Extremely difficult quiz questions

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This extremely difficult quiz question is possible to answer using the internet, lets see who gets the correct answer first.

What is the name of the cottage next door to The Crown & Anchor pub, near Kilnsea, East Yorkshire. ?

Name the author and the title of the story from which this extract is taken:-

“Malabar came in all right. If I ride my horse till I’m sure, then I tell you, Bassett, you can go as high as you like. Did you go for all you were worth, Bassett?”
“I went a thousand on it, Master Paul.”
“I never told you, mother, that if I can ride my horse, and get there, then I’m absolutely sure – oh, absolutely! Mother, did I ever tell you, I am lucky!”
“No, you never did” said his mother.
But the boy died in the night.
And even as he lay dead, his mother heard her brother’s voice saying to her: “My God, Hester, you’re eighty-odd thousand to the good, and a poor devil of a son to the bad. But, poor devil, poor devil, he’s best gone out of a life where he rides his rocking-horse to find a winner.”

Ivan wrote:Name the author and the title of the story from which this extract is taken:-

“Malabar came in all right. If I ride my horse till I’m sure, then I tell you, Bassett, you can go as high as you like. Did you go for all you were worth, Bassett?”
“I went a thousand on it, Master Paul.”
“I never told you, mother, that if I can ride my horse, and get there, then I’m absolutely sure – oh, absolutely! Mother, did I ever tell you, I am lucky!”
“No, you never did” said his mother.
But the boy died in the night.
And even as he lay dead, his mother heard her brother’s voice saying to her: “My God, Hester, you’re eighty-odd thousand to the good, and a poor devil of a son to the bad. But, poor devil, poor devil, he’s best gone out of a life where he rides his rocking-horse to find a winner.”

My first guess was obviously Dick Francis, but couldn't get decent odds from any bookie. Then I remembered our Leader's fixation upon a certain Nottingham Coal-miner turned author. The "Rocking-Horse" reference confirmed it once I'd looked it up. (Don't carry much in my head these days apart from dandruff).

The Virgin and the Gipsy and Other Stories
By D. H. Lawrence

Grrh....my book is called 'Love among the Haystacks and other stories', but yes, Lawrence wrote 'The Rocking-Horse Winner'.

I wonder if anyone would mind if I changed the title of this thread to 'Extremely easy quiz questions for oftenwrong'??

Maybe this will defeat the sage (though I'm not putting any money on it - that rocking horse would have been a better bet!):-

"The takeover of intellectual life by the Blank Slate followed different paths in psychology and in the other social sciences, but they were propelled by the same historical events and progressive ideology. By the second and third decades of the twentieth century, stereotypes of women and ethnic groups were starting to look silly. Waves of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, including many Jews, were filling the cities and climbing the social ladder. African Americans had taken advantage of the new ‘Negro colleges’, had migrated northward, and had begun the Harlem Renaissance. The graduates of flourishing women’s colleges helped launch the first wave of feminism. For the first time not all professors and students were white Anglo-Saxon Protestant males. To say that this sliver of humanity was constitutionally superior had not only become offensive but went against what people could see with their own eyes. The social sciences in particular were attracting women, Jews. Asians, and African Americans, some of whom became influential thinkers."

Please name the author and the title of the book. (As always, being a fair-minded person, I've provided a large clue!)

I refuse to be impressed by 'The Sage', as I have believed for some time that oftenwrong is, in reality, a computer. Remove his plug from the mains and then see just how clever he is...

Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do.

Dave, Dave, don't do that Dave. Nor Phil, either. You'll endanger the mission.

Ah, no answer to the last question from the sage! Perhaps his mind has gone blank? Before we wipe the slate clean with that one, let's try another.

Name the writers of these lines:-

Well on the way, head in a cloud,
The man of a thousand voices
Talking perfectly loud.

But nobody ever hears him
Or the sound he appears to make
And he never seems to notice.

Surely that's Paul McCartney...? ( The Fool on the Hill?)

