Le sigh—it appears I won’t have an opportunity to return to this thread today, so I suppose I’ll take my shot at it and let you vultures scavenge over my corpse. Er, my answers.
1. How many addressable hosts are there on a network that uses a subnet mask of 255.255.255.224?
30.
2. It happens sometimes. People just explode. Natural causes.
This is why I stay the hell away from repo men.
3. So, wait - did they ever tell the poor tinker he wasn’t really a lord? And did he ever get the disguised pageboy into bed?*
References the predicament of one Christopher Sly in Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew.
4. How did Captain John Carter get to Barsoom, originally?
He retreated into a cave to escape from attacking Indians, and passed through a portal.
5. What are the dangers involved in living in a house built by Quintin Teal?
Considering that property is condemned, I’d move out right away.
6. Describe the revenge of Susie Underpants.
Whereas 14 is a diphthong, this is a dip in a thong. (Bing being the dip, thanks to Google)
7. Consider the area bounded by y=x^2 - 1, y=2, y=0, and x=2. Rotate that area around the y axis and find the volume of the resulting solid.*
4 pi cubic units.
8. Don’t make your Elasian girlfriend cry.
The tears of women from the planet Elas contain an unusual biochemical compound that serves as a powerful love potion. Any man who comes into contact with an Elasian woman’s tears will fall in love with her.
9. Are flotsam and jetsam the same thing?
Flotsam floats; jetsam sinks. Also, flotsam usually refers to parts of the boat while jetsam refers to lost cargo.
10. Depending on the choices we make on the initial screen, we may compete in a physical/naked challenge or a machine-assisted mental challenge, among others.
Apprentice Adept series by Piers Anthony.
11. In 1946, it turned out that he wasn’t really of divine Shinto origins.
References the abdication of Emperor Hirohito of Japan.
12. The condemned spy escapes thanks to a flimsy rope, and makes it all the way back to the arms of his loving wife before discovering the cruel truth that none of it actually happened.
“An Occurence at Owl Creek”
13. “Dr. Obispo tries to keep wealthy Stoyte alive” - and this book’s title came from what literary work?
“After Many a Summer Dies the Swan” is a reference to Tennyson’s poem “Tithonus”.
14. Yes, that’s what I’m toying with - a monosyllabic speech sound where the tongue starts at articulatory position for one vowel and moves to the position of another.
A dipthong.
15. If J. Edward Day had been murdered in 1962, who might have been the chief suspect?
He was Kennedy’s Postmaster General who worked to eliminate the circulation of pornography in the mail system, so I’m blaming Hugh Hefner, or maybe Manual Enterprises, Inc.
(Interesting: “The Judicial Officer found that the magazines (1) were composed primarily, if not exclusively, for homosexuals and had no literary, scientific or other merit; (2) would appeal to the “prurient interest” of such sexual deviates, but would not have any interest for sexually normal individuals;”)
16. The Freeman family was decidedly unhappy on the morning of September 19th, 1777.
The Battle of Freeman’s Farm took place on this day.
17. Powdered color is mixed with egg white and yolk, then thinned with water and applied to gesso to make a delicious Japanese fried food.
Tempera paint isn’t a good addition to tempura food.
18. In the critically acclaimed 2003 movie “What A Girl Wants,” what performer played the character responsible for splitting Henry and Libby up?
Jonathan Pryce
19. Let’s see- the father, the mother, the step-daughter, the son, the young boy, and the child are all looking for some sort of writer.
Those are six characters in search of an author. Maybe they should start with Luigi Pirandello.
20. His expert-marksman sister shot and killed his cheating wife, as well as the wife’s adulterous partner, and he ends up going to jail. Only in the South,?
First Vicki Lawrence then Kristy McCall who turned out the lights that night in Georgia.
21. General Bragg beat him at Chickamauga, but at least he didn’t lose Chattanooga - and where the hell was Guildenstern?
General William Starke Rosecrans was the head of the Union Army of the Cumberland, and defeated General Bragg at the battle of Murfreesboro, only to be defeated in turn at the battle of Chickamauga. You’re thinking of Rosencrantz, who along with Guildenstern was sent by the King to arrange Hamlet’s assassination in England but ended up getting killed themselves. That was in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and possibly they would be intensely obscure characters if an existentialist play about them hadn’t been written.
22. What’s so “rare” about the lanthanoids, anyway?
The lanthanoids are the among the elements commonly called ‘rare earth’ metals.
23. So if I hang out in Africa and live happily by eating lotus plants, will I get into a poem, too?
The Lotus-Eaters of Africa were encountered by Odysseus during his travels subsequent to the Trojan War; Tennyson wrote of them.
24. My theory is that the basic building blocks of the universe are one-dimensional objects about 10^(-35) meters long, and there are none attached to this proposal.
That would be the “Superstring Theory”, which states that quarks are merely the points of intersection these strings make with our own three dimensions.
25. More sensibly than Byran, I supported the cheap coinage of silver.
Well, anyone would be more sensible than William Jennings Bryan, who won the Democratic nomination for President in 1896 after making the famous “Cross of Gold” speech which decried the current use of the gold standard in favor of cheap silver coinage. And if someone can actually explain the differences in opinion on whether silver or gold should have been used for coinage, they’re a better man than I.