Paraprosdokians* and Contrafibularity**

* Despite popular belief, the Lincoln Tunnel is not named after Abraham Tunnel.

Material for last week’s E2MQ is thanks to a highly amusing book that comes to us from across the pond.  John Lloyd, producer of the British comedy shows Not the Nine O’Clock News, Blackadder, and Spitting Image, collaborated with John Mitchinson, who writes for the brilliantly-funny comedy panel show, QI (Quite Interesting).

Their UK bestseller, The Book of General Ignorance – Everything You Think You Know is Wrong, published in 2006, has been one of our favourite [sic] finds in recent years and has been the source of much amusing and heated discussion.

But on to the proper answers:

• What shape did medieval scholars believe the Earth to be?  Nope, the answer isn’t FLAT.  The idea of a flat earth first appeared in the 19^th Century and may have been influenced by Washington Irving’s Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828).  Probably as a result of Irving’s fabrication, school children have been taught that Columbus’s mission was to prove the world is round.  The flat-earth gauntlet was picked up by Englishmen S.B. Rowbotham  (Zetetic Astronomy) and Samuel Shenton (Flat Earth Society).  The latter died in 1971 but not before he claimed that the Apollo landings were a Hollywood hoax and photos of the round earth were fabricated.  For those who thought or answered, "Flat," please click here.

• In what year did World War II officially end?  The answer is 1990.  Hostilities ended when Japan surrendered on September 2, 1945, but the Cold War created something of a mess.  A number of interim peace treaties were signed in 1950 and again in 1955.  However, no peace treaty was ever signed with the GDR (East Germany).  So it was Germany’s reunification, October 2, 1990, that marked the official end of WW II.  As long as I’ve got your attention, what was the longest war fought by the United States?

• Why are flamingos pink?  Not because they eat shrimp!  It’s because they eat a lot of blue-green algae, which, despite its name, can be red, yellow, orange, or violet.  By the way, did you know that flamingos are 10 million years old, they are monogamous, and they lay only one egg per year?  They also feed their young with a bright red “milk” produced from their throats.  Flamingos are only one of two birds that produce milk.  The other is...   Give a guess!

• What is the world's strongest wood?  Most everyone got this right.  Balsa is the strongest wood  when measured by stiffness, bendability, and compressibility.  Balsa wood is also mothproof.

• What is the normal state of glass?  Pretty much everyone correctly said that glass is a solid.  Somehow in the past there developed an assertion that glass was a cooled, but not yet crystallized, liquid.  Ain’t true!  Scientists categorize solids as either crystalline or amorphous.  Glass is the latter. 

• What metal is the best conductor?  Most everyone also correctly said that silver is the best conductor.   You know what else is really cool about silver?  Since the 5^th Century BC it has been successfully used to sterilize water!  When travelling, King Cyrus the Great always kept his personal water supply in silver containers and the Greeks and Romans found that food stored in silver spoiled less quickly.

• The air we breathe is mostly nitrogen (78%).  Can you explain why?  This was a tough question.  Scientists claim that the reason nitrogen is so much a part of our air comes as the result of volcanic eruptions during the earth’s formation.  Since nitrogen’s heavier that hydrogen and helium it stayed closer to the earth’s surface.  By the way, oxygen represents another 21% of our air, and there are other gases, but only one represents as much as 1%.   Do you know what it is?

• What African animal kills the most number of people each year?  Well, we should have clarified by saying, “Mammal,” but most everyone got it.  And those who didn’t give the orthodox answer, hippopotamus, answered equally correctly with mosquito.   Did you know that hippos were once thought to be related to pigs, but now are considered close relatives of whales?  Hippos are very irritable creatures who've been known to bite crocs in half and hold full-sized lions under water to drown them.  Humans mostly are victims when their boat is overturned or they are trampled by a startled hippo.  Nothing like these three beauties...

• What was Napoleon's most humiliating defeat?  This is our favorite, and some of you got it correctly.  Waterloo may have been, in the words of the Duke of Wellington, “The nearest run thing you ever saw in your life,” and a crushing defeat for the French, but Boney’s most humiliating defeat came in July 1807.  As part of a treaty to be signed in the Prussian village of Tilsit (now part of Russia and known as Sovetsk), they decided to have a rabbit shoot to entertain the dignitaries.  Someone screwed up and released, instead of wild rabbits for the hunt, domesticated ones.  These furry creatures collectively saw a little man, and mistaking him for the gamekeeper who fed them, charged Napoleon en masse at 35 mph.  Despite the dissuading efforts of the other attendees,  the bunny horde drove the emperor off the field and back to his carriage which sped off. 

• What was King Tut's curse? This was NOT a trick question, but the answer is, “There was no such thing.”  The whole curse story was made up by the newspapers just after Howard Carter discovered Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922.  Seems the Cairo correspondent for the Daily Express started a story of an inscription, a pharaoh’s curse, which read, “They who enter this sacred tomb shall swiftly be visited by wings of death.”  There is no such inscription, and, in fact, no curse has been found in any  Egyptian tomb to date.  One interesting discovery was made in 2005 when the mummy-in-question was run through a CAT scan.  He was 5 feet 6 inches tall, skinny with a severe overbite.  And it looks like he died from an infected knee.

This concludes our official posting of last week's E2MQ answers.  But, what about the WINNER?  From the dark recesses of my past emerged a dark horse contestant.  He was my prep school roommate 45 years ago and remains a true friend today.  This week's winner, Mr. Frank E. Masland, IV, will be receiving a copy of  Lloyd and Mitchinson's General Ignorance because, despite his winning the contest, he scored only 80% on the quiz and needs further study.

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** For those diligent few who have waded this far, we offer, as a recessional, a bit on wisdom from one of the shows written and produced by the above-referenced authors.