Last week we had the BIG Christmas quiz and thank you to everyone who visited and tried it out.
And a very special thanks to the Coastal Crone who reblogged it.
Since we are all used to ‘leftovers’ at this time of the year I thought I would use my leftover questions from last week’s BIG quiz for a little one this week.
The questions still have a Christmassy theme and as usual, if you get stuck, you can find the answers waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay down below.
So enjoy what’s left of the Christmas holiday and good luck with the quiz.
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Q. 1: How many points does a snowflake have? (Sorry there’s only one point for the correct answer.)
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Q. 2: Charles Dickens is said to have considered the names ‘Little Larry’ and ‘Puny Pete’ for which character? (A bonus point is available if you can also correctly name the Dickens novel in which the character appears.)
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Q. 3: In which country that made the news a lot during 2014, and the largest country of its continent, is it said that finding a spider web on Christmas morning brings good luck, and so Christmas trees are decorated with artificial spider webs?
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Q. 4: What is New Year’s Eve called in Scotland?
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Q. 5: What former Egyptian president was born on Christmas day in 1918?
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Q. 6: Which alcoholic ingredient is used in a ‘Snowball’ cocktail?
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Q. 7: And what animal is ‘Snowball’ in George Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’?
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Q. 8: Derived from the Latin word meaning ‘coming’, what is the name of the period leading up to Christmas?
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Q. 9: In the rhyme ‘Christmas is coming’, who is getting ‘fat’?
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Q. 10: The first singing radio commercial, which aired in the US on Christmas Eve 1926, was for which brand?
a) Rolex b) BMW c) Wheaties d) Durex
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Q. 11: Why is the male turkey often referred to as ‘Tom Turkey’?
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Q. 12: In what country did Christmas Trees originate?
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Q. 13: How many ‘Wise Men’ brought gifts to Jesus?
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Q. 14: Which English monarch was crowned on Christmas Day in Westminster Abbey?
a) William I b) William II c) William III d) William IV
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Q. 15: Name the two administrative and ex-colonial regions of China for which Christmas day remains a legal public holiday, whereas in the main country it is not? (A point for each that you name correctly.)
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Q. 16: The Christmas favorite of ‘Pigs in Blankets’ is chipolata sausages wrapped in what?
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Q. 17: In Mexico, it is said that wearing what color underwear on New Year’s Eve ensures finding new love the following year?
a) Yellow b) Green c) Red d) Brown
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Q. 18: Father Christmas is known as ‘Pai Natal’ in which European country?
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Q. 19: The surname ‘Chandler’ derives from the making or selling of what?
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Q. 20: What was Mr Bean searching for when he got his head stuck in a turkey?
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ANSWERS
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Q. 1: How many points does a snowflake have? (Sorry there’s only one point for the correct answer.)
A. 1: Six.
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Q. 2: Charles Dickens is said to have considered the names ‘Little Larry’ and ‘Puny Pete’ for which character? (A bonus point is available if you can also correctly name the Dickens novel in which the character appears.)
A. 2: The character is ‘Tiny Tim’ and he appears in ‘A Christmas Carol’.
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Q. 3: In which country that made the news a lot during 2014, and the largest country of its continent, is it said that finding a spider web on Christmas morning brings good luck, and so Christmas trees are decorated with artificial spider webs?
A. 3: The correct answer is Ukraine. (Since it is the time to be generous you can also have a point if you said ‘Poland’. Although it does not fulfill all the parameters of the question, spiders or spider webs are common Christmas trees decorations in Poland because according to legend, a spider wove a blanket for Baby Jesus. In fact, Polish people consider spiders to be symbols of goodness and prosperity at Christmas.)
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Q. 4: What is New Year’s Eve called in Scotland?
A. 4: Hogmanay.
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Q. 5: What former Egyptian president was born on Christmas day in 1918?
A. 5: Anwar Sadat.
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Q. 6: Which alcoholic ingredient is used in a ‘Snowball’ cocktail?
A. 6: Advocaat.
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Q. 7: And what animal is ‘Snowball’ in George Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’?
A. 7: A Pig.
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Q. 8: Derived from the Latin word meaning ‘coming’, what is the name of the period leading up to Christmas?
A. 8: Advent.
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Q. 9: In the rhyme ‘Christmas is coming’, who is getting ‘fat’?
A. 9: The goose.
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Q. 10: The first singing radio commercial, which aired in the US on Christmas Eve 1926, was for which brand?
a) Rolex b) BMW c) Wheaties d) Durex
A. 10: The correct answer is c) Wheaties.
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Q. 11: Why is the male turkey often referred to as ‘Tom Turkey’?
