Trivia Quiz - Part C

Well, with hats off to the Queen, I have to say I'm a little underwhelmed by the thunderous response from the teeming hoardes to my previous trivia quizzes. However, in all fairness among siblings, I offer part C of the series. Post your answers as a comment. Or even post a comment saying you don't know. Or even one saying you don't care.

1. Below, Lint Monkey is shown putting herself inside a bubble (ahem). After visiting this very interesting science museum, we walked down the street and toured Fort Napoleon. After a quick snack, we then walked down to the beach, where we stumbled across a very unexpected discovery. What did we discover?
a. The Loch Ness Monster having lunch with Bigfoot
b. Jimmy Hoffa
c. Abandoned German fortifications, pillboxes, and gun emplacements from WWII.
d. Dr. Livingstone, we presume
e. Some of Al Gore's hanging chads


2. Underneath Lint Monkey's feet is Mile Marker Zero (or to be more accurate, kilometer marker zero), in front of Notre Dame Cathedral on Ile de la Cite in Paris, France. Who first installed the marker in this spot?
a. Leo Tolstoy
b. Teddy Kennedy
c. King Solomon
d. Robin Hood
e. The Romans



3. Below is a photo of two very important ladies. The lady in the background was designed by Auguste Bertholde. The Lint Monkey saw a miniature version of this statue while she was riding on a boat on a famous river. Which river?
a. The Amazon
b. The Seine
c. The Nile
d. The Ganges
e. The Brahmaputra


4. Behind Lint Monkey is the ornate interior of Grand Central Station. This venerable landmark was featured in a recent Disney movie starring a hypochondriac giraffe, a neurotic lion, and a freedom-seeking zebra. The lemur sang a hit song, "I like to move it, move it." What is the name of the island after which the movie was named?

a. Isla de Muerta

b. Ile de la Cite

c. Gilligan's

d. Galapagos

e. None of the above


5. Standing outside the University of Antwerp's student cafeteria is a cute little car designed by Mercedes. This car is supposed to be marketed in the U.S. soon, but because of highway safety additions and pollution control modifications, the cost will be more than double, and the mileage will be less than half, of what this car gets in Europe. What is the name of this model car?
a. "T"
b. "Smart car"
c. "De Gaulle"
d. "Volkswagen II"
e. "Deux cheveaux"


6. In the background through the windows of the canal boat is the Hotel Amstel. This hotel has hosted the Beatles, Mick Jagger, the Queen of England, and numerous U.S. presidents. The hotel is named after the river on which the boat is gliding. After getting off the boat, Lint Monkey and company toured the house where Anne Frank hid while writing her famous diary. What city is Lint Monkey in here?


7. Here is Lint Monkey standing in the valley below a medieval castle on the mountaintop overlooking the Rue de Vin in the Alsace-Lorraine. In the background you can see the yellowing autumn colors of the leaves of the plant which gives the Rue its name. What is bottled here?

a. Coca-Cola

b. Kentucky Bourbon

c. Puerto Rican rum

d. French wine

e. Dasani water


8. Below, Lint Monkey poses outside Schloss Lembeck in western Germany. While staying here, she and her mother spent a full day travelling to a nearby town to find an Internet cafe so she could do what?
a. Check the numbers on her South African lottery ticket
b. Sell her favorite sugar-glider on e-Bay
c. Register for classes at BYU
d. Order her dad a new Schnitzel to replace the one he spilled in his lap just before he broke the ceramic angel in the Schloss cafe.
e. Download a polka from the Lawrence Welk website



9. Admiral Bobcat is guiding the vessel to a safe harbor in the Belgian city of Oostende on the North Sea Coast. This city is the permanent home to a famous sailing ship, now a museum, named after a famous cartographer and mapmaker. Who was the mapmaker?
a. Columbus
b. Marriott
c. Magellan
d. Mercator
e. Replogle


10. In the far, far background below is a memorial to an infamous villian, from the perspective of Link Monkey's paternal ancestors. Inside the memorial building, in a capital city, sits a statue of that villian. The statue is constructed so that his two hands each make one letter of the deaf alphabet. What is the supposed-significance of those two letters?


11. Here is Lint Monkey again. This time she's many, many miles from the nearest road, way out in a national wilderness area. There be dragons here. Below are pictures, up close and personal. offering evidence. Pogo lived here. This famous swamp is named after an indian phrase which loosely translates to, "land of the trembling earth", because most of the trees actually grow on floating islands of peat, rather than on land. What is the name of this famous national wildlife refuge on the Georgia-Florida border?

