The Rules

Welcome to Exquizite Quizine, a quizzing blog, whose weird set of questions and irregularity of updation are but a reflection of similar qualities in it's creator. Welcome to this blog an good luck in answering the questions which feature here, and you're welcome to post answers as comments. Just make sure that if you're answering questions then encrypt them in any ingenious fashion which ensures that others don't end up accidentally reading them. One suggestion is ROT13[W]

Cheerio and as the notice on some other less well known place says, Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter.

Tuesday, November 22, 2005

[9] Fully Queened

At last a new set of Questions:

  • Q1: In an address to the 1873 annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, botanist George James Allman said:
    No physical hypothesis founded on any indisputable fact has yet explained the origin of the primordial protoplasm, and, above all, of its marvellous properties, which render evolution possible — in heredity and in adaptivity, for these properties are the cause and not the effect of evolution. For the cause of this cause we have sought in vain among the physical forces which surround us, until we are at last compelled to rest upon an independent volition, a far-seeing __ __
    What were the last two words, in that quote, which are quite in the news in recent days.

  • Q2: The following images are from the covers of "The Bulletin of the __ __". There is a definite link between these images. What is it? Quite figure-out-able, if youy think about it a bit. I want the basic funda. (and for extra credit: what are the two blanks, in the title?)


  • Q3: For the last one of this set, a sitter. Identify the creature and the right, in the folllowing picture. What is the entire funda behind it? (If you haven't heard of the __ __ __, yet, then it's time you did).

(7) Yet More Answers . . .

to the Seventh Set that is,

  • Q1: The connect was Multiple/Split Personalities and suchlike. The pictures were: Sheldon's A Stranger in the Mirror, Stupendous Man(aka. Calvin), the poster for The Machinist and Deewangee; all dealing with the theme of split personalities and Schizophrenia.

  • Q2: The catch was that under US trademark laws, you can't claim proprietary rights to a verb. (Strange but true) The original alvin Strip was:
  • Q3: The book was Frank Herbert's(Y) Dune(Z), and the band was, Iron Maiden. Quite easy with all the giveaway words and all. An interesting story just the same, no?

(6) In Flavours Six they be

Now moving on to the Sixth Set,

  • Q1: This was another in one of my series of vaguely arbit picture connects starting with the Snark(Q4) in the first set. The answer was "Quark" as Rare Hand Axe got it. The photos are: a particle track of possibly a discovery photograph of a possible charmed baryon, now identified as the Σc++ (among the initial evidencefor quarks to be more than convenient mathematical constructs), Quark from Deep Space 9, Quark(a type of robot) from the Doctor Who, and finally a type of Cheese (Yeah, weird - I know)

  • The second question was just the first use of the term Cold War, as Rare Hand Axe says.

  • Q3: Now this was a question I really liked. It's about an honest press fighting censorship through ingenious means. The whole article was metaphorically about the suspension of a democratic government. Read this article for more about the same. A similar thing was done by the The Times of India(in it's pre tabloid days) during Mrs Gandhi's emergency. Read the article it's really nice.

(5) Served!

Here goes :
Answers to Quiz 5.

  • Q1: This was pretty easy if you remember the hype created in popular media about the '03 discovery of the Homo Floresiensis ("Man of Flores")(that was X). Y was of course the Hobbits of Tolkien(Z)Sumeet, Eakta and George all got this one right. Though some needed more googling than others.

  • Q2: This was a current affairs question when I posted it, and everyone got it right. It is Justice RC Lahoti talking againts the government's criticism of the Supreme Court ban on reservations in private colleges.

  • Q3: Yup! They're all phrases of Chinese origin. Seems like most everyon went for a trifecta this time ;)

(4) Forth with the Fourth

The fourth one was one of the more arbit ones. Without further ado I present the answers:

  • Q1: The answer to this one was Che, as in the Ernesto "Che" Guevara. [The second clue was just some kind of Pig-Latinesque way of encoding]

  • Q2: The answer is of course Zamenhof, the inventor of Esperanto(if you haven't heard of Esperanto, you should check it out!)). It was a bit vague, but the number of langugages he knew and spoke, should have been a hint of sorts.

  • Q3: This was definitely the most vague question even I have come up with so far, and I'm sorry for that. The guy was Julian Schwinger, of the Feynman, Tomonaga, Schwinger, QED Nobel. The incident is about a course he did with Victor La Mer, where La Mer apparently flunked him. I got this incident from Jagdish Mehra's biography of Schwinger, Climbing the Muntain (Incidentially, if you're interested in science than you should definitely check out some of Mehra's scientific biographies. He's covered Schwinger, Feynman, Pauli, and many other greats, in his splendid style of writing which actually does justice to these great scientists by focussing on their work in a fairly detailed technical way, which is refreshingly missing in most biographies to do with science)



Heheh... It's been a long time since the blog saw updates. Sumeet got the first two (with some googling), but the third was unfortunately formulated in so a vague a manner by yours truly, that I'm not sure it's even possible to deduce an answer from it.

(*) The Cure for Procrastination . . .

is other procrastination. I just realised that. When you have work that you should do, but can put off, is when you think of updating your blog. We here at African or European, are back to famigerating your daily dose of weird information. Hopefully for a more lasting time.

Shanth