DW Daily Answers: 14 September 2020

[chaosvizier]

"Six perfect answers" - opensprit

...or are they?


1. What word-processing software, developed at Brigham Young University, dominated its market in the 1980s and early 1990s?

"Lotus 1-2-3-4-5-6-7 Wives" - captainsblog
"WordPoly" - seekingferret
"WordInventedWholesaleByAConman" - bending_sickle
"Mormon Word. We had to delete it from our computer cos it kept trying to convert the neighbouring software." - crystalcazzie

"I'd initially answered 'Wordstar,' but I think that might have been Osborne-only. Where's my buggy whip?" - digitaldiscipline

(I used WordStar a lot back in ye olden days. -CV)

"Word perfect was the first program I ever used." - b_hulsmans

Correct Answer: WordPerfect

"it wasn't!" - germankitty



2. What ABC sitcom featured the hijinks of cousins Larry and Balki living together in Chicago?

"L.A. Law" - seekingferret

(Living in Chicago, working in L.A. ... that's a hell of a commute. - CV)

"Larry and Balki sound like the names you'd give your cats. Please tell me this is a show about the hijinks of two cats who live together." - crystalcazzie

(There really aren't enough shows about cat roommates. Thanks for nothing, free market! - EW)

"Oh, sure, 'cousins.' Mhmm. Is that what they called it back then?" - bending_sickle

"No idea. Probably because the theme song never was covered in an episode of Glee." - germankitty

(Their loss, because that tune slaps! - EW)

"Let's pretend I knew how to include a gif of Balki and Larry dancing the dance of joy." - b_hulsmans

(*pretends really hard* Wow, it's like I can see it now! - CV)



Correct Answer: Perfect Strangers.

"Later rebooted as Perfect Stranger Things, where the boys are joined by Millie Bobby Brown, who makes their eyes bleed every time they start the Dance of Joy." - captainsblog



3. What film tells the story of the Halloween Gale and the sinking of the Andrea Gail?

"??? Perfection on the High Seas?" - Stephanie la Francofille

"Gale is a riot on Halloween, her costume gets better every year. Can't wait to see what she blows in with this year." - opensprit

"Six Idiots Inna Boat" - Deza

(So much entertainment is about ___ Idiots Inna ____. -AL)

"Was that the Robert Redford storm movie, the Gene Hackman storm movie, the Russel Crowe storm movie, or the George Clooney storm movie?" - cmattg
"Not even George Clooney can redeem a film about the weather!" - germankitty

"Until the perfect storm, the Gale most prominently known for one was Dorothy." - digitaldiscipline

(Does this sentence make sense? I've been working for a lot of days in a row. -AL)

"My very first DVD player came with three DVDs - The Perfect Storm, some random Friends episodes, and Space Jam. It was a simpler time." - crystalcazzie

(How charmingly idiosyncratic. -CV)

Correct Answer: The Perfect Storm



4. What common English proverb comes from the Latin phrase 'Uses promptos facit'?

"Using... fast... simple?" - crystalcazzie
"Something hoc therefore something else hoc" - seekingferret

(It looks like we need a DWDQ Remedial Latin class. Stephanie la Francofille, care to branch out? -AL)

"Who needs proverbs when you're practically perfect in every way?" - Deza

"If at first, you don't succeed, then skydiving probably isn't for you..." - waitingman

"Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, is the definition of practice." - opensprit

"Practice makes perfect. But in fact, only PERFECT practice makes perfect. Sloppy practice makes...sloppiness." - Stephanie la Francofille

(Wow, she is going to be a tough Latin teacher. -CV)

"Practice Makes Oh God It's Not Good Enough! It'll Never Be Good Enough!" - bending_sickle

Correct Answer: Practice Makes Perfect



5. What fictional space traveler in a Douglas Adams series, trying to blend in on planet Earth, names himself after a car?

