JON CARROLL
Thursday, December 26, 1996
©2000 San Francisco Chronicle
AS PROMISED, here are the answers to yesterday's amusing quiz. Please refrain from hissing or throwing vegetables until after the columnist has left the room.
1) Coffee was first cultivated in Ethiopia; chocolate was first cultivated in Mexico. Coffee is, by the way, the No. 2 fluid in terms of annual gross consumption; No. 1 is petroleum.
2) All the actors named were in the film ``Jumpin' Jack Flash.'' Mick Jagger sang the title song, and Whoopi Goldberg misheard one of the lyrics as ``I was raised in a barroom shack by Herb Caen.''
3) From the top down (or closest to God out): seraphim, cherubim, thrones, dominions, virtues, powers, principalities, archangels, angels.
4) Pronaos, acroterion, peristyle and entablature are all parts of a Greek temple; rostrum, swimmerets, uropod and carapace are all parts of a lobster; drupelet, receptacle, sepal and seed are all parts of a raspberry; briolette, baguette, scissors and brilliant are all cuts of gemstones.
5) J. Strom Thurmond, still a U.S. senator, received 38 votes as the Dixiecrat candidate for president in 1948. His platform was mostly unyielding support for racial segregation.
6) Aelia Capitolina is the name the Romans gave Jerusalem after the dispersal of the Jews in 135 C.E. Yathrib was the original name of Medina (which means merely ``City''), the second holiest city in Islam.
7) Morehouse is the oldest college for black men; Spellman is the oldest college for black women.
8) A given date on Earth lasts 47 hours. There are 24 time zones, so after 24 hours the date (call it D) disappears from Zone 1, and one hour later D disappears from Zone 2, and if you work that out carefully with your fingers it comes out to 47.
9) THE MISSING NAMES from the list of the world's most populous cities are 2. Sao Paulo, 4. Cairo, 7. Bombay, 9. Rio de Janeiro, 10. Seoul. Note that three of the top 10 (Buenos Aires is No. 6) are in South America and none is in Europe.
10) The second-largest English-speaking city in 1800 was Philadelphia.
11) The artist formerly known as Prince was born Prince Rogers Nelson.
12) George and Ira Gershwin wrote ``They Can't Take That Away From Me'' and ``Someone to Watch Over Me,'' Cole Porter wrote ``Just One of Those Things'' and ``Anything Goes,'' Rodgers and Hart wrote ``My Funny Valentine'' and ``The Lady Is a Tramp.''
13) The state is Maine, the only state that is contiguous with just one other state. Thus Maine could not be in the middle of the trip, since you'd have to pass through New Hampshire twice, which is against the rules.
14) THE WARLOCKS transformed themselves into the Grateful Dead; the Passions (or Carl and the Passions) became the Beach Boys; the Quarrymen became the Beatles.
15) The right hand of ``The Thinker'' touches his face; the right elbow rests on the left knee. Almost everyone gets the second part wrong; there's a photograph of George Bernard Shaw posing as Rodin's pondering figure, and even he has his right elbow on his right knee.
16) Jefferson Davis (he was so an American president) married Zachary Taylor's daughter.
17) To quote from Barbara Tuchman in ``A Distant Mirror'': ``The `Dunmow Flitch' is a fourteenth century prize for connubial contentment: a side or flitch of bacon was awarded to any couple who could come to Dunmow in Essex after a year of marriage and truthfully swear that they never quarreled and did not regret the marriage and would do it over again if given the chance.''
Always right about now there is the pick of nits, the discovering of alternate readings, the citation from learned volumes contradicting the supposed ``facts'' in the foregoing. Please send these to alara
©2000 San Francisco Chronicle Page C16