30 Questions Quiz with Movie, Book and History References

“Ohh shit”
By Divyanshu Surya Gandhi

Rules
1. 30 Questions in the quiz.
2. +10/-10 on pounce. +10 on direct. +10 on
pass. Part pounce not allowed.
3. One can double the points of pounce if they
say it before seeing the question. -20 if they
are wrong then.

Q.1.
In 1994, X founded the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for
Visual History and Education, originally called the Survivors
of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, a nonprofit
organization established to record testimonies in video
format of survivors and other witnesses of the Shoah. He
did not accept any earnings from a certain project he
undertook before this, stating that it would have been
“blood money”, and rather proceeds from the project went
towards setting up the foundation a year later.
USC: University of Southern California.
Shoah is a Franco British documentary directed by Claude
Lanzmann released in 1985.

Q.2.
Castellammare del Golfo, literally the Sea Fortress on the Gulf,
is a town in the province of ______. It is a relatively popular
tourist destination, and one of the places you might have
seen it is as part of the film Ocean’s Twelve.
The Castellammarese War, was a bloody power struggle in the
early 1930’s, named so because one of the heads involved,
Salvatore Maranzano, was based in that region of _____. At
the end of it, where Maranzano was assassinated, the
parties involved established a power sharing arrangement
called The Commission, which created a system of five
equally powerful entities to avoid any such future wars, and
the system remained in place for a great many years after.
What do we know the Commission as more popularly as?

Q.3.
“Dresden China snuff-boxes, mechanical engines,
electro-plated fish slicers, musical boxes and gilt
blown glass Christmas balls do not go well with
the splendors of a Palace that might have been
built by Titans and coloured by the morning sun”
Is an excerpt from a work of Rudyard Kipling, in
which he references a certain Indian monument,
whose name quite literally means “The Fort of
the Sun”. It’s construction was started under the
rule of the Rathore ruler Rao Jodha, after whom a
city has (quite evidently) been named too.

Q.4.
X started out by writing short stories for men’s magazines like Cavalier.
His first book, an epistolary novel, Y, released in 1974 is one of his most
notable works with three different film adaptations and one Broadway
musical adaptation. When asked about it’s origin he commented-
“Some woman said, ‘You write all those macho things, but you can’t write
about women.’ I said, ‘I’m not scared of women. I could write about them if
I wanted to.’ So I got an idea for a story about this incident in a girls’
shower room….
….Anyway I did the shower scene but I hated it and threw it away, My wife
fished it out of the waste-basket and read it. She said, ‘I think this is pretty
good’…”
And so Y is dedicated to his wife, another author in the same genre,
though nowhere near as famous: “This is for Tabby, who got me into it. -
and then bailed me out of it.”
ID X, Y.

Q.5.
When David Lynch released his epic Sci Fi adaptation of
Frank Herbert’s Dune in 1984, he gave credit to the film
to another prolific director, _____ _______, in the
Television cut and some international cuts of the film,
because of the kind of films he used to work with and
direct. The said director has a very wide range of works
from as early as 1968 ( The Death of a Gunfighter being
his first ) till the year 2000, in both cinema and
television. An urban legend with regards to the director
is that his name anagrams to “The Alias Men”, which,
although apocryphal at best, does give an idea of the
way he worked and the films he was associated with.

Q.6.
A term that most of us have never given a second thought about, The
idea of a ______ _____ was perhaps first mentioned in Robert
Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land –
“They went to the living room; Jill sat at his feet and they applied
themselves to martinis. Opposite his chair was a stereovision tank
disguised as an aquarium; he switched it on, guppies and tetras
gave way to the face of the well-known winchell Augustus Greaves.”
The phrase itself originated out of something quite literal – It was used
to protect a certain aspect of the computer from Burning Out due
to excess heat and reactions with phosphorus.
What two word phrase, something that we no longer really need like
we might have back then.

Q.7.
The Indian Post office (Amendment) Bill was tabled
and passed by both houses in the year 1982. This
bill, once fully implemented, would have given
the Indian Government the power to view all
forms of personal correspondence and take
action or censor as and when necessary.
However, the then President, G.Zail Singh, used a
power given to his post that has never been used
since. What did he use to stop the Bill from
becoming law? The name would be nice, general
funda would do to.

Pocket Veto
A pocket veto is a legislative maneuver that
allows a president or other official
with veto power to exercise that power over a
bill by taking no action (instead of
affirmatively vetoing it).

Q.8.
“Notes towards the Complete Works of Shakespeare” is a
manuscript published in the year 2002, and the six
authors are only known by their first names – Elmo,
Gum, Heather, Holly, Mistletoe and Rowan. It was an
initiative by the staff and students of the University of
Plymouth to demonstrate something in what they
called, was part science experiment part performance
art. The text itself shows a strong disposition to the S
key, and the entire manuscript, about five pages long,
represents the combined work of all six authors over
the period of a month in which they were, quite
literally, locked up in a cage. What is this all about,
really?

Give six monkeys a computer. 

