Joy to the Whirl! Trivia Quiz

Answer: mare

The words "dam" and "distaff" both refer to a female animal. A jenny, while female, is a donkey, so she couldn't be the mother of a thoroughbred horse. The lineage of thoroughbred horses is carefully monitored, and it is always traced through the distaff (female) side. Whirlaway was foaled in 1938 on Calumet Farm in Lexington, Kentucky.

His sire (father) was Blenheim II. His damsire (maternal grandfather) was Sweep, whose sire was named Ben Brush. The progression of names is interesting, and owners often choose names that reflect a horse's ancestry, although this is not one of the many requirements the Jockey Club has for naming racehorses.

Answer: carousel

Even though people argue about the difference between a "carousel" and a "merry-go-around" the words are synonyms, according to "A Pictorial History of the Carousel" by Fred Fried. There are also different spellings for "carousel" - with variations usually doubling letters.

The French word came from the Spanish and Italian "carosella" or "garosello" which means "little war", since the word originally referred to a colorful game crusading knights brought to Europe from Arabian and Turkish cultures.

A knight would ride his horse at high speed to catch a decorated ring with his lance or scented clay balls were thrown back and forth, with the smell of perfume identifying the less than agile riders. The idea of the carousel grew from a device that allowed children and knights in training to practice such feats and to play and enjoy the sense of movement. Until steam was harnessed for the job, carousels were pushed or pulled by man or animal power.

The beautifully carved horses and other animals created for 19th century and early 20th century carousels are popular with collectors today.

The English word "merry-go-round" first appears in print in 1729 in a poem about St. Bartholomew Fair by George Alexander Stevens. They are often called roundabouts, as well.

Answer: Charlie Chaplin

Charlie Chaplin was spurred to create the 1936 film "Modern Times" to reveal the deplorable conditions of workers desperate for jobs during the Great Depression. He was also influenced by conversations with Mahatma Gandhi, who spoke of "machinery with only consideration of profit". Charlie Chaplin had grown up in poverty himself, with the added barriers of an alcoholic father and a mentally ill mother.

In his depictions of the Little Tramp character, Chaplin found a way to keep audiences laughing while also making them feel the pathos of the down-and-out people who were oppressed by a system in which they were merely cogs in a machine. Chaplin originally conceived "Modern Times" with sound, but he soon realized that the Little Tramp was more compelling without a voice.

Answer: Cavalia

Amphithéâtre Anglois and Circus Chiarini were companies formed in the 18th and 19th centuries, as the modern circus took shape on an international scale, and equestrian acts were central, with the horse being the first performing animal of the modern circus.

The Cirque du Soleil began as a company of twenty in 1984, as street performers developed a show for the 450th anniversary of French Canada. But unlike the earliest circuses, Cirque du Soleil did not feature horseback riding. Cavalia, sharing a founder with Cirque du Soleil and obviously inspired by it, makes equestrian acts the focus of its multimedia spectacle.

Some circuses have been legitimately criticized for animal cruelty, but Cavalia takes meticulous care of its horses, allowing only one hour of practice a day, with performances lasting two hours and 30 minutes for each show. Horses are cross-trained so that each animal can have days off.

Answer: Hanukkah

Spinning tops are among the earliest toys, and both children and adults have used them. Clay tops dating to around 3500 B.C. were found in archaeological digs in the city of Ur in present day Iraq, and terra cotta tops from around 3,000 B.C. were found at the site of ancient Troy. Tops were whirled in ancient China, as well.

They can be spun by twisting a peg with the thumb and fingers, pulling a string, or pushing down on a spring. It may be that the first tops were acorns. The dreidel (called "servion" in Hebrew) is a spinning top that has four sides, with a Hebrew letter written on each.

In our picture, the letters gimel ("g") and He (soft "h") are showing; out of sight are nun ("n") and shin ("sh"). They are said to stand for "nes gadol haya sham" or "a great miracle happened there" (in the Temple), but they also can be used to play a game or to gamble.

