Xmas quiz quibbles

The great thing about having a head cold between Christmas and New Year's Day is, well, there is no great thing. There are more football games on television, but the teams all blended together up in my sinus region, and I could not even remember which game I was watching. Oregon always seemed to be playing. The players have funny white dots on their knees, which I gather is the idea of some marketing genius at Nike. No wonder I have nightmares.

I did receive some pretty good news, which is that I did not make any serious shame-causing mistakes in the Xmas Quiz. Oh, there were mistakes, but only a few, and they weren't real mistakes. They were just wrong in a technical sense, as I'm sure you'll agree.

For instance, when people say, "I visited Hawaii," they're probably talking about Oahu or Maui or the Big Island. They're not talking about Necker or Midway or the French Frigate Shoals. Yet each of those islands is part of the Hawaiian Island chain, which has 137 islands and atolls stretching 1,500 miles over the central Pacific.

The Hawaiian Islands fabled in travel posters and popular songs are formally known as the Hawaiian Windward Islands. They used to be called the Sandwich Islands, because of all the sand which is there. I learned that joke when I was 8 years old and have waited all these years to use it.

Similarly, sort of, I asked what the only French territory in North America was. I had in mind, naturally, the Territorial Collectivity of Saint Pierre and Miquelon, which is off the coast of Newfoundland and home of an annual footrace called the Mucky Miquelon Marathon. I forgot that "Central America" is merely the nontechnical name for that area south of Mexico and north of the big hulking continent south of Panama.

Really, there's only North America and South America, and in North America lies the Caribbean, which contains the islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique, which are departments of France, like all the county-like things in France itself. The islands of Saint Martin and Saint Barthélemy are, yes, territorial collectivities of France. So the real right answer would have included those islands.

The mistake did allow me to type "Mucky Miquelon Marathon" one more time, so maybe things worked out for the best after all.

(Also, several people pointed out that all French embassies are located, technically speaking, on French soil, but that falls into the category of "trick question" and I would never, ever do that, unless I could think of a really good one.)

Also, again technically speaking, the Channel Island of Sark is not part of the United Kingdom; all of the Channel Islands are separately loyal to the queen, in her capacity as the Duke of Normandy. Yeah, Duke, not Duchess - the queen apparently can't be a duchess. See, now that would have been a trick question.

My thanks, by the way, to Jenny Wenk, Arnie Hoffman and all of my close personal friends on the Well, who showed me the error of my ways, if errors they be.

As always, the quiz did inspire people to write amplifications concerning items mentioned in the questions. For instance, this, from Allen Harrison:

"It may or may not interest you to know that Milo (of Croton) may or may not have been the father-in-law of Pythagoras, who may or may not have existed, but if he did he founded his order at Croton where Milo was a member, and supposedly his beautiful daughter Theano married Pythagoras. Milo was also famous for eating twenty pounds of meat a day to maintain his strength, although Pythagoras' order was strictly vegetarian.

"Milo was said to have led the army of Croton when it destroyed Sybaris, about fifty miles to the north. Milo supposedly died when his hand got caught in a tree that had split under a bolt of lightning. He wasn't strong enough to free himself and in time a pack of wolves did him in. As all of this happened or didn't in the sixth century B.C.E., the records are spotty at best."

And, with regard to landlocked Bolivia, I got this from Julie Lacy: "A few years ago, when volunteering with Earthwatch in Bolivia, I heard a lot about the Bolivians' resentment of their landlocked status. They lost their coastline to Chile in The War of the Pacific (1879-83). They do still have a navy, though. It patrols their part of Lake Titicaca, protecting their border with Peru which runs through the lake."

So that's all the fun until December, when there will be more questions and more answers and more corrections, and we will all learn more about obscure things and then promptly forget them. Life goes on. Happy 2009.

Roland thinks L.A. is a place for the brain-dead. He says, if you turned off the sprinklers, it would turn into a desert. But I think - I don't know, it's not what I expected. It's a place where they've taken a desert and turned it into their dreams. I've seen a lot of L.A. and I think it's also a place of secrets: secret houses, secret lives, secret pleasures. And no one is looking to the outside for verification that what they're doing is all right. So what do you say, jcarroll@sfchronicle.com?