Well, hello again. Once again you find me battling to get my Idle Moment finished before the editor goes casting around to fill an empty page, in between sticking pins in a wax effigy of me. You might think that after ten years of retirement and not being at an employer’s beck and call I should have got used to planning my own time. Too many distractions!
I was thinking that it’s quite some time since I did any number puzzles, so let’s have some this time. I started sorting through and realised that what I meant was 5BY4 (last seen in April last year). Actually what happened was that I was idly looking at the Periodic Table for inspiration (!) when it struck me that if I took a few atomic numbers, I could ask you to match them to their elements. If the words ‘git’, ‘sad’ and ‘old’ were to come to your mind, then I would have little defence. I thought that I would start at the beginning and pick elements whose numbers end in a one. I thought that number one itself would be too easy so I started at eleven. I have put the numbers in numerical order (radical or what?) and in order to avoid the randomiser (which I have mislaid), I decided to put the elements in alphabetical order. So here we go:
1. 11 A. Antimony
2. 21 B. Gallium
3. 31 C. Lutetium
4. 41 D. Mendelevium
5. 51 E. Niobium
6. 61 F. Promethium
7. 71 G. Protactinium
8. 81 H. Scandium
9. 91 I. Sodium
10. 101 J. Thallium
Next come the Consecutive Celebrities. I am very close to running out of these so this might be the last time I trot them out. For the next edition I’m thinking I might try Seitirbelec Evitucesnoc. I’ll leave you to work out what that might be while you fill in these names:
1. DE: Jazz Nobility
2. ST: Schoolboy(?) Diarist
3. GH: BRM F1 World Champion
4. MN: British female ‘Trance’ singer
5. AB: Carry On Cleo actress
6. HI: Victorian actor-manager
7. FG: Tom Hanks character
8. JK: Showboat composer
9. RS: English film director/producer
10. BC: Railway Children porter
Not wishing to disappoint anybody (Who is he kidding?), I thought I’d better stick to Trivial Knowledge for the last section of the entertainment (this IS the special irony edition!). After the last edition, my mind is still in a bit of a transport rut (one track mind?) so I started with a bit more Underground stuff and saw where it led me. Incidentally, the questions about station name changes was prompted by a Youtuber who goes by the name of Jago Hazzard; I thought I should acknowledge his influence. The first ones of this column are also inspired by another Youtuber. I shan’t tell you his name until next time, otherwise you might just go to his channel to look up the answers.
1. Which station on the London Underground has the largest number of escalators at 31?
2. Conversely, which Underground station has just one escalator?
3. And from my own observation, which Underground station has two escalators, both for upward travel only? There may be more, but this is the only one I of which I am aware.
4. According to both the Scottish Canal and Wikipedia web sites, what (surprisingly round number?) is the total length of the Caledonian Canal (including the manmade sections and four lochs)?
5. And what is the elevation above sea level of the highest section of the Caledonian Canal?
6. What is the length of the Panama Canal?
7. And, what is the length of the Suez Canal?
8. What about a road (or route)? How long is Route 66, which runs between Chicago and Santa Monica?
9. How many U.S. states does Route 66 pass through (and can you name them)?
10. And finally, what road route (it is not an officially designated road) starts at Prudhoe Bay and ends at Ushuaia? Also, approximately how long is it and how many countries does it run through (all according to Wikipedia)?
And so we come to the end of the June/July instalment of Idle Moments. I hope that you will derive as much pleasure out of solving these puzzles as I did from compiling them. So until next time, I hope you all have a good time and keep fit and healthy. Bye for now.
Andy Pirson
As usual, here are the solutions to the puzzles set in the April/May Idle Moments column.
Historic brewery locations:
1. John Lovibond & Sons Ltd. (1962) – Greenwich
2. Brandon’s Brewery Ltd (1949) – Putney
3. Hodgson’s Brewery Co. Ltd. (1965) – Kingston
4. Thomas Clutterbuck & Co. (1916) – Stanmore
5. Thunder & Little Ltd. (1914) – Mitcham
6. Meux’s Brewery Co. Ltd. (1921) – Tottenham Court Road, WC1
7. Page & Overton’s Brewery Ltd. (1954) – Croydon
8. Cole & Burrows (1906) – Twickenham
9. Mann, Crossman & Paulin Ltd. (1979) – Whitechapel
10. William Gomm & Son (1908) – Brentford
Consecutive celebrities:
1. EF: ‘First Lady of Song’ [Ella Fitzgerald]
2. VW: American female singer (soul/funk/R&B) [Vesta Williams]
3. JK: President ‘Jack’ [John F Kennedy]
4. KL: Singer – Love Letters (in the Sand) [Ketty Lester]
5. AB: Art expert/traitor [Anthony Blunt]
6. RS: German composer (Four Last Songs) [Richard Strauss]
7. OP: Politician (Con.); privy councillor [Owen Paterson]
8. CD: ‘Pilot of the Airwaves’ singer [Charlie Dore]
9. LN: English female singer/songwriter [Laura Marling]
10. GH: Scottish captain (and full back) [Gavin Hastings]
General knowledge:
1. The archipelago 40 miles west of the Outer Hebrides whose four main islands are called Hirta, Soay, Boreray and Dùn is St Kilda.
2. The Commonwealth city which has a suburb that shares its name with the archipelago above is Melbourne (Australia, if you didn’t know). There is also one in Adelaide and one in Dunedin (New Zealand). Award yourself a pint (but not at my expense) if you got all three.
3. In musical terms, a Mondegreen is a misinterpretation of actual lyrics (as in ‘Wurlitzer one for the money . . .’ at the start of Elvis’s ‘Blue Suede Shoes’). It is taken from a C17th Scottish Ballad ‘They hae slain the Earl o’Moray/and laid him on the green’, which became ‘Lady Mondegreen’.
4. The London Underground railway which commenced service in 1927 and closed in 2003 is the Post Office’s ‘Mail Rail’. It is now part of the British Postal Museum (located at Mount Pleasant) and you can ride on it.
5. As spotted on a YouTube video recently from a shot of preserved wall tiling at platform level, the tube station on the Piccadilly Line that was originally named Gillespie Road, before being renamed in 1932, is Arsenal (or Arsenal (Highbury Hill) until around 1960).
6. Dover Street Station (opened 1906) on the Piccadilly Line became Green Park in 1933.
7. Walham Green Station (opened 1880) on the District Line became Fulham Broadway in 1952.
8. Also on the District Line, Shaftesbury Road (1877) changed (as early as 1888) to Ravenscourt Park.
9. A little bit different: the Central Line station that was closed when the new Holborn Station was built nearby in 1933, (linked to the existing one on the Piccadilly Line) was called British Museum.
10. That’s funny; we have suddenly found ourselves a long way from London! The Rideau Canal (recognised by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site) is in Canada. It runs 202 kilometres from Ottawa to Lake Ontario at Kingston.