About Blank - Chapter 2
About Blank - Chapter 2
Did you know that the origin of the word Juggernaut traces back to Indian history?
Egad!
We crossed 60 subs in the first week! What an absolute rush it has been to see all of your subscription confirmation emails in my inbox! I just want to take a moment to thank all of you from the bottom of my heart; this is a passion project at best, and having a steady list of readers is just the perfect motivation that I need to keep this running.
Okay, enough of character exposition - below is the list of answers for the trivia that I had sent out last week:
Portmanteau
No Country For Old Men
Adobo
Potion Ingredients (Macbeth)
Severus Snape; Sectumsempra
Xerox Corporation
Shahid Afridi’s retirements; he has retired multiple times across formats
Red Bull
Gin & Tonic
The world’s first vending machine
Readers Apurv Inamdar and Aboli Joshi were the brave ones to share answers and are the first entries on our scoreboard. Send in your answers to the trivia questions below to join the scoreboard. If you have any feedback, please respond to this email to let me know!
For those who are new here, please see below how this newsletter works:
There are 10 trivia questions below; none of them require studying a particular topic
I would suggest that you read and re-read the question; the answer is only your first guess away
You can, if you want to, respond to this email with the list of answers that you think are correct; I will try to maintain a monthly scoreboard
I will share the answers for this quiz in the newsletter sent next week
About Blank Trivia Quiz (Week of Sep 12, 2022)
In the essay section of his novel 1985, Anthony Burgess states that X got the idea for the name of ___ _______ from advertising billboards for educational correspondence courses from a company called Bennett's during World War II. The original posters showed J. M. Bennett himself, a kindly-looking old man offering guidance and support to would-be students with the phrase "Let me be your father." According to Burgess, after Bennett's death, his son took over the company and the posters were replaced with pictures of the son (who looked imposing and stern in contrast to his father's kindly demeanour) with the text "Let me be your ___ _______".
What are we talking about?_________ de Albuquerque was a Portuguese general, admiral and statesman. He served as the Governor of Portuguese India from 1509 to 1515, during which he expanded Portuguese influence across the Indian Ocean and built a reputation as a fierce and skilled military commander. He advanced the Portuguese grand scheme of spreading Christianity and securing the trade of spices by establishing a Portuguese Asian empire. Among his achievements, Albuquerque managed to conquer Goa and was the first European of the Renaissance to raid the Persian Gulf and lead the first voyage by a European fleet into the Red Sea.
Despite all of these achievements, Albuquerque is best known for his contribution to the Indian seasonal diet brought about by the skill of grafting introduced by the Portuguese. The ________ is one of India’s signature exports known for its rich taste and sweet smell.
What are we talking about?After a long and illustrious career in the field of criminal investigations, X retired to a small farm on the Sussex Downs to take up beekeeping as his primary occupation. The timeline of this move is unclear but it can be presumed to be no later than 1904. Later, X and his biographer Y have been documented to work together again to aid the British war effort. There are no records of X’s involvement with criminal investigation posts except for a case that lists Harold Stackhurst as his client.
Who is X?______ refers to a recording with less than professional or flawed sound quality and initially referred to a low-quality recording with audible imperfections, such as background noise or performance mistakes, recorded with inexpensive equipment. In the 1980s and 1990s, _____ was regarded as a more authentic-sounding form of music production than professional methods. Many punk, indie rock, and hip-hop artists pursued a _____ aesthetic for economic and artistic reasons.
Fill in the blankCarl Jung
Bob Dylan
Edgar Allen Poe
Aldous Huxley
Sri Paramhansa Yogananda
Marlon Brando
Oscar Wilde
Lewis Carol
Shirley Temple
George Bernard Shaw
What connects all the names listed above?Hint: 1967, Grammy Award for Best Album Cover, Graphic Arts
The ______ sound we hear today is made up of him knocking his wedding ring against a cabinet in his bedroom, a “slowed anvil sound” and the more musical “blossoming” noise, which is a decades-old recording of a 30-second electric guitar phrase that has been reversed. Yellin also reveals that he and staff decided that they didn’t want anything that sounded like a recognizable instrument, which is why the guitar sounds absolutely nothing like a guitar, thus making the sound a lot more unique.
Fill in the blankIn 2018, as Gavin Hightower was heading to bed, he encountered something rather disturbing. For no apparent reason, the device uttered a X.
“There’s a good chance I’m getting murdered tonight,” Hightower tweeted after the incident.
Hightower wasn’t alone to observe this: numerous ____ device owners have reported their devices X-ing spontaneously, unprovoked by their wake word or any other command. For other users, it’s more than just X. Some report their devices failing to fulfil their spoken requests, performing random other actions instead, and then capping it off with a guffaw.
What are we talking about?The effect is named after X’s 1950 film Y, in which a murder is described in four contradictory ways by four witnesses. The term addresses the motives, mechanism, and occurrences of the reporting on the circumstance and addresses contested interpretations of events, the existence of disagreements regarding the evidence of events, and subjectivity versus objectivity in human perception, memory, and reporting. The Y effect has been defined in a modern academic context as "the naming of an epistemological framework—or ways of thinking, knowing, and remembering—required for understanding complex and ambiguous situations".
What are X and Y?The name X first appeared in 1954, when Austrian zoologist Eduard Paul Tratz and German biologist Heinz Heck proposed it as a new and separate generic term for pygmy chimpanzees. The name is thought to derive from a misspelling on a shipping crate from the town of Bolobo on the Congo River near the location from which the first X specimens were collected in the 1920s.
What is X?
Hint: British producer, musician, DJX’s songwriter Richard Ashcroft heard the Andrew Oldham Orchestra version of "The Last Time" by The Rolling Stones and thought it could be "turned into something outrageous". X sampled and looped four bars, then added dozens of further tracks, including additional strings, guitar, percussion and several layered vocals from Ashcroft. Ashcroft said he imagined "something that opened up into a prairie-music kind of sound", similar to the work of the Italian composer Ennio Morricone, and that "the song started morphing into this wall of sound, a concise piece of incredible pop music". He likened the use of the sample to the golden age of hip hop: "To take something but really twist it and f*** it up into something else. Take it and use your imagination."
Which song are we talking about?
About Blank Recommendation
My recommendation for this week is a 5 min documentary short film called Leap of Faith. This was directed by one of our readers, Apurv Inamdar and is the winner of the It Happens Only In India contest by Scroll and Deutsche Welle.
You can check out Apurv’s other work at https://linktr.ee/heyapurv.
In its short span, the film explores the life of young daredevil boys living in Bhedaghat, India who choose to jump from cliffs to earn money from visiting travellers. The film dialogue is recorded in Hindi but subtitles in English are available on the YouTube link. Editing, the pulsating background score and poignant, candid conversations with these boys are hands down some of the stronger points of this short film. It offers a nuanced take on pursuit of commerce, privilege, or the lack thereof and lengths to which human lives of our less fortunate counterparts are pushed for survival.
If you enjoy what you see in this newsletter, please feel free to share it with your friends and family. If you have any feedback, please do reach out. I hope you have a great week ahead, and I will see you next time.
Warmly,
Sameer on behalf of About Blank