A. 11: After Thomas Jefferson, because Jefferson was opposed to the idea of a turkey as the national bird.
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Q. 12: In what country did Christmas Trees originate?
A. 12: Germany. (Technically it was Latvia but at that time it was part of Germany.)
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Q. 13: How many ‘Wise Men’ brought gifts to Jesus?
A. 13: ‘More than one’ is the correct answer, the Bible does not specify how many. (If you said ‘3’ you don’t get a point.)
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Q. 14: Which English monarch was crowned on Christmas Day in Westminster Abbey?
a) William I b) William II c) William III d) William IV
A. 14: The correct answer is a) William I.
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Q. 15: Name the two administrative and ex-colonial regions of China for which Christmas day remains a legal public holiday, whereas in the main country it is not? (A point for each that you name correctly.)
A. 15: Hong Kong and Macau.
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Q. 16: The Christmas favorite of ‘Pigs in Blankets’ is chipolata sausages wrapped in what?
A. 16: Bacon.
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Q. 17: In Mexico, it is said that wearing what color underwear on New Year’s Eve ensures finding new love the following year?
a) Yellow b) Green c) Red d) Brown
A. 17: The correct answer is c) Red.
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Q. 18: Father Christmas is known as ‘Pai Natal’ in which European country?
A. 18: Portugal.
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Q. 19: The surname ‘Chandler’ derives from the making or selling of what?
A. 19: Candles.
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Q. 20: What was Mr Bean searching for when he got his head stuck in a turkey?
Hi, and welcome to fasab’s fascinating festive facts.
Everything on my blog this week is in Christmas mode including these tidbits of information that you may be able to work into the conversation if you are at a party or two this week.
Enjoy and have a very Merry Christmas.
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The traditional three colors of Christmas
are green, red, and gold.
Green has long been a symbol of life and rebirth;
red symbolizes the blood of Christ,
and gold represents light as well as wealth and royalty.
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The first printed reference to a
Christmas tree was in 1531 in Germany.
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Apparently seven out of ten British dogs
get Christmas gifts from their doting owners.
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A lot of people don’t like it,
but the abbreviation of ‘Xmas’ for
Christmas is not irreligious.
The first letter of the word Christ in Greek is chi,
which is identical to our X.
Xmas was originally an ecclesiastical abbreviation
that was used in tables and charts.
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Electric Christmas lights
were first used in 1854.
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Some people who were born on December 25
feel hard done by because they have to
make do with one present instead of two
and share their big day celebrations with everybody else.
Robert Louis Stevenson, author of Treasure Island,
recognized the problem. When he died on December 4, 1894,
he willed his November 13 birthday to a friend
who disliked her own Christmas birthday
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Franklin Pierce was the first president to
decorate an official White House Christmas tree.
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Silent Night was written in 1818,
by Austrian priest Joseph Mohr.
He was told the day before Christmas
that the church organ was broken
and would not be repaired in time for Christmas Eve.
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Artificial Christmas trees
have outsold real ones since 1991.
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In the British armed forces it is traditional
that officers wait on the other ranks
and serve them their Christmas dinner.
This dates back to a custom from the Middle Ages.
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Long before mistletoe became a saucy ‘kiss encourager’,
it was considered to have magic powers.
It was said to have the ability to heal
wounds and increase fertility.
Celts hung mistletoe in their homes
in order to bring themselves good luck
and ward off evil spirits.
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Each year there are approximately 20,000
“rent-a-Santas” across the United States.
“Rent-a-Santas” usually undergo seasonal training
on how to maintain a jolly attitude
under pressure from the public.
They also receive practical advice,
such as not accepting money from parents
while children are looking and
avoiding garlic, onions, or beans for lunch.
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In Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea,
your age is measured not in years
but in how many Christmases you’ve lived through;
you’re not 20, you’re twenti krismas.
Rather less charmingly,
the Japanese expression to describe
single women over 25 years old is
kurisumasu keiki – left-over Christmas cake.
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Most of Santa’s reindeer have male-sounding names,
such as Blitzen, Comet, and Cupid.
However, male reindeers shed their antlers around Christmas,
so the reindeer pulling Santa’s sleigh
are likely not male, but female – or castrati.
(I wonder if that is the origin of hanging balls
on a Christmas tree comes from?)
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The popular Christmas song “Jingle Bells”
was actually written for Thanksgiving.
The song was composed in 1857 by James Pierpont,
and was originally called “One Horse Open Sleigh”.
Yesterday I wrote about whether your glass is half full or half empty.
Closely related to that, though also slightly different in degree perhaps, is whether you are an optimist or a pessimist.
