A Thursday Afternoon. Quitzkrieg, LitFest Pulse'16 AIIMS, Finals of the General Quiz. 22nd Sept 2016. Vasishta Polisetty.

2. Outline
• 3 Dry Rounds
– Pounce +10/-10
– Infinite Bounce +10
• 3 Differential scoring rounds
• 1 Bidding round

3. Dry Round 1

4. ”X was designed to play in a few minutes when you are relaxed.
But it happened to become an addictive product. I think it has
become a problem. To solve that problem, it's best to take down
X. It's gone forever." He went on to say that the product had
nothing to do with legal issues. ________ (the creator) said that
the guilt that he felt over it was affecting his sleep, and that his
conscience was relieved after he took it down.
1.

6. Flappy Bird

7. He sat on the wooden plank of the scaffolding
up in the air with his legs dangling and worked
looking up. For fun, he drew a little caricature
of himself 
“He executed the work in great discomfort,
having to work with his face looking upwards,
which impared his sight so badly that he could
not read or look at drawings save with his head
turned backwards; and this lasted for several
months afterwards.”
Who is ‘he’ and what is ‘he’ doing?
2.

9. Michelangelo painting the sistine chapel

10. In 1825 the British began developing Coffee arabica, the most common
variety of bean, on plantations across Ceylon, and within a few decades the
country had become the world’s largest producer of the beans.
But in 1869 the British coffee empire unraveled almost as fast as it began with
the arrival of the fungus Hemileia vastatrix. Over the next two decades, the
rust spread quickly through Ceylon, ravaging coffee plants as it went. By 1889,
arabica production in the country had all but shut down.
What did the British do as an alternative solution to the issue?
3.

12. Started cultivating tea instead

13. Shankaracharya roamed around India on his quest for knowledge. Due to
conflicting ideologies, Shankara wanted to debate the renowned
Mimansaka scholar Kumarila Bhatta. He was dying and advised Shankara
to meet Mandana Mishra. They agreed to debate with Mishra's wife
Ubhaya Bharati as the judge. Shankara's wit and razor sharp logic was
unparalleled and Mishra was about to accept defeat. Just then Ubhaya
Bharati raised a question. "how can you claim to have knowledge of the
whole world? Because.... "
To what question of Ubhaya, Shankara had to accept defeat??
4.

15. Being a celibate, he had no
knowledge of the kama-shastra
(knowledge of sex and other sensory
pursuits)

16. Over Labor Day weekend in 1995, X wrote code for an ‘experiment’ and
launched it as a personal project out of a spare. He had bought a $30
laser pointer with the intention of using it to make flashy presentations,
but ended up using it to make his cat chase the red dot. X decided to list
the $30 laser pointer, which broke two weeks after it was purchased,
because “it would be a good way to test out his ‘experiment’, he figured,
and it would cost him nothing,”.
In the listing, he admitted the item didn’t work, even with new batteries.
While no one bid on it for a week, a bidding war started the next week,
and the product first listed for $1 ended up selling for $14.83.
Astonished, X contacted the winning bidder to ask if he understood that
the laser pointer was broken. In his responding email, the buyer
explained: "I'm a collector of broken laser pointers”.
Id X and his experiment
5.

18. Pierrie Omidyar, = X
Experiment = Auction web (no points also for eBay)

19. Map of? What do the colors indicate?
Hint: Colors are directly indicative and not just a legend
6.

21. Color of passport cover

22. This amateur artist sketched a "beautiful
blonde model from the art class" but he later
named it 'Marie Curie Observing the
Radiations from Radium' so that the painting
would represent something related to science..
for some reason..
He even used a pseudonym because a person
of his post "isn't supposed to be able to draw"
Who is this amateur artist who is certainly
much more famous for something not related
to art?
7.

24. Richard Feynman

25. X is the westernmost province of the
Netherlands. The province, located in the
south-west of the country, consists of a
number of islands and peninsulas and a strip
bordering Belgium. Its capital is Middelburg. Its
name literally means ‘land of the sea’
X has given its name to a newer version, Y
ID X and Y
8.

27. Zeeland and New Zealand
Zealand for X is wrong

28. "She's about fifteen years old I should think,
not more, but she stands there with bangles all
the way up her arm and nothing else on. A girl
perfectly, for the moment, perfectly confident
of herself and the world. There's nothing like
her, I think, in the world."
9.

