Friday, August 24, 2007

Friday quiz!

The "hostage" Freakonomics post will be released some time next week. In the meantime, one of those irritating "what links" questions that they sometimes do in the Guardian on Saturdays.

What L links Jack Abramoff, Nigel Short and Sir Peter Maxwell-Davies, and the world's only two legged equestrian monumental statue?

18 comments:

  1. Do you mean Jack Abramoff or Roman Abramovich?

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  2. I've no idea what you're talking about, that post has always said "Jack Abramoff".

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  3. In which case, I hate Blogger for eating my last comment and making this story not only irrelevant, but never having been relevant in the first place.

    Short and Maxwell-Davies are both from Leigh; the Lobey Dosser statue is in Glasgow; and Jack Abramoff is in jail for defrauding American Indians (which seems harsh, given that until recently they tended to make you President for that sort of thing).

    So, err, no idea basically.

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  4. The L is Lobby. Jack Abramoff is a lobbyist. The world's only two-legged equestrian statue is of the Sheriff of Calton Creek, Lobey Dosser. PMD lobbied against uranium mining in Orkney and wrote "Yesnaby Ground" as a protest. Nigel Short... oh, I don't know.

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  5. You've got all the relevant facts together now. Clue 1: what was Abramoff's registered profession?

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  6. anonymous is right on the L. Clue 2 is that the answer lurks on Jamie Kenny's site for the man who can work out what to search for (as John noted, PMD and NS are a pair, in this context).

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  7. OK.

    Jack Abramoff is a lobbyist; Peter Maxwell-Davies and Nigel Short are lobby-gobblers; and the equestrian status is of (inter alia) Lobey Dosser.

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  8. Brooke wins this week's prize, which is a Pimblett's Pie! (just to complete it, Lobey Dosser was indeed named after the Glaswegian practice of dossing in lobbies). I also award an Uncle Joe's Mint Ball and bar for the beautiful and elegant correct use of "inter alia".

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  9. All those years of reading Blood & Treasure has finally paid off...

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  10. "two legged equestrian monumental statue"

    Someone made a statue of Ann Coulter?

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  11. What's a lobby-gobbler? I thought I knew more about Nigel Short than most people but I'd not heard that one.

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  12. A lobby-gobbler is a person from the town of Leigh, where they eat a kind of meat stew called lobby.

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  13. Hmmm. Nosher lives in Greece and has his own olive grove. I bet he doesn't have meat stew very often. Though there's many people would like to see him eat his own words.

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  14. I remember watching Nigel Short's famous 121. Re6???? in Short-Krasenkow 2004. We online kibitzers were all highly amused.

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  15. The return game, as I recall, went 1.Nf3 c5 2.c4 Nc6 3.d4 cd4 4.Nd4 f5!? which is not quite as odd as it looks.

    It's not Nosher's worst blunder.

    Short is currently ill, apparently.

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  16. are you demonstrating your solution to the unexpected exam paradox?

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  17. I hope it's more accurate than your claims about the weather in Galicia....

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