It's All Wrong! Trivia Quiz

Answer: Santa Claus is derived from which real saint?

St Nicholas was bishop of Myra, in Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey), in the 4th century AD. His relics are kept in the church of San Nicola in Bari, Italy. He was known among other things for his good works among the poor. One story recounts how he climbed up on the roof of the home of three girls too poor to afford a marriage dowry, and threw bags of money down the chimney, one of which landed in a stocking hung up to dry.

In the early 19th century, Washington Irving boosted an already prevalent trend of secularizing the saint: in his satirical "Knickerbocker History of New York" he portrayed a jolly elfin pipe-smoker, obviously based partly on St Nicholas and partly on the Dutch burghers of New Amsterdam (i.e. New York before the British took it after the Anglo-Dutch war of 1664). The trend was strengthened in 1823 with the publication of Clement Clarke Moore's poem "A Visit from St Nicholas", better known nowadays as "The Night before Christmas". Beginning in the 1930s, Coca Cola advertisments featuring Santa Claus (the name derives from the German "Sankt Nikolaus" and the Dutch "Sinterklaas") cemented his image as a secular, commercialised figure. For more details, check out http://www.stnicholascenter.org/Brix?pageID=23

The hero of Dickens novel "Great Expectations" is Philip Pirrip, known as "Pip". Nicholas is the hero of the eponymous novel "Nicholas Nickleby".

Tsar Alexander II was assassinated in 1881. Tsar Nicholas II was executed with his entire family (except his daughter Anastasia? Who knows?) by the Bolsheviks in 1918, after the Bolshevik Revolution.

The golfer Jack's last name is Nicklaus.

Answer: Which of the three laws of thermodynamics (the laws of the conservation of energy, of entropy and of the impossibility of absolute zero) makes a perpetual motion machine impossible?

The three laws of thermodynamics state that:

1. No energy or matter is created or destroyed;
2. (as near as I can get it) All things tend to a state of equilibrium, and that to overcome this equilibrium it is necessary to apply an outside source of energy
3: A temperature of absolute zero (i.e. one in which molecular movement ceases) is unattainable.

Ginsberg summed up the laws as: 1. you can't win; 2. you can't break even; 3. you can't get out of the game. Depressing, huh?

It wasn't the ancient Greeks but the Babylonians who invented time measurement based on the number 60, including the second. Why 60? What other relatively convenient number is divisible so many different ways - by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20 and 30? Apparently the Babylonians invented much of what we think of as modern maths.

In duelling, the challenger and the challengee (for want of a better term) were each assisted by his second.

The First Amendment is the one guaranteeing free speech and assembly. The Second guarantees the right to bear arms.

Answer: What common processed food binds water, and is therefore used as a preservative?

Sugar is used to preserve jams and honeys. (Bet you didn't know that!)

Starch is the main carbohydrate found in rice and potatoes; sugar, the other main carbohydrate, is found in fruit and vegetables.

As for "sugar" being the only English word in which the initial "s" is pronounced "sh", I'm not quite sure about that.

;-)

Answer: What colour was Libya's flag from 1969 - 2011?

Libya's flag was....well, just green.

Green is for envy or jealousy; red (as in the phrase "see red"; also "red with rage") is for anger.

According to Leonardo, if a woman in a WHITE dress walks through a GREEN field in bright sunshine, her dress will look green. Having said that, I can't trace the reference for this, but I'm sure the wrong answer is in fact wrong.

A bowling green refers to the sport of bowls, played by trying to place asymmetrical balls as near to a small white "jack" as possible.

Answer: What were Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr, Peter Lawford and Joey Bishop collectively known as?

There were other "hangers-on" to the Rat Pack including Angie Dickinson, Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh.

The hectic urban life is known as the "rat race".

There are advertisements for "rat packs" as part of various rodent elimination offers, but no reference to a colloquialism for a rodent exterminator's equipment.

As far as I can tell, the KGB controllers didn't call their spy ring anything, as opposed to giving the individual spies codenames. In the West, the ring was known as "The Cambridge Five". "Five?" I hear you ask. The identity of the "fifth man" has always been a subject of speculation. For details see http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Cambridge%20Five

Answer: The Tiger and what other main German battle tank during WWII were named after members of the cat family?

