The response to our Jan. 1 Y2K quiz was gratifyingly overwhelming. More than 1,000 entries arrived, about two-thirds by e-mail and one-third by fax or regular post, and their batting average was high.
The winner, drawn from a small pool of correct entries, is (drum roll, please) Chris Barnett of Toronto. Congratulations to him, and to all those who scored high.
The response was fascinating as well for what it said about the modern quiz. I had compiled it the old-fashioned way, from books and memory, with an assist on a couple of sports questions from colleague Neil A. Campbell. Almost all who answered it did so by plugging into the Internet and going on an intellectual scavenger hunt. One entrant noted: "I am sure you will have many more entries than you expected. One U.S. Web site asked, 'What's going on up there in Canada? We're being inundated with e-mail inquiries from Canada -- all with the same question.' "
A few minor errors crept into the quiz, which I own up to below. (I can't read my own handwriting.) Most entrants scaled all of them without difficulty, remonstrating with me in long and learned footnotes. Besides, we did say it would be fiendishly difficult.
Many thanks to all who entered. Here are the answers:
1. Franz Liszt ( St. Francis Preaching to the Birds) and Alexandre Dumas ( The Queen's Necklace)had many mistresses, but the one who wrote the book on the art of fascinating was Lola Montez.
2. The 1804 Paris amusement was the (wheeled) roller coaster.
3. John Dalton provided the first detailed description of colour blindness.
4. The story about Queen Victoria requesting and being sent Lewis Carroll's next book after Alice in Wonderland was denied years later by Charles Dodgson (Carroll's real name), but then he would have denied the gaffe of sending her a mathematical treatise, wouldn't he? Given the story's apocryphal scent, I accepted any answers that mentioned one of these three titles: Dodgson's Condensation of Determinants (1866),his book An Elementary Treatise on Determinants (1867) and his next book writing as Carroll, Phantasmagoria and Other Poems.Not accepted: Through the Looking Glass,which appeared after Phantasmagoria, and Syllabus of Plane Algebraic Geometry,which was published several years before Alice.
5. Candido Jacuzzi.
6. Pope Gregory XIII oversaw this decision to adjust the leap year in the 16th century (1582).
7. Guy Fawkes (Day).
8. Queen Catherine de Medici consulted many soothsayers, but this horoscope was the work of Nostradamus.
9. John Ruskin was the critic sued (by James McNeill Whistler).
10. Rusty and Jerome: The Friendly Giant.
11. Leonara (misprinted as Leonaro) and Manrico: Il Trovatore.
12. Lucky and Pozzo: Waiting for Godot.
13. Sandy and Punjab: Little Orphan Annie. I also accepted Annie,which was the name of the strip when Leonard Starr later drew it.
14. Wilmer and Kasper: The Maltese Falcon.
15. Necaxa and Atlas (soccer teams): Mexico.
16. They were Gertrude Stein's final words.
17. Roberto Clemente had the bad back, suffered the fatal crash and had a champion racehorse named after him.
18. Prime Minister Mackenzie Bowell suffered this "nest of traitors" when grappling with the Manitoba Schools Question of 1896.
19. The Congress of Vienna crowned Brie de Meaux as the "king of cheeses."
20. All were on the Rosetta Stone.
21. The wording was slightly off, but most entrants identified the work: General James Wolfe, before taking Quebec, said he would rather have written Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard "than defeat the French tomorrow."
22. He was the first human born in Antarctica.
23. The sport France banned was "dwarf-tossing."
24 and 24(a). King George V was killed in 1936 just in time to make the better newspapers. His doctor was Lord Dawson of Penn.
25. Another typo: Jan. 23 should have been Jan. 2-3. Again, almost everyone got this: The aim was to roust Manuel Noriega from within the Vatican's embassy in Panama.
26. The Amsterdam Hilton wanted to commemorate the scene of John Lennon and Yoko Ono's bed-in for peace (and, not incidentally, charge great sums for nostalgic visitors who wanted to stay in the room).
27. The disputed symbol was the beaver.
28. U.S. President George Bush was the broccoli hater.
29. The answer I had in mind was Gulliver's urination on the palace to put out a fire. I also accepted a couple of his other acts later deemed worthy of bowdlerization.
30. Another typo: The name was Reuben Mattus, not Mathis. But almost everyone got this right: He named his ice cream Haagen-Dazs.
31. We remember the Hill sisters every time we sing Happy Birthday to You,which they wrote first as Good Morning to All. Footnote in light of the AOL Time Warner merger: The song was not copyrighted until 1935, and the rights were purchased in 1989 by Warner-Chappell Music Group, a division of Time Warner. Until 2010, anyone singing Happy Birthday to You in public owes royalties to the tiny, struggling megacorporation.
32. There was some discrepancy with the calendars in use in England and Spain -- only one of them had adjusted to the Gregorian version (see Question 6) -- but April 23, 1616, is considered the date on which both William Shakespeare and Don Quixote'sMiguel de Cervantes died.
33. This meal was found in Tutankhamen's tomb, discovered in 1922.
34. Winston Churchill was the fellow Norman Shelley impersonated.
35. The Triple Crown Line.
36. Lisa Kroniuk was the pseudonym of Canadian author Pierre Berton.
37. Annie Oakley was the sharpshooter who didn't nick Prince Wilhelm.
38. Joseph Heller changed Catch-18 to Catch-22 so that his book wouldn't be confused with Leon Uris's Mila 18, scheduled for the same season.Many entrants offered the generic answer "because his publisher had another book coming out with 18 in the title"; however, Catch-22 was published by Simon & Schuster and Mila 18 by Doubleday.
39. Paul McCartney was speaking, and the rumour was that he had died.
40. John Kennedy Toole, author of A Confederacy of Dunces.
41. The unlucky family man was Franz Joseph, Emperor of Austria (1848-1916) and King of Hungary (1867-1916).
42. Mary Had a Little Lamb was played in 1877 (by Thomas Edison) on the first practical phonograph: tin foil on a metal cylinder.
43. Although Frederick Middleton commanded the troops, it was master organizer CPR general manager William Cornelius Van Horne who oversaw the speedy rail passage from Ottawa to Qu'Appelle.
44. The monk was Ralph (other spellings accepted, including Rodolfus) Glaber.
45. Charles Darwin wrote the book ( Origin of Species)that T.H. Huxley wished he'd thought of.
46. Alexander Fleming found the novel use for tears and didn't impress the club in 1929 with his news of penicillin.
47. The attacking leader who benefited from Giustiniani's mortal wound was Sultan Mehmed II (other spellings accepted), leader of the Muslim Turks at the fall of Constantinople.
48. The Wright brothers achieved the first powered flight.
49. There were many 11th-century astronomers, mathematicians and philosophers, but the one whose words "you have probably read in a form I would not have recognized," particularly in the Edward FitzGerald translation of his Rubaiyat, was Omar Khayyam.
50. The planet Herschel discovered is now known as Uranus.