wiki-illiam #108: q7

[dubdobdee]

7. Where:

1: in reality, was Snowfield?
2: are the branchy trees white with rime?
3: may Robin Hood's lieutenant have been buried?
4: appropriately, did Vigar and Smith provide a final two ton twist?
5: might the splendour of St John the Baptist earn the village city status?
6: does the heroine who illuminated Üsküdar look down on London Road?
7: did an error with the eggs and almonds spawn a famous dessert?
8: does Lent kick off with a historic two day match?
9: does St Ann provide free drinks 24/7?
10: is the gate free from blame?

1:

All diamond-related: one to firm up, two to find

1: What are diamonded with panes of quaint device?
Madeline's window in Keats' Eve of St Agnes = braisedbywolves
2: What tale began with serious problems for a scorpion?
Ian Fleming's Diamonds are Forever = dubdobdee
3: What made Diamond's eyes lustrous with desire in the Lodi Gardens?
4: What stolen Crown diamond was retrieved during a rendering of the Hoffman Barcarolle?
Sherlock Holmes story The Mazarin Stone = princeflorizel
5: Who, in a way emulated Gibbon, but substituted a Third Chimpanzee for the Roman Empire?
Jared Diamond, author of The Third Chimpanzee/Guns Germs & Steel = braisedbywolves
6: What title embraced studies, amongst others, of a walking talking killing machine, a hell fighter, the time-warp tough guy and an honourable man?
7: What was queried as an alternative to suffocation with cassia or a fatal shooting with pearls?
Throat cut by diamonds, in John Webster's play The Duchess of Malfi = braisedbywolves
8: What diamond was kept by the knight to the disadvantage of the rogue?
9: What blink like dull diamonds in the smog of Eastern Megalolopolis?
Philadelphia and Baltimore and Washington, acc. Norman Mailer in "The Siege of Chicago" = braisedbywolves
[but is it actually "Megalolopolis", or is that a Guardian typo for Megalopolis?]
10: What was the eye in Aurangzeb's peacock throne?
The Koh I Noor (of course!) = braisedbywolves

2:

All Elizabeths -- three to get

1: Who was known as the Queen of the Blues?
Bessie Smith = Matt McG on twitter
2: Who went from Hastings to Holland, and then to Cornwall?
Elizabeth of Lancaster, dauhgter of John of Gaunt, married the Earl of Pembroke, then the Duke of Exeter, then John Cornwall, 1st Baron Fanhope. anatol_merklich
3: Who retained the embalmed "capital" remnant of her executed husband?
Sir Walter Raleigh's wife Elizabeth kept his embalmed head in a velvet bag anatol_merklich
4: Which corpulent lady was affectionately known by her family as Betty Humbug?
Princess Elizabeth, daughter of Mad King George, married Prince Friedrich Hesse-Homburg anatol_merklich
5: How is Tolhuys's creation bearing the inscriptions Victoria, Libertas and Scalda popularly known?
6: Which legendary serial gynaecocide was consigned to immurement, while her accomplices were burned at the stake?
The real-life vampire and goth-heroine Erzsébet Báthory = dubdobdee
7: Where is Whitehead's equine memorial to more than two and a half years of deadly conflict?
8: Who felt quickening at six months on receiving her cousin's good news?
Elizabeth, cousin of The Virgin Mary and mother of John the Baptist braisedbywolves
9: Who lisped her threat to repeatedly scream to the point of vomiting?
Violet Elizabeth Bott, from Richmal Crompton's Just William series dubdobdee
10: Which relative called "Cusha! Cusha! Cusha!"?

3. In what work:

All Verdi operas -- few more to chase

1: does the clown inadvertently commit filicide?
Verdi's RIGOLETTO = alextiefling
2: is the two-timing stout knight emptied from a laundry basket into the river?
Verdi's FALSTAFF = dubdobdee
3: does a half-caste Peruvian gentleman twice change his name and become a monk?
Verdi's LA FORZA DEL DESTINO = alextiefling
4: does conflict between patricians and plebeians lead to poisoning of the chief magistrate?
5: does a nobleman unknowingly order the beheading of his brother, supposing that he was the son of a gypsy?
6: does the heathen King, like his real daughter, convert to Judaism, following a meteorologically induced period of insanity?
7: does jealousy over a military promotion lead to a contrived 'affair', followed by uxoricide and then suicide?
Verdi's OTELLO = Matt McG on twitter
8: is the King assassinated at a festive occasion, following a prediction by a fortune-teller?
Verdi's UN BALLO IN MASCHERA = alextiefling
9: is a regicide conspiracy overheard in the great tomb in the Cathedral of Aachen?
Verdi's ERMANI = Matt McG on twitter
10: does the love affair of a phthisical courtesan end in her premature death?
Verdi's LA TRAVIATA = petrajane