I thought I'd better give another Computer a chance to answer the one about Steven Pinker's THE BLANK SLATE. The clue was indeed helpful, but do we really deny Human Nature?

Grrr....the sage wins again!



Yes, Phil, 'The Fool On the Hill', accredited to Lenin N. McCartney, who I assumed was an Irishman smuggled into Russia in a sealed train in 1917 to fight for the Bolsheviks in their revolution (both parts).

Presumably at the invitation of a very young Harpo Marx?

Okay, let's try again. Author and title, please?

"We came in sight of Reading about eleven. The river is dirty and dismal here. One does not linger in the neighbourhood of Reading. The town itself is a famous old place, dating from the dim days of King Ethelred, when the Danes anchored their warships in the Kennet, and started from Reading to ravage all the land of Wessex; and here Ethelred and his brother Alfred defeated them, Ethelred doing the praying and Alfred the fighting.

At Reading lock George, Harris and I came up with a steam-launch, belonging to some friends of mine, and they towed us up to within about a mile of Streatley. It is very delightful being towed up by a launch. I prefer it myself to rowing."

(To Say Nothing of the Dog)

Is ow referring to that well-known Tome on the Tory Government :' Several Men up Sh*t Creek in a Canoe without a Paddle' ?

The title of this thread seems to have been hi-jacked by the Leveson Enquiry.

In one issue in January 1967, a British tabloid paper published stories about the death of a young socialite in a car crash and the number of potholes in the roads of a northern town. Why did those stories become memorable?

and errr ummm

This might help:-


YouTube

RockOnBrother wrote:
What Fab Four song became the unofficial anthem of Vietnam War era young Americans? Not exactly a protest song, this song unofficially united protesters and survivors.

Answer here and here when you think you know.

Equally popular in 1969/70 were “Give Peace a Chance,” “All you need is Love,” and “Let it Be.”

Ivan wrote:In one issue in January 1967, a British tabloid paper published stories about the death of a young socialite in a car crash and the number of potholes in the roads of a northern town. Why did those stories become memorable?

Oh, THAT Beatles. Thanks for the clue. It is widely held that if you can remember the '60s, you weren't really there.

However, I risked spraining a wrist and lifted The Beatles Anthology from my bookshelf to locate John Lennon's confirmation that when he wrote "A Day In The Life" he was also reading The Daily Mail (sorry about that) that mentioned the 4000 holes in Blackburn streets and where he also read about the death of an acquaintance Tara Browne, heir to the Guiness fortune, with an ultimately fatal pleasure in fast driving his Lotus Elan as well as the demon drink. (Actually 18 December 1966).

An allegation made elsewhere was that Blackburn Corporation spent so much money on carrying out the survey that they had none left to actually repair the holes.

For a thoroughly scurrilous explanation of why Lennon adapted the lyric from "Blackburn" to "The Albert Hall" you may wish to search the internet.

In which country did this happen and when? Who was responsible for it?

“Almost the entire population of one and a half million people, in camps and fortified villages. There, thousands were beaten to death or died from malnutrition, typhoid, tuberculosis and dysentery. In some camps almost all the children died.

The inmates were used as slave labour. Above the gates were edifying slogans, such as "Labour and freedom" and "He who helps himself will also be helped". Loudspeakers broadcast patriotic exhortations. People deemed to have disobeyed the rules were killed in front of the others. The survivors were forced to dig mass graves, which were quickly filled.

Interrogation under torture was widespread. Many of the men were anally raped, using knives, broken bottles, rifle barrels, snakes and scorpions. A favourite technique was to hold a man upside down, his head in a bucket of water, while sand was rammed into his rectum with a stick. Women were gang-raped by the guards. People were mauled by dogs and electrocuted. A special tool was devised which was used for first crushing and then ripping off testicles. They used pliers to mutilate women's breasts. They cut off inmates' ears and fingers and gouged out their eyes. They dragged people behind Land Rovers until their bodies disintegrated. Men were rolled up in barbed wire and kicked around the compound.”

sounds like an account of the abuses of Nazi Germany, except I don't believe an entire population of a country was involved - unless 'entire population' refers to the population of Jews

No, it wasn’t the Nazis, but I’ll give our resident ‘sage’ the chance to comment before I reveal the answer.

