The Never-Ending Quiz Archive
The Never-Ending Quiz was a game played on the erstwhile discussion group Quiz GB. Before its time there, it lived briefly on the website of Oxford University Quiz Society; these archives are of the games played there.
26 September 2000 - set by Rob Linham
1. Who said of whom, "[His] morality was as English an article as a beefsteak"?
Answer: Nathaniel Hawthorne of Dr Johnson
2. Which game is thought to be descended from the earlier pastime of "Pall Mall"?
Answer: Croquet
3. After whom is named the "law" that the amount of work done is inversely proportional to the number of people employed?
Answer: C. Northcote Parkinson (Parkinson's Law)
27 September 2000 - set by Stephen Pearson
1. Which current British Olympic athlete is called "Christmas" by her coach?
Answer: Katherine Merry
2. Which Beatles song includes an instrumental passage inspired by part of J.S. Bach's Brandenburg Concerto number 2?
Answer: Penny Lane
3. What quizzing distinction is held by the University Librarian of the University of Bristol?
Answer: He captained the first team to win University Challenge in 1962 (Geoffrey Ford).
29 September 2000 - set by Sean Blanchflower
1. How much is Maggie worth when she is scanned in at the supermarket checkout in the opening titles of "The Simpsons"?
Answer: $847.63
2. Which TV character's first name was never actually revealed, yet is now universally believed to be "Philip", after it was used by a quiz book writer to test whether anyone would copy his questions?
Answer: Columbo
3. Who is the only Best Actress Oscar winner to have appeared on the TV show Friends?
Answer: Helen Hunt
29 September 2000 - set by Olly Johnson
1. Who provided the "Auto-destructive 12 string Rickenbacker solo" on the last track of the last record that Creation Records ever released?
Answer: Paul Weller (single was "Accelerator" by Primal Scream)
2. Which German cryptosystem was Colossus, the first electronic computer, built to crack?
Answer: Lorenz (German name) or FISH (Allied codename)
3. Which sportsman "came to earth to save us all from war and death and stuff"?
Answer: Brian Boitano (according to the song "What Would Brian Boitano Do?" from the South Park movie)
29 September 2000 - set by Jack Welsby
1. Name the co-founders of Exeter University's student television station. One is now a Radio 1 DJ and the other fronts a well-known British band.
Answer: Emma B and Thom Yorke (of Radiohead)
2. In the TV comedy "The League Of Gentlemen", what is Tubbs' and Edward's surname?
Answer: Tatsyrup
3. This year, who became only the second ever British-born and trained ice hockey player to be drafted by an NHL team?
Answer: Colin Shields
30 September 2000 - set by Stephen Pearson
1. Who worked in the London offices of the publishers Picador for three weeks in April this year under the name "Bridget Cavendish"?
Answer: Renee Zellweger (working "undercover" in preparation for her role as Bridget Jones in the film)
2. Which band's two guitarists were born in England and Canada but raised in Scotland, leading to frequent comments about the supposed influence of bagpipes on their style?
Answer: Big Country
3. What links the tennis players Julian Alonso, Ivo Heuberger and Magnus Norman?
Answer: They've all had relationships with Martina Hingis
30 September 2000 - set by Jack Welsby
1. What were the names of the two contestants who were playing in the infamous "WANKERS" edition of Countdown?
Answer: Gino Corr and Lawrence Pearse
2. Where would you find WLW and Davord, Lord of Tharg?
Answer: In "Mega-zine" on P142 of Channel 4 Teletext
3. In writing which two Gilbert and Sullivan operettas did Gilbert not return to a theme he had already employed in his "Bab Ballads"?
Answer: "Princess Ida" and "The Grand Duke"
Note: This question was later queried, but its original form has been preserved here for posterity.
4 October 2000 - set by Stephen Pearson
Earlier this year, Mojo magazine published a list of what it considered to be the 100 best songs of all time.
1. About which two songs on the list did their respective songwriters say that they weren't sure that they had written the songs themselves, and thought that they might have unintentionally plagiarised existing songs?
Answer: "Yesterday" and "Live Forever"
2. Which song on the list was written by Kirsty McColl's father?
Answer: "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face"
3. Which song on the list has been alleged to contain instructions for making vegetarian soup if played backwards?
Answer: "Maybe I'm Amazed" (according to the Simpsons episode in which Lisa becomes a vegetarian)
5 October 2000 - set by Sean Blanchflower
1. The origin of the name of which London Underground station is disputed, with one highly dubious theory claiming that it is named after the wife of Edward I?
