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. ?

Only if you're talking about the Marie Cluck, who ran the sub-post office in Middle Wallop for 35 years until the excitement became too much for her.

The 'Have A Go' pianist for thirteen years was the third one, Harry Hudson. I believe it was Mabel at the table who "gave 'em the money" after the ritual humiliation of such programmes, which in this case included Wilfred asking contestants if they were "courting".

Excellent spot of Dionne Warwick! With a talent like hers why did she ever need to change her name?!

And how did she ever get to become bankrupt?

The questions are rhetorical , of course...

Can you connect a Swiss city with the French Revolution, a wild animal and a 19th century American writer?

Bern was occupied by French troops in 1798 during the French Revolutionary Wars.  Since the 16th century, the city has had a bear pit.  Mark Twain agitated for copyright protection under the Berne Convention of  1886.

The Queersicht is a gay and lesbian film festival, held annually in the second week of November.

Oh dear, that’s very good. Your first paragraph ticks all the boxes, but please don’t roar with laughter because I’m now between a rock and a hard place. In other words, it wasn’t the intended answer to my question!  

Would anyone like to have another go?

Surely the Lucerne Lion Monument-in honour of the Swiss Guards killed during the French Revolution-and much admired by good old Mark Twain...?

Well done. Luzern (Lucerne) has a dying lion monument, carved out of natural rock, to commemorate the Swiss mercenaries who perished at the Tuileries in 1792. Samuel Clemens (alias Mark Twain) called it "the saddest and most moving piece of rock in the world".


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion_Monument

Most European neighbours of France were obviously affected to a greater or lesser extent by the events consequent upon the 1789 Revolution, and Switzerland was no exception, so almost every city location has some tale to tell.  The English Channel (again) kept us in splendid isolation until Boney got ambitious.  The sad tale of the massacre of 600 "Swiss Guards" in 1792 was entirely due to the order given by King Louis XVI to them to lay down their arms in the face of the mob.

Bad mistake, but just one of many.

Impressive knowledge - as always.

But now for something more prosaic :

A chap known as 'Bunter' died in the Channel Islands in 2005.

Who was he?

That would be Edgar, born 76 years ago in Pretoria, and a star of SA cricket.  He liked to be called Eddie, but due to his appearance and demeanour was usually "Bunter".  He was probably further confused by so many English people choosing to refer to him as "Ken".  

This may be the point at which Phil indicates that's not the answer he was thinking of, which actually referred to the weekly children's magazine "Bunty" that appealed to pre-teen girls interested in stories about Ponies and/or pillow-fights in the dorm after lights-out.

So I'll pause here before continuing, as my Probation Officer doesn't like me to harp on too much about such things.

There was a goalkeeper called Eddie Edgar who made one appearance for Newcastle, but I think he’s still alive.

Nicholas Soames’ nickname is ‘Bunter’, but he’s still alive.

Gerald Campion played the part of ‘Billy Bunter’, but that’s too obvious, and anyway he died in France in 2002.

Edward Heath died in 2005 and was allegedly no stranger to a Jersey children's home, but his nickname was ‘Grocer’ because he abolished retail price maintenance.

Bob Hunter, who founded Greenpeace, died in 2005. Could he have been referred to as ‘Bunter’?

Cricketer you say? I’m stumped!  

" This may be the point at which Phil indicates that's not the answer he was thinking of, which actually referred to the weekly children's magazine "Bunty" that appealed to pre-teen girls interested in stories about Ponies and/or pillow-fights in the dorm after lights-out

Damn. I hadn't realised that my interest in girls' magazines and scragging the lower sixth in the quad was so transparent.

Clever thinking by Ivan, but ow at the pavilion end is quite correct about 'Eddie' Barlow. I once had the privilege of chatting to him and have a Wisden Almanac signed by the late great man. He was a lovely chap and quite amusing - like so many professional cricketers. I found him a humble individual, too.

