Auntie's Quiz O' the Week

[DickZ]

Thanks, Auntie, and maybe it’s time to annoint Pong II as King Pong II since he’s continuing to reign supreme.

I got numbers 1, 2, 4, 6, 9, 11, and 13, although I have to admit that for number 4, I just knew the Cicero part but not the Marcus Tullius part.

[AuntShecky]

Previous bonus answer: Country

In the final months of the life of Buddy Rich, the legendary jazz drummer checked in and out of medical facilities for various tests and treatments. During one hospital gig, a nurse asked Buddy if he were allergic to anything. “Yeah,” he answered, “country and western music.”

Not everybody has an aversion to country music, though one has to admit that in its contemporary version, many of the tunes sound exactly alike, especially the plaintive ballads by female country singers. Although the genre originally was an umbrella under which one could find bluegrass music, Appalachian folk-songs (via Irish, Scottish, and English settlers), cowboy ballads, Bob Wills-style Texas “swing,” and a pasteurized branch of the Blues, the present-day “rococo” of country music is all snap, glamour, and pop, as far away from its folklore roots as Nashville is from Greenwich Village. So much for authenticity, unless you think that after a country singer struts off the stage with its high-tech lighting and state of the art sound system, he heads straight to the barn to kick around a pile o’ manure with his high-heeled boots.

The multi-million dollar music industry aside, western civilization has always had a soft spot in its heart for the pure, fresh air of the countryside. Before the recent big mortgage disaster,for decades folks dreamed of an idealized little cottage in the country. Once they signed a deed, the ink was scarcely dry before they proceeded to renovate the place! A show biz anecdote to illustrate: flush with his success, Moss Hart proudly showed his Bucks County, PA estate, all landscaped and renovated, to his playwriting partner, George S. Kaufman, who remarked: “This is what God could have done if He'd had the money.”

With that, let’s stick a piece o’ hay between our teeth and mosey up to the quiz:

I'm A Little Bit Country (and a whole lot o' other stuff)

Thanks to DickZ for the first question. Hey, fellow LitNutters, why don't you join him and contribute to this weekly spectacular (or spectacle.) See details immediately following the quiz.

1. What was the name of the short story by Edward Everett Hale about a man who in a fit of rage denounces the United States and blares out that he wishes he would never again hear of his country? For that outburst, he is sentenced to spend the rest of his life on various ships of the US Navy, never to set foot upon the shores again, and he comes to understand the folly of his attitude.

2. In 2007, a movie by the Coen Brothers earned multiple awards including Best Picture. Name the title of the film, derived from the first line of a seminal poem by William Butler Yeats.

3. Name the song often played as an alternative to the National Anthem or as an extra number during community events in the U.S. Its tune comes from a British song, “God Save the Queen.”

4. Alan Paton was a South African novelist and humanitarian who devoted his life to healing his homeland suffering from the evils of apartheid. What was Paton’s first book, published in 1948?

5. He’s a jealous husband and his spouse is an unsophisticated naif who quickly picks up the wicked ways of the city in which bawdy 1675 comedy by William Wycherley?

6. Which fable by Aesop contrasts the lifestyles of two diminutive mammalian cousins?

7. For the 1954 movie, The Country Girl, based on the Clifford Odets play, this woman played “against type” and won an Oscar. Not only that, she went on to co-rule a tiny European country in real life! Who was she?

8. Willa Cather once placed the The Country of the Pointed Firs next to Huckleberry Finn and The Scarlet Letter for its importance in American literature. Who was the native of Maine who wrote this novel that reaped such praise?

9. First appearing between the years 43-37, Bucolics and Georgics are collectively known as “eclogues,” poems extolling the virtues of farm life. Who was their author?

10. A soliloquy beginning “Friends, Romans, and countrymen” appears in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, III,ii. Which character gives this speech?

11. In 1920 Wilfred Owen wrote a short but extremely powerful poem containing violently raw imagery and a poignant anti-war message. The title of the poem as well as its concluding two lines-- which Owen calls “the old lie” --come from the Roman writer, Horace. What are these lines?

12. What is the literary term for the artificial conventions or artistic style of a painting, poem, or play idealizing the virtues of shepherds, or rustic life in general?

13. And finally, “Sticks Nix Hicks Flicks” was arguably the most famous headline of all time. Name the long-running show business periodical in which this tongue-twister originally appeared.

