Q1
If a grumpy king of Sweden got together with Vorombe titan, a fiery St Erasmus and Cleveland the twenty-second and twenty-fourth, who would take the biscuit – and in which seedy area would they all live?
CLUES
- St Erasmus is also known by another name, which will help you.
- This question could take you back to your childhood.
Q2
Why might you find Julia Roberts and King Lear’s daughters on a pedestrian crossing in Louisiana?
CLUES
- The names of King Lear’s daughters are not going to be of any use to you.
- The names of types of pedestrian crossing in the UK might be more useful.
A1
The seedy area is Sesame Street as they all suggest characters from the long-running children’s television show.
King Oscar II (not the Grouch) was king of Sweden in 1872–1907 (and of Norway in 1872–1905).
Vorombe titan is the largest bird known to modern science ever to have roamed the Earth – so it was a very Big Bird. It’s the largest example yet unearthed of an elephant bird (belonging to the family Aepyornithidae), an extinct group of colossal flightless birds that roamed what’s now Madagascar during the Late Quaternary.
St Erasmus is also known by the name Elmo – as in St Elmo’s Fire, luminosity accompanying brush-like discharges of atmospheric electricity that sometimes appears as a faint light on the extremities of pointed objects such as church towers or the masts of ships during stormy weather, or along electric power lines. It is often taken as a good omen because it tends to appear as storms are dying out.
The twenty-second and twenty-fourth president is Grover Cleveland who served two discontinuous terms (1885–9 and 1893–7);
Cookie Monster, naturally, would take the biscuit.
A2
The linking word is Pelican.
The Pelican Brief is a 1993 film thriller based on a John Grisham novel published the previous year, starring Julia Roberts as a young law student and Denzel Washington as a reporter investigating the assassination of two Supreme Court justices.
King Lear, ranting in near-madness in the hovel where he encounters Edgar disguised as Tom o’ Bedlam (Act III Scene iv), says:
Judicious punishment. It was this flesh begot
Those pelican daughters.
The reference is to the ancient belief that pelicans’ young feed on the parent bird’s blood.
A pedestrian crossing is a Pelican crossing (an abbreviation for Pedestrian Light Controlled Crossing), using a push-button that prompts the traffic lights to change to red, introduced in the UK in 1969.
Louisiana is the Pelican State – named because of the flocks of pelicans that inhabit the bayous on the Gulf Coast.
Q3
Hot Chocolate had one that dated from 1815; the Human League, one from 1854; and the Pet Shop Boys, one from 1864. Can you explain?
CLUES
- Kate Bush had one dating from 1847.
- Some pop stars are very well-read.
Q4
Why would eight Kings of England measure a variable electric current; a German opera composer tell you about magnetism; and a certain physical elegance be a guide to whether something is runny?
CLUES
- Measurement is important.
- The German composer, unfortunately, is not Wagner, or Strauss, or Offenbach.
A3
This is about hit songs which have the same titles as nineteenth-century novels.
Hot Chocolate had a substantial UK hit in 1974 with a song named ‘Emma’, about an actress who took her own life after failing to make the big time, and nothing whatsoever to do with the 1815 Jane Austen novel of that title.
The Human League’s hit song ‘Hard Times’ likewise shared nothing with the 1854 Charles Dickens novel except for its title: the 12-inch medley of that song with ‘Love Action’ is regarded as a highlight of their catalogue.
The Pet Shop Boys took the title of Anthony Trollope’s first ‘Palliser’ novel Can You Forgive Her? (1864) as the title for a hit song of 1993.
(Unlike all of the above, Kate Bush’s first hit ‘Wuthering Heights’, in 1978, took its inspiration directly from the Emily Brontë book.)
A4
These are all units of measurement in physics.
Inductance (the degree to which an electromotive force is generated in an electrical circuit by variations in the current flowing through it) is measured in henries, H.
Magnetic flux is measured in webers, Wb (the reference in the clue is to Carl Maria von Weber, 1786–1826, composer of Der Freischütz).
A non-SI unit measuring dynamic viscosity (which is also measured in Pascal seconds, Pa s) is called the poise, P. More often encountered is its subdivision the centipoise (cP), which is almost exactly equivalent to the viscosity of water at 20°C.
Q5
Why might a bark beetle make you take a stiff drink, take extra care when getting out of your car or pay your own share of the bill?
CLUES
- It’s not so much the beetle itself as what it causes.
- Think about what nationality these might suggest.
Q6
A promising Texan who died at the age of 22, a character played by Burt Ward and Daenerys’s killer could all be very cosy in an American university at a particular time of year. Who, where, when?
CLUES
- We’re not looking for an individual university so much as a group of universities.
- The Texan is a musician.
A5
They all refer to things that are supposedly ‘Dutch’.
Dutch elm disease is caused by the fungus Ophiostoma ulmi, spread by bark beetles, first observed in the Netherlands in 1910 and responsible for the ravaging of some 25 million native elms in the UK during the twentieth century.
Dutch courage, meaning a stiff drink, supposedly derives from the seventeenth-century Great Plague of London, when the Dutch were the only sailors prepared to sail up the Thames to supply the stricken city. They used to take a few stiff drinks to fortify themselves before putting into port. To this day, as a mark of gratitude, Dutch ships dock in the Pool of London without paying berthing fees.
A safety manoeuvre in which you get into the habit of reaching for your driver’s door handle with the opposite hand – so that it forces you to turn and glance at obstacles or traffic that might be coming alongside you – is called a Dutch reach.
If everyone pays their own share of the bill at a meal, they ‘go Dutch’. (But just remember I didn’t have a starter.)
A6
They are all related to Christmas.