I have a friend who has gone through life with a “when one closes another one shuts” philosophy. He also says things like, “Behind every silver lining there’s a cloud”.
It’s amusing, but in his case and I would guess in a good many others, that attitude eventually becomes a self-fulfilling predicament. He’s never taken any chances in life and he has been in a job that he never really cared for, for the past 30 years or so. He’s just counting the days until he can retire and he has been doing that for many, many years, not just recently. Sad, but it can’t be helped, or rather he can’t be helped.
As well as creating an aversion to any sort of risk, if you think things will go wrong then they usually will, and more often than not it’s your own fault. If you set out to do something with failure uppermost in your mind, you psych yourself out of giving 100 percent to the task at hand. If you don’t give it that 100 percent effort then it will either not turn out as good as it could have, or it will fail completely. In such cases the pessimist always blames things like bad luck, or other people, never their own defeatist attitude from the outset.
An optimistic person, on the other hand, will approach a task thinking it is going to succeed. Therefore in their case they will put much more care and effort into it (even sometimes subconsciously) thereby raising their chances of succeeding. Don’t get me wrong, starting off with an optimistic viewpoint will not guarantee success, it will just make for a better attempt at the job, and the better the job you do the better are the chances it will succeed.
Failure will stop a pessimist dead in his tracks because he is sure he is going to fail from the beginning and when it happens he shrugs his shoulders and packs up and goes home.
But failure won’t do the same for a person with an optimistic outlook. An optimist is surprised by failure. He usually wants to know why it happened, so he will analyze it and then try again.
And that is one of the great secrets to success. Sir Winston Churchill probably defined it best when he said that “success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm”, and although Churchill is now remembered for his notable political victories and war-time leadership, he also had his fare share of defeats as well along the way.
I have been part of several projects that have been complete failures, but that never stopped me from getting back up, dusting myself down, and trying again. And if you stay optimistic and work accordingly giving 100 percent of your effort then sooner or later you will succeed.
I’m very optimistic about that!
PS: I haven’t tried this out, but they say you should always borrow money from a pessimist, because he doesn’t expect to get paid back!
There has always been a fine line between bad luck and stupidity.
I’m not even sure that there is such a thing as luck. Some people say you make your own luck and to a great extent I think I would go along with that.
There are the people who seem to have “good luck” but who are in fact people who have just had the courage and the confidence to take advantage of an opportunity when they saw one. Even lottery winners wouldn’t have won anything if they hadn’t taken the chance and bought a ticket in the first place, despite knowing that the odds were firmly against them.
Then there are the people who complain about having “bad luck” but who are in fact people who just do stupid things and when they inevitably go wrong blame bad luck instead of their own stupidity.
I had an uncle like that. All his life he kept using that saying, “If I didn’t have bad luck, I’d have no luck at all”, but the truth he was just dumb and did dumb things. I have a feeling he’ll feature in future blogs.
For now, however, we’ll use another much more famous example. If ever there was a good illustration of both good luck and bad luck wrapped up in the same person it was in a man called Roy Cleveland Sullivan.
Roy was born in Greene County, Virginia on February 7, 1912. He was described as a brawny man with a broad, rugged face, who resembled the actor Gene Hackman.
In 1936 he started working as a ranger in Shenandoah National Park in Virginina in 1936. Nothing very unusual in that, in fact a nice job if you like the outdoors and nature and all that good stuff. You could say in that regard Roy was a lucky man.
But Roy’s nickname was the “Human Lightning Conductor” or “Human Lightning Rod” because, between 1942 and 1977, he was hit by lightning on seven different occasions (unlucky) and survived all of them (lucky). For this reason he was a proud entrant in the Guinness Book of World Records as the person struck by lightning more recorded times than any other human being. Two of his ranger hats are on display at two Guinness World Exhibit Halls in New York City and in South Carolina.
"The Human Lightning Rod"
The first documented lightning strike on Mr Sullivan occurred in April 1942. He was hiding from a thunderstorm in a newly built lookout tower that hadn’t yet been fitted with a lightning rod. The tower was hit seven or eight times and set on fire. Roy ran out of the tower, but just a few feet away received what he considered to be his worst lightning strike. It burned a half-inch strip all along his right leg, hit his toe, and left a hole in his shoe.
The second bolt of lightning to hit him happened in July 1969. This one was extremely unusual because he was hit while in his truck, driving on a mountain road. Normally in a lightning storm one of the safest places to be is in a vehicle, the body of a car or truck normally protects people as long as they are not touching any metal parts. In this case, however, the lightning first hit nearby trees and was deflected into the open window of the truck. The strike knocked Roy Sullivan unconscious, burned off his eyebrows, eyelashes, and most of his hair. The uncontrolled truck kept moving until it stopped near a cliff edge.
