a temporary insanity cured by marriage”?
A. Nietzsche
B. Ambrose Bierce
C. Samuel Johnson
D. Elizabeth Taylor

6. Same word, different definition: “Love is the delightful interval between meeting a beautiful woman and discovering that she looks like a haddock.” Who said it?
A. Woody Allen
B. W. C. Fields
C. John Barrymore
D. Groucho Marx

7. Speaking of definitions, who described the ideal marriage as “a union between a deaf man and a blind woman”?
A. George Bernard Shaw
B. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
C. Oscar Wilde
D. Henny Youngman

8. In the late twentieth century, Walker Percy wrote a novel “Love Among the Ruins.” Name the British poet who wrote a poem with that same title much earlier?

A. Thomas Hardy
B. Kipling
C. Robert Browning
D. Robert Burns

9. We've all heard it hundreds of times, maybe we'll experienced it more than a few times, but who first coined the phrase “It’s better to have loved and lost/Than never to have loved at all”?

A. John Dryden
B. Cervantes
C. Voltaire
D. Tennyson

10. An incurably optimistic philosopher who sees our world as “the best of all possible worlds” would naturally have a sanguine view of love but —would this positive attitude also include the downside of love, including, ewwwww!–venereal disease? Well that’s exactly as he calls it in a extremely witty poem by Richard Wilbur (1921– .) Guess the title:

A. “Ever Since Columbus”
B. “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World”
C. “A Reckoning”
D. “Dr. Pangloss’s Song”

11. Name the usually less-earthy poet who wrote the following lines:
“A woman can be proud and stiff/ when in love intent./Love has pitched its mansion in/ The place of excrement. . .”
A. Pope
B. Yeats
C. Blake
D. Eliot

12. Who said “Free verse is like free love; it is a contradiction in terms.”
A. G. K. Chesterton
B. Robert Frost
C. Byron
D. Auden

13. In 1967 Howard Nemerov (1920- 1991) wrote some lines that were acutely topical then but surprisingly enough do not seem at all dated in the year 2011. It begins:
“Lovers everywhere are bringing babies into the world/Lovers with stars in their eyes are turning the stars/Into babies, lovers reading the instructions in comic books/ Are turning out babies according to the instructions. . .” What's the poem’s title:

A. Make Love Not War”
B. “Love Goes Out the Window When the Pram Wheels Into the Hall”
C. “Ah, Love Your Magic Spell is Everywhere”
D. “Family Values”

14. And finally, name the singing group whose 1957 Top 40 hit was “Bye, Bye Love”:

A. Ray and Bob Eberle
B. The Everly Brothers
C. The Brothers Four
D. The Righteous Brothers


Answers
1. D 2. C 3. D 4. C 5. B 6. C 7. B 8. C 9. D
10. D 11. B 12. A 13. A 14. B

[Virgil]

I haven't done one of your quizzes in ages. I only got seven right here. It seemed I should have done better. Anyway, I got 1,3,5,9,10,11,14 correct. Thanks Aunty.

[DickZ]

Thanks, Auntie. I only got 5, 8, 9, and 14. I never even dreamed that I would flunk Valentine’s Day.

[Wilde woman]

I am apparently love-retarded. I only got 5/13 - #1, 3, 8-10. To make up for it, here's some juicy Valentine's Day trivia. The first recorded mention of St. Valentine's day in association with romantic love is Chaucer's 1382 poem, the Parliament of Fowls, although Chaucer places it in May rather than in February. In the poem, Chaucer gives some randy descriptions of the god Priapus and goddess Venus, as well as an adorable scene where all the birds of the world choose their mates under the guidance of Lady Nature.

#3C is really bothering me:

Small glasses of an orange and hazelnut flavored liqueur served as an after-dinner cordial.

What are these called? I know it's amor-something.

[AuntShecky]

I am apparently love-retarded. I only got 5/13 - #1, 3, 8-10. To make up for it, here's some juicy Valentine's Day trivia. The first recorded mention of St. Valentine's day in association with romantic love is Chaucer's 1382 poem, the Parliament of Fowls, although Chaucer places it in May rather than in February. In the poem, Chaucer gives some randy descriptions of the god Priapus and goddess Venus, as well as an adorable scene where all the birds of the world choose their mates under the guidance of Lady Nature.