30. Dancing girl from mohenjodaro

31. 10. the epoch of incredulity
• The 1783-84 eruption of Laki, Iceland was one of the deadliest
eruptions in the history of mankind. The eruption lasted for
over 8 months, and resulted in massive clouds of ash and
poisonous gases including SO2 that darkened the sky all over
Europe and consequently to a drop in global temperatures.
This caused widespread crop failures and famine in Europe.
Over 6 million people died globally.
• However, one of it’s indirect aftermaths also left an indelible
mark on European and probably the world history. What?

33. The French Revolution

34. Differential 1

35. • Scoring (6-n) x 2; where n is the no. of teams
answered
• 2 sets
– Identify city by satellite image
– Identify the script

36. 1.

37. 2.

38. 3.

39. 4.

40. 5.

41. ኢትዮጵያአፍ
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.

43. London
1.

44. Rio
2.

45. Istanbul
3.

46. Amsterdam
4.

47. Venice
5.

48. ኢትዮጵያአፍ
1.
2.
3.
4.
Khmer
Odiya
Thai
Amharic

49. 5.
6.
7.
Georgian
Bengali
Tibetian

50. Dry Round 2

51. The very first New York Comicon was held on July 27, 1964. The
event, featuring booklet art by Spider-Man co-creator Steve Ditko
and guests like Stan Lee's long-serving secretary, Flo Steinberg, was
organized by Bernie Bubnis, Ron Fradkin and now-legendary comics
creator Len Wein, who is said to have coined the word "Comicon"
to describe the event.
___________ was the first person to purchase a ticket, making him
Comic-Con Attendee Number One for the ages.
His letters to the editors at Marvel Comics were printed in the
pages of Fantastic Four, and he became a contributor to various
fanzines as a teenager, which brought him a connection to other
fans via letters.
Here's a fanmail copy which may help
Who's this person? The attendee no. one!
11.

55. It was in 2007, that people in rural Antioquia, 200 miles north-west of
Bogota, began phoning the Ministry of Environment to report sightings of a
peculiar animal. "They found a creature in a river that they had never seen
before, with small ears and a really big mouth," recalls Carlos Valderrama,
from the charity Webconserva.
Nobody knows how many hippos there are. The local environmental
authority, which bears responsibility for them, estimates between 50 and
60, with most living in the lake at the park. That is a very significant rate fo
growth in around 35 years. This is the largest herd outside Africa where
Hippos are endemic species.
If Africa is the only endemic place for Hippos, how did they even get there?
12.

58. The following is a classification proposed by Brent Berlin, an anthropologist and Paul
Kay, a linguist in 1969, which has made popular what is known as the color debate.
Stage I: Dark-cool and light-warm
Stage II: Red
Stage III: Either green or yellow
Stage IV: Both green and yellow
Stage V: Blue
Stage VI: Brown
Stage VII: Purple, pink, orange, or gray
There are two formal sides to the color debate, the universalist and the relativist.
The universalist side claims that the biology of all human beings is all the same while
the relativist side claims that the variability of __________ points to more culture-
specific phenomena.
Give funda
_____ is not a single word. Just guess what the variability of what is being talked of
13.

60. As languages evolve, they acquire new basic
color terms in a strict chronological sequence;
if a basic color term is found in a language,
then the colors of all earlier stages should also
be present.
“Linguistic relativity”

61. In the year 1980 after having played his last game for the Los Angeles
Dodgers, Major League Baseball player Gary Thomasson is bought by the
Yomiuri Giants of the Japanese Nippon Pro Baseball. Having played for the
San Francisco Giants, the Oakland Athletics, and the New York Yankees
before he was traded to the Dodgers, Thomasson was a bit of a star.
Signed with great fanfare to the biggest contract ever given to a player in
the Nippon league, Thomasson was a disappointment in his two years in
Japan, coming close to setting the league strikeout record before a knee
injury ended his career. But since the contact remained, Yomiuri giants
was in legal
Tokyo writer and conceptual artist Genpei Akasegawa published a book
containing photographs of found objects which he termed "Hyperart
Thomasson”
Some photographs are shown here, what is the book about? Funda? This
has lead to generic use of the word Thomasson
14.