There is a legend that when Jewish children were being taught to read Torah in secret under the tyrant Antiochus IV Epiphanes, they would quickly hide their scrolls when enemies were near and play with dreidels instead.

It was under this oppressive ruler that the Maccabean Revolt and the events celebrated during Hanukkah took place in 167-160 B.C.E.

Answer: False

Edgar Allan Poe's 1841 story "A Descent into the Maelstrom" and Jules Verne's 1869 novel "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" were fictional narratives that took advantage of superstitions and legends surrounding the Moskstraumen Maelstrom off the coast of Norway.

These appeared, along with sea monsters, on sailing maps of Scandinavia and the North Atlantic Ocean as early as the "Carta Marina" created by Olaus Magnus in the 1500s. Herman Melville also refers to the "Norway maelstrom" in his novel "Moby Dick", and viewers also see a ship go down in a giant whirlpool in "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End", leading people to imagine a maelstrom as a giant funnel that envelops even the largest ships. Actually, the vortex that is seen as water whirls in a maelstrom doesn't suck things into its center, since centripetal force is at work, pushing the water away from the center of the whirlpool.

In the midst of a maelstrom, an object simply spins around. This does not mean a maelstrom isn't dangerous to ships and especially to boats that get knocked about or overturned within the stirring water, but the giant whirlpools around the earth - including the Saltstraumen and the Moskstraumen - do not suck large ships into their centers. Local boatmen make good money taking tourists to their edges.

Answer: gyres

The circles on the map represent the five major ocean gyres. They are (from left to right on the map) the Indian Ocean Gyre, the North Pacific Gyre, the South Pacific Gyre, the North Atlantic Gyre, and the South Atlantic Gyre. Important currents exist along the boundaries of the gyres.

For example, the Gulf Stream and the Loop Current along the edges of the North Atlantic Gyre affect climate and hurricane formation and strength. Climate change can be seen in the color and temperature of the oceans, which have an effect on the air above them.

The hint in the question is from "The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats, which begins, "Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the center cannot hold". Gyres, on a large or small scale, are whirling things.

Answer: Roman

The Villa del Casale, near Piazza Armerina on the Italian island of Sicily, comes from the late Roman Empire (4th and 5th centuries AD). The mosaics depicting young women in what look like bikinis were unearthed in the 1950s, just before this style of swimwear became popular with young women of the 20th century.

At one point, some historians argued that the women were contestants in a beauty contest, but the consensus maintains that they are engaged in an athletic event. Another mosaic in the villa depicts men taking part in a hunt, undoubtedly collecting African animals to be used in spectacles in the Circus Maximus or held in menageries for the Emperor or other members of the ruling elite. Scenes of the Labors of Hercules and other mythological subjects are also depicted. Excavations at the villa, thought to have been constructed between 310 and 340 AD, continued into the 21st century, and the ruins and their restorations have been declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Answer: bandalore

The image from a 1791 French fashion magazine shows a woman playing with an early form of the yo-yo, or "bandalore" as English speakers of the 18th century would have called it. (It was also called a "quiz" and the "Prince of Wales' toy" in England.) According to the summary with this image in Wikimedia Commons, "The most common French word for Yo-yo at the time was 'Emigrette', but it is called the 'Joujou de Normandie' in a caption to a version of this image which was included in Albert Charles Auguste Racinet's Le Costume Historique (1888)".

The French also called it an "incroyable". A painting in watercolor and gold from around the same time as our image (ca. 1770) depicts a young woman in India playing with a similar string toy. A Greek image of a young boy playing with a toy that looks like a yo-yo appears on the inside of an Attic red-figure kylix (shallow drinking cup) from around 440 BC. Our modern word for yo-yo is from a language of the Philippines, brought to America in the 1920s by Pedro Flores, who mass produced the toy, selling the name to Donald Duncan in 1930.

After selling the rights, Flores later used the word "bandalore" for his versions of the toy.