4. Who:

Theme = everyone is Dutch (lots of provisional ideas to be firmed up here)

1: held exclusive dinner parties at Veere?
2: is remembered in Northland's most westerly point?
3: built an insular wooden cabin by a sea which took his name?
4: is famed for his chained fringillid and died in the devastating Thunderclap?
5: was a student of Brahe and later made diagrammatic representations for VOC?
6: was the father-in-law of a great painter and the guest of a quiet leader on the day of his fatal shooting?
7: was the ethical philosopher with an interest in optics who received a cherem?
Baruch Spinoza = alextiefling
8: stayed in Queens' and was Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity?
9: developed his own apparatus to study animalcules?
van Leeuwenhoek = anatol_merklich
10: removed Royal Charles from Chatham?

5. Who:

Dudes ending in 'by': and lots to get still!

1: put Fairfax on the map?
2: wrote of guinea pigs and moles?
3: supposedly came from Tappington?
4: won on a Rainbow (and also Florrie)?
5: modelled for The Pitcher Goes to the Well?
6: recognised his 20th-century Armageddon when elevated to the Lords?
Lord Allenby = combination alextiefling and dubdobdee
7: was credited with the invention of IC?
8: shared with Eleanor at Plas Newydd?
Miss Ponsonby of Llangollen = katstevens
9: was neither gossip nor breadbate?
One Rugby, mocked while off-stage in The Merry Wives of Windsor = katstevens
10: surveyed Itseqqortoormiit?
William Scoresby = katstevens


6:

Isaacs or near offer!

1: Whose first pseudonym was adopted from Billy Powell?
2: Who wrote morbidly of the dead stretched at the cross roads?
3: Who was successfully sued by Howe for patent infringement?
4: Who enjoyed cigale rôti with sauce à la coccinelle at Chez Pêcheur?
Jeremy Fisher's newty pal Sir Isaac Newton = dubdobdee
5: Whose contemplative discourse was prefaced with a quote from St John 21:3?
Izaak Walton (it's The Compleat Angler = alextiefling
6: Who took unified joys from a multitude of tongues from words derived from a Patmos vision?
Isaac Watts = alextiefling
7: Who wrote about the wisdom of Acheson, Harriman and four others?
8: Who led the successful prosecution in a famous fly-paper case?
9: Who held a governorship and two bishoprics simultaneously?
10: Which member for Harwich, chose to sit for Youghal?

Comments

[alextiefling.livejournal.com]

7.3 is Hathersage, where the grave of one 'John Little' may be found.

7.10 is Repton, where "The gate is free from blame" (in Latin, obv) is the skool motto. (I have recently been researching Old Reptonians, which is why this leaps out at me.)

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

Hello. I'm back at werk today, so will attempt to help from now on. Not that I can shed much if any light on the missing pieces of rounds 1-6.

But speaking of casting light, I think No.6 of today's is referring to Florence Nightingale, the lady with the lamp. Per her wiki page, there's a statue of her outside the London Road Community Hospital in Derby.

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

And 7.7 must be Bakewell tart!

[ruudboy.livejournal.com]

Right, this is the section where my family legitimately did well on Christmas Day.

5 is Tideswell, where St John the Baptist church is known as "The Cathedral of the Peak".
7 is Bakewell, of tart fame.
8 is Ashbourne, where there's one of those mad 200-a-side football matches.

The theme is places in Derbyshire.

I googled some others at the time, and after I came back home I got a text from my sister saying she'd solved them all. The only other (non-googled) suggestion I have, is that 4 might possibly be Chesterfield, of crooked spire fame but I've no firm basis for that.

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Is #7 Bakewell tarts? They're sort of almondy and named after a place?

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

A place in YORKSHIRE! Ooo-er

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Or DERBYSHIRE even!