65. “useless-but-well maintained” architectural
features given a name, “Thomasson”

66. ‘Dr. X Will See You Now, Mrs. Y.’ is an alternative history play by British comedy
writing duo Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran.
A small boy, Y was taken to the local doctor, suffering from recurring nightmares.
The doctor realised there was nothing he could prescribe which could help young
Y. Instead he suggested that Mrs Y take her son to Vienna, where a psychiatrist
had just set up the first child psychiatric clinic in the country.
In fact young Y was never taken to see X - presumably his father thought
psychiatry was bunkum. But playwrights wondered suppose, just suppose, Mrs Y
had taken her son on that train ride to Vienna?
ID X and Y
15.

68. X- Sigmund Freud Y - Hitler

69. In celebration of Pokémon’s 20th
birthday, Nintendo re-released the
original Red, Blue, and Yellow
games as digital downloads
through its online shop. Most of
the games look basically the same,
but one Pokémon in particular has
left a few gamers puzzled: #124,
Jynx, the “Human Shape”
Pokémon. What is the move taken
by nintendo assumed to be for
“political” correctness?
16.

72. OpenBiome is a non profit organization based in dedicated to expand
safe access to _________ transplants. It hosts the world’s first public
_______ bank.
Their site also has opened a _________ donation program, which first
involves rigorous screening and testing.
The organization has now also introduced _________ capsules that are
a substitute and are presently under clinical trials.
In May 2013, FDA announced that it had been regulating _________ as
a drug. OpenBiome, recommended that for medical use, _________
should be considered a tissue not a drug
Hint for medicos : These guys are battling against Clostridium difficile
17.

74. Stool donors and
Fecal transplants
C. Difficile causes antibiotic induced
diarrhea since antibiotics deplete
gut microflora. Stool enema can
reverse it and cure (?) it

75. The Balmis-Salvany Expedition (1803–1806) was a three-
year mission to the Americas led by Francisco Javier de
Balmis. It set off from A Coruña on 30 November 1803.
Regarding this expedition, Jenner, wrote, "I don’t imagine
the annals of history furnish an example of philanthropy so
noble, so extensive as this." The mission took ________ to
the Canary Islands, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Mexico, the
Philippines and China.
18.

77. The small pox vaccine.

78. The violence began on January 7, 1974 when a party of six males
from the southern Kasakela tribe brutally attacked and murdered
Godi, a young, well-liked male of the northern Kahama tribe. Over
the next four years, all six males from the Kahama tribe would be
killed by the Kasakela. Female Kahama tribe members suffered
similar fates – one was murdered, two went missing and were
never found, and three were kidnapped, beaten, and raped by the
Kasakela. The war was over a sliver of jungle turf and it lasted from
1974 through 1978.
What are we talking about?
19.

80. The Gombe
Chimpanzee war.
Tanzania
Chimpanzee war
would do

81. Quoting a blog…
“This device doesn’t work so well and besides, it is
difficult to use it with one free hand.”
What is this device used for?
20.

83. To depixelate
Japanese porn

84. Differential 2

85. • Scoring (6-n) x 2; where n is the no. of teams
answered
• 1 set
– Identify where this typeface has been famously
used (no need of the the font’s name)

86. 1.

87. 2.

88. 3.

89. 4.

90. 5.

92. 1.

93. 2.

94. 3.

95. 4.

96. 5.

97. Dry Round 3

98. Self-described woman-hater Daffy Duck volunteers for the mission. X tries to seduce him
by hiking up her skirt to reveal her shapely leg and kissing him full on the lips twice. The
first kiss electrocutes Daffy and melts him like butter, but the second kiss electrocutes X
having the same effect on her. Daffy ultimately resists her charms but swallows his secret
message when the temptress corners him. After a frenetic battle, she x-rays Daffy and
broadcasts the supposed secret - "Hitler is a stinker” to Hitler himself.
ID X
X’s name is a corrupted version of that of a real personality’s.
21.

100. Hatta Mari a parody
of Mata Hari

101. In sociolinguistics, a T–V distinction (from the Latin pronouns tu and
vos) is a contrast, within one language, between various forms of
addressing one's conversation partner or partners that are
specialized for varying levels of politeness, social distance, courtesy,
familiarity, age or insult toward the addressee.
English too, in the past had a more formal second person personal
pronoun. And the formal version was…. X. In Early Modern English,
Y was the singular and X was the plural. Plural X came to be used as
a polite form of address (similar to the French vous, which is also
used for the plural), but over time this polite form became more
and more common, eventually displacing the singular Y altogether.
The irony is that today we perceive thou to be archaic and formal,
while the original intent is to be more informal.
X and Y please…
22.