"Ford Prufrock??" - Stephanie La Francofille

(Shall I part my hair like Zaphod? Is my towel within reach? I have heard the Vogons quoting poetry, each to each. - EW)

"Ford Edsel" - seekingferret

"Studebaker Oops" - Deza

"Mazda Bongo Friendee" - crystalcazzie

"It's Starman and his Tesla Roadster! DON'T PANIC" - opensprit

"Fun fact: The Trillian app is named after Tricia McMillan, because her facility with languages and cultures was a good fit for a single app to handle several IM clients." - digitaldiscipline

(+1 for giving the mods some SERIOUS early 2000s nostalgia. - AL)

"That would be our man from Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse: Ford Prefect" - cmattg

Correct Answer: Ford Prefect



6. Who is your soulmate (real or fictional) and what makes them your ideal match?

"A solemate is that special someone you can trade shoes with and they fit perfectly. I haven't found mine yet, but Shoe Deities willing, someday..." - seekingferret

"A pair of black Stuart Weitzman pumps. They're barely affordable yet extremely stylish, fit my feet perfectly and match most of my wardrobe, from their patent-leather heels to their smooth soles. What more can a girl want?" - germankitty

"Jane Eyre and I would get along purrrfectly, with our willful ways and resentment of the upper classes. Besides, the only other job I could do besides teach is be a governess." - Stephanie La Francofille

"Ryan Reynolds, because, have you looked at his body? Gimme!" - b_hulsmans

"Ching Shih, the world's best pirate, because I too would like to roam the seas and make nations cower before me. Maybe a little rampaging, too, as a treat." - bending_sickle

"I'd have to go with one of those anime girls who's cheery sometimes and serious when I need it." - cmattg

"My wife's crazy suits my crazy. They say she's one in a million - which means there's 24 more just like her in Australia alone!!" - waitingman

(And, knowing Australia, at least 20 of them are highly venomous. -EW)

"EW in 20 years if I go into stasis so you can age up to me." - opensprit

(How sweet! In 20 years I promise to love your cryogenically frozen head as much as the day I met you. -EW)



And there you have it. The perfect quiz. There can never be another. But there can be more. Yes, more quizzes! More questions! More power! MORE! So keep up the good work and play on; your answers bring joy to millions. Thousands. Hundreds. Some. A number of persons greater than one. And that's worth it every time.

Tune in tomorrow for more quizly goodness, and Rock On!

AL&EW&CV

Comments

[seekingferret]

No, living in LA and working in LA is a hell of a commute.

[angledge]

You're not wrong.

[germankitty]

DWDQ weekly stats: 16/43. Edging slowly but surely towards 50%, folks. Maybe we should recruit another player? But well done!

Weird, how the one answer you think may get you a quote doesn't, yet another you feel kind of "meh" about does ... I seriously suspect some corollary of Murphy's Law at work!

And where's the new quiz?!?

[crystalcazzie]

Maybe we should look into recruiting. Are you thinking we should convince current players to join our team (I'm sure there must be more Europeans here... right?) or advertising for new ones? Maybe we could lure people in with clickbait and then once they're here they'll have no choice but to play! *laughs evilly*

[germankitty]

Recruitment might work ... see icon?

[crystalcazzie]

Yes! I approve of this plan.

Oh, and AL?

[germankitty]

"Until the perfect storm, the Gale most prominently known for one was Dorothy." - digitaldiscipline

(Does this sentence make sense? I've been working for a lot of days in a row. -AL)

Yes, yes it does -- Dorothy was the gal who got blown transported by a storm from Kansas into Oz. (Tbh, took me until this morning to get it. Nevermind.)

Re: Oh, and AL?

[crystalcazzie]

And her surname was Gale...

Re: Oh, and AL?

[germankitty]

Huh. I didn't know that ... then again, I don't remember ever seeing the whole movie; it's not exactly a staple here in Germany, and seeing that they'd only been shown in a dubbed version on TV -- no thanks. (I do remember trying to read the book[s] once; despite my penchant for fantastic literature in general, I never managed to finish. Same as Lord of the Rings, I'm afraid. Just. Not. My. Thing, sorry.)

Re: Oh, and AL?

[crystalcazzie]

I'm not sure I've ever sat down and watched the whole thing either. It's one of those films that's so ingrained in popular culture I feel like I know pretty much everything about how it goes, but I can't say for certain if I've ever actually seen it!