Answer: Elephant and Castle
2. Which city's underground system has stations whose names include a South American country, two foreign capital cities and a variety of cheese?
Answer: Milan (Uruguay, Lima, Moscow, Gorgonzola)
3. Everyone knows about St John's Wood and "mackerel", but there are only three stations on the Paris Metro / RER that contain no letters of the French word for mackerel (macquereau). Name one.
Answer: Issy (RER line C) or Poissy (RER line A5) or Bondy (RER line E)
6 October 2000 - set by Jack Welsby
1. Whom did Victor Lewis-Smith replace as television critic of the London Evening Standard?
Answer: Jaci Stephen
Note: Ms Stephen herself later e-mailed to observe that Mark Steyn was her successor and Victor Lewis-Smith's predecessor, and indeed the correct answer to this question.
2. What is the name of the topological construction that can be created by removing a circle from the surface of a hollow sphere, and sewing the edge of a Möbius strip to the edge of the resulting hole?
Answer: A projective plane
3. At which education institution did Dr Harold Shipman do his A-levels?
Answer: High Pavement Sixth Form College, Nottingham
8 October 2000 - set by Stephen Pearson
1. What five-letter name was suggested for the hypothetical information storage and retrieval system described in an article in "Atlantic Monthly" more than fifty years ago, which (it was proposed) would make links between documents on the basis of association and which has therefore been seen as a forerunner of the World Wide Web?
Answer: Memex
2. Which real-life Parisian, born in 1330, features as a character in a best-selling novel of 1997?
Answer: Nicolas Flamel (in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone)
3. Which member of the band Stratosfear is now working as a chartered surveyor?
Answer: Ricky Macdonald (from the British Telecom advert!)
10 October 2000 - set by Jack Welsby
1. "crack and AIDS and murder, violence too plus global warming, floods and arson, rape and birth defects and things affecting every person, war and crime and racism, all problems of the past you see" due to the use of what implement?
Answer: Hockey stick (Change the World with my Hockey Stick by The Vandals)
2. Take p to the power negative s, subtract from one and form the reciprocal. Take the product of all this over all primes p to get an expression in terms of s for which mathematical function?
Answer: zeta (Riemann zeta function)
3. The Marti family were famous for creating which movement?
Answer: Mechanism of clocks (called a "movement")
5 November 2000 - set by Rob Linham
1. "O latest-born and loveliest vision far / Of all Olympus' faded hierarchy." Who?
Answer: Psyche (Ode to Psyche by Keats)
2. A 1751 Hogarth engraving forced an Act of Parliament to be passed that year, controlling what?
Answer: Gin
3. What could variously be classified as nuclear, stem, extended or symmetrical?
Answer: Family
6 November 2000 - set by Stephen Pearson
1. Which former tutor in ancient history at the University of Oxford left school in 1925 at the age of fifteen and became a university student only when he was thirty-six years old?
Answer: G. E. M. (Geoffrey) de Ste Croix
2. In a lecture delivered in March 1990, which scholar stated that "the literature of Anglo-Saxon England has seen intense editorial activity since the mid-nineteenth century. Yet, curiously, there has been very little theoretical discussion of the principles according to which these texts are edited."?
Answer: Michael Lapidge
3. To which New Testament scholar has the sentence "I'm not saying that John was the first Gospel, but that it was a first Gospel" been attributed?
Answer: Bishop John A. T. Robinson
11 January 2001 - set by Rob Linham
1. Which actress "ran to New York, but ran away from fame"?
Answer: Louise Brooks (from the OMD song "Pandora's Box)
2. The name of which part of the human body arises from the fact that it is usually found empty after death?
Answer: Jejunum
3. Nine people in a crowd surge during a Pearl Jam set at which music festival in 2000?
Answer: Roskilde Festival (in Denmark)
11 January 2001 - set by Sean Blanchflower
What was the most notable event on each of the following dates?
1. cycle 35, year Ding-chou, month 4, day 11
Answer: A solar eclipse famously ended a battle between the Medes and the Lydians - the earliest historical event whose exact date is known (28 May 584 BC)
2. 11.19.11.3.14 (Long Count)
Answer: Galileo discovers two moons of Jupiter using his newly created telescope (7 January 1610).
3. 16 Baramundah 1706 A.M.
Answer: The Hubble Space Telescope was launched and deployed from the Space Shuttle Discovery (24 April 1990).