103. X – you
Y – thou

104. Calvin and Hobbes Log Bridge Parodies are a series of fan art
illustrations depicting two fictional characters crossing a creek over
a log bridge, as originally seen in an iconic Calvin and Hobbes
cartoon drawing by Bill Watterson.
Like some of these here
Guess the parody in the image in the following slide
23.

105. What is this parody based on?
Who are these guys?

107. The pair is named after John Calvin, a 16th-
century French Reformation theologian, and
Thomas Hobbes, a 17th-century English
political philosopher.

108. What is trying to be shown here in this series of images
24.

112. Gluten free art

113. "It seems very pretty," she said when she had finished it, "but it's rather
hard to understand!" (You see she didn't like to confess, even to herself,
that she couldn't make it out at all.) "Somehow it seems to fill my head
with ideas—only I don't exactly know what they are! However, somebody
killed something: that's clear, at any rate.”
What had ‘she’ just read?
25.

115. Jabberwocky in Alice in the wonderland

116. 26.

117. The study was criticized for lack of supporting data, it was just
supplemented by a couple of photographs. Also there is no
indication of the scoring of slides being blind.
What is the study about?

120. Sunil Gavaskar Bob Marley Bob Holland
27.

122. All 3 named their sons Rohan after Rohan Kanhai

123. 28. Knocked ooover
• In the 2010 animated film Despicable Me, ______ _______ is
referenced near the beginning. The main character Gru
travels to the Bank of Evil, the bank that funds all evil plots for
villains around the world, to try to take out a loan. As he
passes under the banner with the bank's name, and under
"Bank of Evil", in small letters, it reads, "Formerly ______
_______".
• FITB
• Pic follows

124. Bad credit

127. 29
• The following stamp, issued by The Republic of Abkhazia
(former Georgia) , in 1994, features two popular celebrities
of the entertainment industry, the famous Beatles star John
Lennon, and Groucho, a popular comedian and TV actor.
Issuing of this stamp was an attempt to express the
countries view on “X”, and marked an important event in
the history of the country.
• What is the stamp a take on?
• And what event did it mark?

130. Answer
• Marx and Lennon on a 1994 Abkhazia stamp
parodying Marxism-Leninism

131. 30.
The graph explains
an irrational
response of an
organization for a
burlesque.
What is the graph
about?

133. • Themes of Charlie Hebdo magazine

134. Differential 3

135. • Scoring (6-n) x 2; where n is the no. of teams
answered
• 1 set
– Identify these famous personalities by their
childhood pics

136. 1.

137. 2.

138. 3.

139. 4.

140. 5.

141. 6.

142. 7.

144. 1.

145. 2.

146. 3.

147. 4.

148. 5.

149. 6.

150. 7.

151. Bidding Round

152. • Only one team can answer each question
• All questions carry +30 points each
• Teams interested in answering, can bid a negative score as multiples of -5,
i.e., the negative they’d get if they’d answer wrong
• Bidding starts after the question is shown
• If they answer right, they anyway get +30
• Bidding continues till one team has been decided upon to answer the
question
• If 2 or more teams, bid the same and not willing to slide further, it’ll be
conducted written for them
• You can only increase the bid (in negative) not decrease
• If no team is willing to bid, the question will be open on bounce
Rules

153. Shortly before Sammy Griner's birth, his father Justin was
diagnosed with kidney failure, for which he received dialysis
for four hours per session, three days a week. In April 2015,
Laney Griner launched a GoFundMe campaign, hoping to raise
$75,000 to help pay for his medical care and an eventual
kidney transplant. She was initially reluctant to associate the
campaign with her son’s photograph, wishing for it to focus on
her husband's medical need, but changed her mind, and in
the first five days it received donations of nearly $9,000 from
300 people. The campaign was linked to on Reddit, bringing
the total to more than $83,000 in a few days.
1.

156. "Well it wasn’t that the job was tough… it was confusing. You see, no one knew
what was being made in ---------, not even me, and a lot of the people thought they
were wasting their time here. It was up to me to explain to the dissatisfied workers
that they were doing a very important job. When they asked me what, I ‘d have to
tell them it was a secret. But I almost went crazy myself trying to figure out what
was going on.”
Who’s the speaker?
Where/ what was he
talking of??
(blanked that because it
would be a give-away)
2.