And I'm with you on the Lord of the Rings books. I tried to read them and got partway through The Two Towers before deciding that life was too short to force myself to continue reading something so incredibly boring.

Re: Oh, and AL?

[germankitty]

You got further into LotR than I did -- I think I threw in the towel around p.75 or so of "Fellowship". Really, it should be right down my alley (I've read rip-offs and enjoyed them), if only Tolkien's style wasn't so ponderous and, yes, boring! I had to buy the trilogy for Uni, and was lucky that we never got around to discussing it -- but Spousal Unit filched it from me and has been a fan ever since. Oh well.

A lot of American/British pop culture passed me by, or I only caught up as an adult, when I knew enough English to go to the source, so to speak. For example, Dr Seuss is barely known here, but Enid Blyton has been popular for ages. Narnia, Alice ... not so much, though.

Same for TV -- we had lots of cartoons, "Lassie", "Little Rascals" and a bunch of other US shows from the black-and-white era, but afaik, "Doctor Who" never made it to our screens.

Re: Oh, and AL?

[crystalcazzie]

Dr Seuss pretty much passed me by too. I know of him and his works but I never read them as a kid and I don't think he's anywhere near as popular here as in America. I did spend a lot of my childhood devouring every Enid Blyton book I could though! And I loved Roald Dahl too. Did his books make it over there? I never read much Narnia or Alice either. (I do have a vague memory of starting The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and being so upset that the witch was the bad guy that I gave up!)

I'd never heard of Little Rascals until it was parodied on The Simpsons. But I am shocked you never got Doctor Who! Do you have it now? I know its popularity has soared in other countries since it came back in 2005, and the 50th anniversary special got a Guinness World Record for the largest simulcast around the world (although that record has since been broken by Game of Thrones.)

Re: Oh, and AL?

[germankitty]

A friend of mine gave me a translation of Dahl's "Kiss, Kiss", pretty much traumatizing me in the process. Some of the stories are just GROSS, and I've never been fond of horror/supernatural, anyway, so ... yeah, no. Dahl isn't well-known here, I don't think. (My local library introduced me to Mary Poppins and Dr Doolittle, though!)

Had to google about Dr Who; apparently it was shown here intermittently from 1989 on, with little success, got soon relegated to late-late Saturday nights, then was shown in abbreviated form** on late Sunday afternoons (competing with sports and other programming, so no chance) and eventually ended up on pay-tv and early streaming services. In short, it's still obscure for most people except the die-hard sf fans.

**Star Trek suffered the same fate; all the episodes were edited to fit a 45-minute time slot, so roughly 7 minutes got cut from each. Which resulted in some ... let's say unusual changes in storylines at times, on top of bad translations. ARGH!

"Little Rascals", or more precisely, the original "Our Gang" short films, were silent, so were cheap and needed only a voice-over here and there instead of dubbing, and as slapstick is pretty universally funny, it made business sense at least. Also, a lot of US primetime shows were edited to fit that 45-minute format and ran between 6 and 8 pm on weekdays -- before the main news. UK series like "Ivanhoe" (a very young Roger Moore) or "All creatures great & small" was half kiddie and half family TV for early Sunday afternoons.

Oh, and full disclosure: I'm one of the dozen or so people world-wide who's NEVER seen an episode of GoT! *hides*

Re: Oh, and AL?

[crystalcazzie]

Ah, right, lol. Roald Dahl is mainly famous as a children's author here and I keep forgetting that he also wrote adult fiction. I grew up reading things like Matilda and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory but I haven't read any of his adult stories (and from the sounds of it I don't really want to!)

That's a shame about Star Trek. I hate it when broadcasters edit things to fit slots they weren't originally intended for. I remember when Channel 4 did that to Alias. For some ridiculous reason they decided to show it in the afternoon, so had to cut out a lot of the fight sequences to make it appropriate for the timeslot and the result was a pilot episode that made no sense cos huge parts of the plot had been lost!

I held out on watching Game of Thrones for a while but eventually succumbed. I liked it, but not enough to stay up and watch the simulcasts at 2am!