Q.9.
In the year 2007, a certain Hollywood actor outbid another Hollywood
actor in an auction of a very rare dinosaur fossil. And that’s
something you could very readily associate from one of his most
famous roles in film. The one who won, was actually on a spending
rampage that spanned seven years and saw him burn through 150
million dollars, on things ranging from bungalows to castles to
islands and jets. Now however, his star value has significantly
reduced, and he had to painfully part with his Action Comics #1 at a
record selling price of 2.16 million. On 24 December 2015, he
agreed to return the fossil skull to the authorities after it was found
that it was illegally transported from the discovery site in Mongolia.
The actor who lost the bid, is now in a position where he might
realistically get something he’s never gotten so far. And the world
would feel really sorry if he had to return it, especially if it were a
host gaffe. ID both.

Nicholas Cage and Leonardo di Caprio

Q.10.
SBS Prince Beverages Pvt. Ltd. seeking to cash in on the
popularity of X launched the product Y earlier in
February this year. Launched in four flavours — cola,
lemon, orange and surprise — a 400ml pet bottle costs
Rs.15
Jitender Keswani who owns the company, said the
product is for the “common man” who cannot afford to
buy costly soft drinks. He also said the slogan for the
drink was the best — “Drink and fight for your right”.
ID Y

Q.11.
X’s first autobiography’s title claimed that he wasn’t
someone (Y) whom he portrayed in a certain series.
The book, which came out in 1975 was criticized by
some fans because of the perception that X was
rejecting the character Y. He maintained he was only
clarifying the difference between himself and Y, whom
he always enjoyed playing. However, he later published
his second autobiography in an attempt to address the
misconceptions. Give X, Y and the titles of the two
autobiographies, which are functionally very similar to
each other, and a whole host of titles in popular media.

Q.12.
X, a Major League Baseball legend, has to his name one of the most enduring
streaks in professional sports history, and what, after some thought and
calculation by a Nobel Prize winning physicist Edward Purcell, who was
also a Sabermetrician (cool name for a hardcore Baseball analyst), was
called “the most extraordinary thing that ever happened in American
sports”.
That is arguably his most famous achievement. His popularity during his
career was such that he was referenced in film, television, literature, art,
and music both during his career and decades after he retired, in places
like “We didn’t start the fire” and a really famous Hemingway work too.
But he is also known for courting and marrying Y, who was equally, if not
more popular in the US and all over the world back then. They fell out, and
he re-entered her life years later as another one of her marriages was
failing. He quit his day job to ask her to marry him again, but he never got
the chance to ask her, and he sent a dozen roses, thrice a week, for the
next twenty years, to her grave, never marrying again.
ID X, and well, Y is who she is.

X: Joe Di Maggio Y: Marilyn Monroe

Q.13.
X was a French police officer and biometrics researcher who
created anthropometry, an identification system based on
physical measurements. Anthropometry was the first
scientific system used by police to identify criminals. Before
that time, criminals could only be identified based on
unreliable eyewitness accounts. The method was
eventually supplanted by fingerprinting. X is also credited
with contributions like the mug shot and the
systematisation of crime-scene photography which remain
in place to this day.
X is referenced in the Sherlock Holmes story The Hound of the
Baskervilles, in which one of Holmes’s clients refers to
Holmes as the “second highest expert in Europe” after X.

Q.14.
An app was created by a group of software engineering
students at the University of Iceland named Sad
Engineer Studios. The app has proved to be very
popular in Iceland with thousands downloads from the
Google Play Store.
Called Íslendingabók (The Book of Icelanders), one of the
main features of this app is something called the
Bump. It is particularly important given Iceland’s small
population, and generational naming traditions.
What is the main function of this app?
Their tagline is “Bump in the app before you bump in X”

Q.15.
These are the recipients of a very specific
award/honour. As you can see, there is a
name blanked out next to the date 19 May
1990. Whose?

Nishan-e-Pakistan; Morarj Desai

Q.16.
The Ecuadorian national team figured they were going to need some
help if they were going to win the 2006 World Cup.
And so they did what we all do in their situation. They opened up the
yellow pages and found a X. A man named Tzamarenda Naychapi, a
X from Ecuador’s Shuar tribe, answered the call and visited each of
the 12 stadiums the Cup would be played in.
An official from the Ecuadorian Tourist Office said, “When Ecuador
qualified for the World Cup, we thought about what we could bring
to Germany. It is a big present from this little country to be in the
World Cup and they wanted to bring a present back, so we thought
about what Germany is missing. Tzamarenda said he could bring
Germany peace and lots of positive energy”
So what is X?

Q.17.
The picture in the next slide has been widely claimed as a
“first” of sorts. The four women in it are part of a doo-wop
music band, called the Les Horribles X-ettes . One of them
actually worked at X, and her husband, who also worked at
X, wrote and composed the first few songs for the group. At
their first few performances, they dubbed themselves “the
one and only High Energy Rock Band”.
When you replace X with the actual word, the initials of the
name of the band form something that is inextricably linked
to X.
What you need to do, is give us X, and also what “first” this
picture is supposed to have achieved.

Les Horribles Cernettes; First picture
uploaded on the web.