Answer: carol

The English word "carol" derives from the French "carola" which was known as "ronel" in northern France and "Reigen" in Germany. Such folk dances were at first connected to May or Midsummer festivals, but as early as the writing of "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" in 14th century England, men and women were depicted doing carol-dancing together at fifteen-day Christmas celebrations.

However, in the Gawain story, we are at the king's court, where people are a bit more daring than in most folk cultures of Europe, where modest women danced separately, as the girls are doing in the sculpture.

The carol dancers in the circle sang their own accompaniment, perhaps to popular ballads, and eventually the word "carol" came to mean the song itself, especially when referring to group singing done at Christmastime. Round dances made their way into classical music, for example, Béla Bartók's Duet #2- "Reigen/Maypole Dance/Kalamajkó".

The sculpture can be found in Immenstadt, in Bavaria, Germany.

Answer: Charybdis

Some scholars think Homer is describing the geography of the Strait of Messina, a narrow channel between the island of Sicily and the province of Calabria at the southern tip of mainland Italy. The strait has strong currents, internal waves, and large whirlpools.

In "The Odyssey", Scylla is a sea monster that lives inside a craggy rock on one side of the strait. She has six heads and manages to swallow up six of Odysseus's sailors as his ship passes by. Water rushes into the whirlpool, Charybdis, three times a day, then rushes out again. Odysseus and his men hear the roaring of the waters and they see the water churning and bubbling as if it were being heated in a cauldron.

After he thinks he has dodged the whirlpool, the small ship is swept back by a storm.

As Charybdis is about to engulf him, Odysseus grabs a fig tree and clings to it until the whirlpool disgorges his ship and he is able to escape, rowing with his hands. As with stories of the maelstrom off the coast of Norway, the dangers of turbulent water in the Strait of Messina are real, but the monstrous malevolence of these forces of nature are exaggerated in literature.

Answer: True

In a "Storm Track" article, Tim Marshall describes how "The Oz Tornado" was designed by special effects chief Arnold Gillespie after the first effort, a thirty-five foot tall rubber cone, failed to move like a real tornado. A former pilot, Gillespie took the idea of a windsock - a familiar sight at airports - and made one out of muslin cloth.

He connected the top to a gantry in the ceiling area of the stage and placed the bottom in a slot on the floor, so that it could be moved, with the bottom and top sometimes moving in different directions, as would happen in a whirlwind. Piano wire was used for stability, and powdery brown fuller's earth was sprayed, using hoses. Smoke and panels of glass with cotton "clouds" on them completed the illusion, after which actors were placed in front of the previously filmed image while wind machines blew stuff around as would happen with a real tornado. Our image is of a real tornado, however.

Answer: Isaac Watts

The words to "Joy to the World" were written by Isaac Watts, who has been called the "Father of English Hymnody" because he was so prolific in his creation of hymns. Many of his hymns are still sung in churches over 250 years later. Like Georg Friedrich Handel's "Messiah", Watt's less ambitious creation "Joy to the World" was not written to be a Christmas tradition.

It was meant to anticipate the triumphant return to earth in Christ's future second coming. While some of the lines echo Handel, and Lowell Mason credited Handel in his original score, music historians maintain that none of the music actually comes from Handel.

The tune is called "Antioch" for the city where believers in Jesus were first called Christians. Joseph Mohr was the writer of "Silent Night", Nahum Tate wrote "While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks", and William Blake's words are used in a hymn called "Jerusalem".

Answer: Vincent van Gogh

Vincent van Gogh moved to Paris in 1886 to live with his brother, Theo, who was the manager of an art gallery. Theo and Vincent lived in the Montmartre district, where many other painters had studios. He studied art and also was influenced by Impressionists like Camille Pissarro, Claude Monet, and Paul Gauguin.