JRR Tolkien in The Lord of the Rings, The Fellowship of the Ring, "A Part of the Shire" refers to The Three-Farthing Stone by the side of the East Road that marked the point where the borders of the Eastfarthing, Westfarthing and Southfarthing of the Shire came together.

It is likely that he drew inspiration from an actual stone monument, 9 feet high, probably erected in the 18th century, and now a grade II listed building, still to be seen roadside at the conjunction of three English Midland counties, where it has always been known as The Four Counties stone.

What four counties were those, and what explains the changed nomenclature?

This is near the delightful Moreton-in-Marsh, I believe - a place I love visiting.

The four counties were Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire, Warwickshire and a small slice of Worcestershire , but Gloucestershire pinched the small bit of Worcestershire in the 1930s and thereafter only three counties adjoined the monument.

Or something like that...

Well done, Phil. It was a very small bit indeed that was pinched but that is exactly what happened. You omitted to mention that the Fire Service College is not far away, but I'll give it to you anyway. A collection of old fire engines they had there was destroyed by fire a couple of years ago. (Though they don't like to dwell on that.)

I suspect that at least one of our number is fortunate enough to live not too far at all from the beautiful Cotswolds.

I have to travel a fair way myself, but am happy to make the effort, whether by car or train...

This weekend, F1 motor-racing is at Monza, the last European venue (before the circus moves on to Singapore two weeks later). Some "Tifosi" (fans) will recall the sad death there of Wolgang von Trips in 1961 when his chance of becoming World Champion ended in a collision with the barrier that also caused the tragic death of fifteen spectators.

Wolfgang Alexander Albert Eduard Maximilian Reichsgraf Berghe von Trips had successfully raced Ferraris against major drivers of the era such as Stirling Moss.

What was the unlikely nickname which von Trips had much earlier been given in the face of his formidable real one and by which he was universally known in the sport? Which of his partners in the Ferrari team is alleged to have coined it?

I probably know as much about F1 as I do about ballet dancing , but the name has been 'leeked' to me, boyo...

Won't ask you to do a little entrechat for us then, but the second part of the question goes on: Which fellow driver was it who applied the unlikely soubriquet of "Taffy" to a German Count?

In the circs, it was likely to have been Mike Hawthorn...sadly , another victim of driving at speed...

Mike Hawthorn, sadly indeed, and possibly resulting from his character, not dissimilar to that which had allowed RAF fighter-pilots to win the Battle of Britain just twenty years previously.

We've probably all heard of the 'Vicar of Bray', but who is the famous son of the 'Dentist of Bray'...?

Was it Uncle Willie's son? No? I didn't really think so.  

http://www.colorado.edu/journals/standards/V5N1/poetry/Bray_3.html

That's a great effort - good thinking.

But it's not the answer I am looking for.

I could have even said that there was also a famous daughter of the tooth-puller...

Just spotted this.

Well done ow , from whom we extracted the information and who takes the chequered flag!

It is, of course, Stirling Moss ( who had a car rallying sister, Pat). Their father was Alfred Moss - a dentist in Bray, Berkshire...

It's the weekend so here's another puzzler that might interest Cutting Edge followers:

in 1973 an octagonal wooden seat was installed encircling the trunk of a chestnut tree on a village green with a memorial plaque stating:

This seat was erected to celebrate the centenary of the 16 women who were sent to prison in 1873 for the part they played in the founding of the Agricultural Workers Union.


What's that all about then?

When I was a GCSE examiner, one of my colleagues came from Ascott-under-Wychwood. I have a sneaking suspicion that he was a Tory. He told me what a wonderful country Switzerland was, so I started going to Germany for holidays. I don't remember him ever mentioning anything about those women.

