"Splendid! One of us is to furnish a repast for the hounds. The other will sleep in this very excellent bed. On guard, Rainsford."

-General Zaroff's last words in Richard Connell's short story "The Most Dangerous Game."

Richard Connell's screenwriting career kicked off after his adventure yarn (quoted above) was adapted for the movies (although he didn't get a screenwriting credit); in the adaptation, an additional female character, Eve, was added. The actress who played Eve is most widely remembered for another film role, in a movie which was filmed simultaneously with "The Most Dangerous Game" and has one central element in common with it.

What was the other film?

First correct answer posted to comments wins a circular tin with a picture of Phil Daniels in Quadrophenia on the lid. No Googling or calling up David Thomson. One guess per comment, but comment as often as you like.

We speak not here of the mere borrowing of cliches; nor of the crushingly formulaic. It is easy to laugh at bad titles, particularly the bad titles of bad books. It is, perhaps, more useful to examine the ways in which certain extraordinarily uncongenial phrases offend the eye and ear every time one sees them in a bookstore, in an advertisement, or on a web page. I propose an anatomy -- a necessarily whimsical one, to be sure -- of the greatest offenders of our sensibilities. Here are three categories to begin with. More doubtless exist, but this will do for a start.

The Clunker

This is the kind that just sounds dreadful if one imagines it falling out of one's mouth. Bad books frequently have graceful euphonius titles, but many books both good and bad seem to have been titled by people hoping to demonstrate that they were raised by Bizarro Superman. Business and self-help books seem to yield a lot of these off-sounding titles. Now, Discover Your Strengths, for example, deploys "Now" in an attempt to lend urgency to a platitude (and to connect it to a previous title: First, Break All the Rules). The resulting phrase is as bland as possible, yet somehow also...wrong. It's like trying to gussy up oatmeal with a few slices of a dill pickle.

More winceworthy is the horrible detour into punmanship: with a title milking the text's questionable analogy between workers and captive cetaceans, Kenneth Blanchard's Whale Done! offends the ear so completely that I suspect no other book title of our time will match it for eliciting pain. I feel I can actually hear some cretin fatuously congratulating me on a pointless job "WHALE done!"

A certain strain of lighthearted category mysteries also tends in this direction, but although Killer Hair: A Crime of Fashion and Hocus Croakus are indeed themselves near-criminal offenses of lazy wordplay, we should be lenient with the authors, since such abominations are almost expected in certain fields.

The Windmill

These titles, swollen with gas, float before one's eye in the bookstore and beg to be punctured. No one genre is more truly guilty than another of this particular crime in titling, although perhaps literary fiction winds up in this category with notable frequenc -- and authors at all levels of accomplishment fall prey. Which is worse -- Updike's Seek my Face or Nicholas Sparks' Nights in Rodanthe? An impossible decision.

Horror and suspense also produces a number of these inflated title monstrosities -- Cerulean Sins, by Laurell K. Hamilton being a perfect example. One should also nod in the direction of Stephen King's From a Buick 8, which manages to sound self-important and a bit like a typographical error at the same time.

In the pretentiousness department, of course, the past master is the late, great Robert Ludlum, whose formula of "The [Name] [Portentous Abstraction]" has been almost endlessly parodied. While no one title stands out (is The Prometheus Deception any worse than The Osterman Weekend? Well, OK, yes, but you get the idea), Ludlum's greatest howler is perhaps on display in the title of The Cry of the Halidon This thriller was originally published under a psuedonym, as if the author understood that such screaming badness was wretched even for him.

(It goes without saying that to attack epic fantasy titles on these grounds would be to shoot already dead fish in a barrell, with a howitzer.)

Seriesitis

It's understandable that an author with a series needs to maintain whatever tag lets readers know that this book, indeed, fits the beloved mold already established by thirty or so masterworks that have gone before. But some do it with a certain amount of grace, and others make a poor choice early on, and then are stuck with it. J.D. Robb's series of futuristic crime-romance tales uses the rather uninspiring phrase "...in Death" as the basis for each entry's name. While the first title, Naked in Death, simply sounds agreeably pulp-y, the sequelae suffer. Conspiracy in Death, Holiday in Death, Judgment in Death...death, be not proud, for you'll apparently run around with any old adjective or noun, even the ones you have nothing to say to.

Barbara Parker's "Suspicion of..." series has the converse problem. While a Suspicion of Deceit is plausible, a Suspicion of Innoncence is confusing, and Suspicion of Vengeance begins to sound like crime-novelist glossolalia.

Some series novels take a bad turn, titlewise, and then recover: Janet Evanovich started off with One for the Money and punningly sequeled with Two for the Dough -- a neat enough twist that the ear can handle. Then, however, Three to Get Deadly came along, with its nails scraping on the blackboard -- a bad combo of an almost-rhyme with the fact that "to Get Deadly" barely makes any sense. Four to Score was like a verbal shrug -- after the tortured half-cleverness of the previous title, this was just surrender to the vestige of form. Only the ill-considered rhyme remained.

But all was not lost! Evanovich wisely lightened her touch with the titles, and used the ordinal numbers more simply from then on: High Five, Hot Six, Seven Up, Hard Eight, To the Nines.

Poetry it ain't, but it doesn't echo horribly in my inner ear, either. And given the number of titles that do, I'm ready to give the woman some kind of award: Euphony under trying series-writer circumstances. Whale done, indeed.

Next: the problem of Romance.

