Answers for February 1999

Our WINNER for the abbreviated quiz of February 1999 is the celebrated Banana Bender:

John Winckle

Question 1

What (in science) was discovered on 1 March 1980?

Answer

Well, Benoit B.Mandelbrot was messing about on his computer ….

Better Answers:

  • 7 spontaneous religious implosions, 666 intergalactic beast encounters, 2,583 High mind control groups, 8,722 Cults, 55,788 UFO sightings, 144,000 doomsdays, 666,666 habitable comet trails, 1 cure for all
  • AIDS
  • Buckminster Fuller’s balls.
  • If you turn your bread upside-down, you get the taste on the top of your toungue.
  • Lukewarm Fusion
  • Professor W. E. Coyote discovered that it is possible for certain species of bird to travel through solid walls of stone if they are painted to appear like a long tunnel.
  • Radioactive goat’s milk
  • That the Australian banking system seemed to violate the law of conservation of energy. You can just keep taking out of a bank by telling it you’re creating money to pay it back from nowhere.
  • That the real purpose of science is to create conditions conducive to getting grants.
  • Well I was in Year 9 Chemistry – and discovered The Bunsen Burner … closely followed by The Fire Extinguisher.
  • The car keys (they were behind the couch)
  • The clitoris.
  • Methodological Solipsism Considered as a Research Strategy in Cognitive Psychology
  • The cure for AIDS, but it has been kept quiet until all the homosexuals and junkies are killed off, and besides, the Pharmaceuticals corporations get to make much more money this way.

Question 2

Why did Sir Isaac Newton hang around in brothels and bars?

Answer

To spot bogus money and catch counterfeiters. He was Master of the Royal Mint at the time, and he thought counterfeiting the worst of all crimes … as a hobby he used to think up terrible tortures and sadistic methods of execution, to be applied to counterfeiters (if any were caught).

Better Answers:

  • Because he found the studies of falling bodies quite demanding. He sought an easier problem (sort of like Einstein and the Special Theory of Relativity). This simpler problem (leading to the oft-forgotten Special Theory of Gravitation) deals only with a specific class of bodies at rest, namely fallen women.
  • Because he was young, carefree and lacking in gravity
  • Come on. For the same reason you and I do. Well, you do anyway.
  • He hung round in bars drinking cheap port with fruitilexia chasers to prove his new theory that what goes down must come up. He hung around in brothels because it was very hard to get lucky in a pub with port and fruitilexia spew all down your shirt.
  • He wanted to meet the “apple of his eye”
  • He was able to find lots of things going up and down obeying his new found theory of “Moments of Gravity”
  • He was master of the Royal Mint, and would track down counterfeiters in the Bars & Brothels and when captured had them hung/hanged drawn & quartered.
  • His apples dropped.
  • To see what he was missing out on (he was a teetotaling celibate)
  • Wait a minute, I know this one… It goes something like “An English man, an Irish man and Isaac Newton walk into a bar…
  • Because he always got the equal and opposite reaction from Mrs Newton

Question 3

When was the famous picture of the Loch Ness Monster first published?

Answer

There was Water Monster Fever all over the world in the early 1930s. The first Loch Ness pictures were in 1933, but the famous “Surgeon’s Photo” by R.K.Wilson, showing no body but a long, bent neck and small head was published in 1934. To be specific, on April 1st, 1934. Oh crikey ……

Better Answers:

  • Sometime after it was taken.
  • 1 Oct 1971, just in time for the episode of the Goodies it starred in. See http://angelfire.com/nc/usarian/.
  • 42BC.
  • Before the Loch Ness monster came into existence. Subsequently when Nessy did turn up, she decided not to make an appearance at all but rather makes a tidy living by blackmailing the businesses who make a buck out of flaunting trademark and copyright laws.
  • I took the only picture of the real loch ness monster in 1993 and I’m still awaiting bids before I will allow publishing.
  • In the Weekly World News, right next to the picture of Elvis and Attila the Hun posing at the Aborigine Museum.
  • Never, there is no loch ness monster so there is no photo of it.
  • On the cover of December’s issue of Rolling Stone.
  • Trick question. It wasn’t famous until AFTER it was first published.
  • Very shortly. No really, I’ll find it any day now.

Question 4

Outside of Cuba, where is the world’s principal centre of literature and culture concerning Che Guevara?

Ansswer

Melbourne

Better Answers

  • Outside of Cuba
  • At his mum’s
  • Bolivia
  • Buenos Aires has the Che Guevara Museum for the enlightenment of Argentina’s youth
  • Guevaraville, founded by the Big Che(ese) while on a sabbatical in the wilds of Collingwood.
  • Mawson Base, Antarctica.
  • Mexico City, Mexico
  • New York
  • Nimbin, man.
  • Smoot, Wyoming
  • On the Internet
  • Wendy’s giant candy museum of fairy tales, in the land of OZ
  • Wherever that damned Taco Bell chihuaua is, no doubt
  • Langley, Virginia

Question 5

In French l’Autriche means “Austria”. Replacing the i with a u-circumflex, what does l’autrûche mean?

Answer

Ostrich

Better Answers

  • Austrûa
  • Atrocity, which after all is in keeping with the french opinion of Austria. It is merely an example of vowel shift and/or bad Spelling. (Tori for example)
  • I need a wee wee.
  • It means that the writer is describing something other than Austria.
  • The past tense of Austria … a term used by the French to describe Austria after the annexation by the Nazi’s.
  • Pronounced “Louder Ouch!” : A strange effect only seen in people under the age of 40 when grandma turns the Sound of Music up for the singing parts.
  • Some obscure deluxe pizza, undoubtedly
  • Possibly the Australian Austrich, better known as an emu.
  • And I thought the Norwegian language questions were hard. It’s all Dutch to me.
  • Alta Vista says it means “the autrûche” and that’s good enough for me.

And here are some of the more printable Comments:

  • There’s a difference between “trivia” and “obscure shit that no-one in their right mind would possibly know or find out without hours of research”. But you know that already, don’t you.
  • This quiz reminds me of how unlearned I really am.
  • Not enough questions.
  • This quiz is great. I wet myself laughing when I read the answers to January’s.
  • Please give up making cracks about Queensland and its allegded backwardness or, or, well STOP it, unless there is EVIDENCE.
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