Between processing freshman contact list information (of which I’m maybe 25% done), taxes, and the ugly surprise of a backed-up septic tank, I was correct to say last week that I would have little to say this week. Because I’m not as far through as I’d like, next week may be short as well. So let's get to the other stuff.
Stuff to Listen to
Canadian History Ehx covered the part C for when parts A and B are the War of 1812 and the Aroostook War: The Pig War, which describes the only casualty.
Stuff to Look at
The Annotated Topography of Dante's Inferno.
Faces of Power, the 45 US presidents with very short summaries of their lives.
The Articles You Can Learn From This Week
There's enough in this article about the rise of Neapolitan cuisine to fill a couple questions, but the section covering the Risorgimento should be your first stop if you don't know about it.
Baseball approaches, whether it reaches us or not is less certain. More certain is that there will be a Buzzword Special Event on Baseball coming soon. I cannot throw it but I have great affinity for the knuckleball, which is one of the better analogies for "What I was good at in quiz bowl." This profile from the New Yorker is almost 20 years old, but it touches my sweet spot for this pitch. That may be because I actually remember that one season of Luis Tiant (mentioned in the article) as a Pirate.
I read through this article on Harper Lee and didn't find anything I didn't know, but it led me to....
The Articles I Learned From This Week
This article about Harper Lee which I didn't know about at all.
I had known about "Grade Up to Elite Cow" from some mention long ago, but this article on the boardgames archive of the British publisher Waddingtons showed me a variation of Monopoly I hadn't considered.
The theories about the Tunguska Event are somewhat new to me, and certainly the fictional theories included here are.
I knew about some of the history of vaccines in this article, but I didn't know about the meat based-duel included in this. You will want to know about it because it reads like the opening line of a bonus.
1
Hitler avoided bombing the Astoria hotel in this city as he wanted to use it when he defeated Russia.
A. Name this city which was renamed from Leningrad in 1991.
answer: St. Petersburg
B. Hitler wanted to use the Astoria in the same way as this leader used it, delivering a speech from a balcony proclaiming the Russian Revolution.
answer: Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
C. In the room directly above Lenin's balcony room, this author spent his honeymoon and wrote part of The Master and Margarita.
answer: Mikhail Bulgakov
2
One of his political ploys was to turn the local Bangui band into "Tropical Fiesta" his own personal orchestra.
A. Name this dictator who turned his republic into an empire.
answer: Jean-Bedel Bokassa
B. Bokassa overturned the government of his cousin David Dacko and ruled this African nation.
answer: Central African Republic or Central African Empire
C. Bokassa emulated this man in declaring himself emperor, inviting Pope Paul VI to crown him on the 173rd anniversary of his crowning himself.
answer: Napoleon Bonaparte
3
The versine of an angle theta is calculated by drawing a line normal to one ray of the angle that intersects the point on the unit circle that intersects with the other ray.
A. That makes the versine one minus this trigonometric function.
answer: cosine
B. Sine squared plus versine squared equals this function, the length between two points on a circle.
answer: chord
C. When the versine of an angle equals the cosine of the angle, this is the smallest positive degree value of the angle.
answer: 60 degrees
4
The title character is seen with left pointer finger raised as he reaches out for a bowl of poison hemlock.
A. Name this painting depicting the end of a Greek philosopher.
answer: The Death of Socrates
B. The Death of Socrates was painted by this French neoclassist painter, who depicted another death in The Death of Marat.
answer: Jacques-Louis David
C. This philosopher recounts the events of Socrates' death in the dialogue Phaedo, and is depicted head downcast at the foot of the bed in The Death of Socrates.
answer: Plato
5
William Thornton's design for this building drew ideas from the Paris Pantheon and Louvre, and retained the open recess in the middle insisted upon by George Washington.
A. Name this government building in Washington, DC, which beginning in 1800 housed not only the legislature but offices of the judicial and executive branches.
answer: The Capitol
B. The location for the Capitol building on what was then Jenkins' Hill was selected by this planner who laid out a grid with diagonals.
answer: Pierre Charles L'Enfant
C. Thanks to the designs of later architect Benjamin Latrobe, including materials like sandstone, marble, copper, and zinc, the Capitol survived this 1814 event.
answer: burning of Washington DC (accept answers indicating burning and the general location, as well as burning of the Capitol.)