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

1. is bound to be from Austen or Trollope or similar. (Update: I just googled "Austen" + "Snowfield" and it isn't her but I was close! There's probably someone here who will know it.)

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

It rings a bell - maybe one of Acton/Currer/Ellis type of Bell?

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

Erm, no. Possibly I misled.

Per wiki's entry on the Peak District: "Snowfield in George Eliot's first novel Adam Bede (1859) is believed to be based on Wirksworth, where her uncle managed a mill"

[(Anonymous)]

Pete wot doesn't do LJ says 7.9 is Buxton - the spring is St Ann's Well there.

[(Anonymous)]

Also, 6.1 is probably Isaac Sprague (googling is OK now right?) Billy Powell = William Powell star of the Thin Man, Isaac Sprague = The Original Thin Man/Living Skeleton.

[alextiefling.livejournal.com]

6.10 is Irish nationalist politician Isaac Butt, who somehow managed to get elected simultaneously for Harwich and Youghal in the 1852 general election. I know nothing about him that is funnier than his name.

6.9, predictably enough for KWC, is Manx bishop Isaac Barrow, whose charitable foundation created the school. He was bishop of Ely as well as bishop of Sodor and Man and governor of the Isle of Man. I'm not sure how much his flock in Ely saw of him once he got the Manx positions.

[alextiefling.livejournal.com]

I should have mentioned that I got both of these through creative use of Wikipedia.

[(Anonymous)]

2.7 is the Horse Memorial in Port Elizabeth in Eastern Cape, South Africa

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

er which anonymous is this? Still Pete wot doesn't do LJ?

(just pop a pseud in the post, then I can properly credit you)

[anatol-merklich.livejournal.com]

Some filling in on the Dutches and Dutchesses:

4.2: petrajane solved this; the westernmost point of New Zealand's North Island's Northland province is Cape Maria van Diemen.

4.4: I had some ideas, but they weren't too close to reality. Wikoogled that the painter Carel Fabritius (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carel_Fabritius) painted The Goldfinch in 1654 and died when the gunpowder depot in Delft exploded the same year.


4.5: As opposed to the previous question, I had heard about this guy, but only found the answer via wikoogle: Willem Blaeu (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willem_Blaeu) studied with Tycho, and became cartographer for the Dutch East India Company. His sons were also cartographers – the family's main claim to fame (ie why I'd heard of them) is the Atlas Maior (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_Maior), the "largest and most expensive book published in the seventeenth century", which has been covetably facsimiled by Taschen (http://www.taschen.com/pages/en/catalogue/classics/all/44808/facts.blaeu_atlas_maior.htm).

4.6: Solved by seanwalsh: Rombertus_van_Uylenburgh (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rombertus_van_Uylenburgh) was the father of Rembrandt's wife Saskia, and embarrassed, was invited to the lunch, because there were no other guests. At the end of the meal, William of Orange stumbled on the stair, and was then murdered with a pistol by Balthasar Gerards..


4.8: Also solved by seanwalsh: Erasmus of Rotterdam (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erasmus_of_Rotterdam).

Btw I've received some undue credit (2.3 and 2.4).

[anatol-merklich.livejournal.com]

4.3 appears to be (http://www.geographicus.com/P/AntiqueMap/NovaZembla-debry-1601) Willem Barentsz: In 1596 on Novaya Zemlya by the Barents Sea, [u]sing the timber from their ship they constructed a small cabin where, subsisting on stores from the ship and the occasional polar bear, they survived the unbelievably harsh winter.

[(Anonymous)]

Cusha Cusha? (2.10) Daughter-in-law

[alextiefling.livejournal.com]

Specifically "My sonne's faire wife, Elizabeth" in the poem High Tide of the Coast of Lincolnshire by Victorian poet Jean Ingelow, of whom the Cambridge History of English and American Literature says she "wrote too much and too long". It's a long poem written in what is either a Lincolnshire dialect or (more likely) romantic cod-Early-Modern-English, and the gist of it is that Elizabeth has drowned with the high tide and the breaching of the sea-wall. To me it is notable only for the lines:

Till floating o'er the grassy sea
Came downe that kyndly message free,
The 'Brides of Mavis Enderby.'

- which is not, sadly, about lesbian plural marriage, but it ought to be. Mavis Enderby, more prosaically, is a place in Lincolnshire.