"Panzer" is a generic German word meaning "armour". It can refer to an (armoured) medieval knight, as well as being the German word for "tank". The Germans sometimes named their tanks after members of the cat family, hence the designation "Panther" for the PzKpfw V (short for "Panzerkampfwagen", or "armoured fighting vehicle"). The Panther was a direct answer to the Russians' T34, which gave the Germans a nasty shock at the beginning of their invasion of Russia in 1941. The PzKpfw VI was the famous Tiger, made in two versions, Marks I and II.

The main German battle tank at the turn of the 21st century is known as the Leopard.

The cheetah is the only member of the cat family that can't retract its claws. This is because they're not designed for holding onto prey, as are those of the other members of the cat family, but for traction, especially in the high-speed turns the animal has to make when following desperately zig-zagging prey. (If panthers couldn't retract their claws, they would be too blunt to allow them to climb trees - which they can most definitely do, not least to sleep.)

Answer: Where does solar wind come from?

Solar wind comes specifically from the sun's outer atmosphere, its corona, which is so hot that the sun's gravity can't hold onto the material in it; this material shoots into space at about one million mph.

The second person of the Trinity is the Son (i.e. Christ, the son of God the Father).

The sun controls Leo (the lion); Sagittarius, the archer, is controlled by Jupiter.

The ancient Babylonians (here they are again!) worshipped the moon as pre-eminent, more so than the sun. Apparently this was because the moon looks bigger than the sun, and its cycles seem to control agricultural ones.

Answer: _______ Mather was influential in the Salem witch trials in 1692

Cotton Mather was the most prominent Boston Congregationalist minister. His views were a mixture of conservative and modern, so that as well as being a chief prosecutor at Salem, he was also a proponent of inoculation against smallpox. He was not one of the five judges at the Salem trials (there don't seem to have been prosecutors as such; the judges seem to have acted as a team of investigators), but they did at least rely on him as an "expert" in the field of witchcraft. It was he, for instance, who urged them to accept "spectral evidence" - something his father, Increase Mather, later urged them NOT to do! Cotton later considerably moderated his views on witchcraft and the evidence for it - not much consolation to the 19 victims who were hanged, or the one who was pressed to death for not returning a plea. In 1702 the trials were declared unlawful; in 1957 Massachusetts formally apologised for them. (My thanks to braunda for help here.)

You fool someone by pulling the wool over their eyes.

The Coton (one "t") is the rare breed of dog. It's got its own website at http://www.cotondogs.com/

Cotton was, of course, the principal crop of the South, not the North. Or was it? I wanted this question to read: "What was the South's main agricultural crop?" According to Parish's book on the Civil War, it was corn. Wouldn't that have made a neat trick question? Unfortunately it's only a passing reference, and I haven't found any information to back it up. Anybody know anything about this?

Answer: What sport uses the terms "bargeboard", "ballast" and "bottoming"?

The "bargeboard" is a streamlining plate attached to the sides of the car; "ballast" is weights to bring the car up to the minimum weight; and a car "bottoms" when its suspension is compressed to its maximum and its chassis consequently hits the track.

Bruno, Greg and Arie are all Indianapolis 500 champions.

I've roamed around the internet sufficiently to convince me that I haven't got a clue what the world's best-selling face moisturiser or breast milk formula is, but in neither case is it called "Formula 1" or "Formula One". More than that I really couldn't care less about.

Answer: Who tried to shoot Pope John Paul II in St Peter's Square in 1981?

The Pope spent three months in hospital recovering from the attempt; he later visited Acga in prison and forgave him.

Sirhan Sirhan was convicted of assassinating Robert F Kennedy, although a look at the website http://free.freespeech.org/rfkennedy/ suggests that as much of a question mark might hang over this killing as over that of Robert's presidential brother.

Three men were arrested for Malcolm X's murder. I haven't been able to find out their names, but it appears that the assassination was the result of a feud between Malcolm and Elijah Mohammed, leader of the Nation of Islam.

John Hinckley Jr tried to assassinate Reagan.

Thanks for the help, people! Next time I'll get the questions and answers in the right boxes!