158. Oppenheimer for the
Manhattan project

159. Captain Arthur Henry Rostron of RMS Carpathia, immediately checked the ship's
position which he calculated as 41° 10' N, 49° 12' W. Rostron ordered a course at
maximum speed (17 kn (20 mph; 31 km/h)). Rostron ordered the ship's heating
and hot water cut off in order to make as much steam as possible available for the
engines, succeeding in going 3.5 knots faster than the ship's rated top speed (a
speed it would never reach again in its career). At full speed it took the Carpathia
four hours after being informed. But they were already 2 hours late.
Why was RMS Carpathia in such a hurry?
3.

161. Carried the survivors
of Titanic

162. Researchers from the family-history website
Ancestry have now said that ‘X’, 38, is actually
‘Y’ ’s 17th cousin, sharing a common ancestor
back in 14th century England. Tracing the
paternal lines of both men revealed that the
pair are related to John Beaufort, the first Earl
of Somerset, who was born around 1373.
Miriam Silverman, U.K. content manager for
Ancestry, said: “It’s amazing to think that that
when stepping into the role of Y, X would not
only be portraying a world-class _____ _____
but a real-life relation.”
4.

165. X a reckless lab assistant, speaks in a Japanese accent. He has green
skin, pink whites in his eyes, wears a white turban of clay with
jeweled base and two purple circles inside each other on both sides
at the top. He wears white gloves and boots, a blue suit with a
white belt, and a long wavy, purple cape. Despite his high
intelligence, he is not good at planning his schemes, and as a result
they fall apart. However, he is a master at manipulation and
trickery.
5.

168. https://shop.anitadongre.com/ was a website
which crashed around April 2016.
“Within hours of the event in Mumbai, Ms.
Dongre’s IT staff called her in panic to say that
the website had crashed as hundreds of
people, presumably on a hunt for the dress
logged on. Email and phone calls poured in
from as far as Brazil and Australia, with most
buyers calling from the U.S. and U.K., Ms.
Dongre said.”
6.

170. The dress of the duchess was designed by her

171. “A man named Boukman, another houngan,
organized on August 14, 1791, a meeting with
the slaves in the mountains of the North. This
meeting took the form of a religious ceremony
in the Bois Caïman in the northern mountains
of the island. It was raining and the sky was
raging with clouds; the slaves then started
confessing their resentment of their condition.
A woman started dancing languorously in the
crowd, taken by the spirits of the loas. With a
knife in her hand, she cut the throat of a creole
pig and distributed the blood to all the
participants of the meeting who swore to kill
all the whites on the island.”
This was the start of what?
7.

173. The Haitian revolution

174. Katz's Delicatessen is a kosher style restaurant located on the Lower
East Side in Manhattan. Since its founding in 1888, it has become
popular among locals and tourists alike for its pastrami sandwiches and
hot dogs, both of which are widely considered among New York's best.
A sign has been hung up in this restaurant and key words from it have
been blanked out.
Looking at the photographs of the restaurant, fill in the key words.
8.

179. Where ‘Harry Met Sally’
From Meg Ryan's famous fake orgasm scene in ‘When Harry Met Sally’,
followed by Estelle Reiner's iconic line "I'll have what she's having”.

180. X talking to Wired magazine in 2013:
“What I did was almost 50 years ago and it's about 4,000 times easier today.
To do so then, you needed a Heidelberg printed press, you had to be a skilled
printer, know how to do colour separations, negatives, type-setting... those
presses were 90 feet long and 18 feet high. There was a lot of work involved
in creating one. Today, you open a laptop.”
Today, the majority of X’s work is for the U. S. government. He has been
associated with the FBI for over four decades and has lectured to and
consulted with hundreds of financial institutions, corporations and
government agencies around the world.
Who is X?
9.

182. Frank William Abagnale, Jr., whose life story provided the inspiration for the film
Catch Me If You Can, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Abagnale.

183. 10
• The ___ ___ index was invented by The Economist in 1986
as a lighthearted guide to whether currencies are at their
“correct” level. The ___ ___ PPP exchange rate between
two countries is obtained by dividing the price of a ___
___ in one country (in its currency) by the price of a ___
___ in another country (in its currency). This value is then
compared with the actual exchange rate; if it is lower,
then the first currency is under-valued (according to PPP
theory) compared with the second, and conversely, if it is
higher, then the first currency is over-valued.
• FITB

186. Answer
• Big Mac