[petra jane (from livejournal.com)]

Got my reference-librarian on. Under the cut in case anyone's still working on them:

The 24-foot brass gun nicknamed 'Queen Elizabeth's Pocket Pistol', built by Jan Tolhuys in 1544 and decorated with grotesques, the figures of Liberty, Victory and Fame, and the river god Scalda, originally guarded the English Channel. In spite of its popular name, the gun was a gift from Charles V to Henry VIII. It's now in place outside Dover Castle (http://www.dover.freeuk.com/garrison/pistol.htm).

The Horse Monument at St. George's Park in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, commemorates the horses who served and died in the Anglo-Boer War. The monument, by Messrs Whitehead and Sons, depicts a kneeling soldier standing in front of a bridled horse.

In Hendrick Willem van Loon's Van Loon's Lives, the lives of eminent historical figures are described in dialogue through the device of fictional dinner parties on the island of Veere.

Willem Janszoon Blaeu studied astronomy under Tycho Brahe for several years, before going on to become a leading engraver, mapmaker and globe producer. With his son Joan Blaue, Willem produced an elaborate 208-map work, the Atlas Novus. He was appointed mapmaker to the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie or VOC in Dutch) in 1633, and was succeeded by Joan on his death in 1638.

William the Silent had dined with Rombertus van Uylenburgh on the evening of his assassination. Van Uylenburgh's daughter Saskia later married Rembrandt.van Rin.

During the Raid on the Medway in 1667, Michiel de Ruyter led a Dutch squadron up the Medway to Chatham and towed the HMS Royal Charles back to the United Provinces.

The Reverend Richard Harris Barham, under the nom de plume Thomas Ingoldsby, wrote screeds of light verse set in his childhood manor home, Tappington. From what I can tell, the Ingoldsby Legends were reprinted in just about every newspaper in the English-speaking world.

In the 1935 film No Limit, George Formby (of all people) plays an 'umble chimney-sweep (what else?) set on winning a motorcycle race on the Isle of Man. He wins over the Rainbow Motorcycle Company with his pluck or some such, and is appointed an official Rainbow rider for the big race, which of course he wins, before wooing his equally plucky lady friend Florrie.

Trilby models for a painting titled 'The Pitcher Goes To The Well', in George du Maurier's novel Trilby, before she falls under the mesmerising powers of the original Svengali and is transformed into the nineteenth-century equivalent of an X Factor finalist.

The Integrated Circuit or microchip was the invention of Jack Kilby. Some time in the 1970s, Gordon Moore noted that integrated circuits were growing ever more complex at such a rapid rate that the number of transistors on each chip - and, as a result, its computing capacity - could be expected to double about ever two years. Computer processing power has largely followed Moore's Law - mostly because the IC industry uses the double-every-two-years metric as its benchmark.

[alextiefling.livejournal.com]

About those operas, guessing but checking on Wikipedia before posting:

3.4 is Simon Boccanegra; the plebians and patricians are Genoese, not (as I had originally thought) ancient Roman.

3.5 is Il Trovatore (The Troubadour) - a blood-soaked melodrama that is pretty much the go-to stereotype of a 19th-century opera.

3.6 turns out not to be set in Egypt at all, but to be Nabucco, a story which frankly bears about as much relation to the actual return of the Jews from Babylon as I do to the Pope. The 'real daughter' reference is not about any RL daughter of Nebuchadnezzar, but rather the plot point that the villainess, Abigaille, is purportedly the daughter of the king, but actually the child of slaves; the heroine, Fenena, really is the king's daughter. (In fact, it was the last king of Babylon, Nabonidus, who seems to have been insane for several years. He was a keen archaeologist, and had a scholarly daughter who is history's first known museum curator. Nevertheless, it was Cyrus the Great, who defeated Nabonidus, who actually freed the Jewish exiles.)

[alextiefling.livejournal.com]

A little work with Google reveals that 7.2 is more peotry:

By cool Siloam's shady rill
The sounds are sweet as strawberry jam
I raise mine eyes unto the hill,
The beetling Heights of Abraham;
The branchy trees are white with rime
In Matlock Bath this winter-time.

This is by John Betjeman, as might be guessed from the juxtaposition of Biblical grandeur with English domesticity. When I tried typing the key phrase into Google, it automatically prompted me with "branchy trees white with rims", suggesting that this error is significantly more common than the correct spelling!