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The All New All New Groundspeak UK Pub Quiz

Simply Paul
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Dobunnis

+Dobunnis

Posted
Posted

I haven't a clue... but as a recurring character I'd guess at the Master... who I loved as a kid. Episode name impossible I guess... pairing off... hmmm... Kylie?

 

Not watched the reboot... not watched since McCoy TBH.

 

No, not the master and he has only appeared in those two episodes. The Doctor did try to pair him off with a recurring character though. As for the name of the episode, I guess I will accept what was special about that episode instead.

 

Helen

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Dobunnis

+Dobunnis

Posted
Posted

He was midshipman somethingorother, Alonso?, he also does the voiceover for Dr. Who confidential.

 

I will give you that one. He did indeed play Midshipman Alonso Frame.

 

It was Capt Jack Harkness that the Dr tried to pair him off with, was it the episode where we ended up with two David Tennant Doctors , and one of them went off with Rose to another dimension?

 

At the end of the other episode the Doctor does point Jack in Alonso's direction with his name to get them together but it is not in "Journey's End", the last episode of the 4th revived series.

 

That just leaves the name of the second episode in which Alonso Frame appears (or at least what is special about it) for the ding,

 

Helen

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Dobunnis

+Dobunnis

Posted
Posted

Does he pop up in a bar with Cap'n Jack? In the David Tennant to Matt Smith Regeneration episode.;

 

DING! :D

 

It was indeed the second part of "The End of Time", David Tennant's last episode as the Doctor, and yes Alonso Frame does pop up in the bar near the end when the Doctor is visiting his old companions before regenerating.

 

Over to bobbinz

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Delta68

+Delta68

Posted
Posted

OK, it's my first contribution to this thread so bear with me...

I've worded it so it's not instantly googlable (hopefully)

 

A UK stone is 14 pounds. Agreed?

 

A [missing word] stone is an obsolete British unit of measure and equals eight pounds.

 

What's the missing word I am thinking of and why?

 

 

Mark

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Delta68

+Delta68

Posted
Posted

It's the butcher's stone and it applied primarily to beef although it was also used for sugar and spice. It went out of use just before WW2.

 

DING

 

Close enough but the word I was thinking of was 'Smithfield'

 

From Wikipedia:

Smithfield (a London meat market) + stone

 

Calculated on the basis that for every 14lb (1 standard stone) of livestock purchased, 8lb (1 Smithfield stone) of saleable meat are produced.

 

 

Mark

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Pajaholic

Pajaholic

Posted
Posted

Gad sir, they are Barleycorns!

 

Ding!

 

By Jove,he's got it!

Every time I think of shoe sizes I can still hear Phil Jupitus on QI musing on how he might wander into a shoe shop one day and (in a loud and pompous voice) enquire of the hapless wretch trying to serve him, "Kind storekeeper tell me, how many barleycorns am I this fine day!?"

 

Interestingly, at the time of William the Conqueror (1066 and all that), the "inch" was legally defined to be three barleycorns. However, the origins of the inch go back much further, well before standardization - which leads to the next question:

 

What was the original definition of an inch?

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keehotee

+keehotee

Posted
Posted

Gad sir, they are Barleycorns!

 

Ding!

 

By Jove,he's got it!

Every time I think of shoe sizes I can still hear Phil Jupitus on QI musing on how he might wander into a shoe shop one day and (in a loud and pompous voice) enquire of the hapless wretch trying to serve him, "Kind storekeeper tell me, how many barleycorns am I this fine day!?"

 

Interestingly, at the time of William the Conqueror (1066 and all that), the "inch" was legally defined to be three barleycorns. However, the origins of the inch go back much further, well before standardization - which leads to the next question:

 

What was the original definition of an inch?

 

1/12th of a foot?

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Pajaholic

Pajaholic

Posted
Posted

1/12th of a foot?

No. It was the other way around as the inch pre-dates the foot by some time. Although it is alleged that Henry I tried to standardize the foot on the size of his feet that's unlikely to be true because hardly anyone has two feet the same size and in any case his feet were smaller than 12". A foot just happens to be approximately 12 of the original inches for most people, which is why we have 12 inches to the foot rather than ten.

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Pajaholic

Pajaholic

Posted
Posted

I seem to remember there being some reference to it being the length of an adult man's top thumb joint..... ish!

DING!

 

It was originally defined as the size of the top segment of one's thumb (i.e. between the top knuckle and the tip) and each person's inch could be different from the next person's. There is much linguistic evidence for this as many languages (including French, Italian, Spanish, Portugese, Dutch, Sanskrit, many Eastern European languages, and most Scandinavian languages) have the same or very similar words for "thumb" and "inch".