Answers
1. "The Man Without a Country"
2. No Country for Old Men
3. “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee”
4. Cry, the Beloved Country
5. The Country Wife
6. “The City Mouse and the Country Mouse”
7. Princess Grace (Grace Kelly)
8. Sarah Orne Jewett
9. Virgil ( Publius Vergilis Maro)
10. Marc Anthony
11. “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.” (“It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.”)
12. Pastoral
13. Variety

NOTICE: Please send me your own questions and answers for the next quiz via PM. The topic of the next quiz is the missing word in the following bonus question:

Similar to a title of novel by Balzac, Franz Kafka called his 1919 short story “A Country _______(who?)”

Sources: add to previous noted list: The Portable Curmudgeon, edited by Jon Winokur. New York: New American Library, 1987.

[DickZ]

Thanks for the quiz, Auntie. Keep feeding Pong II whatever it is that you’ve been feeding him. I start getting nervous around 5PM Eastern if the quiz hasn’t been posted yet, but you came through again.

I got numbers 1, 3, 4, 6, 10, and 13, but I have to admit that the only reason I got #13 is because that’s the only show business newspaper I know. I should have gotten #7 too, but didn't pay enough attention to the hint.

[Virgil]

This was a tough one for me. I only got five correct: 4, 6, 7, 9, 10. Question on number 12. I said bucolic. Here's the definition from M-W:

bucolic
Main Entry:bu·col·ic
Pronunciation:\byü-ˈkä-lik\
Function:adjective
Etymology:Latin bucolicus, from Greek boukolikos, from boukolos cowherd, from bous head of cattle + -kolos (akin to Latin colere to cultivate) — more at cow, wheel
Date:circa 1609
1: of or relating to shepherds or herdsmen : pastoral
2 a: relating to or typical of rural life b: idyllic
— bu·col·i·cal·ly \-li-k(ə-)lē\ adverb

I'm protesting. I think I should get credit.

I didn't think many people knew who Buddy Rich was. Perhaps the greatest drummer of all time.

[DickZ]

This was a tough one for me. I only got five correct: 4, 6, 7, 9, 10. ...

Well, Virgil, I'm glad you got #9 since you would have had to change your name if you missed it.

[Virgil]

Well, Virgil, I'm glad you got #9 since you would have had to change your name if you missed it.

Yes, I would deserve to be thrown off this site if I didn't get that one.

[AuntShecky]

This was a tough one for me. .

But it wouldn't be so tough if other LitNutters would send me some questions! (Hint, hint.)

Oh and Virgil, if you should ever be "kicked off this site," I would quit in protest!

Thank you for taking the quiz.

[Virgil]

But it wouldn't be so tough if other LitNutters would send me some questions! (Hint, hint.)

Oh and Virgil, if you should ever be "kicked off this site," I would quit in protest!

Thank you for taking the quiz.

Thank you Aunty. I really appreciate that.

Hey you didn't answer whether bucolic also was a correct answer for number 12.

[AuntShecky]

:
Hey you didn't answer whether bucolic also was a correct answer for number 12.

Well, Virgil, I looked up "bucolic" in my dictionary, and it had a similar description, but the original question specified literary works about shepherds, whereas "bucolic" is an adjective that could be used for more general situations.

But just to be clear, I don't keep track of how LitNutters "score" on these quizzes. Just like Internet gambling sites, Auntie's quiz is "For entertainment only!"

[PabloQ]

Can't we all just get along?
I got 1,2,3,6,7, and 13 which I think is pretty dismal.

[AuntShecky]

Previous bonus clue: “Doctors”

Dr. John Fell, who was Dean of Christ Church at Oxford in the late 17th century, was the subject of what arguably may be the best literary anecdote of all time. When Fell told a certain student, Tom Brown, that he could escape expulsion from the college by successfully translating Martial’s 23rd Epigram,* Brown came up with this:

I do not love thee, Dr. Fell,
The reason why I cannot tell;
But this I know and know full well,
I do not love thee, Dr. Fell.

*Non amo te, Sabidi, nec possum dicere quare;
Hoc tantum possum dicere non amo te.

Tom Brown’s disapproval of the academic dean is quite different from our contemporary attitude toward those with the “Dr.” in front of their names, at least the ones who write “M.D.” following them. Indeed, until very recently the average layperson regarded the physician with inordinate respect, as those human high-achievers occasionally get to “play God.” The fondest wish of many an American mother is that her daughter (or son) marry one, as television viewers swoon over actors portraying physicians on daytime soaps and prime time dramas.

