There Was a Crooked Man Trivia Quiz

Answer: Against a crooked stile

James Halliwell-Phillips (1820-1889) was known as a collector of English nursery rhymes and fairy tales, as well as being a renowned Shakespearian expert. A version of the rhyme we know as 'There Was a Crooked Man' appeared in 'Nursery Rhymes of England', first published in 1842, with a number of subsequent editions published to include more material.

The full rhyme, as usually printed in contemporary collections, is as follows:
"There was a crooked man, and he walked a crooked mile.
He found a crooked sixpence against a crooked stile.
He bought a crooked cat, which caught a crooked mouse,
And they all lived together in a little crooked house."

The picture showed a stile, which is a structure, such as a ladder or set of steps, that helps people pass barriers that otherwise impede passage.

Answer: A Pixy in Petticoats

Beatrice Pentreath is the pixy of the title, a young woman of unconventional behaviour who uses the rhyme to describe John Burrough shortly after meeting him on the moor. In a review published in the "New York Times Review of Books" on March 21, 1908, Lewis Melville described her as "an underbred minx, ... too 'fast', too flippant, too vulgar, with a coarse nature, ... heartless - for she throws over the lover whom she has encouraged from the day of their first meeting when he becomes disfigured by a wound". Nevertheless, he admitted to finding her to have been drawn as such an appealing character that it was easy to overlook those deficiencies.

The other three titles are the trilogy for which Henham, writing as John Trevena, is best known. They use the natural forces at work on the moors as metaphors around which the novels are constructed. In the introduction to 'Furze the Cruel' he wrote, "Almost everywhere in Dartmoor are furze, heather and granite. The furze seems to suggest cruelty, the heather endurance, and the granite strength."

Answer: Your crooked heart

This poem, originally published in the 1940 collection 'Another Time', starts by describing a lover singing hyperbolic promises of eternal love, which are followed by the far more pessimistic ideas that the poet hears in the chiming of the clocks. It is possible that the crooked reference is an allusion to the imperfections of life which feature prominently in the poem. The final two stanzas read:

"'O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.'

It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on."

Answer: Tesseract

A cube is a three-dimensional figure with squares on all six sides, while a parallelepiped has parallelograms for faces. A glome is the four-dimensional equivalent of a sphere. A tesseract is a four-dimensional figure whose hypersurface is made up of eight cubic cells (just as a cube has six faces made up of squares). You can draw a two-dimensional figure of six connected squares which can be cut out and folded to make a cube, which is called a net of the cube. In the same way, you can construct a net in three dimensions of cubes that could be manipulated in four dimensions to make a tesseract, such as the image in the question. Enough mathematics.

Quentin Teal's idea was designed to allow flexible use of space, and building a large house on a small area of land, Unfortunately, an earthquake causes the house to fold into an actual tesseract, with consequences that can only be described as very interesting.

Answer: Gables

'Three Gables' is the family home of the Leonides family, whose patriarch Aristide is poisoned with his own eyedrops, setting off a chain of events in which all family members become suspects, and several more deaths ensue. The narrator is in love with Sophia, one of Aristides's granddaughters, and cannot marry her until the unpleasantness is settled. Eventually he finds out both the truth, and the version of that truth which is best turned over to the police - granddad really should have paid for those ballet lessons!

Gables are the areas on a wall under the sloping edges of the peak of a roof. A house named 'Chimneys' appeared in other Christie works, including 'The Secret of Chimneys' and 'The Seven Dials Mystery'.

Answer: Explosives

A group of criminals disguised as doctors persuade Davy to help them break into the bank next door to a hospital, and leave him to take the rap. Five years later, he is a reformed character, but gets in touch with the old gang to stop an entrepeneur from cheating the townspeople. He succeeds, and is seen as a hero by his neighbours, as he is hauled back to prison once again. Crooked, but nice.

Norman Wisdom (1915-2010) was a multi-talented performer who is probably best known for the movies he made featuring Norman Pitkin, a bumbling everyman character. He also may be familiar from his more recent television appearances as Billy Ingleton on the BBC comedy 'Last of the Summer Wine'. The character was a recurring role between 1995 and 2004.

Answer: Don't Let the Rain Come Down

The Serendipity Singers were one of the folk groups that had a period of popularity and chart success in the 1960s, Their biggest hit was their first single, 'Don't Let the Rain Come Down (Crooked Little Man), which received a Grammy nomination.

The group had nine members, who performed the song with different combinations of singers for various parts. The first three lines of each chorus were sung by a different group of three, with everyone joining in for the last two lines.

"Ah, ah) Oh, no, don't let the rain come down
(Ah, ah) Oh, no, don't let the rain come down
(Ah, ah) Oh, no, don't let the rain come down
My roof's got a hole in it and I might drown
Oh, yes, my roof's got a hole in it and I might drown."

The verses all contained variants on the words of the original nursery rhyme that showed the crooked man trying to fix a hole in his roof, ending with

"Now this crooked little man and his crooked cat and mouse
They all live together in a crooked little house
Has a crooked door with a crooked little latch
Has a crooked roof with a crooked little patch."

Answer: Near a rattlesnake nest

Talk about crooked men! Pitman, played by Kirk Douglas, first pulls off the robbery and hides the money, then gets a prison guard to agree to help him escape for a share of the loot. That goes awry when Ah-Ping kills the guard, so he has to escape on his own, and five convicts (including Ah-Sing) die in the process.

He dies from a rattlesnake bite while trying to retrieve his money. The sheriff who had originally arrested him, and who had subsequently become the governor of the prison, arrives, and decides to head to Mexico to enjoy the money. I expected more upright behavior from Henry Fonda.

Answer: There Was an Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe

In this, the third episode of the show, we are still getting to know about Phoebe's eccentricities, and her mangling of the two nursery rhymes is still somewhat surprising - the extent of her ditziness has not yet been revealed, but this gives us an idea! The show actually focuses on a number of subplots: Monica has a boyfriend whom her friends like better than she does, but who doesn't like them; Chandler starts smoking again when Joey asks him to help practice smoking for a part in a play; Phoebe's bank accidentally credits her account with $500, and the amount keeps growing as she tries to get it adjusted. Eventually Monica breaks up with Alan, and Phoebe gives the $7,000 she has accumulated to Chandler, on the proviso that he never smoke again. (This was never followed up in later episodes when he did in fact indulge again.)

Answer: Blockhead

Blockhead is the stage name of hip hop producer Tony Simon, who releases his own work as well as having produced such other artists as Aesop Rock, Cage and open Mike Eagle. In 'Escape the Meadow' (a title which has certain nursery rhyme connotations), you can hear

"There was a crooked man and he had a crooked smile
He had a crooked sixpence and he walked a crooked mile
He had a crooked cat and he had a crooked mouse
And they all lived together in a crooked little house."

If you've been following the quiz, you will note the addition of a crooked smile.