Quiz Questions 31 to 40
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Round 31 - 6 January 2000 Bon appétit! In each case, you are to say who was feeling the need for nourishment. You will find the four names (plus one misleading suggestion) in this alphabetically arranged list: Dudley Finch, Bonus marks for full references (book, chapter or short-story title). 1. ‘It's a rummy thing about breakfast. (...) When you can't get it, you feel like a python when the Zoo officials have just started to bang the luncheon gong.‘(...) there was a young fowl of sorts not far away engaged in getting outside a large, pink worm, and I could willingly have joined it at the board. In fact, I would have taken pot-luck at this juncture with a buzzard.’ 2. ‘(...) the milk-train left at three-fifteen, and he was firmly resolved to catch it. The sooner he was out of this place the better. Meanwhile, he craved food. Any sort of food. His entire interior organism was up on its feet, shouting wildly for sustenance.’ 3. ‘(...) now fudge and chocolate cake seemed to be dancing sarabands before my eyes, and I felt that I would have given anything for a good whack at them. Not since the distant days of my first private school had I been conscious of such a devastating hunger. Peckish is not the word. I felt like a homeless tapeworm.’ 4. ‘(...) though he had celebrated his first day of emancipation (...) by rising late and breakfasting later, he had become aware by now of that not unpleasant emptiness which is the silent luncheon-gong of the soul.’ Click here to go to Quiz Answers Round 32 - 15 January 2000 Sweet Swan Now, let's have none of that deplorable ‘letting-I-dare-not-wait-upon-I-wouldness’ which Sir Watkyn Bassett was once said to exhibit. You must plunge in resolutely – dare I say execute a swan dive? – and give full references (from P. G. Wodehouse's works, I mean, not his brother-author's) for as many as you can of these four passages. In the last three cases, too, you are to name the protagonists (i.e. W and X in 2, Y and Z in 3, the divinity in 4).Bonus marks for adding one sentence about what is happening in each case. 1. ‘"(...) We don't want infants mewling and puking about the Drones." "Keep it clean," urged a Pieface. "Shakespeare," explained the Bean. "Oh, Shakespeare? Sorry. (...)"’ 2. '"Just waiting till I can see the whites of his eyes," said W. X, whose air now was that of a man who has had it drawn to his attention that there is a ticking bomb attached to his coat-tails, repeated his stricken-duck impersonation, putting this time even more feeling into it. Only the fact that he had brilliantined them while making his toilet that morning kept his knotted and combined locks from parting and each particular hair from standing on end like quills upon the fretful porpentine. "For heaven's sake, (...)!" "My boy?" "You can't pot that bird's hat!"’ 3. ‘"(...) when the man comes down into the kitchen again you're waiting and you bean him one with a sandbag. Then you tie him up and come along to the front door and let me in (...). How about it?" "I bean him one?" said Y doubtfully. (...) Z exhibited the impatience which all wives, from Lady Macbeth downward through the ages, have felt when their schemes appear in danger of being thwarted by the pusillanimity of a husband. The words, ‘Infirm of purpose, give me the sandbag!’ seemed to be trembling on her lips. "You poor cake eater!" she cried with justifiable vigour.’ 4. ‘Matters had been worse than usual that morning. After days of rain and greyness the weather had turned over a new leaf. The sun glinted among the bottles of Unfailing Lotion in the window, and everything in the world seemed to have relaxed and become cheerful. Unfortunately, everything had included the customers. During the last few days, they had taken their seats in moist gloom, and, brooding over the prospect of coming colds in the head, had had little that was pleasant to say to the divinity who was shaping their ends. But today it had been different.’ Click here to go to Quiz Answers Round 33 - 26 January 2000 Sports Page 1. I can follow the broad, general principles, of course. I mean to say, I know that the main scheme is to work the ball down the field somehow and deposit it over the line at the other end, and that, in order to squelch this programme, each side is allowed to put in a certain amount of assault and battery and do things to its fellow-man which, if done elsewhere, would result in fourteen days without the option, coupled with some strong remarks from the Bench. 