Category Archives: books

books, memes

March Quiz Questions

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Each month we’re posing six pub quiz style questions, with a different subject each month.
As always, they’re designed to be tricky but not impossible, so it’s unlikely everyone will know all the answers – just have a bit of fun.

Literature

  1. Which Italian city is Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet set?
  2. Which of the following did not live entirely in the 19th century: Lermontov; Tolstoy; Dostoevsky?
  3. What is the name of the snake in The Jungle Book?
  4. Winston Smith is the protagonist of which George Orwell novel?
  5. Agatha Christie’s By the Pricking of My Thumbs and Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes are two novels who take their titles from lines in what Shakespeare play?
  6. Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against author Salman Rushdie after the publication of what 1989 novel that mocked the prophet Muhammad?

Answers will be posted in 2 weeks time.

books, quotes

This Month’s Poem

A Touch of Nature
Thomas Bailey Aldrich

When first the crocus thrusts its points of gold
Up through the still snow-drifted garden mould,
And folded green things in dim woods unclose
Their crinkled spears, a sudden tremor goes
Into my veins and makes me kith and Ice
To every wild-born thing that thrills and blows.
Sitting beside this crumbling sea-coal fire,
Here in the city’s ceaseless roar and din,
Far from the brambly paths I used to know,
Far from the rustling brooks that slip and shine
Where the Neponset alders take their glow,
I share the tremulous sense of bud and briar
And inarticulate ardors of the vine.

Find this poem online at All Poetry

books, memes, quotes

This Month’s Poem

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Halsway Carol
Iain Frisk

Lo for the tiding of the long night moon
Let the sunrise call about the morning soon
Short is the biding of the fading light
Sing for the coming of the longest night

North wind tell us what we need to know
When the stars are shining on the midnight snow
All of the branches will be turned to white
Sing for the coming of the longest night

  A winter day, the summer grass turned hay
  Frost in the field ’til the dawn of May
  A summer’s light never shone as clear or as bright
  So dance in the shadows of a winter’s night

Lo for the tiding of the long night moon
May the harvest last until the springtime bloom
Home is our comfort at the winter’s height
Sing for the coming of the longest night

All of the colours of the sunrise sky
Shine a light upon us, as the day goes by
Sun-setting shadows fading out of sight
Sing for the coming of the longest night

  A winter day, the summer grass turned hay
  Frost in the field ’til the dawn of May
  A summer’s light never shone as clear or as bright
  So dance in the shadows of a winter’s night

Find this poem online at Town Common Songs

books, memes, quotes

This Month’s Poem

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Skimbleshanks: The Railway Cat (opening)
TS Eliot

There’s a whisper down the line at 11.39
When the Night Mail’s ready to depart,
Saying “Skimble where is Skimble has he gone to hunt the thimble?
We must find him or the train can’t start.”
All the guards and all the porters and the stationmaster’s daughters
They are searching high and low,
Saying “Skimble where is Skimble for unless he’s very nimble
Then the Night Mail just can’t go.”
At 11.42 then the signal’s nearly due
And the passengers are frantic to a man –
Then Skimble will appear and he’ll saunter to the rear:
He’s been busy in the luggage van!

He gives one flash of his glass-green eyes
And the signal goes “All Clear!”
And we’re off at last for the northern part
Of the Northern Hemisphere!

Find this poem online at Famous Poets and Poems

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This Month’s Poem

On The Ning Nang Nong
Spike Milligan

On the Ning Nang Nong
Where the cows go Bong!
and the monkeys all say BOO!
There’s a Nong Nang Ning
Where the trees go Ping!
And the tea pots jibber jabber joo.
On the Nong Ning Nang
All the mice go Clang
And you just can’t catch ’em when they do!
So its Ning Nang Nong
Cows go Bong!
Nong Nang Ning
Trees go ping
Nong Ning Nang
The mice go Clang
What a noisy place to belong
is the Ning Nang Ning Nang Nong!!

Find this poem online at All Poetry

books, memes, words

September Quiz Answers

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Here are the answers to this month’s six quiz questions. If in doubt, all should be able to be easily verified online.

Literature

  1. Which Tolstoy novel begins “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”? Anna Karenina
  2. Who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016? Bob Dylan
  3. Who wrote A Child’s History of England? Dickens, 1853
  4. Who succeeded Wordsworth as Poet Laureate in Nov 1850? Tennyson
  5. Apart from his novels, what is Anthony Trollope remembered for? Introduction of pillar boxes to UK
  6. Which two-word term was popularised by a 1948 Robert Heinlein novel of the same name, which inspired a science fiction franchise centring on a character named Tom Corbett? Space Cadet

Answers were correct when questions were compiled in late 2024.

books, memes, quotes

This Month’s Poem

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A Modern Hiawatha
George A Strong

When he killed the Mudjokivis,
Of the skin he made him mittens,
Made them with the fur side inside,
Made them with the skin side outside.
He, to get the warm side inside,
Put the inside skin side outside;
He, to get the cold side outside,
Put the warm side fur side inside.
That’s why he put the fur side inside,
Why he put the skin side outside,
Why he turned them inside outside.

Find this poem online at Poetry Nook

books, memes

September Quiz Questions

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Each month we’re posing six pub quiz style questions, with a different subject each month. As always, they’re designed to be difficult, but it is unlikely everyone will know all the answers – so have a bit of fun.

Literature

  1. Which Tolstoy novel begins “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”?
  2. Who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016?
  3. Who wrote A Child’s History of England?
  4. Who succeeded Wordsworth as Poet Laureate in Nov 1850?
  5. Apart from his novels, what is Anthony Trollope remembered for?
  6. Which two-word term was popularised by a 1948 Robert Heinlein novel of the same name, which inspired a science fiction franchise centring on a character named Tom Corbett?

Answers will be posted in 2 weeks time.

books, memes, quotes

This Month’s Poem

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Kubla Khan
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round;
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

Find this poem online at Poetry Foundation