While in Paris, the dark tones of his earlier works began to be replaced with the vibrant colors we see in his later, most popular works. His brushstrokes became more like those of the Impressionists and Pointillists, with short strokes or dots of color, and he developed a technique of using impasto, which gives a three dimensional effect. During two years in Paris, he created a series of paintings of one old windmill from the 1600s that still stood in the neighborhood (and was still standing in the 21st century).

The Netherlands windmill in our photograph is not one painted by Vincent van Gogh, but it also was built in the 1600s and continued in operation, pressing seeds into vegetable oil, into the 21st century.

The windmill's name is "De Zoeker" - which means "The Seeker" - a good match for Vincent van Gogh.

Answer: Sufi

The major branches of Islam are the Sunni, Shia, and Sufi. Sunni Muslims comprise about 85% of Islamic believers, and have been labeled traditionalists. Shi'ites are the second largest group, originating with those who believed Ali to be the first legitimate successor of Muhammad; they are the majority in Iran and have influence in several other Middle Eastern countries.

The Nation of Islam, popularly called Black Muslims, are a primarily American group founded in the 1930s. Sufis are the mystics of the Islamic world, and they emphasize ecstatic worship, love, service, and rejection of worldly values, believing that these practices represent the roots of Islam as written in the Qur'an. Mevlâna Jalâluddîn Rumi (1207-1273) was a Sufi teacher and poet that the whirling dervishes look back to as the father of their customs, especially the "sema ritual" - the whirling dance.

The sema is also called the Mevlevi ritual, based on Rumi's first name. The dance is thought to bring body, soul, and spirit together in spiritual worship.

The Persian word "darvish" emphasizes poverty, as it seems to describe a beggar who would go from door to door.

Answer: Whirlpool Galaxy

NASA calls the Whirlpool Galaxy a "classic spiral galaxy". Its designation Messier 51 comes from a late 18th century list made by Charles Messier, who was interested in comets. He cataloged things he saw that were not comets so he wouldn't have to keep looking at them. Messier was using a small-aperture telescope, and the objects he listed can be seen with today's binoculars.

He was seeing deep sky objects; that is, not individual stars, comets, or planets, but various fuzzy objects then called nebulae: interstellar clouds, star clusters, and galaxies.

The Whirlpool Galaxy is in the constellation Canes Venatici, which means "hunting dogs" in English. This small constellation is near the larger constellation Boötes, the herdsman. Through a series of mistranslations, it was thought that the herdsman had dogs, so eventually some stargazers found dogs in the sky, and later this constellation was given the name. Canes Venatici is also near Ursa Major, which the Greeks saw as the herdsman's ox cart, and the Whirlpool Galaxy can be found by looking southeast of the easternmost star of Ursa Major.

A companion galaxy, MG5195, is visible at the top right of our image. The neighboring galaxy's gravitational influence is leading to star formation and may be responsible for the Whirlpool Galaxy's spiral shape. In our image you can see its spiral arms and dust clouds where new stars are being formed. A cross-like structure is visible at the core of the Whirlpool Galaxy in another Hubble image, leading astronomers to infer that a black hole lies at the center of this galaxy. In 1994, a supernova, a giant explosion that destroys a star, was seen in the Whirlpool Galaxy. Located around 23 million light years away from earth, the Whirlpool Galaxy is 60 thousand light years across.

Answer: Ultimate

Originally called "Ultimate Frisbee" the official term for the sport was shortened to "ultimate" to avoid the use of a brand name owned by the Wham-O company, and the simple piece of equipment is called "flying disc" for the same reason. After selling cake pans he and his wife Lucile played with on the beach in California, Fred Morrison came back after World War II and designed a similar disc he called a "whirl-o-way" or (after a spate of UFO sightings in the 1950s) a "flyin-saucer" and later the "Pluto platter" which was patented and the rights sold to Wham-O in 1957. Meanwhile, for many years, college students in New England had been tossing around a leftover pie pan (or in an alternate legend, the top of a cookie tin) from Connecticut's Frisbie Pie Company. Wham-O renamed their disc "Frisbee" (slightly different spelling), and Ed Headrick patented a professional model for the company. Students in the 1960s began playing a game they called Ultimate Frisbee.