Well, I'm not a doctor and I don't even play one on TV, but I know full well that doctors worked damn hard to get where they are: multiple years of post-graduate education and internships financed by scholarships, crushing student loans, and wages from his first wife. Even though it seems that those established in the higher-echelon of the medical profession are flush with what P. G. Wodehouse called “the oil de palm,” the primary motive to become a physician is to help patients. Little did the doctors know that one day they'd find themselves ultimately working for insurance companies.

But just as in the case of lawyers, when we really need a doctor, we're grateful to locate one, even if it means looking for him on the golf course. While he “runs some tests,” instead of taking two aspirin and calling him in the morning, let’s take our weekly medicine. At the end of the quiz -- unlike the usual diagnosis or the typical insurance claim form -- you might actually find a couple of straight answers.

Whazzup Doc?

1. (Courtesy of DickZ): What book by Russian author Boris Pasternak was made into a blockbuster movie starring Omar Sharif and Julie Christie?

2. What’s the title shared by Christopher Marlowe’s Elizabethan tragedy and post WWII novel by the Nobel laureate, Thomas Mann?

3. I.F. Stone states that this man “who became a legend in his lifetime” was the “greatest figure” to become “truly scientific in the full modern sense.” Who was this Greek physician believed to have lived between 460 and 337 B.C.?

4. By day he was a pediatrician in New Jersey, by night one of the most influential figures in twentieth century American poetry. Who was he?

5. And speaking of split personalities, what’s the complete title of the 1886 novel by Robert Louis Stevenson about a doctor who acts as his own guinea pig in an experiment on the nature of good and evil?

6. In which Gospel of the New Testament would one find the advice, “Physician, heal thyself”?

7. Who wrote the 1666 play whose title translated into English is The Doctor in Spite of Himself?

8. Name the 1925 novel by Sinclair Lewis about a small-town doctor who experiences frustration when his idealistic values become compromised.

9. Which Nobel Prize winner wrote the 1906 play, The Doctor’s Dilemma?

10. This term, unfortunately synonymous with “Witch Doctor,” actually refers to a religious figure rather than a “medicine” man, and often appears in discussions about Native American rituals, though the word itself derives from Slavonic origins. What is this word, which starts with the letter “s”?

11. An emotionally powerful 1915 work by Somerset Maugham features Philip Carey, who starts out as a struggling artist but eventually becomes a doctor. Another unforgettable character of the book is a waitress named Millie. Name this novel, which formed the basis for two excellent, similarly-titled movies.

12. “Doctors are just the same as lawyers; the difference is that lawyers merely rob you, whereas doctors rob and kill you, too.” When I read that quotation I could not believe that this ultra-serious artist was the source. (Maybe he had one of his cynical characters say the line.) In any event, which internationally-acclaimed writer (1860-1904) wrote that passage?

13. And finally, released in 1964, what was Stanley Kubrick’s ground-breaking anti-war satire deeply dedicated to the well-being and preservation of “precious bodily fluids?”

Answers

1. Doctor Zhivago
2. Doctor Faustus
3. Hippocrates
4. William Carlos Williams
5. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
6. The Gospel of St. Luke
7. Molière
8. Arrowsmith
9. George Bernard Shaw
10. shaman
11. Of Human Bondage
12. Anton Chekhov
13. Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

Sources: previously noted, especially Brewer’s Dictionary, The Reader’s Encyclopedia, Video Hound Golden Movie Retriever; also, I.F. Stone, The Trial of Socrates, New York: Little, Brown, 1988.

Next quiz topic: “To Be Announced”

[DickZ]

Thanks, Auntie, for another great quiz. This was the hardest one I can remember, and I’m not going to even mention to my daughter the doctor how poorly I did on it.

I got numbers 1, 3, 5, 11, and 13 – and I left out The Strange Case of part of 5 - but I'm still taking full credit for it.

And I’m on pins and needles waiting for the topic of next week’s quiz.

[Taliesin]

Got 1,2,3,5,10 and 13
I think that if you had noted that the answer to 12 was a doctor too I might have gotten it.

[qimissung]

Ouch! Is there a doctor in the house? I only got 1, 2, 4, 10 and 11 right! I knew 12, but my memory did not intercede in time!

[Virgil]

Well, I got the first five right and then collapsed. 1,2,3,4,5.