Answers to Our Quirky Quiz

'BIG JIM' LARKIN, founder of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union, commemorated by statue in O'Connel Street, Dublin.
The building in the background is the General Post Office where another famous socialist, James Connolly, founder of the Citizen Army, held out in the 1916 Easter Rising.

(right) rear view of the house-that-isn't on Leinster Gardens in London W2. (See London Lights, q.2).





The Year that Was

1) 216,000 people were killed or disappeared in the
Dec. 26, 2004, tsunami, according to an Associated Press assessment based on government and relief agency figures. The UN said its total of dead and missing was 223,492.

2) George Galloway MP

3) Including the bombers, 56 people were killed in London on July 7.

4) Gate Gourmet, which supplies airline meals for British Airways. The company is part of Texas Pacific, which also own Burger King.

5) Poland

6) 3.5 million

7) France

8)The Israel Labour Party

9)Ariel Sharon

10)Bolivia

Quote...Unquote

1)Charlie Chaplin

2) Maurice Chevalier

3)Heraclitus (about 535-475 BC)

4) Lillian Hellmann (replying to sub-poena from the House Un-American Activities committee)

5) Alice Walker

What's in a name?

1) James Larkin

2) Billy Connolly

3)James Connolly

4) James Keir-Hardie

5) Iago, if canonised, becomes Santiago, as in Santiago de Compastella, in Galicia, a popular place for pilgrimage. That's St.James in English, as in "St.James infirmary Blues".

Noms de plume, noms de guerre

1) Tito

2) George Eliot

3)Sholem Aleichem, whose "Tevye der Milchiger" was turned into the musical Fiddler on the Roof

4)Achad HaAm, lit. "One of the People".

5) Julio Antonio Mella, Cuban communist, and some claim, Trotskyist, though his name is celebrated in Cuba today. Newspapers implicated Mella's comrade Tina Modotti in his 1929 shooting. There is still argument whether Mella was murdered by Stalinist agent Vittorio Vidali, or someone hired by Cuban dictator General Machado.

The place in question

1) Philadelphia.

2) Los Angeles

3) Pakistan

4)Manchester

5) United States

Watch your language

1)Romansch

2) Andorra

3)Yiddish

4)Maltese

5) 9 million

Thanks for the Memory

1) Spike Milligan

2) Simone Signoret

3) David Niven

4)Edward Said

5)Rudolf Rocker

London Lights

1) Dick Whittington's cat (outside the Whittington hospital)

2) There's no such house. When the Metropolitan Railway was being cut through property owners insisted that a facade be erected to hide the place where it broke the line of the street. (see rear view above)

3) The Westbourne river, culveted except where it was damned to form the Serpentine.

4) As a St.Pancras councillor, GBS campaigned, against fierce opposition, for the provision of public toilets for women workers in Camden Town.

5) Little Venice is by the Grand Union Canal basin, in London W9. Hugo Chavez is president of Venezuela ( 'little Venice', said to have been so called by explorer Amerigo Vespucci when he saw native dwellings on stilts above the water).

HOPE YOU LIKED THE QUIZ AND IT HELPED PASS THE TIME.

Happy New Year in 2006!