#3C is really bothering me:



What are these called? I know it's amor-something.

Oh I made that up for the quiz! If I had said "almond" liqueur you might have thought of "Amaretto."

How 'bout that Eddie Spenser though! How come 21st century guys don't write their sweeties a 88-poem sonnet cycle?

I think you're absolutely right about the Chaucer
allusion. But the Feast of St. Valentine goes back much further, I'm thinking.

[Wilde woman]

Oh I made that up for the quiz! If I had said "almond" liqueur you might have thought of "Amaretto."

How 'bout that Eddie Spenser though! How come 21st century guys don't write their sweeties a 88-poem sonnet cycle?

Yes, amaretto! That's what I was thinking of. Obviously, I don't know my liqueurs, but that's partially because I don't have the budget (I'm a grad student!) to indulge in fancy booze very much.

As for Valentine's poems...I'd be happy if my boyfriend wrote me a half-decent limerick.

[qimissung]

This is the worst I've ever done, I think. I only got 2, 4, and 14 right, but I loved taking it. Thanks, AuntShecky.

[AuntShecky]

2/17/11 quiz

I hear tell that once upon a time, the milieu for small talk and pleasant conversation was the cocktail party. This was back in the day before Internet chat rooms and Twitterers (Tweeters?-- “I twaght I taw a puddy cat.”) Anyway, one of the more popular ice-breakers was the question, “Have you read so-and-so’s novel?” prompting an equally popular yet truthful answer, “No, but I saw the movie.” Even though yours fooly has never been spotted within a 100-mile radius of anything resembling a cocktail party –nor for that matter, a movie theater lately -– books and movies have something to do with today’s topic: novels, poems, and movies about the movies.

Movies about movies– that opens up a whole viper’s nest of clichéd metaphors, such as “biting the hand that feeds you.” Or “a snake swallowing its own tail.” Come to think of it, not everybody in the Hollywood community is a stunt person, but they all seem to be contortionists. That’s because Hollywood has the double-jointed ability to pat its own back, especially on the big award ceremony coming up on Feb. 27. I didn't get an invitation to that soiree either– my invitation must be lost in the mail, just like my nomination to “Who’s Who in American Colleges and Universities, ” which I've been eagerly awaiting for four decades. (It should be here any day now.) Meanwhile, ahead of schedule and well below budget is this week’s Feature Presentation, which we like to call:

Roll ‘Em


1. A prominent figure in French New Wave, Francois Truffaut directed the picture which won an Academy Award (TM) for the Best Foreign Language Film. The fictional plot depicted the goings-on among cast and crew both on and off-camera. What was the title of this partially satiric, partially affectionate movie about the making of a movie?

A. Life is Beautiful
B. Cinema Paradisio
C. Day for Night
D. Night and Day

2. “Double Feature” depicting the speaker’s experience upon exiting a movie theatre after a matinee, comes from a poet who usually finds his inspiration in gardens and the greenhouse. Who is the author of this fine lyric poem?

A. Theodore Roethke
B. Seamus Heaney
C. Carl Sandburg
D. Archibald MacLeish

3. To this day, George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) never fails to surprise his audiences, through his works and from quirky anecdotes about his unusual life. The fact that Shaw himself had helped adapt one of his own stage plays into a movie script was interesting enough; even more interesting was that the adapted script had won a major award. Most interesting of all was the fact that when informed about the honor, Shaw had no idea what it meant– he had to ask just what an “Academy Award” (TM) was. What was the title of both the film and the movie?

A. Pygmalion
B. My Fair Lady
C. Major Barbara
D. Candida

4. The breakthrough for this writer’s career began in the 1920s with the publication of critically acclaimed and financially successful short stories. Later years found the author working in Hollywood, the setting and subject for the 1941 novel, The Last Tycoon, whose chief character was supposedly based on the legendary studio head, Irving Thalberg. Who was this author?

A. William Faulkner
B. Ernest Hemingway
C. F. Scott Fitzgerald
D. Dorothy Parker

5. One of Robert Frost’s subjects is a former movie queen, “the picture pride of Hollywood,” aging, down on her luck, and working as a cleaning lady. What is the title of this poem?

