Tag Archives: blog

memes

January Quiz Answers

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

General Knowledge (1)

  1. What type of clothing is a Glengarry? Hat or bonnet
  2. Which country features a shipwreck on its national flag? Bermuda
  3. Which two months of the year are named for mortal men? July and August
  4. Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire is famous for which two foods? Stilton Cheese, Melton Mowbray Pork Pie
  5. Name the type of rigid airship, first flown commercially in 1910, and carrying many thousands of fare-paying passengers before WWI? Zeppelin
  6. Benjamin Disraeli once described William Ewart Gladstone as “A sophistical rhetorician, _____ with the exuberance of his own verbosity”. What is the missing word? Inebriated

Answers were correct when questions were compiled in late 2024.

amusements

Annual Impossible Exam 2024: the Answers

Way back on Christmas Eve I posted a link to this year’s King William’s College General Knowledge Paper 2024-25.

As always it was obscure and fiendishly hard.

Today the Guardian have published the answers.

I’ve not yet totted up exactly how well I didn’t do, but I doubt I have more than a handful of correct answers! Did anyone manage to get into double figures without internet searches?

books, memes, quotes

This Month’s Poem

Stopping by Woods On a Snowy Evening
Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Find this poem online at Poetry Foundation

amusements, memes

Ten Things

This year our Ten Things column each month is alternating between composers and artists a century at a time from pre-1500 to 20th century. As always, there’s no guarantee you will have heard of them all!

Ten Composers Born Before 1500

  1. Nicholas Ludford
  2. Robert Fayrfax
  3. Johannes Ockeghem
  4. Guillaume Du Fay
  5. Gilles Binchois
  6. Josquin des Prez
  7. John Taverner
  8. Robert Carver
    Robert Carver
  9. Guillaume de Machaut
  10. Antoine Busnois
memes

January Quiz Questions

Again this year, 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.

General Knowledge (1)

  1. What type of clothing is a Glengarry?
  2. Which country features a shipwreck on its national flag?
  3. Which two months of the year are named for mortal men?
  4. Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire is famous for which two foods?
  5. Name the type of rigid airship, first flown commercially in 1910, and carrying many thousands of fare-paying passengers before WWI?
  6. Benjamin Disraeli once described William Ewart Gladstone as “A sophistical rhetorician, _____ with the exuberance of his own verbosity”. What is the missing word?

Answers will be posted in 2 weeks time.

history

January 1925


Our look at some of the significant happenings 100 years ago this month.

1. Norway’s capital Christiania was renamed Oslo.Norwegian Folk Museum, Oslo

1. The states of Aleppo and Damascus were united into the State of Syria.

6. Born. John DeLorean, car maker, in Detroit (d.2005)

7. Born. Gerald Durrell, English naturalist, zookeeper, author, and television presenter, in Jamshedpur, British India (d.1995)

15. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin fired Leon Trotsky as Commisar for Military and Naval Affairs.

24. A total solar eclipse. The path of totality ran in an arc from SE Canada, NE USA to the north of the British Isles./p>

25. The tomb of Tutankhamun was reopened in Egypt so Howard Carter could resume his archaeological work. Carter was disappointed to find that the pall which had covered the sarcophagus was now ruined because someone in Egypt’s antiquities department had carelessly stored it in a wooden shed that did not provide adequate protection from sunlight.