| Author | Message | ||
     J. Crohn Citizen Username: Jcrohn Post Number: 687 Registered: 3-2003 |
Okay, time for a new quiz. Match the following book excerpts to their politically liberal (or, in some cases, pinko-leftisto) authors. Extra points for identifying the books in question. 1. "Bush has spoken in several published interviews of his intense dislike for "intellectual snobs" and the "guilt" his thinks many of his college clasmates felt over Vietnam or race or their own privileged position in life. In May, 1994, he told Texas Monthly, "What angered me was the way such people at Yale felt so intellectually superior and so righteous. They thought they had all the answers. They thought they could create a government that could solve all our problems for us." 2. "(I have no desire to give Mr. Murray ammunition for future encounters, but I have never been able to understand why he insists on promulgating the disingenuous argument that he has no personal stake or preference in the subject of The Bell Curve, but only took up his study from disinterested personal curiosity--the claim that disabled him in our debate at Harvard, for he so lost credibility thereby. After all, his overt record on one political side is far stronger than my own on the other. ...)" 3. "Most Americans and many Europeans equate native Africans with blacks, white Africans with recent intruders, and African racial history with the story of European colonialism and slave trading. There is an obvious reason why we focus on those particular facts: blacks are the sole native Africans familiar to most Americans, because they were brought in large numbers as slaves to the United States. But very different peoples may have occupied much of modern black Africa until as recently as a few thousand years ago, and so-called African blacks themselves are heterogeneous. Even before the arrival of white colonialists, Africa already harbored not just blacks, but (as we shall see) five of the world's six major divisions of humanity, and three of them are confined as natives to Africa. One quarter of the world's languages are spoken only in Africa. No other continent approaches this human diversity." 4. "Why did liberalism recede between the wars, even in states which did not accept fascism? Western radicals, socialists, and communists who lived through this period were inclined to see the era of global crisis as the final agony of the capitalist system. Capitalism, they argued, could no longer afford the luxury of ruling through parliamentary democracy, and under liberal freedoms, which, incidentally, had provided the power-base for moderate, reformist labour movements. Faced with insoluble economic problmes and/or an increasingly revolutionary working class, the bourgeoisie now had to fall back on force and coercion, that is to say, on something like fascism." 5. "The kingdom of Aragon and Catalunya (which Catalan history books prefer to call the kingdom of Catalunya and Aragon) had an empire by the beginning of the fourteenth century. It was run from Barcelona. It would not have existed if Catalunya had the same problem as the rest of Christian Spain--the effort of dislodging the Arabs, which in other parts of the peninsula took seven hundred years. But Catalunya's short reconquista was finished by the thirteenth century, and now it could start getting itself an empire. It did so with almost hallucinatory speed." | ||
| J. Crohn Citizen Username: Jcrohn Post Number: 688 Registered: 3-2003 |
The authors: Robert Hughes, Molly Ivins, Eric Hobsbawm, Jared Diamond, and Stephen Jay Gould. *** Additional quiz: which of the above are dead? | ||
| Dave Ross Supporter Username: Dave Post Number: 5734 Registered: 4-1998  |
No. 2 is Gould, who,unfortunately, passed away recently. No. 5 is Hughes, who is not dead. | ||
| J. Crohn Citizen Username: Jcrohn Post Number: 691 Registered: 3-2003 |
Twenty points to Dave for correctly identifying the passages from books by Robert Hughes and Stephen Jay Gould, plus ten for knowing that Gould is dead. Now, go for broke: what are the titles of the Hughes and Gould books excerpted? (Egregious hint: the title of one of them is right there in the excerpt itself...) | ||
| Dave Ross Supporter Username: Dave Post Number: 5738 Registered: 4-1998 |
Hughes: Barcelona Gould: The Structure of Evolutionary Theory | ||
| J. Crohn Citizen Username: Jcrohn Post Number: 692 Registered: 3-2003 |
Barcelona is correct; The Structure of Evolutionary Theory is not. Dave is up ten, for a total of forty points. Mem-toots (is that an Egyptian name?), while still in the lead with 70 points, is losing standing. | ||
| mem aka "toots" Citizen Username: Mem Post Number: 2309 Registered: 5-2001  |
J. No! It's not Egyptian, but lol... I tend not to read books about politics - So I am outta that last quiz... | ||
| Dave Ross Supporter Username: Dave Post Number: 5741 Registered: 4-1998 |
(I was going to guess Gould's Mismeasure of Man,but that came out way before Bell Curve.) | ||
| alia Citizen Username: Alia Post Number: 121 Registered: 5-2001 |
A man is found dead in a room with 53 Bicycles. What happened? | ||
| mikecappy Citizen Username: Mikecappy Post Number: 53 Registered: 10-2001 |
Deck of cards. | ||
| mem aka "toots" Citizen Username: Mem Post Number: 2313 Registered: 5-2001 |
knock, knock... | ||
| pizzaz Citizen Username: Pizzaz Post Number: 36 Registered: 11-2001 |
who's there? | ||
| J. Crohn Citizen Username: Jcrohn Post Number: 693 Registered: 3-2003 |
"(I was going to guess Gould's Mismeasure of Man,but that came out way before Bell Curve.)" The Mismeasure of Man it is. (The revised and expanded edition came out in 1996.) You get 10 points--minus 5 for failing to think as opportunistically as Gould's publisher. "I tend not to read books about politics - " But Mem-toots, only one of those books is about politics; of the remaining four, two are histories, one is popularized social science, and the other is a synthesis of history and biology. | ||
| thevillagepub Citizen Username: Thevillagepub Post Number: 139 Registered: 11-2001  |
It was the 53 bicycles.The man had been playing cards with "Bicycle" brand playing cards.Normally there are only 52 cards in a deck.Since there were 53 cards in the room,the murdered man must have been holding an extra card. Another GOOGLE winner! | ||
| thevillagepub Citizen Username: Thevillagepub Post Number: 140 Registered: 11-2001 |
My turn, A man rode into town on his horse on Tuesday. A week later, he left on Friday. How is this possible? TheVillagePub | ||
| John Holl Citizen Username: Jgh Post Number: 134 Registered: 6-2002  |
Friday is the horse's name? | ||
| thevillagepub Citizen Username: Thevillagepub Post Number: 141 Registered: 11-2001 |
Correct! | ||
| John Holl Citizen Username: Jgh Post Number: 135 Registered: 6-2002 |
I got a million of 'em! | ||
| J. Crohn Citizen Username: Jcrohn Post Number: 696 Registered: 3-2003 |
From this week's issue of New Scientist: "The patient, who we will call Jane, needed a kidney transplant, and so her family underwent blood tests to see if any of them would make a suitable donor. When the results came back, Jane was hoping for good news. Instead she received a hammer blow. The letter told her outright that two of her three sons could not be hers. What was going on?" A. Two of Jane's sons had been switched at birth and were not, in fact, biologically her own, despite the fact that they were her husband's. B. Jane's blood DNA didn't match her children's because, in reality, Jane is a mixture of two non-identical twin sisters who fused in the womb and grew into a single body with different parts from each twin. C. Jane's husband and sister conceived the two unrealted children, then pretended they were Jane's biological offspring. D. Before conceiving her unrelated sons, Jane had undergone fertility treatments using donated eggs. The donor women therefore were the genetic mothers of the unrelated sons. | ||
| Joan Citizen Username: Joancrystal Post Number: 2197 Registered: 5-2001 |
The correct answer is D. |
