The Dark Half Trivia Quiz

Answer: Black Dahlia

Elizabeth Short was found brutally sliced in half in Los Angeles' Leimert Park on January 15th, 1947. However, despite the prominent location of her dead body, her murderer was never found. The case remained unsolved and its truth has been obscured ever since.

Its mystique has enthralled many who have crossed path with the tale since, perhaps in large part due to the lack of accessible factual information surrounding the case.

Answer: Barrow

Barrow shares its surname with Clyde Barrow, the famous Texan outlaw. Between November and January, some inhabitants of Barrow, Alaska may never see the sun and be trapped in a seemingly perpetual twilight zone. It is the 9th northernmost city in the world (Longyearbyen in Norway being 1st) and has a population of less than 5,000 people. The surreal aurora borealis, generated by an interaction between charged electrons in the solar wind and Earth's atmosphere, can frequently be seen on the dark winter nights in Barrow.

As a random aside, it's a good thing that Disney's 'Beauty in the Beast' (1991) was set in France, and not in Barrow. Otherwise, the line in the titular song, 'certain as the sun rising in the east' might not have quite worked...

Answer: Drake Mallard

'Darkwing Duck' aired from 1991-5 as an animated television series produced by Disney.

The name Drake Mallard might have given some clues to the discerning quizzer; a male duck is called a drake and the mallard is a common member of the Anatidae - duck - family. It's also quite an apt name, really, like the placeholder name John Doe that doesn't attract attention. This is also true of Drake Mallard who must keep his true identity a secret.

As his alter ego, Darkwing Duck, he brings justice to the criminals of St. Canard. After all, he is the terror that flaps in the night! Whilst his motives are altruistic, his big ego and arrogance has made him unpopular as a superhero with some other residents. In fact, 'Let's Get Respectable' was a whole episode dedicated to smoothing out his rough image, although he reverted to original type by its end.

Answer: Umbrage

In Latin, an umbra is a shadow or shade. It did not originally have negative connotations attached with it, but in the 17th century the association of darkness with negative thoughts popularised the word. Before coming to be known as the sense of being offended as we know it today, it indicated something that was vaguely hinted at, leading to suspicion. Dolores Umbridge, the infamously cruel witch in 'Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix', has a surname derived from umbrage; there was certainly a lot to be offended at with her!

Answer: Illusion of Gaia

'Illusion of Gaia' was an expansive role-playing game which documented the travels of Will, a young boy with strange psychic powers. Will was the Dark Knight tasked with defeating Dark Gaia and saving the world. On his journey, he could enter Dark Spaces to recuperate, and could also transform into the mighty Shadow to best his foes. Throughout the game, themes of light and shade were juxtaposed, both conceptually and within realistic locations.

The game portrayed some of the best and worst sides of human nature - on the downside, there were themes of starvation, cruelty, despair and brutality.

However, on the other side, themes of friendship, altruism, romance and emotional growth blossomed. In some ways, the game highlighted that there can be no light without the shade to contrast it against...

Answer: Aye-aye

The aye-aye tends to live in the canopy of trees and is mainly active at night. It uses echolocation to search for food; its diet tends to consist of fruit, seeds, nectar and insects.

This curious animal's name was not thought to have derived from the sailor's obedient call. One theory is that the name derives from an exclamation of terror; another from the Malagasy (native Madagascan language) for 'I don't know', which is 'heh-heh'.

It is an endangered species in large part due to the negative stigma attached to seeing one. There is a belief that should an aye-aye point its middle finger at you, you will die, and so they are often killed. Deforestation has also removed its habitat and contributed to its endangerment.

Answer: Carolingian Minuscule

Many of the presently surviving Latin texts were transcribed by Carolingian scholars using the Carolingian minuscule. The easily legible capital words and spaces between words are features that have remained in written language since, even though the Carolingian script was eventually outdated in favour of Gothic and Italic scripts.

The Dark Ages is colloquially considered to be a time of stagnation, war, strife and difficulty from the period from 476 to 1066 AD. However, that reputation is not necessarily entirely accurate.

Whilst Charlemagne (8th and 9th centuries AD), the well-known Frankish king, was known for his war pursuits, he was also thought to be fond of learning and the promotion of such learning, despite never reaching full literacy himself. Many educational establishments were built to teach the trivium and quadrivium, a curriculum of grammar, logic, rhetoric and then geometry, arithmetic, astronomy and music. Trivium derives from the Latin for 'three ways', which, incidentally, is the same word 'trivia' - which we are all familiar with - derives from! Whilst it is debated as to how far reaching and how potent the educational reforms really were, they certainly happened.

Answer: Melanoidin

Black garlic is thought to be a fairly recent innovation, being developed in 2005. It removes the strident pungent taste from garlic that many dislike, and is instead sweet and umami - umami is considered the fifth taste and is a pleasant savoury flavour - with a hint of balsamic. Melanoidins are polymers of combined sugars and amino acids produced through the Maillard reaction or caramelisation reactions.

The heat required to cause the reaction tends to be around 65-80 degrees Celsius. Melanoidins can also be found in coffee and malted beer and bread, amongst other foods.

Answer: Olbers' Paradox

This question was inspired by the commonly asked question: why is the sky blue? In thinking that, one might ask themself... why is the sky 'black' at night? Heinrich Olbers postulated that in an infinite and static universe, there will have been enough time for light from every existent star to have reached us and will thus fill every angle of space we can observe. But it is clearly not so.

Why then does Olbers' paradox exist? One possible explanation is that the universe is not yet old enough for the potential starlight out there to have reached us, and yet may be travelling our way as we speak. In addition, as the universe is also thought to be expanding constantly, some light is thought to be red-shifted (stretched), past the visible spectrum and relatively cool; in other words, more light than we can perceive is reaching us, but not in its original form. Of course, this is only a cursory view of the topic, but an interesting one nonetheless.

Answer: George Eliot - Charles Lutwidge Dodgson

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson's pseudonym was Lewis Carroll, author of the lovably quirky 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'. It is thought he, as a fairly reclusive man, wanted to hide behind the pseudonym so as to avoid gathering too much attention. Happy unbirthday to most of you, by the way! George Eliot's real identity was Mary Ann Evans, and wrote in the mid 1800s, when women were not allowed to be expressive. Therefore, she adopted a male pseudonym to be able to express herself.

Joanne Rowling, also known as J.K. Rowling, authored the 'Harry Potter' series. She was thought to have different reasons to Mary Ann Evans for adopting her pseudonym Robert Galbraith; she wanted to break into the detective fiction genre without her previous reputation influencing the feedback she would receive on her work. Her reasons for adopting the J.K. Rowling pseudonym may not have been as far off, however, as her publisher thought the 'Harry Potter' series would not sell as well under a distinctly female name, so a more gender-neutral pseudonym was constructed in that instance.

Mark Twain's name is nautically based and comes from the saying 'by the mark twain', meaning that the water is 12 feet deep and therefore is safe to traverse. Mark Twain claimed to have borrowed this name from a certain Captain Isaiah Sellers who used to sign documents about the Mississippi River as 'Mark Twain'.

Agatha Christie actually wrote most of her books as Agatha Christie, but the majority of these were her famous detective novels. Mary Westmacott was the nom de plume used to write six 'romance' novels, which were not 'romance' novels in the strictest sense of the word, but more life-affirming novels. She is said to have considered writing detective novels her work, and the novels written under Mary Westmacott were for fun.

And... Stephen King? He reportedly wrote under Richard Bachmann to increase publication rates without saturating the Stephen King brand, and also to determine if talent or luck underpinned his success. He felt he was outed too soon to answer that question.