The Wombat File Is Yours to Keep

We're home this morning with Imogen, hoping to get this quiz out to you while her attention is engrossed by two pegs, an eyedropper, and a plastic pig (some of you may recall the NBC sitcom based on precisely this premise). So pardon us if we get right to today's trivial point:

Of Chile's 5 UNESCO World Heritage Sites, one received its designation because it preserves artifacts more than a millenium in age. Of the others, one is marked for special treatment because -- in the process of dealing with one of the largest natural sources of a particular substance in the world -- it became the center for a vibrant workers' culture. The substance those workers dealt with is famous for its use both in war and peace. What are the artifacts in the first case, and the substance in the second?

First correct answers posted to comments wins five minutes with the pegs and the eyedropper. The pig has already rolled way back under the sofa: can you reach back there and see if you can get it? Oh, no, that looks like a bit of old bagel. No Googling or grabbing your sister's hair. I said no. One guess (at both parts) per comment but comment as often as you'd like.

Posted by BT at 09:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Hey there, lovers of stupid questions it takes too long to read, let alone answer, to be very entertaining. Did you miss us last week? No? Well, we're back anyway.

After the shocking lapse of last Friday, we have an inordinately large pile-up of the kind of brief questions that we're just too lazy to pad out into full-on quiz questions. Instead, we present them all to you at once...consider it a smorgasbord of delights primed to clog your neural pathways.

1. Oscar Hammerstein, the grandfather of the famous lyricist, was a big-time theater owner and opera buff. He also held multiple industrial patents, including one for the first automatic assembly of what product (more popular in his day than ours, but still around)?
2. What famous retail brand took the name of a Nashville hotel in 1886, where a product served by a local grocer became well-known?
3. In the late 1950s, a teenager named Ernest Evans was rising to local fame in Philadelphia by singing over the loudspeaker at Fresh Farm Poultry, where he worked. He went on to become famous under what name, bestowed on him by a co-worker?
4. The name of what modern conveyance is derived from a word in French that originally meant both a springy jump or a young goat?
5. After watching a young Polish girl doing it in 1835, Joseph Neruba formalized and popularized what activity, which swept through Europe shortly thereafter?

FIrst correct answer to each of the comments wins a jellybean of a type rejected by my daughter. Available colors are Interstate-Highway-Exit-Sign-Green, Wilting Pink with Variable Flecks, Not-Quite-White, Fading-Bruise Yellow and Too-Brown Brown. No exchanges. No Googling or making a springy jump like a young goat. One guess per each part per comment but comment as often as you can bear to.

Posted by BT at 11:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (19)

I just wanted to make one of those mandatory blog posts where the blogger writes about why s/he doesn't blog anymore really even though s/he maintains the illusion of having a blog that requires blogging software and pushbutton updates and email notifications and RSS feeds and a new beta thing from google that you build out of lego and recycled styrofoam using specs you download via text message and attach a bluetooth headset to it and then every time your favorite blogger describes his lunch it scuttles across the room and writes the first four sentences of the blog post in the accumulated dust and if you clap your hands then it does the rest of the post by squirting out shaving cream in a manner that is slightly naughty-seeming if you've got that kind of a sense of humor which lets face it you probably do.

And I just wanted to mention that although the exhaustion factor of parenthood is only slightly more universally noted than the fact that Ann Coulter is a bad person, I am exhausted on account of my parental duties.

And I want to make all sorts of foolish promises about making this blog better and a repository for reflections on the Nathan Englander novel riding around in my bag which may or may not get read in 2007 and the CSA vegetables rotting in my fridge, or the enormous bloody what-have-I-done headache of working on aforementioned CSA yet expressed mind you in a compelling and amusing manner that yet does justice to my real pride in actually working on something for the community however over-taxing.

And I also want to mention that I'm not getting any real writing done these days either and somehow feel better for having admitted that here and by writing this entry make a vow to myself and everyone indulgent enough to have read this far that somehow I can turn that around starting now.

And in addition I'd like to find a compelling and engaging way to tell you that Imogen has started talking a little and is pulling up a lot and will probably be walking soon and both girls have a virus and are a little sweaty in their beds tonight and I really wish I could do more to make them more comfortable and I went again to the carousel with Helena on Sunday and omg there's really nothing, nothing, nothing in the world so exactly on the nose of perfect like riding the carousel with your three-year-old.

And I think that's where I should probably leave it.

Posted by BT at 10:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Without further ado:

Invented by Juan de la Cierva in 1923, this device has been used by ranchers and artillery units. One was featured in the James Bond movie You Only Live Twice, and another in Mad Max: The Road Warrior. Batman briefly had one in the late thirties and early forties.

What is the device?

First correct answer posted to comments gets a copy of a rare early edition of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in which Edmund says "Aslan sucks!". No Googling, or asking your Facebook "friends." One guess per comment but comment as often as you like.

Posted by BT at 11:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (20)

The author of the No. 2 nonfiction bestseller in 1912 (according to Publishers Weekly), she was also the first woman to graduate from the University of Rome La Sapienza Medical School, and her studies there led her to begin work in a Roman housing project in 1907. She lived in Italy until Mussolini chased her out, and then fled Spain in the wake of the Spanish Civil War. She moved to the Netherlands, where she died in 1952. In 1948, she wrote ""Times have changed, and science has made great progress, and so has our work; but our principles have only been confirmed, and along with them our conviction that mankind can hope for a solution to its problems, among which the most urgent are those of peace and unity..."

Her work fell out of fashion in the U.S. after her early fame, but her reputation and methods were revived in the U.S. in 1960, and remain influential in many circles. An international organization dedicated to her ideas (one of several) is now headquartered in the Netherlands. She has also been pictured on Italian currency, both on coins and paper money.

What is her name -- (which also appeared in the title of her bestseller)?

First correct answer posted to comments wins a Eurobeat remix of the Emerson, Lake and Palmer version of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. No Googling or being so smart that you knew this already without even really having to think about it, because that's just going to take the wind out of my sails and frankly I just can't deal with that today, know what I'm sayin'? Thanks. Anyway, one guess per comment, but comment as often as you like.

Posted by BT at 11:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)