Four Hundred Quizzes And Other Gallimaufry

Answer: CD

DV is 505; DCCC is 800; and CM is 900.

Written in binary, 400 is 110010000.

The first known use of Roman numerals was in the period between 900 and 800 BC. Up until the 18th Century AD, Roman numerals where widely used for bookkeeping and preparing accounts. However, while simple arithmetic is easy with Roman numerals, multiplication and division are more difficult, and there is no zero.

Answer: Moon

The sun has an equatorial radius of 695,510km, the moon has a radius of 1,737km.

The sun is also 400 times the distance of the the moon from earth, which is why they often appear to be the same size.

Answer: Ted Williams

A score of .400 is two hits out of five at-bats.

Ted Williams achieved it while playing for the Boston Red Sox in the 1941 season. At the time this quiz was written in November 2019, no player had been added to the .400 honours board.

Ed Delahanty, Ty Cobb, and Rogers Hornsby are the only players, so far, to have achieved .400 in three seasons.

Answer: Atari

The computer was made between 1978 and 1992. More than two million were produced. When launched, they cost US$549.95.

The Atari 400 was a huge development in home computing, even with an 8k base RAM.

Writing in "Creative Computing" in 1980, Ted Nelson opined: "I've been in computer graphics for twenty years, and I lay awake night after night trying to understand how the Atari machine did what it did."

Answer: Server will not process request

I usually get these when I score 10/10 in 16 seconds on a funtrivia quiz.

There is a range of client service errors with a 4XX classification - 27 in all. Among them is 417, "I'm a teapot": a 1998 April fool's joke.

"URL moved permanently" is a 301 error, and "Network Authentication Required" is 511.

Answer: Forbes

The first 'Forbes 400' was produced in 1982, when the magazine deemed there were 13 billionaires in the USA.

That number steadily increased until the October 2019 list (most recent to the writing of this question) recorded 306 in the USA.

Top of the 2019 list and, at that time the world's richest person, was Jeff Bezos, head honcho at Amazon, in at $114bn. (Two days after writing this question, Bill Gates was named elsewhere as the world's richest person, so this is a fact that needs continual reevaluation.)

Answer: Lou Reed

Lou Reed included the lines in his song "Sick Of You" on his 1989 album "New York".

Reed (March 2, 1942 to October 27, 2013) came to prominence as lead singer and songwriter with the Velvet Underground.

In an obituary in the "Guardian" newspaper, Richard Williams wrote: "Before the arrival of Lou Reed, it could be said that rock'n'roll remained a part of the entertainment industry, still in the business of ingratiating itself with its target audience even as it tried equally hard to alienate their parents. Reed, who has died aged 71, made alienation the dominant mode and an article of faith for subsequent generations."

Williams said that the Brooklyn-born Reed had shaped the approach of such near-contemporaries as David Bowie, Iggy Pop and Patti Smith, and exercised an influence on successors such as Talking Heads, the Sex Pistols, Joy Division, REM, and the Strokes.

In "Rolling Stone" magazine, Jon Dolan wrote Reed was "...a massively influential songwriter and guitarist who helped shape nearly fifty years of rock music..."

Yet, Reed could also produce gentler lyrics, such as "Walk On The Wild Side" and "Perfect Day".

After several years of success, the Velvet Underground split due to tensions between Reed and his collaborator John Cale, though they were to later record again.

Answer: Rapid City, South Dakota

John Denver's song "Starwood In Aspen" opened with the words "It's a long way from L.A. to Denver..."
In the final verse he sang:
"It's a long way from this place to Denver
It's a long time to hang in the sky
It's a long way home to Starwood in Aspen
A sweet Rocky Mountain paradise
Oh my sweet Rocky Mountain paradise."

It is actually 1,022 miles as the proverbial crow flies from L.A. to Denver. If it is an American grey crow (and I think we can take it that is the case), then at the average daily flying range of 40 miles, that crow would have to "hang in the sky" for almost 26 flying days.

Memphis is 1,097 miles from Denver; El Paso is 623; and Phoenix is 809. John Denver was born in Roswell, New Mexico, 439 miles from Denver. The farthest major city on the continental USA from Denver is Portland, Maine, which is 2,081 miles.

[Source: mapsofworld.com]

Answer: Londonderry

In 1613, the Honourable The Irish Society began to construct walled fortifications to defend English and Welsh settlers in the town of Doire (Derry). The work was completed in 1619.

The walls are about a mile (1.6km) in circumference and vary in height and width. They are completely intact. After those 400 years, they they remain one of the most complete sets of walled fortifications in Europe.

Historically, they worked. The walls helped the citizens repel the army of King James II when he attacked and laid siege in 1688 and 1689. The siege lasted 105 days, but between 4,000 and 8,000 people died, mainly of diseases.

The name of Northern Ireland's second largest city is problematical and a source of contention. The original in Gaelic was Doire -"oak grove" - which was anglicised to Derry, and then changed to Londonderry by Royal Charter in 1613 to recognise the investment of London trade guilds. Nowadays, to get around political sensitivities, many people refer in writing to "Derry-Londonderry".

Some people also call Derry-Londonderry "the Maiden City" - because "it was never taken".

Answer: Victoria and New South Wales

The B400 is the official designation of a route that is commonly known as the Murray Valley Highway.

This 412-mile (663km) route was built in the 1920s and early 1930s to open up remote parts of Australia's south east. It runs from Robinvale, near Adelaide, to Corryong, a small town southwest of Canberra.