Questions Inspired By My Bedroom Quiz

Answer: Babylon-5

The Bab-5 CCG is a very complicated game, and it's taken me over a year to become vaguely accomplished at it. The show is really cool, though. The character dynamics are more complex and developed than those of "Star Trek." Bab-5 was, I have heard, the first show where the episodes are more like chapters of a book than isolated events.

Answer: Patrick O'Brian

In Patrick O'Brian's books, the British Navy are the heroes, and the main enemy is the Americans in the War of 1812. However, the Hollywood production changed the enemy to the French in the Napoleanic Wars, since obviously no American movie could feature the US as a possible bad guy.

Answer: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the philosopher and rival of Isaac Newton

The Baroque Cycle is a masterful work because of how well it blends the fictional and historical. The books are also unendurably long, at almost 1000 pages each, but that's beside the point. The point is that "Quicksilver" and "The Confusion," and the yet unpublished volume, "The System of the World," tell a terrific story of history and adventure, which is of course just the sort of stuff I fall for.

Answer: Sam sum

In my Latin class, we were asked to translate this as a welcome break from stupid stories about Ancient Roman children. I'm curious about how they figured out how to say the things like "train" that Latin would obviously have no word for.

Answer: San Diego, California

The Point Loma light (in the Point Loma area of San Diego) does a wonderful job of preserving an image of the life of a lighthouse keeper in the nineteenth century. I believe it's a National Historic Site. Instead of being constructed like a traditional East Coast lighthouse, with a tall tower and an adjoining house, Point Loma has a house on the bottom and a lighthouse tower rising out of the centre of it.

Answer: No

To my great agony, you cannot delete files from a CD-R. I certainly wish you could, because then I could reuse them, but it's only CD-RWs that you can rewrite (hence the name). However, my CD player won't read CD-RWs, so I'm at a distinct disadvantage, I fear.

Answer: a pen never had the feathers on it; they were always removed

The feathery bits were always removed because they would get in the way of the writer's hand. For some reason, this pen thinks it's more aesthetically pleasing to leave the barbs on. A pen has to be sharp for you to write with it, glass was very often used for ink bottles, and I don't see why people wouldn't have used blue ink, though it was more expensive because it had to be made from indigo, a rare substance.

Answer: red

The iPod mini holds fewer songs than the regular iPod (only 1000 songs, how little!), and thus costs less. I'm still very taken with it, though. If I want to worry my sister, I can always call it my "baby."

Answer: bagpipes

The chanter is like bagpipes without the bag and the drones (those two or three big pipes that stick up at the top). It's much easier to play and is a good way of learning the fingering and the melodies without added difficulty.

Answer: philosophy

David Hume was an eighteenth century philosopher, known as a member of the skeptic movement. Skepticism primarily entails that we can't make any assumptions about the future, no matter how rational. He wrote some famous philosophical treatises and also a history of England.

Answer: he was an atheist

While at Oxford, Shelley wrote a pamphlet essentially criticising Christianity. When he was summoned to a tribunal to explain this "little syllabus," and refused to answer any questions or deny writing the pamphlet, he was expelled from the university.

Answer: Scarborough Fair

The version of "Scarborough Fair" that Simon and Garfunkel sing is extremely different from the traditional version of the British Isles that Francis James Child recorded in his compilation of traditional songs. That version is called "The Elfin Knight" and involves a lady who meets an elf along the road, and is set a number of impossible tasks by the elf.

Answer: No

Although many other characters' names are different, retaining the original French names, Asterix and Obelix's names remain the same as in every translation of the Asterix books.

Answer: language

Richard Lederer's publications have included "Anguished English" and "Fractured English," both books dealing with mistakes and typing errors people have made in written English.

Answer: Delta

Delta is one of the US's biggest airlines, based in Atlanta. I have no idea why it is named after a Greek letter, but am deadly curious in the matter.