2. "In for the middles, of course?" "Yes." "So am I." "Yes, so I saw in the Sportsman. It says you weigh eleven-three." "Bit more, really, I believe. Shan't be able to have any lunch, or I shall have to go in for the heavies. What are you?" "Just eleven. Well, let's hope we meet in the final." "Rather." 3. We began the sixth game. And now for some reason I played really well. I struck a little vein of brilliance. I was serving, and this time a proportion of my serves went over the net instead of trying to get through. 4. He sank back in his chair, staring before him. And as he sat the wall seemed to melt and he was gazing upon a green field, in the centre of which a man in a grey uniform was beginning a Salome dance. Watching this person with a cold and suspicious eye stood another uniformed man, holding poised above his shoulder a sturdy club. Two Masked Marvels crouched behind him in attitudes of watchful waiting. On wooden seats all round sat a vast multitude of shirt-sleeved spectators, and the air was full of voices. One voice detached itself from the din. "Pea-nuts! Get y'r pea-nuts!" Click here to go to Quiz Answers Round 34 - 3 February 2000 Tense Moments 1. "Her ladyship further instructs me to add that, should you prove recalcitrant, I am to strike you over the head with the poker." 2. MAGISTRATE: How did he appear, when apprehended? POLICEMAN: Very apprehensive, your worship. MAGISTRATE: You mean he had a sort of pinched look? (Laughter in court.) 3. Beastly shock it was! The bally thing had absolutely engulfed me, if you know what I mean. Even as I was putting it on I got a sort of impression that it was a trifle roomy; and no sooner had I let go of it than it settled down over my ears like a kind of extinguisher. 4. The fearful woman had been playing with me, leading me on, watching me entangle myself like a fly on fly-paper. And suddenly I perceived that I had erred in thinking of her eyes as mild. A hard gleam had come into them. They were like a couple of blue gimlets. She looked like a cat that had caught a mouse .... Click here to go to Quiz Answers Round 35 - 11 February 2000 Impostor! 1. "The way I always look at it," I said, "is that it's dashed difficult for anything to prevail against what you might call a pure and all-consuming love. I mean, can it be done? I doubt it." 2. "At present there is nothing that you can do. Mere impersonation is not a crime. If I had exposed him when we met you would have gained nothing beyond driving him from the house. Whereas, if we wait, if we pretend to suspect nothing, we shall undoubtedly catch him red-handed in an attempt on your nephew's invention." 3. As far as the eye could reach, I found myself gazing on a surging sea of aunts. There were tall aunts, short aunts, stout aunts, thin aunts, and an aunt who was carrying on a conversation in a low voice to which nobody seemed to be paying the slightest attention. 4. "The capacity to jelly an eel seems to me to argue intelligence of a high order. It isn't everybody who can do it, by any means. I know if someone came to me and said 'Jelly this eel!' I should be nonplussed. And so, or I am very much mistaken, would Ramsay MacDonald and Winston Churchill." Click here to go to Quiz Answers Round 36 - 21 February 2000 Show Time 1. Less violent than Salvini's Othello, it had in it something of the poignant wistfulness of Mrs. Siddons in the sleep-walking scene of Macbeth. 2. They moved slowly off with bowed heads, like a couple of pallbearers who have forgotten their coffin and had to go back for it ... 3. But this move, though shrewd, brought him only a temporary respite. No doubt this audience had had to deal before with singers who hid behind pianos. It took them perhaps a minute to find the range, and then some kind of a dried fish came dropping from the gallery and caught him in the eye. Very much the same thing, if you remember, happened to King Harold at the battle of Hastings. 4. "If you knew how sick and tired I am of it all! Tired ... Tired ... Tired. The lights ... the glitter ... the gaiety ... It is so hollow, so fruitless. I want to get away from it all, ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!" Click here to go to Quiz Answers Round 37 - 2 March 2000 Terpsichorean Revels 1. "They tie bells to their trousers and dance old rustic dances, showing that it takes all sorts to make a world." 2. He was a man who never let his left hip know what his right hip was doing. 