The following year, in 1970, Roy was again struck by lightning, this time while in his front yard. The lightning hit a nearby power transformer and from there jumped to his left shoulder, searing it.
The fourth strike occurred in 1972, while Roy was working inside a ranger station in Shenandoah National Park. It set his hair on fire; he tried to smother the flames with his jacket. Then he rushed to the rest room, but couldn’t fit under the water tap and so used a wet towel instead.
Not unnaturally, after the fourth strike Roy began to experience a degree of paranoia and believed that some “force” was trying to destroy him and, although he had never been a timid man, he acquired a fear of death. For months, whenever he was caught in a storm while driving his truck, he would pull over and lie down on the front seat until the storm passed. He also began to carry a can of water with him and believed that he would somehow attract lightning even if he stood in a crowd of people.
On August 7, 1973, while he was out on patrol in the park, Sullivan saw a storm cloud forming and drove away quickly. But the cloud, he said later, seemed to be following him. When he finally thought he had outrun it, he decided it was safe to leave his truck. But soon after he did so – you guessed it – he was struck by a lightning bolt. He said that on this occasion that he actually saw the bolt that hit him. The lightning set his hair on fire, moved down his left arm and left leg and knocked off his shoe, although he said “it did not untie the lace”. It then crossed over to his right leg just below the knee. Still conscious, Sullivan crawled to his truck and poured the can of water, which he always kept there, over his head.
On June 5, 1976, lightning bolt number six hit him, this time injuring his ankle. It was reported that he saw a cloud, thought that it was following him, tried to run away, but was struck anyway.
On Saturday morning, June 25, 1977, Sullivan was fishing in a freshwater pool when he was struck for the seventh time. The lightning hit the top of his head, singeing his hair, and traveled down burning his chest and stomach. Sullivan turned to his car and then another unexpected thing happened — a bear appeared and tried to steal trout from his fishing line. Sullivan had the strength and courage to strike the bear with a tree branch. He claimed that this was the twenty-second time he hit a bear with a stick in his lifetime.
All seven strikes were documented by the superintendent of Shenandoah National Park, R. Taylor Hoskins, and were verified by doctors. Sullivan himself recalled that the first time he was struck by lightning was not in 1942 but much earlier. When he was a child, he was helping his father to cut wheat in a field, when a thunderbolt struck the blade of his scythe without injuring him, but because he could not prove the fact later, he never claimed it in his total.
Roy Sullivan’s wife was also struck once, when a storm suddenly arrived as she was out hanging clothes in their back yard. Yes, her husband Roy was helping her at the time, but this time he escaped unharmed.
Understandably in later in life Roy was avoided by people because of their fear of being hit by lightning, a fact that he said saddened him. He once recalled “For instance, I was walking with the chief ranger one day when lightning struck way off. The chief said, ‘I’ll see you later.'”
So, ‘bad luck’ to have been hit so many times by lightning or ‘good luck’ to have survived them all, take you pick.
Unfortunately the story doesn’t have a happy ending. On September 28, 1983, Roy Sullivan died at the age of 71 from self-inflicted gunshot wound over an unrequited love. It is not know whether the love was unrequited because the other party did not have the same feelings for Roy or whether they just feared getting hit by lightning!
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There is a similar tale about a British cavalry officer, a Major Summerford, who was fighting in the fields of Flanders during the last year of WW1, when a flash of lightning knocked him off his horse and paralysed him from his waist down.
Summerford moved to Vancouver, Canada, and six years later, whilst out fishing, he was again struck by lightning, this time paralysing the right side of his body.
After two years of recovery, one summer day he was out in a local park, when a storm suddenly blew up and Major Summerfield was again struck by lightning. This time he was permanently paralysed.
He died two years after this incident.
Four years after his death, his stone tomb was destroyed.
Yes, it was struck by lightning!
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All a bit too morbid? Maybe we need to end on something a bit more light hearted. As “luck” would have it I remember a suitable (and clean) story. It’s a little bit funny, I hope.
Anthony S. Clancy of Dublin, was born on the seventh day of the seventh month of the seventh year of the century, which also happened to be the seventh day of the week.
He was the seventh child of a seventh child, and he had seven brothers
That makes seven sevens.
On his twenty-seventh birthday he went to the race track.
The seventh numbered horse in the seventh race was named Seventh Heaven, and was handicapped seven stone.
The odds against Seventh Heaven were seven-to-one.
fasab 