You've GOT to be Joking! Trivia Quiz

Answer: Brahms

Brahms, born six years after Beethoven died, spent a long time working on his first symphony, conscious (as was the rest of the musical world) that he was Beethoven's musical heir, at least as regarded the symphony. Brahms' First Symphony in C minor proved a hit; so much so that the conductor Hans von Buelow gave it the approving nickname "Beethoven's 10th".

Answer: gray

...in other words, same colour as a black rhino. The word "white" is a corruption of the Dutch word "wijd", meaning "broad". This applies to the white rhino's snout, which is ideal for cropping on the open grasslands of southern Africa, whereas the black rhino's beaklike snout is adapted for stripping the foliage of its natural scrubland habitat.

Answer: False

It was fought on Breed's Hill. The Americans intended to fortify Bunker Hill, but they got confused on the night march to it; they crossed it and fortified the Breed's Hill position instead.

Answer: False

Shelley didn't name the monster, presumably to reinforce its un-humanity. Viktor Frankenstein was the man who created (or more accurately, assembled) it.

Answer: Pipe (for smoking)

Magritte is right, of course. It's not a pipe - it's a painting of one. I could say that he was making a comment on the nature of reality and representation in 2-D art. However, he himself despised critics who looked for reasons for his paintings - so I won't. (He said that ideas just came to him and he painted them without knowing what they meant.)

Answer: non-flammable

Inflammable and flammable mean the same thing. The prefix "in-" in this case comes, not from the Latin negative prefix meaning "not", but from the Latin intensifier meaning "into, in, within, on or towards". It's from that root that we get the words "intensify" and "intoxicate", as well as "inflammation" and "inflammatory".

The only possible opposite of "flammable" is the clunky and artificial "non-flammable". The Oxford English Dictionary records the first use of "flammable" in this sense as being in the early nineteenth century, by which time the synonymous "inflammable" had existed for a couple of centuries.

Answer: Patricia

I think any blurb would be embarrassing, don't you? Moving right along....

Answer: Albert

You remember how besotted Queen Victoria was about her beloved husband Albert? When he died, she expressed the wish that no future king should bear that name; the later Albert (full name: Albert Frederick Arthur George) respected that wish and used one of his other names when he was crowned.

Answer: northwest

Well, that's how it looks on my atlas. The general orientation of the country of Panama is east-west; the Panama Canal, cutting directly across it at a point where the country twists to a northeast/southwest orientation, is therefore oriented southeast/northwest, and it's the latter direction you'd be travelling in to get from the Pacific to the Atlantic (or more accurately its Caribbean appendage).

Answer: Madonna

What else? Surely you wouldn't accuse a rank quiz amateur of including trick questions on his first quiz, would you? (For the record, Madonna's full name is Madonna Louise Ciccone, born 1958.)