Category: oldblog

Trivioku puzzle #4

trivioku4
trivioku4

1.What’s the term for a public outdoor swimming pool? (4)
2.What is solid carbon dioxide also known as? (3,3)
3.Which organisation has 12 members,including Iran and Nigeria,now that Indonesia has left? (4)
4.At which village in Radnorshire was diarist Francis Kilvert the curate? (5)
5.What’s the high-pitched cry often made by puppies called? (4)
6.What was the nickname of Castilian nobleman Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar? (2,3)
7.Dr Johnson,Jerome K Jerome and Tom Hodgkinson have all edited magazines called The — ? (5)
8.What word connects Sting with a city in Poland? (6)
9.Which character,first name Tom,features in several of Patricia Highsmith’s novels? (6)
HINT:This is down, leading to food shortages.

Posted on by Andrew Chapman

The warp (stop all the clocks)

has already broken the news (and spoilered my anecdote!), but I’m going to drone at you anyway…

The world won’t be the same without Ken Campbell’s drawling of the words ‘glossolalia’, ‘Neville Plashwit’ and ‘gastromancy’, and walking his dogs on the Walthamstow marshes.

Permit me to trot out a personal memory: and I were chatting to Ken (for it is he) in the bar before a show a few years ago and I speculated whether any of the material was the same as in the last show of his I’d seen. He replied in his remarkable nasal way: “As Newton said about Jesus, he was made of different stuff.”

As he said it, he was pathetically counting out dozens of pennies to see if he had enough for a drink, so I stepped in and got him one. It was, beloved readers, a coke. Ned Sherrin and Alan Coren never told stories like this, eh?

I can still remember some of Macbeth in Vanuatu pidgin thanks to Ken, and that’s a life skill to treasure – though remembers more than I do.

Actually, I’ve also stalked him along Green Lanes with another friend, but that’s another story.

I guess we’ll never get the History of Comedy Part Two now. Sniff.

Maybe if I keep working on my already prodigious eyebrows I can do the tribute act some day.

Posted on by Andrew Chapman 4

Trivioku puzzle #3

trivioku3
trivioku3

1.What gives you the edge in typography and economics? (6)
2.Which central Indian city is associated with the cobra? (6)
3.Which Roman town was the birthplace of Cicero? (7)
4.Which edible crustacean has branching gills? (5)
5.Which animal is associated with the zodiac sign Aries? (3)
6.Keats wrote an ode to a Grecian what? (3)
7.Which northern town is associated with both George Orwell and George Formby? (5)
8.Which modern country was formerly known as Persia? (4)
9.What is the base unit of mass in the metric system? (4)
HINT: Our planet is doing this.

Posted on by Andrew Chapman

Trivioku puzzle #2

trivioku2
trivioku2

1.Graham Greene wrote a novel called Travels with My _ ? (4)
2.The Magic Flute and La Traviata are examples of what art form? (5)
3.Who is the Muse of lyric poetry? (5)
4.What popular edible fish often swims with dolphins? (4)
5.Who allegedly fiddled while Rome burnt? (4)
6.Which bone runs parallel to the radius? (4)
7.Which 1571 naval battle was also the title of a poem by G K Chesterton? (7)
8.What is the name of the boiled cornmeal dish popular in Italy? (7)
9.Which former US presidential candidate is a congressman from Texas? (3,4)

HINT:What are environmentalists trying to save?

Posted on by Andrew Chapman

Trivioku puzzle #1

Trivioku1
Trivioku1

1.Which country’s capital city shares its name with a type of grape? (4)
2.Which tuberous vegetable is often wrongly called a sweet potato? (3)
3.What name is given to a benign tumour composed of fat tissue? (6)
4.Which African language’s dialects are divided into three groups,Northern,Benaadir and Maay? (6)
5.Klein,Wolf and Campbell – what do they have in common? (5)
6.Which religion’s name means ‘surrender (to God)’? (5)
7. What do Goldfrapp and Moyet share,but not Hannigan? (6)
8. Alfred — is an actor who has played Tony Hancock and Doctor Octopus.(6)
9. What term is given to money paid to a former unmarried partner? (8)

HINT: Gods and athletes

Posted on by Andrew Chapman 1

The author did it

There’s an interesting article about G K Chesterton in the latest New Yorker (the article’s not online yet), which mentions in passing that GKC ‘must have influenced’ Borges – indeed he did. It sent me ferreting off to find some of the essays where Borges wrote about him, and I found one I hadn’t come across before, ‘The Labyrinths of the Detective Story and Chesterton’.

Anyway, what caught my eye was Borges listing what he took to be the rules of classic detective fiction. Here they are (his words in italics, my comments afterwards):

A. A discretional limit of six characters.
B. The declaration of all the terms of the problem. This is basically Dorothy L Sayers’ ‘fair play’ rule – I’m sure I saw an essay of hers with a list of principles once, but I can’t track it down.
C. An avaricious economy of means. I’m not totally certain what he’s on about here (he only gives counterexamples, eg Conan Doyle regularly breaks B), though I think there’s a tone of Occam’s razor about it.
D. The priority of how over who. ie what happened is more interesting to deduce than who actually did it.
E. A reticence concerning death. (He adds that detective fiction’s “glacial muses are hygieve, fallacy and order”. I think he means it should be an elegant puzzle rather than a gore-fest.
F. A solution that is both necessary and marvellous. There’s only one solution, which makes the reader boggle – but has no recourse to the supernatural. Chesterton’s Father Brown is his model.

That was written in 1935 – only a few years after Ronald Knox came up with his ten commandments for detective fiction (1929) and SS Van Dine formulated his twenty rules (1929). (Side note to self: ooh, I must track down The Sins of Father Knox.)

Anyway, er yeah, not sure why I’m posting this – just interested me. I wonder if there are similar principles that make games work?

Posted on by Andrew Chapman 2

Howzat?

It’s all been happening. On Sunday I played cricket for the first time in 20 years. It was advertised as ‘Rubbish Cricket’, so I took comfort from that, but was nevertheless the rubbishest player there (out of 11 in total, so only small teams). That said, I did have a moment of glory right at the very end when I took a wicket. The setting was glorious: the village cricket ground at Ewelme. On Monday I ached all over all bloody day, because clearly I are seriously unfit.

On Tuesday I went to some arts/business function at the BMW MINI plant at Cowley, avoiding the awards ceremony it was all about purely to go on a free tour of the plant afterwards – these are apparently much prized, and I just like being in places where I have no conceivable business.

It’s an extraordinary experience – well, after 90 minutes I was getting pretty bored, but before that it was more overwhelming. We visited two of the vast (and we’re talking about dozens of football pitches each here) ugly prefab buildings that grace that bit of Oxford’s ring road. The first was where loads of huge robots swing around in constant motion, grabbing parts and welding them together and so on. It’s the most dehumanised setting I’ve ever seen (there are very few actual meatware staff in there), like something out of an sf horror film really. The Matrix? You’re already in it, sunshine.

I only asked one question: “Are the robots made by robots?” They are. The whole place is an amazing monument to human technology – and utterly depressing. I couldn’t help but think our civilisation is totally fucked.

The second shed had lots more people, all of whom do 11-hour shifts on huge conveyors (they’re moving on them too), fitting all the twiddly bits to the cars. They make 50 Minis (sorry, MINIs) an hour, every single one to order and different from its shiny neighbour.

And fourthly (geddit?), on Wednesday we learnt something important – that’s a story for another day, but the good news is that all is well.

Posted on by Andrew Chapman 14