The Wombat File Is Yours to Keep: The Friday Quiz: Grab the Brass Bag of Grab-Gas

It's another grab bag; time to gab and brag, to gag on the blab and garb yourself for grab-bag gassery. Check out these four mini-bags of brain-skag and get ready to wag your head and babble your answers:

1. When Stanley Kubrick told Arthur C. Clarke "Tell your friend I wasn't coming after him," Clarke didn't pass along the message, in part, he later said, because he wasn't sure how true Kubrick's statement was. To what acquaintance of Clarke was Kubrick referring, and what was the film which occasioned the supposed-to-be-reassuring remark?

2. Name the species of mammal that secrets a toxin on the inside of its elbows, which it then spreads upon the bodies of its young to give them a form of self-defense.

3. He suffered from Potts disease, he was exiled from his home city due to his religion, and once wrote: "A person who is too nice an observer of the business of the crowd, like one who is too curious in observing the labour of the bees, will often be stung for his curiosity." Who was this bee-hater?

4. Arthur Henry Sarsfield Ward (under a pen name) created the characters of Sir Denis Nayland Smith and Dr. Petrie, but the books in which they appear take their titles from their far more famous antagonist. What was the antagonist's name?

I won't be around until late in the day to blab back at you, but the first correct answer to each wins a bag of cabbage, a rack of fatback, and a sack of Tab-soaked crab. No Googling or asking Andy McNab. Or watching old Jennifer Saunders sitcoms, or going to Blarney Castle to get the Talent for Eloquence. Or referring to Barbara Streisand in a breezy, attenuated style. One guess on each part per comment, but you may comment as often as you lab.

Comments

1. Eyes Wide Shut, and the friend was Bruce Vallanche. Personally, I believe Kubrick.

2. 'Roos!

3. Maybe that religious proofs dude - it'll come to me.

4. Varney the Vampire

Posted by: boxjam | October 26, 2007 07:23 AM

I don't know, Boxjam seems so authoritative. Nevertheless, I must guess.

1. The Shining and um Johnny Carson.
2. Flying Foxes.
3. Ralph Waldo Emerson.
4. This be Sherlock Holmes.

Posted by: art | October 26, 2007 07:39 AM

Not that Johnny Carson would be the answer for two wombat questions in a short space of time...

Posted by: art | October 26, 2007 07:42 AM

Number 4 is the insidious Dr. Fu Manchu.

Posted by: Scraps | October 26, 2007 10:06 AM

3. Spinoza

Posted by: boxjam | October 26, 2007 10:23 AM

It'd be ironic if #3 was Brigham Young.

Posted by: boxjam | October 26, 2007 10:25 AM

I just said "Ubi mel, ibi apes" by the watercooler, and no one said "Brigham Young" in response, so that would be especially ironic.

BTW, it's Barbra. I'm just sick over the fact I know that.

Posted by: Jonathan | October 26, 2007 07:35 PM

Scraps gets Number 4, but the rest remain unsolved.

Thanks for the spell-check, Jonaathan.

Posted by: lewombat | October 26, 2007 09:22 PM

Hm. AI, and Isaac Asimov?

Posted by: Scraps | October 27, 2007 01:09 PM

1. Henry Kissinger, and Dr. Strangelove.

2. The overexposed meerkat.

3. Samuel Johnson.

Posted by: gavinedwards | October 28, 2007 05:50 PM

1. Nothing yet. The figure we are looking for was, like Kissinger, not American-born.

2. The meerkat is the wrong order and the wrong continent.

3. Johnson was younger. He called one thing the other man created, "a performance which no age or nation could hope to equal."

Posted by: BT | October 29, 2007 09:52 AM

2. Wallaby

Posted by: boxjam | October 29, 2007 10:27 AM

2. Dik-dik

2. Tasmanian devil

Posted by: boxjam | October 29, 2007 10:28 AM

2. Koala

Posted by: boxjam | October 29, 2007 10:30 AM

3. Benjamin Franklin

Posted by: Jonathan | October 29, 2007 11:47 AM

Nope. Not a marsupial on #2, not an American on #3.

Posted by: BT | October 29, 2007 01:11 PM

3: Alexander Pope.

Posted by: Scraps | October 29, 2007 07:39 PM

1: Werner Von Braun, Dr Strangelove.

Posted by: Scraps | October 29, 2007 07:41 PM

Pope and von Braun/Strangelove; Scraps is right on both. For the record, von Braun told Clarke that he'd never gotten around to seeing the film.

Still no word on our mystery mammal. Since it's now Tuesday, I'll remark that we are really talking about three species, all of the genus Nycticebus, specifically Nycticebus coucang, Nycticebus bengalensis, and Nycticebus pygmaeus.

Posted by: BT | October 29, 2007 09:58 PM

My 10-year-old daughter, on hearing that Googling is not allowed, submits a guess of Hippopotamus.

Posted by: Jonathan | October 29, 2007 11:08 PM

Without Google, we're all ten years old.

Nope.

I'll add in passing that Nycticebus are pretty much an arboreal group.

Posted by: BT | October 29, 2007 11:51 PM

Sloths.

Posted by: boxjam | October 30, 2007 01:24 PM

macacs

Posted by: boxjam | October 30, 2007 01:25 PM

I mean macaques