In 1972, the first inter-mural college game of ultimate was played between Rutgers and Princeton universities, and soon after the game began to spread to other countries. Variations on golf, dodge ball, and other games have been developed for the flying disc.

There is also a variation called "Guts" in which the disc is thrown back and forth across a field by opposing teams. The "ultimate" sport is part of the World Games and has its own organization - the World Flying Disc Federation (WFDF) - that was organized in the 1980s, after the Wham-O company had gone a long way toward establishing the new sport under its own International Frisbee Association. The WFDF has written up rules for ultimate and for other sports played using a flying disc. Ultimate is played on a field with end zones, much like the various forms of football, but it does not have referees and depends upon its players to honor the "spirit of the game" and play fairly.

Answer: Whirlybirds

"Whirlybirds" (later syndicated under the name "Copter Patrol") was inspired by an "I Love Lucy" episode in which Lucy has to catch a helicopter flight because she misses the sailing of an ocean liner and must be hoisted down to the deck. The "Whirlybirds" series grew directly from this episode, when the Desilu production company became interested in the helicopter as the focus of a series.

It ran on CBS in the United States and on the BBC in the United Kingdom. The helicopters that delivered wounded soldiers to the hospital unit in the television series "M*A*S*H" were Bell 47s (called the H-13 Sioux by the military), but - while its setting was the 1950s Korean War - the series actually ran from 1972-1983. "Skippy the Bush Kangaroo" also featured a Bell-47 but originally ran from 1966-1970 and was an Australian production.

The aircraft in the 1990s series "Wings" was not a helicopter but a 1981 Cessna 402C and was located on the northeastern United States island of Nantucket.

Answer: warrior

According to the Guild Wars official wiki page, warriors, rangers, and necromancers are associated with axes, but whirling axes are warrior weapons. The wiki explains that with a whirling axe, a warrior can "[s]pin and attack nearby foes. You can move while spinning"; and axes can add to adrenaline, giving the warrior even more power. FT's eburge goes on to say, "Here's a bit of an extra fact: rangers can also whirl their axes in a bubble around them (with a skill called Whirling Defense), reflecting incoming projectiles and creating combination skill effects inside combo fields." WOW.

A whirling axe can also be a stolen skill acquired by a thief. A player on "Guild Wars Insider" comments that the whirling axe lets the warrior spin around and mow down many enemies within seconds and that it is hard for enemies to escape such an attack.

A video game series called "Golden Axe" was introduced by Sega in 1989 and the Play Station game "Rune" owes much of its imagery to Viking battle axes and other hack and slash weapons; but the word "axe" is actually linked to over 500 games by the web site "Giant Bomb".

It is often described as a "melee weapon". Outside of video games, the battle axe, made for combat rather than chopping word or other practical everyday uses, has a long history, with some of the earliest being from ancient China and Egypt. The axe in the picture is displayed with 16th or 17th century armor in Dresden, Germany, but these artistic designs were more for ceremony and display than for battle.

Answer: Millennium Wheel

The London Eye is located in Central London, across the River Thames from the City of Westminster, where the Houses of Parliament and Buckingham Palace stand. It whirls, but at a slow rate, so that one revolution takes about 30 minutes. It was officially opened on New Year's Eve as 1999 rolled over to 2000, although technical delays made the public wait until March 2000 to go for a ride on it.

In 2012, the London Eye was an icon for viewers of London's Olympics. The original Ferris Wheel was part of the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois, USA in 1893, preceding the London Eye by over a hundred years. Two years later, in 1895, the Great Wheel became London's challenge as tallest in the world, built for the Empire of India Exhibition.

The Cosmo Clock 21 was also built for an exposition, in Yokohama, Japan, in 1989. The Sky Wheel is a large Ferris Wheel in an amusement park in Taiwan.