3. "It was the opinion of Father Mariana that dancing was a deadly sin. He was particularly down, I may mention, on the saraband. He said the saraband did more harm than the Plague. I know just how he felt. I'll bet he had worked like a dog at twenty-five pazazas the complete course of twelve lessons, guaranteed to teach the fandago: and, just when his instructor had finally told him that he was fit to do it at the next Saturday Night Social, along came the Amalgamated Brothers with their new-fangled saraband, and where was Pop? Leaning against the wall with the other foot-and-mouth diseasers, trying to pretend dancing bored him." 4. It was a truculent affair, this Dream of Psyche. It was not so much dancing as shadow boxing. It began mildly enough to the accompaniment of pizzicato strains from the orchestra--Psyche in her training quarters. Rallentando--Psyche punching the bag. Diminuendo--Psyche using the medicine ball. Presto--Psyche doing road work. Forte--The night of the fight. And then things began to move to a climax. With the fiddles working themselves to the bone and the piano bounding under its persecutor's blows, X ducked, side-stepped, rushed, and sprang, moving her arms in a manner that may have been classical Greek, but to the untrained eye looked much more like the last round of some open-air bout. Click here to go to Quiz Answers Round 38 - 9 March 2000 Visual Arts 1. Who agrees to let her portrait be used in a poster advertising Paramount Hams? 2. Bertie's portrait, featuring an outsize monocle and constituting "a bally libel on the Wooster face," is used to advertise what product? 3. This man established the fundamental principle of the Liberty of the Subject, when he rebelled against photographing the newly-elected Mayor of Tooting East who, "after being warned that his face is not up to the minimum standard requirements, insisted on remaining in the chair and moistening the lips with the tip of the tongue;" name this champion of photographers everywhere. 4. Who was so bold as to hang at Blandings a portrait of a girl "with nothing on except a quite inadequate wisp of some filmy material," stoutly maintaining that the Emsworth ancestors in the portrait gallery "were such a collection of ugly thugs that it was a charity to give the viewer something to divert his attention from them?" Click here to go to Quiz Answers Round 39 - 18 March 2000 Charms to Soothe the Savage Breast 1. X on the banjo was worth hearing. His rendering of extracts from the works of Messrs Gilbert and Sullivan was an intellectual treat. 2. "When I sing, I sing openly and honestly, starting from the soles of the feet, very deep and loud and manly, so that anyone can see that my heart is in the right place." 3. It was loud in spots and less loud in other spots, and it had that quality which I have noticed in all violin solos, of seeming to last much longer than it actually did. 4. "In the singing of that particular song the muscles unconsciously contract as you come to the final 'boy.' Thus--'I still have you, sonny BOY.' You observe? It would be impossible for anyone, rendering the number with the proper gusto, not to force his hands together at this point, assuming that they were in anything like close juxtaposition. And if there were any slippery object between them, such as a piece of soap, it would inevitably shoot sharply upwards and fall"--he scanned the room keenly--"outside the bath on the mat." Click here to go to Quiz Answers Round 40 - 28 March 2000 The Art of Eating 1. "This, then," I said, "subject to such additions as I may think out in my cell, is the menu as I see it." And I read as follows: Le Dîner "That about covers it, Y?" "Yes, you don't seem to have missed out much." 2. "The common where these races are held is a desert without an oasis. Practically a death-trap. I met a fellow the other day who told me he got there last year and unpacked his basket and found that the champagne had burst and, together with the salad dressing, had soaked into the ham, which in its turn had got mixed up with the gorgonzola cheese, forming a sort of paste. He had had rather a bumpy bit of road to travel over." "What did he do?" "Oh, he ate the mixture. It was the only course. But he said he could still taste it sometimes, even now." 3. Now, the head of the Perfecto-Zizzbaum Motion Picture Corporation was not one of those men who can eat sandwiches aloofly and, as it were, surreptitiously. When he ate a sandwich there was no concealment or evasion. He was patently, for all eyes to see, all ears to hear, a man eating a sandwich. There was a brio, a gusto, about the performance which stripped it of all disguise. His sandwich flew before him like a banner. 4. Slowly, fading off across hill and dale, the vast bellow died away. And suddenly, as it died, another, softer sound succeeded it. A sort of gulpy, gurgly, plobby, squishy, wofflesome sound, like a thousand eager men drinking soup in a foreign restaurant. Click here to go to Quiz Answers |