The Wombat File Is Yours to Keep: The Friday Quiz: Tricycle, Redux

After the glorious triumph that was last week's triple-pronged terror of a Quiz, we've gone back to the same well, for an even more aggravating excursion into pointless figure-it-outery. Order up an extra-large yerba mate and get ready for this week's tripartite think-down.

As before, the goal is to identify the individual answer to each devilish prong of the pitchfork, and then stab the one-word "theme" (tangentially related to each answer) through it's eldritch heart. Here we go:

1. This piece of technology was invented by Tom Cranston and Fred Longstaff as part of the Royal Canadian Navy's DATAR system in 1952, the very first version was much larger than almost any version in common use today, and had as its centerpiece a used item of sports equipment. The connection to the theme is one of the first widely-used applications of this technology.

2. An individual giant weta holds the world record for what? Our theme can be found in the name of a being in the same order, which can also reach impressive scale.

3. Born in Wales in 1916, he was an RAF pilot during World War 2 and later did espionage for Britain in Washington DC. He later married the actress Patricia Neal, (who would win an Academy Award for Hud). Who was he? The theme is found in the name of a character from his second-most-well-known work.

Individual correct answers win applause, but only identification of the overall theme gets a limited-edition audiobook of Fred Willard reading Scott McClellan's What Happened in character as Mike LaFontaine. No Googling or insisting that you believed it at the time because you figured, why would the President lie to his own press secretary? One guess at each part (plus theme) per comment but comment oh so much of the comment.

Comments

Have I gone too far this time?

You can tell me...I can take it...

Posted by: BT | May 30, 2008 09:24 AM

#3 sounds like Roald Dahl, unless Patricia Neal married another Welsh spy.

I guess his second-best known work would be James and the Giant Peach. So is the theme-related character James?

Posted by: Scraps | May 30, 2008 09:55 AM

Scraps gets an early win with Dahl for #3. But "James" is not the theme.

Posted by: BT | May 30, 2008 09:59 AM

Is number 1 a radar gun, for measuring speed?

I have no idea what a weta is, but if it holds a world record that world record is obviously longevity - those suckers can live 10,000 years!

Posted by: boxjam | May 30, 2008 10:13 AM

Yeah man, you're pretty out there this week; or perhaps you've just been spoon-feeding us for lo these many years.
Fruitlessly, then:
1. giant fishing trawler
2. giant spider web
um, things that catch other things?

Posted by: bootsy3000 | May 30, 2008 10:13 AM

Following Bootsy's lead, is the character Miss Spider?

Posted by: Scraps | May 30, 2008 10:19 AM

OK, one clues:

The piece of sports equipment from #1 is from an indoor sport. The relation of the answer to the theme has to do with something I spent too much time doing in the 1980s (no, not that! Something you can do in public!)

Posted by: BT | May 30, 2008 10:43 AM

1. Video game?

Theme: centipede?

Posted by: Scraps | May 30, 2008 10:45 AM

Theme solved! Well done, Scraps; I guess that was easier than I'd hoped/feared.

But in fact your answer to #1 is not quite right -- it wasn't a video game that the Canadian RAF guys invented. And we haven't heard the answer to #2 yet either.

Posted by: BT | May 30, 2008 11:24 AM

I want to say that #1 would be a trackball. But my memory places that trackball on the controls of Asteroid, which the 7-11 on the corner had long before it got that fancy schmancy Centipede. (The piece of sports equipment being a billiard ball?)

Posted by: KF | May 30, 2008 12:30 PM

Centipede had a tracball. I'll bet you're right. (Asteroids had buttons.)

Posted by: Scraps | May 30, 2008 12:31 PM

Oh, and I guess the answer to #2 might be number of legs.

Posted by: KF | May 30, 2008 12:32 PM

#1 is trackball. I think the answer to #2 will perhaps seem too recondite to easily get. Perhaps the question was badly formed. But number of legs is not it -- the weta has merely 6.

Posted by: BT | May 30, 2008 02:15 PM

1. graphical user interface; handy for Missile Command
2. longest pledge drive

Posted by: Jonathan | June 2, 2008 12:13 PM

2. longest tail

Posted by: Jonathan | June 4, 2008 05:19 PM

2. longest time spent motionless

Posted by: Jonathan | June 4, 2008 05:20 PM

2. longest attention span

2. largest collection of Mortimer Adler monographs

Posted by: Jonathan | June 4, 2008 05:21 PM

2. most-legged fan of Keanu Reeves

Posted by: Jonathan | June 4, 2008 05:54 PM

2. longest primary campaign

Posted by: Jonathan | June 4, 2008 07:59 PM

OK, so I'm sorry I never posted the final answer. A specimen of the New Zealand weta holds the record for the world's heaviest insect. I thought that as a repulsive/fascinating creepy-crawly, this thematically connected to the "centipede" through-line, especially as many of us have seen footage of giant centipedes catching and eating bats. The idea was that the answer to No. 1 is "track ball" (first constructed with a used bowling ball, and first experienced by many of us playing Centipede in the '80s), the answer to No. 2 was as above, and No. 3 is as Scraps identified, Roald Dahl and the Centipede from James and the Giant Peach.

OK, I won't do this again until I've got the system worked a bit more smoothly...

Posted by: BT | June 6, 2008 12:13 PM

The Wombat File Is Yours to Keep

The Wombat File is a Delaying Tactic that May Save Your Life

The Friday Quiz: Tricycle, Redux

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