Q.18.
Perhaps the most “intriguing” of all epidemics in history, The X plague has
occurred at different points of time across the world, with cases in France,
Netherlands, and even Madagascar. But the most prominent case of the
plague took place in the early 1500’s in Strasbourg, France. The first
victim, a woman, fell prey to the disease in a narrow street, and over the
course of the next few weeks, it had spread to about 400 people in various
different stages of the affliction, and leading to as many deaths. While the
event is bizarre to read about, most historians agree that it did indeed
happen, though the reasons behind it are still unclear. Possible theories
include Mushrooms containing natural equivalents of LSD, supernatural
compulsions, and stress due to the period of famine and other
communicable diseases that were prevalent in that period.
Here is an excerpt from an article on it, the operative word blanked out –
By the end of the week, 34 others had joined her and, within a month, the
number of X individuals had swelled to 400.
Authorities prescribed “more X” to cure the tormented movers but, by
summer’s end, dozens in the Alsatian city had died of heart attacks,
strokes and sheer exhaustion due to X.

Q.19.
X is a rather unusual man in his sport. While most of his
peers are, shall we say, “colourful” X has a penchant for
being systematic and ordered. Apart from his
considerable achievements in ____________, X also
speaks 4 languages, has a PhD, and plays chess.X was
one of the first ever Summer Olympic gold medallists
of this country in 1996. In 2012, he auctioned off his
medal to a bidder for USD 1 Million, to use the money
to ‘help the dreams’ of thousands of children in his
country. After the sale, the bidder immediately
returned the medal back to X out of respect for him. So
who is X?

Q.20
While shooting this scene, the production team
wondered what to use in place of a certain
substance. The final composition was a mixture
of chocolate and peanut butter of unknown
proportions. The resultant was very realistic, and
became one of the most talked about scenes of
that movie, even earning a special place in the
Oscar’s opening sequence the next year.
What movie, and which scene are we talking
about?

Q.21.
The above notice was against a certain kind of
music that was being created at the time in
America. X and Y were genres of music
prevalent in those times, with the sole point
of difference being related to the above
notice. Eventually, Y ( the notice being against
it ) became part of a wider musical
movement, one that we know as Z today.

X: Rhythm Y: Blues Z: Rock n roll Blank:
Negro

The novel is The Cuckoo’s Calling, written by a writer
called Robert Galbraith.
This tweet led to an investigation to find out more about
Robert Galbraith. However, investigations revealed that
a) Robert Galbraith was not living; and
b) Someone was impersonating this nobody to sell
books.
There was then an investigation to find out who was
impersonating the late Robert Galbraith., and writing
books in his name. They found out that the
impersonator was J.K. Rowling!

Q.23.
• Music directors – Vinayak Salvi, Rohan Utpat
• Lyricist – Vikas Dubey
• Singer – Alamgir Khan
What am I talking about?

Q.24.
Palantir Technologies, Inc. is a private American
software and services company, co-founded by
Peter Thiel, which specializes in data analysis. It is
known for 2 softwares in particular: Palantir X
which is used by counter-terrorism analysts and
fraud investigators, and Palantir Y, used by hedge
funds, banks and financial service firms. ID X and
Y, which are the names of 2 cities, and (unrelated)
say what the name of the company is a reference
to, from the world of literature

Q.25.
The current director of the FBI, James Comey,
recently admitted that their cyber crimes
division was was severely understaffed. Most
of the world’s top ethical hackers, geeks and
out-of-the-box programmers were ineligible
for employment due to a very specific FBI
criteria. Which criteria?

There is no seat in Lok Sabha numbered 420.

Q.27.
“The answer to this is very simple. It was a joke.
It had to be a ______, an ordinary, smallish
_____, and I chose that one. Base thirteen,
Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. I
sat at my desk, stared into the garden and
thought ‘__ will do’. I typed it out. End of
story.”

How Douglas Adams chose “42”

Q.28.
The Summy Company registered for copyright of the song
X, in 1935. In 1988, Warner/Chappell Music purchased
the company owning the copyright for $25 million,
with the value of X estimated at $5 million.
Based on the 1935 copyright registration, Warner claims
that the United States copyright will not expire until
2030, and that unauthorised public performances of
the song are technically illegal unless royalties are paid
to Warner. In 2008, Warner collected about $5,000 per
day in royalties for the song. However, as of now the
copyright claims are under legal dispute.
Name the song.

Q.29.
Designed at Google with the help of volunteers
from Hack4good, this new tablet can be operated
with gloves on and in regions of high humidity. It
is meant to help a certain group of skilled people.
The sharp edges were removed so that the clothing
would not be pierced.
The tablet has been put in waterproof casing, and
can be dunked into a 0.5% solution of chlorine
without suffering abrasions.

Q.30.
There are multiple reasons as to why this is so-
• 1.Worshippers of Shiva used to do this to
demarcate their homes and to separate
themselves form people who worshipped
other deities.
• 2.It happens to keep the houses cool.
• 3.The copper compound involved is effective
against mosquitoes and termites too.
• What are we talking about ?

30 Questions Quiz with Movie, Book and History References

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30 Questions Quiz with Movie, Book and History References