This character’s creator described him as “insufferable”, and called him a “detestable, bombastic, tiresome, ego-centric little creep”. On August 6 1975, the New York Times carried his obituary, the only time it has thus honoured a fictional character. Who?
Answer: (select the text below to show)
Hercule Poirot.
Question by Amit Varma
In Texas Hold’em Poker, which hand is known as ‘six tits’?
Answer: (select the text below to show)
QQQ.
Question by Amit Varma
X is a song written by Y and famously covered by Z. Time Magazine’s Josh Tyrangiel described it thus:
Y murmured the original like a dirge, but except for a single overwrought breath before the music kicks in, Z treated the 7-min. song like a tiny capsule of humanity, using his voice to careen between glory and sadness, beauty and pain, mostly just by repeating the word X. It’s not only Z’s best song — it’s one of the great songs, and because it covers so much emotional ground and is not (yet) a painfully obvious choice, it has become the go-to track whenever a TV show wants to create instant mood. ‘X can be joyous or bittersweet, depending on what part of it you use,’ says Sony ATV’s Kathy Coleman. ‘It’s one of those rare songs that the more it gets used, the more people want to use it.’
Name X, Y and Z.
Answer: (select the text below to show)
X—Hallelujah. Y—Leonard Cohen. Z—Jeff Buckley.
And here’s the Tyrangiel piece I quoted from.
Question by Amit Varma
In the book “The World of _____” by Bennett Alan Weinberg and Bonnie K Bealer, there is a photograph of a label from a jar of pharmaceutical-grade crystals. It reads:
“WARNING: MAY BE HARMFUL IF INHALED OR SWALLOWED. HAS CAUSED MUTAGENIC AND REPRODUCTIVE EFFECTS IN LABORATORY ANIMALS. INHALATION CAUSES RAPID HEART RATE, EXCITEMENT, DIZZINESS, PAIN, COLLAPSE, HYPOTENSION, FEVER, SHORTNESS OF BREATH. MAY CAUSE HEADACHE, INSOMNIA, VOMITING, STOMACH PAIN, COLLAPSE AND CONVULSIONS.”
Fill in the blank.
Answer: (select the text below to show)
Caffeine.
Question by Amit Varma
In 1981, Jimmy Page, Chris Squire and Alan White got together to form a band, and tried to recruit Robert Plant into it. Plant attended one rehearsal, chose not to join the band, and the project fell through. Had it survived, the band would have called itself XYZ. Why?
Answer: (select the text below to show)
XYZ was to stand for eX–Yes and led Zeppelin. Squire and White were from Yes, Page from Zeppelin.
Question by Amit Varma
“I am a small eye poet.” Who once wrote these words in a letter to his mother?
Answer: (select the text below to show)
Question by Amit Varma
Who used to be known as Dileep Kumar, and is now married to Saira Banu?
Answer: (select the text below to show)
AR Rahman.
Question by Abhishek Toraskar
In British Bingo, many numbers have nicknames, which are used while calling out the number. What number does the phrase “All the Steps” stand for?
Answer: (select the text below to show)
“39”, in reference to the well-known book “The 39 Steps”.
Question by J Ramanand
Which is the only palindromic song by a palindromic group to have entered the US charts?
Answer: (select the text below to show)
“SOS” by Abba.
Question by Amit Varma
Herodotus once wrote:
“The counting was done by first packing ten thousand men as close together as they could stand and drawing a circle round them on the ground; they were then dismissed, and a fence, about navel high, was constructed around the circle; finally, other troops were marched into the area thus enclosed and dismissed in their turn, until the whole army had been counted.”
Whose army?
Answer: (select the text below to show)
(Source: Histories.)
Question by Amit Varma