12. In the hills of Tennessee, Lint Monkey enjoyed a relaxing vacation, including horse riding, bumper boating, and canoeing, as shown below. From home base in Fairfield resort, the family took a day trip to Kentucky, when the transmission went out in her dad's Chrysler. The family was on their way to visit a tourist attraction called "Kentucky Down Under". At this park Lint Monkey got to see:
a. Van Gogh's self-portrait, and Whistler's mother
b. Kangaroos, boomerangs, stalactites, kukaburras and didgeridoo's
c. Cleopatra's mummy
d. Charlemagne's throne, along with his radius and ulna
e. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Abridged

13. Below, Lint Monkey is standing in the middle of the very famous:

a. Heathrow Airport

b. Cheops Pyramid

c. Exit Glacier

d. Times Square

e. Great Wall of China

Family Tree Back to 250 A.D. (!!!)

First, congratulations are in order to the Queen for answering all the Trivia B question correctly. Yes, Parliament was the word I was looking for on Question 9. And the painter is better known as "Red" Skelton... from Vincennes. All my kids have been to Vincennes, which is not Versailles (although I think they've also been there, too...). Today I'm in Hagerstown, Maryland, and after work and before dinner, I stopped by the Washington County Free Library (funny name, but it is very proud that it is the founder of the very FIRST bookmobile in the world). I was planning to do some further research into my Furley line (my dad's maternal grandmother). But I stumbled across a book containing the muster rolls of the English regular army, taken from records from England, and found in it some information on my Rowell ancestors (my mother's mother). What I discovered was truly unbelievable! But it gets even more unbelievable! I found one of those rare missing links. Thanks to a Rowell cousin, I already had data going back to a Benjamine Rowell before the Revolutionary War, and had a few names of Rowells pre-dating him, but nothing that would identify which of those were direct relatives. Well, today, I found the missing link. What's more, I found references, which, when followed, lead me to a series of genealogies, including historical works on European nobility, and I followed the line back ... all the way, to before Christ! All the way back to six generation before! This particular line hails from local governors of Romania and places that today are in Hungary and Austria. Okay, so you're like me, you're saying, no way can records exist that trace that far back. I felt someone was really telling a tall one. The composite picture showed that we are direct descendents of William the Conqueror, the Earls of Surrey, the Counts of Warren, and scores and scores of other nobles. Yeah, right. So after writing down about 20 pages of family tree, I came back to the hotel room and got on the internet, and started checking wikipedia, oxford-online, the JMU library historical research databases, and the more I checked, the more astounded I became! Starting with my missing link's grandmother, Elizabeth Warren, from Jamestown Virginia, the historical records trace back, directly, all the way back to 250 A.D.! It's amazing! The historical references stop at Ovida Der Burgunder, born about 250 A.D., whose son was Helderic der Burgunder, and grandson was geberich of the Western Goths, about 300 A.D. Don't confuse Burgunder with Burgundy. Burgunder was in what today is Romania, northeast of Italy. The next 12 generations (back to about 100 B.C.) aren't listed in the on-line historical records, so I'm not going to claim them or enter them into my genealogical database (I want to keep my database reliable, so I'm only entering in stuff that I consider verified.) But hey, going back to AD 250 is still amazing. If you want to see some of our relatives, use Wikipedia to look up Ricimer (about 350 AD), or Gondioc King of the Burgondes (AD 437), or Theoderic I (AD 470), or Theudebert I (AD 500), or Wacho, King of the Lombards (about 480). Or look up Lambert de Hesbaye, son of Guerin of Poitiers (AD 630). Hesbaye, by the way, is near Tongeren and Liege, both cities that we have visited in Belgium. We are descendents of Robert de Hesbaye, or Chrodobert, Duke of Hesbaye, who is patriarch of the Robertians, gread-grandfather of Odo and Robert, who were Frankish kings. Robert is also an ancestor of Hugh Capet, last of the Frankish kings and first king of France, and a direct descendent of Robert de Hesbaye sat on the French Throne from Capet until the French Revolution! While you're in Wikipedia, search for Fulk IV, or Fulk V, both direct ancestors of ours. Fulk IV's daddy was Aubri Geoffrey, Count of Gatinais, and his wife was Bertrade de Montfort, who ran away from him and married King Philip I of France. One of the juicier parts of our history has to do with Hamelin Plantagenet, son of Geoffrey of Anjou, son of Fulk V. Geoffrey of Anjou was married to Matilda, Princess of England, and daughter of Henry I King of England, and son of William the Conqueror. However, Geoffrey had a reputation for playing around a bit. He had several unknown, ahem, consorts or mistresses. His son, Hamelin Plantagenet, was billed as Matilda's son, but apparently he didn't look a thing like Matilda, who was descended from Henry I and Mathilda Steward of Scotland. (No red hair perhaps?) Regardless of who Hamelin's mom was, Hamelin married Isabel de Warenne, daughter and inheritor of William de Warenne, Third Earl of Surrey. Their son, William de Warenne, was the 6th Earl of Surrey, and we follow his line down to Edward Warren (AD 1321), and thence down to Thomas Warren (AD 1624) born in Ripple Parish, Kent, England, who came to Jamestown, and whose daughter Elizabeth Warren, married James Boyce. Their daughter Mary Boyce, married Sam Tarver, whose granddaughter Lucy Tarver married Samuel Rowell, whose son Benjamine Rowell was born the same year and same location as MY Benjamine Rowell from my cousin's records. Good old Benjamine's daddy Samuel was the missing link. The Warrens are the link back to royalty, and of course royalty kept records of who was whose daddy. That accounts for the ability to trace so far back. The fact that so many of the individuals are already in the existing historical records, with their parents and relatives, is amazing to me. I never would have dreamed we could go so far back. Of course, this is only one line of hundreds or even thousands. And the line changes from male lineage to female and back a few times as it goes. And what's more, there are more ties that I didn't write down... so we will probably end up going back up other lines as well. I'm so surprised at this, I couldn't sleep although it si after 1 a.m., and I've got more work to do tomorrow. So I guess I'll turn in. If you comment on the queen's blog, tell her congratulations.