The promising Texan is Buddy Holly, killed in a plane crash on 3 February 1959 (a date later immortalized in Don McLean’s tribute song ‘American Pie’ as ‘the day the music died’).
The character played by Burt Ward was Robin, sidekick to Adam West’s Batman in the cult TV series of the 1960s.
Daenerys Targaryen’s killer, in the final series of Game of Thrones based on the novels by George R. R. Martin, is Jon Snow.
So they’d clearly be at home in an Ivy League university (the name given to the group of prestigious colleges on America’s east coast: Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Cornell, Columbia, Brown, Pennsylvania) … at Christmas.
Q7
If an anatomy textbook, an Inn of Court and a clownish Master of Ceremonies are three, how many more would you need to achieve a twenty-first-century publishing sensation?
CLUES
- The answer to this is more black and white than you’d think.
- The anatomy textbook may be more familiar to you as the title of a TV show.
Q8
If Tales from Topographic Oceans and Kan’ami and Zeami represent certainties, why is Flora Britannica somewhat more ambivalent?
CLUES
- Kan’ami and Zeami are Japanese historical figures.
- It’s the author of Flora Britannica we’re interested in rather than its subject matter.
A7
The clues are all ‘grey’ (or ‘gray’) – so if these count as 3 shades of grey, we need another 47.
British writer E. L. James (Erika Leonard)’s erotic trilogy beginning with Fifty Shades of Grey became a publishing sensation in 2012 and led to a series of movie adaptations.
The standard anatomy textbook for medical students is Gray’s Anatomy, first published in 1858 and originally written by Henry Gray, lecturer in anatomy at St George’s Hospital Medical School in London. The hit US TV series Grey’s Anatomy (first shown in 2005) plays on the book title but with a slight spelling variant – in reference to the lead character Dr Meredith Grey (played by Ellen Pompeo).
Gray’s Inn is one of the four Inns of Court, probably founded in the late fourteenth century.
Actor and photographer Joel Grey (b.1932) is best known as the MC in Bob Fosse’s classic 1972 film (and in the earlier Broadway production) of Kander & Ebb’s Cabaret, based on the Berlin stories of Christopher Isherwood. His performance earned him the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. He’s the father of actress Jennifer Grey, the star of Dirty Dancing.
A8
One is a yes, one is a no and the other is a maybe.
Tales From Topographic Oceans is a 1973 concept album by the British prog-rock band Yes, often cited as the most extreme example of their drawn-out, virtuosic, some would say self-indulgent, style.
Japanese Noh theatre was invented and developed by Kan’ami Kiyotsugu and his son Zeami Motokiyo in the Muromachi period (the fourteenth century by the Western calendar); still performed today as part of the Japanese theatrical tradition, it usually consists of musical drama derived from traditional Japanese folk tales.
If these are the certainties, Flora Britannica represents something more ambivalent because it’s a noted work of natural history by the writer and conservationist Richard Mabey.
Q9
Why might you suspect that a husband with more doors than wives, a wireless Danish king and ‘The Chairman of the Board’ had been in contact with Isatis tinctoria?
CLUES
- The husband appears in an opera.
- The tinctoria element in the Latin name might give you a useful hint as to what connects them.
Q10
What might connect: an Anglican cleric who became an ‘Eminent’ Catholic; a male soldier who became a female activist; and the Third Doctor’s companion?
CLUES
- ‘Eminent’ is a word famously used about this person by someone else.
- The fact that there was a transformation (in the case of the first two at least) is not the point of the connection.
A9
Isatis tinctoria is the plant whose leaves make the blue dye called woad, used (according to Julius Caesar) by the ancient Britons to colour their bodies. The people in this question have nicknames which suggest that their faces are blue or partly blue.
The husband with more doors than wives is Bluebeard, or Barbe-bleue, as he first appears in Charles Perrault’s Histoires ou Contes du Temps Passé of 1697. His story was adapted in Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, the one-act opera by Bartók and his librettist Béla Balázs, first performed in 1918, which concentrates on Bluebeard’s wife’s curiosity about what lies behind the seven doors that lead away from their Castle’s Great Hall. She demands that Bluebeard open each one in turn, and is unpleasantly surprised to find that each contains evidence of his past and present cruelties.
Harald Blåtand or Bluetooth (c.911–987) was King of Denmark from 935 and of Norway from 936, the first Christian Viking king. ‘Bluetooth’ itself may, disappointingly, be a mistranslation: the Danish ‘Blåtand’ means ‘dark-complexioned’, probably simply implying that he wasn’t blond. He has become ‘wireless’ in recent years as his nickname has become synonymous with the wireless networking technology developed by the Swedish company Ericsson.
Finally, ‘The Chairman of the Board’ was one of several nicknames given to Frank Sinatra – another, still better-known, was ‘Ol’ Blue Eyes’.
A10
Their surnames.
Cardinal Henry Edward Manning (1808–92) was one of the four subjects profiled in Lytton Strachey’s iconoclastic Eminent Victorians, published in 1918. An Anglican for the first 40 years of his life, he was ordained a Catholic priest in 1851 and appointed Archbishop of Westminster in 1865.
The American transgender whistleblower and freedom-of-information activist Chelsea Manning was born Bradley Manning in 1987, and came to prominence after passing hundreds of thousands of documents to Wikileaks, among which was a considerable amount of classified and highly sensitive material relating to US military intelligence.
The British actress Katy Manning (b.1946) played Jo Grant, the Doctor’s principal companion in Doctor Who during the 1971–3 seasons, opposite Jon Pertwee in the Doctor’s third incarnation. Her character bowed out at the end of the iconic story ‘The Green Death’ having fallen in love with environmentalist Professor Cliff Jones.