 

Interestingly, the expression "rule of thumb" is often alleged to spring from the regulation of domestic violence. i.e. a man being allowed to beat his wife but only with a stick no thicker than his thumb. However, it really comes from the way that artisans etc. used their thumbs to measure things. Even when the inch had been standardized it was often good enough to gain an approximation by seeing how many times the top joint of your thumb would fit and using that "as a rule of thumb".

 

Over to Pharisee ...

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Betelgeuse

+Betelgeuse

Posted
Posted
Go for it!! :)

OK, on the basis that Pharisee can jump in any time before the ding is given ...

 

Who 'invented' expiry dates for milk and other perishable goods?

 

That one was on TV the other day :P

 

It was Al Capone. He donated a million dollars to a children's home with the express condition that the milk be date marked because he hated the sour milk he was given as a child. Just goes to show, eh?

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Pajaholic

Pajaholic

Posted
Posted

That one was on TV the other day :P

 

It was Al Capone. He donated a million dollars to a children's home with the express condition that the milk be date marked because he hated the sour milk he was given as a child. Just goes to show, eh?

DING!

 

I wondered whether anyone else had watched Billy Connolly's Route 66.

 

Al Capone, who besides being a notorious and ruthless gangster actually 'committed' many good deeds. He was the first to open soup kitchens after the 1929 Wall Street Crash and provided food and clothing to the needy at his own expense. He is alleged to have paid the hospital fees of several who could not afford medical care. He also provided free milk to children well before the UK Labour Government thought of it. As part of his free milk scheme he insisted that the milk be marked with an expiry date so that those benefiting from the scheme wouldn't have to suffer sour milk as he did during his childhood. According to several sources, this was the first recorded implementation of 'use-by' and other expiry dates for perishable goods.

 

Over to Betelgeuse ...

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Betelgeuse

+Betelgeuse

Posted
Posted

With a title like that, how could I possibly miss it? :)

 

Again, if Pharisee wants to jump in all is good.

 

Where and when would you find Baily's Beads?

 

Around the edge of the moon, during a solar eclipse.

 

Ding!

 

The effect is caused by the sun shining through valleys in the rugged landscape as the lunar limb moves across it. :)

 

Over to Keehotee.

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Pajaholic

Pajaholic

Posted
Posted

Hopefully, the easy bit: A dwarf planet is a body that isn't a satellite of another planet, large enough that its own gravity has made it spherical, yet not large enough to gravitationally pull in everything in its surrounding area.

 

As to how many: I guess the answer depends on how far out you consider the Solar System to extend. Pluto was recently demoted to dwarf planet. ISTR this had something to do with another dwarf planet being found in the same orbit. Ceres is in the Asteroid Belt. So if you consider the Solar System to stop at about the orbit of Pluto, the answer is 8 planets plus three dwarf planets, making 11 in all. However, there are at least two dwarf planets further out than Pluto. So that gives 8 planets plus at least 5 dwarf planets, giving a minimum of 13.

 

That said, I suspect that the answer to this will change in a year or two because 'they' seem to discover new objects in space with monotonous regularity and ISTR conjecture that there could be over a hundred dwarf planets yet to be discovered. This makes sense as it's hard to believe that Ceres is the only body in the Asteroid Belt large enough to be 'gravitationally spherical' and the Solar System beyond Pluto hasn't been fully surveyed AFAICT.

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keehotee

+keehotee

Posted
Posted

Hopefully, the easy bit: A dwarf planet is a body that isn't a satellite of another planet, large enough that its own gravity has made it spherical, yet not large enough to gravitationally pull in everything in its surrounding area.

 

As to how many: I guess the answer depends on how far out you consider the Solar System to extend. Pluto was recently demoted to dwarf planet. ISTR this had something to do with another dwarf planet being found in the same orbit. Ceres is in the Asteroid Belt. So if you consider the Solar System to stop at about the orbit of Pluto, the answer is 8 planets plus three dwarf planets, making 11 in all. However, there are at least two dwarf planets further out than Pluto. So that gives 8 planets plus at least 5 dwarf planets, giving a minimum of 13.

 

That said, I suspect that the answer to this will change in a year or two because 'they' seem to discover new objects in space with monotonous regularity and ISTR conjecture that there could be over a hundred dwarf planets yet to be discovered. This makes sense as it's hard to believe that Ceres is the only body in the Asteroid Belt large enough to be 'gravitationally spherical' and the Solar System beyond Pluto hasn't been fully surveyed AFAICT.

 

Ding.

 

At the moment there are 8 full planets, and 5 dwarves :)

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Pajaholic

Pajaholic

Posted
Posted

Ding.

 

At the moment there are 8 full planets, and 5 dwarves :)

Thanks. I wasn't expecting to have been correct as I did a quick search after answering to discover there are another 4 dwarf planets known in the outer Solar System.

 

Pharisee: Thanks for the go-ahead.