Wikipedia says


In 1873 a farmer dismissed several men of Ascott-under-Wychwood because they had formed a branch of the National Union of Agricultural Workers. He hired labourers from the village of Ramsden to work as strikebreakers but a group of women from Ascott-under-Wychwood tried to dissuade the Ramsden labourers from working. 16 of the women were arrested, tried by magistrates in Chipping Norton and given short sentences of imprisonment in Oxford Castle. Their convictions were met with rioting in Chipping Norton, questions in Parliament and a royal pardon from Queen Victoria. The 16 are commemorated as the Ascott Martyrs.^[7] In 1874 at least four of the women emigrated with their families to New Zealand, where they now have numerous descendants.^[8] In 1973 on the centenary of the women's ordeal a commemorative bench was erected in the village


but I guess the prize goes to Ivan - all I did was crib

"Cribbing" is implicitly allowed by Witchfinder's first words in the first-ever posting here:

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

Sorry not to have participated - I was in the pub, but didn't know the answer anyway...although I have a feeling that one of us lives pretty close to that village...

It's much more fun if it isn't easy to 'crib' the answers using the internet. For example, where is this?


Personal photo

somewhere in Austria?  Looks lovely

If that were the Matterhorn coyly hiding behind cloud it could be typhoid-Zermatt, but Swiss trains are red, not blue. Possibly the little-known Sussex Alps then, or indeed Austria.

A question like this is almost impossible unless, by chance, you’ve been to the village in question or happen to have seen it in another source. The problem is how to make a question ‘extremely difficult’ (which implies crib-proof), while still giving people a reasonable chance of working out the answer to it.

Here is another photo from the same village. It shows a mountain which has a connection with an actor who died earlier this year. Now the question is probably too easy, and either the sage or our blogger will get the answer in a trice…..


Personal photo

Baffled.

It's not a place called Grainau is it?

Not a bad guess, but the mountain isn't the Zugspitze, the tallest in Germany. In fact, it isn't in Germany at all.

The train isn't blue, but I can understand from the first photo why someone might think so - trick of the light.

The second photo shows the notorious north face of a certain mountain......

The North face of the EIGER is indeed notorious.  So in that knowledge it's easy to deduce that the nearest popular tourist honey-trap would be GRINDELWALD.  The miracles of the internet then allowed instant comparison with similar views to the one taken by Ivan on a personal visit.

Which sparks a philosophical moment of realisation at just how complicated a process that was in reality. Binary code stored I-don't-actually-know-where can be read by the costly box of tricks on my desk at home.  How far we have come since an artist would create just one such picture, unavailable to more than a few people in the same place at the same time.

Cameras no longer function by the action of light upon chemicals which produce a physical paper record similar to the artist's drawing or painting. Early digital cameras recorded their results on a floppy disc.  Have you still got a computer capable of reading a 3½"disc?  Modern laptops can't even read a CD/DVD, much less a tape drive.  Historians and biography writers now use libraries to research newspapers, diaries and memoires etc., but what legible trace will our generation leave for posterity when the future's machines are bound to be completely different?

It's questions like that which separate the truly clever from the also-rans...

Very good. I was last in Grindelwald seven years ago. It’s a spectacular place when the sun is shining, but the weather is unreliable.

The actor who died earlier this year was George Kennedy, who starred with Clint Eastwood in ‘The Eiger Sanction’ in 1975.

The main rail network in Switzerland is state-run, but private companies operate lines which feed into it, such as the Berner-Oberland-Bahn, which operates between Interlaken and both Grindelwald and Lauterbrunnen. I hope I can be forgiven for thinking the trains were brown and yellow…..  


Personal photo

Thought I'd get it once Ivan had dropped enough hints, so patience scores over any implied cleverness.

When I was quite a young boy,” Uriah Heep tells David Copperfield, “I got to know what umbleness did, and I took to it. I ate umble pie with an appetite. I stopped at the umble point of my learning, and says I, ‘Hard hard!’ When you offered to teach me Latin, I knew better. ‘People like to be above you,’ says father, ‘keep yourself down.’ I am very umble to the present moment, Master Copperfield, but I’ve got a little power!