Hi folks. Yes, it’s time for your bimonthly bout of wailing and gnashing of teeth. Too late! You can’t escape now! I don’t know why; I’m just in a funny kind of mood at the moment. But before we get on with the WaGoT, it’s time for another apology, although I claim that it’s not my fault. Freddie and the Dreamers were always known as part of the Merseybeat scene. I am old enough to remember and I never received any news that Mr Garrity came from Manchester (actually, Crumpsall; a place much referred to in the monologues of the great Mike Harding). Thanks to Rog Harrison from Glasgow, though he lived in Manchester in those far off days of our collective youth. No sack cloth and ashes this time though; I don’t regard myself as guilty, just a victim of a decades-old publicity machine.
Right. Let the fun begin (as ever) with some conundra of a digital nature:
- 13 M to the FH in the WOHMH
- 12 S on a PC
- 8 BT on the UF
- 241 TBC on HCP (AD)
- 4 UL at WS
- 1246 PS by JW in IRM
- 21 S on a K
- 3 A in a M of CD
- 24 T in the CNG
- 36524 D in the NC
I was greatly pleased with how well Consecutive Celebrities went down in the last edition (not a single complaint!), so here we go for a second stint. I apologise in advance if you don’t like numbers 4 and 7; I was only able to find a single example each of these two letter combinations:
- KL: Walking on Sunshine
- LM: ‘Wanderin’ Star”
- MN: Monkee
- NO: Portuguese footballer
- OP: Maharajah of the Keyboard
- PQ: Bird of a Feather
- QR: WW1 pilot (son of Teddy)
- RS: Mrs. ‘Wall of Sound’
- ST: ‘Little Master’
- TU: Actress – one of Three of a Kind
OK. Let’s finish off with some ‘general’ knowledge questions (‘cos I always do). Just how general you think they are, is up to you, though I must thank Itchy Boots* for question 1:
- Pangong Tso is a lake in the Himalayas, about 160km long. It is one third in Ladakh (India) and two thirds in China at an elevation of 4,225 (or maybe 4,350) metres (13,862 feet). What is its claim to fame?
- When the original Globe Theatre burned down in 1613, which play (attributed jointly to William Shakespeare and John Fletcher) was being performed?
- In the December 2021 Idle Moments, we learned that the total number of gifts ‘my true love gave to me’ was 364 but how many of them were birds?
- . . . and how many of the gifts in total were inanimate?
- English singer Eden Kane reached No. 1 in the charts in 1961 with Well I Ask You, following up with four more top ten hits until 1964. What was his real name? Clue: he had two brothers who had hits under their real names (Peter and Robin) in 1969 and 1976, respectively.
- When you were at school (over 50 years ago for some of us), what was the name of that funny glass thing in the fume cupboard in the chemistry lab that produced hydrogen on tap?
- And over in the physics lab, what was the name of the device with two spinning wheels that created big sparks?
- After the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan, he said to his wife Nancy, ‘Honey, I forgot to duck’. He borrowed the line from which American boxer, who said it to his wife, following his world title defeat by Gene Tunney in 1926?
- What were the names given to three Gloster Gladiator biplanes that, for several weeks, formed the aerial defence of Malta in 1940 (until supplemented by Hawker Hurricanes)?
- What do Isla Mann, Sue Narmey, Ephraim Spitchurs, Gus de Wind, Haley Scommit and C View all have in common?
Well, there we are for another year. I hope you have found it worthwhile and that you finish it off with a happy and peaceful Christmas (if that is you wish for). I aim to be back with you in February with more fun and frivolity to keep your grey matter exercised.
Andy Pirson
* For those who don’t know, Itchy Boots is a very successful You Tuber from The Netherlands (1.87 million subscribers) called Norally who rides solo around the world on a motorbike and uploads episodes about her travels a couple of times a week. She is currently riding a borrowed Royal Enfield Himalayan (pre-launch new model) around India. She is also on a break from riding her own bike (a Honda CRF300 Rally, called Alaska) though Africa from north to south.
As ever, here are the solutions to the puzzles set in the October/November column:
Number puzzles:
- 63 is One One One One One One in Binary
- 7 Months of the Year are Thirty One Days Long
- 33 Junctions on the M Twenty Five
- 281 Bus Route from Tolworth to Hounslow
- 16 Bottles of Champagne in a Balthazar
- 25 Fire Tubes in the Boiler of Stephenson’s Rocket
- 12 is the Common Logarithm of a Trillion
- 9 Symphonies Completed by Gustav Mahler
- 53 Mondays and Tuesdays in Twenty Twenty Four
- 16 Cylinders in the Engine of a Bugatti Chiron
5BY4:
- AB: Decapitated queen – Ann Boleyn
- BC: Big Yin – Billy Connolly
- CD: Detective Author – Colin Dexter
- DE: English Comedian (‘Mandy’) – Dick Emery
- EF: Car builder – Enzo Ferrari
- FG: Liverpudlian Dreamer – Freddie Garrity (except it turns out he was Mancunian)
- GH: The Railway King – George Hudson
- HI: Norwegian Playwright – Henrik Ibsen
- IJ: Swedish boxer – Ingemar Johanssen
- JK: Beat Generation author – Jack Kerouac
General knowledge:
- The world’s second highest monolith (after Uluru in Australia), Ben Amera, is in Mauritania;
- A craft, almost lost to mechanisation in Britain, a putter is a maker of scissors;
- A (the) sgian-dubh (roughly pronounced skee-an doo), is a small single-edged knife worn in the kilt hose (sock) when wearing Highland dress;
- The everyday product manufactured by a process involving the use of a dandy roll is paper;
- The common food mass produced using the Chorleywood process is bread;
- The last president of the USA to die in office, not by violent means, was Franklin D Roosevelt;
- Thinking of assassinations, the number of attempts made to assassinate Queen Victoria was eight;
- The blue plaque erected in 2016 at 22 Gladstone Avenue, Feltham, is dedicated to Freddie Mercury;
- The blue plaque erected in 2016 at 43 Waverley Gardens, Barking is dedicated to Bobby Moore;
- And finally, the blue plaque erected in 2016 at 51 Barrowgate Road, Chiswick, is dedicated to Tommy Cooper.