 

Next question: Who or what is or was "Cruithne" (pronounced Crew-een-ya)?

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Betelgeuse

+Betelgeuse

Posted
Posted

Ding.

 

At the moment there are 8 full planets, and 5 dwarves :)

Thanks. I wasn't expecting to have been correct as I did a quick search after answering to discover there are another 4 dwarf planets known in the outer Solar System.

 

Pharisee: Thanks for the go-ahead.

 

Next question: Who or what is or was "Cruithne" (pronounced Crew-een-ya)?

 

It's a minor moon of Earth with a very odd orbit. It's also a Celtic deity.

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Pajaholic

Pajaholic

Posted
Posted
It's a minor moon of Earth with a very odd orbit. It's also a Celtic deity.

I'll give you a DING for the first bit.

 

There are two possible answers:

  1. A Celtic tribe also known as the Picts.
  2. Earth's second moon.

The second was named after the first.

 

WRT 2. Although it's sometimes called "Earth's second moon", it isn't a true satellite of earth. Rather it co-orbits the Sun in the same region as Earth and so has an orbit synchronous with that of Earth's. From Earth, Cruithne appears to describe a kidney-shaped path that gradually drifts relative to the Sun. There is a third 'moon', called "2002 AA29" with an even odder orbit. Again, this isn't a true satellite of Earth. For those interested, there's some info here. Going back to Keehotee's question: I wonder whether the existence of Cruithne and 2002 AA29 means that Earth isn't a true planet but is, by definition, a dwarf planet?!

 

Over to Betelgeuse ...

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thehalibutkid

+thehalibutkid

Posted
Posted

I just happened to look at the right time and for once knew the answer. :D

 

Keeping it on a vaguely similar theme, where would you find God's Final Message to His Creation, and what was the message?

 

Mark

 

The far side of the Quentulus Quazgar Mountains in the land of Sevorbeupstry on the planet of Preliumtarn, which orbits the star Zarss, which is located in the Grey Binding Fiefdoms of Saxaquine.

 

It is "We apologise for the inconvenience." (at least for Marvin). Though some would argue that it is different for each viewer.

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MTH

+MTH

Posted
Posted (edited)

DING, although I suspect you had to look it up :laughing:

 

It's in "So Long, And Thanks For all the Fish" by Douglas Adams - the fourth in the Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy Series. Still brilliant almost 30 years later. The book is on the shelf next to me - I must read it again sometime.

 

Mark

Edited by MTH
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thehalibutkid

+thehalibutkid

Posted
Posted

DING, although I suspect you had to look it up :laughing:

 

It's in "So Long, And Thanks For all the Fish" by Douglas Adams - the fourth in the Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy Series. Still brilliant almost 30 years later. The book is on the shelf next to me - I must read it again sometime.

 

Mark

 

I confess my original answer was Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Some kinda themepark planet. Though I thought i'd look up the exact quote.

 

Another Adams Character is Dirk Gentley. He follows the "zen" method of motoring. How does this work?

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Pajaholic

Pajaholic

Posted
Posted

I wonder if this is anything to do with something a friend used to do. When lost he would follow any car that looked like its driver knew where he or she was going until he spotted a landmark he recognised. He referred to this as "Zen Navigation" and explained that someone who knew where they were going wouldn't be driving round in circles like he would if he was lost and once they'd led him somewhere he could recognise he was better off - even if the spell of 'zen' had taken him miles out of his way! FWIW, he was also a H2G2 fan. Although he never said where he got "Zen Navigation" from it actually works and it's also got me 'unlost' a few times!

 

So, is the "zen" method of motoring merely to follow a driver who looks like they know where they're going?

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thehalibutkid

+thehalibutkid

Posted
Posted

I wonder if this is anything to do with something a friend used to do. When lost he would follow any car that looked like its driver knew where he or she was going until he spotted a landmark he recognised. He referred to this as "Zen Navigation" and explained that someone who knew where they were going wouldn't be driving round in circles like he would if he was lost and once they'd led him somewhere he could recognise he was better off - even if the spell of 'zen' had taken him miles out of his way! FWIW, he was also a H2G2 fan. Although he never said where he got "Zen Navigation" from it actually works and it's also got me 'unlost' a few times!

 

So, is the "zen" method of motoring merely to follow a driver who looks like they know where they're going?

 

That's a ding.

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Pajaholic

Pajaholic

Posted
Posted
That's a ding.

Well, I'll be ... and until today I thought that he'd made it up himself!

 

As I know little about the books of Douglas Adams, I'll switch authors to Bram Stoker. Possibly the most famous fictitious vampire was Bram Stoker's 'Dracula'. Some say that Bram was inspired by a stay at a certain British town and that he based Dracula on a genuine historical figure. What was the town and who was the historical figure?

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