Trivia, Part B

Well, since so few people tried the trivia quiz Part A, we'll go with Part B.

1. In the background is the honest-to-goodness real original of this famous painting. This painting hangs in a building which figured prominently in the book, The DaVinci Code. Of all the hundreds of artists represented in this building, only one is honored by having an entire room dedicated solely to his works. In fact, it is the only room in the entire museum named after an artist, even though he never saw the place. Who is the artist who has his own room? (Hint: It's not DaVinci. Another hint: he is buried in a church in Antwerp, but not its cathedral. Another hint: he called Anthony Van Dyke "one of my best pupils.")


2. This arch is surrounded by a 12-lane traffic circle which forms one end of what might arguably be Paris' most famous avenue. What monument stands in the middle of the circle at the other end of this avenue?


3. The guy who designed this tower also designed the structural steel for a famous statue, a small model of which is located on an island at the Pont de Grenelle about 1 kilometer to the left in this photo. Who designed the full-sized statue? (Hint: the statue wears sandals.)


4. The chapel below is located inside the walls of a large fort, which had its origins in a hunting lodge in the 12th century. The fort was later expanded to contain an elegant palace, complete with gardens and statuary, used for the weddings of several French kings. several others were born here. Known as a 'chateau', this famous site is located in a tiny town outside of Paris, whose name begins with the letter V. There is an American city by the same name. What was the name of the famous 20th-century American clown, comedian, and painter (all one person) who was born in the American city? (Hint: this is not Versailles.)


5. Many Americans think this is the "London Bridge". It isn't. This bridge is named for a famous English edifice which today contains the crown jewels and Henry VIII's set of armor The edifice is just to the left of this picture. A flock of ravens has lived in this edifice for centuries. What is supposed to happen if the ravens ever leave?


6. In addition to the phone booths, what else in this city is famous for being this shade of red? (hint: it isn't the fire trucks)


7. Third row seats, center stage, are very hard to come by in this famous theatre, but we got tickets there just an hour before the play started. The playwright who made this theatre famous came from a small town on a river, which shares its name with a cosmetics company. What is the name of the river?


8. This replica of the famous sculpture sits in the entrance hall of a museum. In addition to a famous library in its coveed courtyard, this museum holds what is probably the most famous stone in the world. What is the name of that stone?


9. The big building located adjacent to the base of this clock tower is used by a particular group for its official meetings. What group?


10. This lion is one of four which guard the corners of a famous column. Whose column? (Hint: he's not named Trafalgar!)


And finally, below is a photo showing a typical parking situation in Europe. Notice the proximity of the cars in front and back. We could ask how in the world they get the cars in and out of the spot, but to be honest, I don't know. But we saw lots of these all over Europe. This one is near St. Michel in the student quarter of Paris. Question 11: What famous landmark stands across the river from the student quarter, out on the island? (Hint: it has a statue of Charlemagne off to one side in the plaza in front. Another hint: "rose window".)