Welcome to the New Year. The New You. The brilliant You who is ready to astonish us all with your knowledge of the recondite, your mastery of the arcane, the occult, and the just plain unimportant. The Quiz Champ you were born to be.

If you played in our 2004 festival of Mentaliciousness, you're ready to defend your standing or better yourself in our new four-week festival of factoid-mongering. If you hung back, now is the time to step up and claim your birthright as a Wombat File reader. And if you've joined us since then, let your humble editor assure you that no better entertainment will come your way over the next couple of fortnights.

The Players: Every wombat-blooded reader who dares join us.

The Goal: Wind up at the end of January (and four rounds of play, plus the occasional Friday "lightning" round) with the greatest point total out of 2006 possible points.

The Prizes: One-of-a-kind items, mementoes of a precious, fleeting moment of wombattery. I'll tell you all about them as we go along.

The Method: For those of you who are only familiar with our Friday quizzes, the questions will be similarly tortured, but answers in this case should be submitted by EMAIL. Please send all answers (and quiz-related correspondence) to

bt AT wombatfile DOT com

with the word "quiz" in the subject line. That last bit is important, as I will only be looking for answers in a filtered folder.

Deadlines: the full-credit deadline for ROUND ONE (see the ten questions just below) is 12:01 AM Thursday, January 5. All correct answers received by that time will receive full credit. Early Thursday I will post a set of Delicious Clues for each brain-whizzer. There will be a second, post-clue deadline for answers of 12:01 AM Friday, January 6. In other words, you've got a chance to use the clues to get closer to any question that stumped you. All answers (or changes to previous answers) sent after the clues are posted will get half-credit.

You may submit some answers before the first deadline, and hold others until after the clues, and there is no penalty for changing your answer, although any changes made post-clue take your possible points for that question down to 1/2. Your final answer is the one you are stuck with.

General prohibitions and good sportsmanship: You're on your honor, here, just as in the Friday quizzes. No Googling in pursuit of the answers, and no trips to the reference shelf, the reading room, or that pile of old Popular Mechanics in the den. Points acquired by playing fast and loose with this rule will weigh on your soul like Jacob Marley's freaking chains, capeesh?

Also, use the comments for general trash-talking, boasting, and silly mouthing-off, but under no circumstances should you be offering hints to other players, should you have figured out any of the answers. Pain of disqualification, etc. (If you want a question clarified, feel free to email. If a serious emendation of the question is mandated, I'll make sure it goes in the comments).

Enough said. Let's get ROUND ONE underway. 10 questions, each a possible 40 points, for a total possible of 400 points.

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1. Between 1816 and 1855, Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von Struve mapped a "chain" which stretched through parts of what was at the time only two nations. This chain is now a UNESCO World Heritage site that is part of ten separate countries. What was its purpose?

2. There were 105 of these. The first was named Adobe, and the last was named Kennebec. Some of the others were called Aardvark, Ferret, Chipmunk, Manatee, Calamity, Bandicoot, and Bluegill Triple Prime. From the first to last, their existence spanned a little more than a year, and they were the last of their kind-- there were no more after Kennebec. What were they?

3. Howard and his three brothers -- Bob, Dick and Don -- got a big break when they performed with Bing Crosby on his hit recording of "Swingin' on a Star." This appearance led to a nightclub act with singer Kay Thompson. Howard broke out when he went solo -- his third single, "Canadian Sunset," hit the Top 10, and he had a #1 hit the following year. At one point in his career, the only performers with more gold albums were Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra. Under what name did he become famous?

4. Sir James Coats once said, of a unique and exclusive sporting locale, " [it] is a powerful and attractive mistress. She will stand no nonsense when you are learning the ropes, and many and severe are the rebuffs that she administers to her most ardent suitors." The club that maintains the site to which he refers calls the activity pursued thereon "one of the last amateur sports." What is the activity in question?

5. Name the author of the following passage, the opening of a 1938 novel by an author who would become considerably more famous for work published more than a decade later:

At first he could not see clearly what they were pointing at. There aseemed to be some paler and slenderer plants than he had noticed before amongst the purple ones: her hardly attended to them, for his eyes were busy searching the ground-- so obsessed was he with the reptile fears and insect fears of modern imagining. It was the reflections of the new white objects in the water that sent his eyes back to them: long, streaky white reflections motionless in the running water-- four or five, no, to be precise, six of them. He looked up. Six white things were standing there. Spindly and flimsy things, twice or three times the height of a man. His first idea was that they were images of men, the work of savage artists; he had seen things like them in books of archaeology. But what could they be made of, and how could they stand? -- so crazily thin and elongated in the leg, so top-heavily pouted in the chest, such stalky, flexible-looking distortions of early bipeds ... like something seen in one of those comic mirrors. They were certainly not made of stone or metal, for now they seemed to sway a little as he watched; now with a shock that chased the blood from his cheeks he saw that they were alive, that they were moving, that they were coming at him, He had a momentary, scared glimpse of their faces, thin and unnaturally long, with long, drooping noses and drooping mouths of half-spectral, half-idiotic solemnity.

6. In Venezuela in 1824, a physician experimenting with compounds of plants of the genus Gentiana created a medicine later adopted by the British Navy. A readily available product, the direct descendent of this remedy, still carries the name of a Venezuelan town. What is the (non-medical) product?

7. Years after defeating his foe at a battle in Indiana, the victorious general went on to refer to the man he defeated as "one of those uncommon geniuses which spring up occasionally to produce revolutions and overturn the established order of things." The defeated leader fled to Canada, but came back to inflict further damage in Michigan and is considered a hero by many. One of the members of the victorious forces later had a grandson who was named for this figure -- but when his father died, the young man was given a "Christian" first name, and the tribute name left as his middle name. The boy went on to be one of the most famous Americans of the 19th century. Who was the "uncommon genius" commemorated in this boy's name?

8. Basque "anguleros" use water infused with what substance to kill the juvenile eels they net in river estuaries?

9. In 1994, the American Society of Civil Engineers, apparently responding to the challenge long ago thrown down by the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, offered a list of "Seven Wonders of the Modern World," commemorating "the greatest civil engineering achievements of the 20th century." The honored projects include two towers, a bridge, a tunnel, a dam, a water-control network, and a canal, some of which are in (or abut) territories controlled by multiple nations. Name the eight countries (total) in which these works can be found -- amazingly, none are Asian nations. Note: Partial credit possible.

10. During World War II, Bill Scott worked in the U.S. Army's First Motion Picture Unit, alongside Ronald Reagan. In 1953, he adapted Edgar Allen Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" for an Academy Award-nominated short film. Between the years of 1959 and 1964, he vocally interpreted the work of multiple poets on a well-known television program, including the work of William Wordsworth, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Charles Lamb. Scott was also one of the chief writers and co-producers of the program. What was the name of the television show?