Two clues:-
1.The details of these atrocities appeared in a book in 2005 written by Harvard professor Caroline Elkins.
2. ‘The entire population’ refers to the ethnic group known as the Kikuyu. (That might have made the question too easy!)

This is about the Mau Mau and Kenya, I believe.

However, I await the Sage's confirmation!

I'd be far more likely to be able to deal with tricky questions on football...

Yes, that was all done by the British in Kenya in the 1950s, along with the hanging of 1,090 ‘terrorists’:-

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/apr/23/british-empire-crimes-ignore-atrocities

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/apr/14/torture-mau-mau-camps-kenya

Not to worry. As so-called historian Dominic Sandbrook wrote in ‘The Daily Mail’ in 2010: "Britain's empire stands out as a beacon of tolerance, decency and the rule of law”.

Doesn’t our history make you feel proud to be British? Those were the ‘good old days’, according to UKIP.  

It didn't do them much good anyway (I'm pleased to note).  Ultimately the British were obliged to acknowledge Jomo Kenyata as Kenya's Leader.

The veneer of "civilisation" is quickly stripped away.

Shocking - was never taught this in history lessons - this kind of thing should be on the curriculum - it might defuse a bit of the 'land of hope and glory' stuff that fuels the likes of UKIP

The (few) Kenyan survivors were recently granted judgment for damages in the English Courts. Better than nothing, but a long time coming.

I have an even more difficult quiz question to pose : How many more self-inflicted disasters will Ed Miliband face before the general Election - following the latest gift to Cameron of the Scottish Labour leader's resignation and associated criticism of her Westminster equivalent?


Answer in no more than 100 words...

Confirmation, if it were needed, that there is something fundamentally wrong with the British parliamentary system, in which the principal figures become ever-further distanced from real people.

Hasn't anyone got a better idea?

Anyway (as John Cleese always says. What do you always say?), the topic heading is still "Extremely difficult quiz questions" so here's a teaser which won't be at all difficult if you do know the answer:

Ioseb Jughashvili was pivotal in 20th. Century world history, but by what name is he more generally known?

Stalin? Or was it John Major? Anything the latter did involved a hash at some point in proceedings...

Phil Hornby wrote:-
I'd be far more likely to be able to deal with tricky questions on football.

Okay. Which two serving foreign secretaries went to watch Grimsby Town play Gillingham when they first met in April 1976?

I suppose going to Grimsby feels like it is in foreign parts , even if you represent it in Parliament- and , indeed, if one is married to a US citizen and the footballing companion is also American...

Grimsby may not be as attractive as it sounds, but in the spirit of humouring someone who has actually asked for trouble, there is a South-coast seaside town team who have had just ONE moment in the spotlight, when they were awarded the Daily Mirror "Giant-killers Trophy". The club recorded a famous victory over holders Manchester United in the FA Cup in January 1984, while they were managed by Harry Redknapp.

That's more than enough clues.

What club?

oftenwrong. I suspect that it might be the town in which you live, or are you in nearby Boscombe?

as John Cleese always says. What do you always say?

Talking of John Cleese, didn't he, when playing the part of Basil Fawlty, sometimes make reference to a certain foreign secretary (or to be technically correct, secretary of state)?

(I do hope these recent posts make a semblance of sense to anyone who isn't either a sage or a member of the Pease Pottage Conservative Club! )

I seem to recall Bournemouth also having a famous victory over what was , at the time, a footballing giant - Wolverhampton Wanderers in the FA Cup.

What was particularly unusual about the match?

Did the goalposts collapse?

O tempora! O mores!

Latin.
The times change and we change with them.

One of the posts snapped and held up the game - though not the netting, obviously!

So good to see at least one other person who can produce the trivia at the drop of a hat!

Now, about this Latin stuff...

What's the Latin for "Kick and rush"?