A very loud helicopter that, we presume, was looking for weapons of mass destruction on the streets of Parks Slope spent the wee hours of last night circling above our apartment. Thus we are bleary-eyed and unbushy-tailed, and we offer with no further attempt at explanation or apology this week's question.

He walked the streets in white robes and sometimes affected a golden crown. He promised serenity to his followers. His strict program for living included both equality for men and women and communal ownership. It also meant no bean-eating, disguising meanings when one spoke, or killing white roosters. After a while he attracted followers, who said that he could predict the future, heal miraculously, and travel in spirit to distant locations.
Eventually, the local authorities kicked him out of town.

He became world-famous for something else entirely.

Who was he?

The first correct answer posted to comments wins a selection of post-it notes emblazoned with the expensively-comissioned logo and brand-name of a now-defunct dot-com business entity. No Googling or getting your extensive Friendster network to help you out. One guess per comment, but comment as often as you like.

Last night, in a rare case of the Wombat File staff actually remembering to buy tickets for something we wanted to see, we bestirred ourselves to Belle and Sebastian's benefit performance for the Prospect Park Alliance. As if to reward our unusual lack-of-slackness on the artistic front, the humidity retreated, a light breeze ruffled the oaks above our heads (whch glowed in the lights, prompting an Ent-comparison from Stuart Murdoch), and a few stars made themselves visible.

The band was surprisingly tight and the sound excellent for an outdoor show – it's always difficult to work with strings on stage, but on songs like "Don't Leave the Light on Baby" they had every layer of sound perfectly aligned. Songs from the forthcoming record, particularly "Roy Walker," were encouraging, and a Velvets-esque rave-up coda to "Judy and the Dream of Horses" was ample compensation for the fact that the band didn't play too many songs from If You're Feeling Sinister. There was also an encore cover of "My Little Red Book," more fun in the idea than in the execution, but still a Love-ly way to wrap up a summer night.

Although we do have power here in part of Brooklyn, I hope you'll forgive me when I say that I just plain forgot about the quiz this week, and had even been online for a good hour, reading news and trying to find out when my friends in less-fortunate parts of town would have power, before I realized that gosh, it's Friday, isn't it?

So, today's special Blackout Edition of the Quiz -- what star of television and film did I see, looking as anxious as the rest of confused Gotham, on Thursday afternoon after the lights went out?

First correct answer posted to comments wins a bottle of warm diet Snapple.

Hello, Jake? Has the early edition gone to bed yet? No. Good. Listen, this one's the big one, Jake. It's the Pulitzer that we've deserved for so long. I'm here in Plano. Texas. That's right, Texas. It's a big country, Jake, you ought to get out and see it some time...all right, all right, keep your shirt on! Anyway, Jake, I'm here in Plano with some Episcopalians. No, no, E-P-I-S-C-O -- right, right. Sorry. This line's got static -- must be a tumbleweed off course somewhere.

Anyway, somethings cooking here in Plano, Jake, something big. These Anglican communion types -- well, you know that big dust-up over that New Hampshire fella -- that's right, the new Bishop, the gay one. Looks like something's going on down here, Jake. And it's happening all over the country, too. These people are unsettled. They're thinking it over. Mulling it, you might say. Turning it over in their minds. Giving it the old brain-treatment. Jake, I'd bet this bus-trip-battered fedora of mine that these people are engaged in nothing sort of pondering.

Considering that our near future looks to include California Governor Ranier Wolfcastle, it's time to turn away helplessly and consider, once again, the comfortably dead past. Although I'm afraid of having to re-christen this the Wombat File 19th-century quiz, here's yet another field trip to the fun-fact-ery of yesteryear.

One hundred forty-five years ago this month, Julia Archibald Holmes wrote in her journal "I have accomplished the task which I marked out for myself . . . Nearly everyone tried to discourage me from attempting it, but I believed that I should succeed . . . " She became the first woman on record to accomplish the task to which she referred. 35 years later, Katharine Lee Bates also did it, and the poem she was inspired to compose will be familiar to most readers.

What did Mrs. Holmes do in the summer of 1858?

First correct answer posted to comments wins a 5-day internship with the Gary Coleman For Governor campaign organization. No Googling or asking the barkeep. One guess per comment, but comment as often as you'd like.

Chat with Johnny Rotten -- courtesy of USA Today!

Manage a puppet theater!

Compose a duet for Rhea and Jaycen.

Write a speech about the United Nations (a quartet of C-Notes will be yours!)

Share your beauty-school secrets.

Friday has leapt upon us with its customary spastic ferocity, and -- responding with all of the terrified vigor we can muster -- we desperately offer the following nutrition-free noodler for your mental mastication.

This peripatetic American was living the placid life of a recruiting officer in Pittsburgh, but when he heard about a future president's victory in battle, he set out for New York and got on a ship to go and join the fighting. After six more years in the military, he resigned his commission and took a job as a manager of a California bank. That didn't work out particularly well, and six years later found him in Louisiana, running a school that would later become a large university. But not quite two years after that he resigned that post, and headed to St. Louis, where he briefly served as the director of a transit company. He did a few things after that which made his name more well-known. He died in New York City.

Who was this wandering soul?

First correct answer posted to comments wins a transcript copy of Wallace Shawn's DVD commentary about working with Tom Selleck in Monte Walsh. No Googling or swiping Dr. Strange's all-seeing Eye of Agamotto. One guess per comment, please, but comment as frequently as you like.