A. “Provide, Provide”
B. “Directive”
C. “The Bearer of Bad Tidings”
D. “The Witch of Coös”

6. “Homer Simpson” is the protagonist of “The Day of the Locust,” but this Homer is far from the hilarious character on the current animated TV series. This 1941 novel is a dark, nearly-apocalyptic vision of Hollywood, though incidentally, its author’s brother- in-law was the American humorist, S. J. Perelman. Name this author.

A. Dashiell Hammett
B. Nathanael West
C. George S. Kaufman
D. Budd Schulberg

7. A critically acclaimed picture of 1992 is a fictional and satiric look at the movie business today, celluloid warts and all, with questionable compromises, shady deal-making, chewing up and spitting out creative types, and the resulting resentment, along with the shadow of
a crime. Directed by the inimitable Robert Altman, its script by Michael Tolkien has been often used as a model in college-level screenwriting classes. What is its title?

A. Sunset Boulevard
B. The Player
C. Barton Fink
D. Swimming With the Sharks

8. Though most known as a director, Woody Allen did not direct but appeared as the title character of The Front, a 1976 dark comedy about the movie business and how it works around the obstacles caused by which historical event?

A. How World War II affected the film industry
B. The Hollywood Blacklist
C. The Great Depression
D. The arrival of a new competitor, television

9. Speaking of Woody, which one of his movies follows the romance between a neglected housewife and a movie character who literally steps out of the screen and into “real” life?

A. Stardust Memories
B. Sweet and Lowdown
C. Melinda and Melinda
D. The Purple Rose of Cairo

10. “The Bridge” by the American poet Hart Crane (1899-1932) was inspired by the Brooklyn Bridge, but another one of his poems took its subject matter from way over on the other coast and depicts a poignant scene inspired by a figure from the silent film era. Who was this famous movie star?

A. Mary Pickford
B. Harold Lloyd
C. Buster Keaton
D. Charlie Chaplin

11. An overly earnest movie director has ambitions to make an influential world- changing movie he wants to call “O Brother, Where Art Thou,”-–incidentally, the same title of a relatively recent comedy by the Coen Brothers and starring George Clooney. When the would-be auteur disguises himself as a hobo and goes on the road to do research, he discovers something which audiences want and need much more than social enlightenment. What is the title of this 1941 classic movie written and directed by the great Preston Sturges?

A. Sullivan’s Travels
B. Hail, The Conquering Hero
C. The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek
D. The Great McGinty

12. And finally, this movie about movie-making always makes the top of every list of Greatest Movie Musicals of all time, and often among the greatest movies of all time. What is the name of this beloved 1952 classic about Hollywood’s transition from silent pictures to talkies?

A. All About Eve
B. A Star is Born
C. There’s No Business Like Show Business
D. Singin’ In the Rain

Answers
1.C 2. A 3.A 4.C 5.A 6.B 7.B
8.B 9.D 10.D 11.A 12. D

[DickZ]

I probably should just keep quiet on this, but I only got #4. I thought I knew the movie adaptation of Shaw's play Pygmalion was called My Fair Lady, but I guess it wasn't. And to make things even worse, I don't know the difference between a film and a movie.

[AuntShecky]

I probably should just keep quiet on this, but I only got #4. I thought I knew the movie adaptation of Shaw's play Pygmalion was called My Fair Lady, but I guess it wasn't. And to make things even worse, I don't know the difference between a film and a movie.

Apparently, the award-winning screenplay which Shaw himself helped adapt was based on the original play for the stage. My Fair Lady was much later -- a musical version of Pygmalion. I think it was Lerner and Loewe, but please don't quote me.

I don't know the difference between a "film" and a "movie" either, except maybe the former gets taken more seriously and the latter comes with $7 popcorn.

Finally, I'm having second thoughts about these quizzes. They're a lot of fun to write but time-consuming yet are not generating enough interest ("hits") to keep 'em comin'. What do you think I should do, Dick?

[DickZ]

. . .
Finally, I'm having second thoughts about these quizzes. They're a lot of fun to write but time-consuming yet are not generating enough interest ("hits") to keep 'em comin'. What do you think I should do, Dick?

I can well imagine they are very time-consuming to write, as I've tried to come up with some myself and have failed miserably. Mine had nothing like the creativity and imagination that yours always have. I would certainly understand if you abandoned the project and turned your attention to other efforts.