Edit: All this talk about Star Trek has reminded me. Many years ago when we had an analogue satellite dish we were sometimes able to pick up channels from other countries and I vividly remember watching an episode of The Next Generation dubbed in German. I didn't know any German but I did know the episode pretty well so it was fun to follow along!

Re: Oh, and AL?

[germankitty]

I don't remember Dahl as a children's author at all; iirc, all my library had from the UK for kids was Rosemary Sutcliff, Enid Blyton (Famous 5, Malory Towers and Sullivan Twins), Hugh Lofting and PL Travers. From the US, I remember reading Little Women, the Sue Barton series and various obscure works two elderly, very pious ladies gave me that all had a religious background (which I didn't mind too much, as they were interesting to my inner history buff).

Other than that, I used to read a LOT of legends and fairy tales, at age 7 I became a fan of a 19th-century German author who wrote mainly self-insert and/or Gary Stu adventure novels, read some of the classic German girls' series (most written before WWII)... and discovered historical fiction when I was ten. Soon after, my librarian let me loose in the adult section (she knew I'd read my way through most of the kiddie section at least twice already), SF came when I was 12 and I never looked back.

Heh. I remember renting the ST:TNG pilot from an English video store (we used to have UK Army barracks in town) and falling asleep more than once while watching, it was so tedious. Then in 1991 we were holidaying in Wales, the show was on BBC and I was drawn in because the later seasons definitely got better. Soon after, we got Sky (then still free via satellite), and I caught up on reruns.

I've been a ST fan since TOS days; back in the 70s, folks in Germany had a lively exchange of video copies to get undubbed episodes. VCRs still cost a lot of money, but some people invested in a second machine and would make copies of tapes they got from the UK or (mostly) Australia. You'd buy tapes, mail them to someone who had the episodes you wanted, paid one or two pounds per episode plus return postage and get the tapes back with one to three weeks. Then ST was back on German TV ... and I happened to catch "Amok Time". I guess the German title, "Space Fever" should have set of alarm bells, but ... imagine my horror when the 7 minutes cut to fit the time slot all dealt with the whole "pon farr" issue! The Kirk/Spock fight was ultimately handwaved away as a dream/nightmare caused by some kind of interstellar flu bug. *facepalm/headdesk* That was the last EVER dubbed episode I watched.

Re: Oh, and AL?

[crystalcazzie]

That sounds like a good selection of children's authors. What about Frances Hodgson Burnett? I loved A Little Princess and The Secret Garden. I absolutely loved Enid Blyton too. I desperately wanted to go to Malory Towers or St Clair's when I was young! Probably as much as kids today want to go to Hogwarts. I loved the Famous Five too, but I never got into the Secret Seven. They just weren't as good.

Yeah, the first two seasons of ST:TNG are absolutely terrible. It's a good thing it was made back then cos if it was made today it would probably have been cancelled almost immediately and never given the chance to become the brilliant series it was.

I was born in the early 80s so I pretty much grew up with TNG and that's probably why I love it so much. I never really got into TOS as much. I have a memory of watching an episode with my dad when I was young and thinking it was very weird. I later realised that episode was Spock's Brain, regarded by pretty much everyone to be the worst episode of TOS ever, so not a very good introduction to the series!

Lol, sounds like the broadcaster didn't want to deal with the implications of Pon Farr and decided handwaving it away as a flu-induced nightmare was the better option!

Re: Oh, and AL?

[germankitty]

I've read "The Secret Garden", but most likely in my early 20s when I was on a mission to catch up on UK/US children's classics (combined with frequent trips to Foyle's to buy English-language books; back in the 70s, we usually went every one or two years, by train and ferry, and always with an empty bag to hold all the books, cosmetics and other stuff. :P) It certainly wasn't part of my childhood -- and neither was Beatrix Potter, btw! Re: Blyton, I liked Famous 5, felt kinda meh about St Clair's, but loved Malory Towers. "Naughtiest Girl" was fun as the school was co-ed for once, and I think I bought a few "Secret Seven" books for my son. And my inner history geek still drools over Rosemary Sutcliff!

Regarding ST, you're pretty muc the same as my son (born in '87) -- grew up with TNG, DS9 and Voyager, has little use for TOS. (And he frustrates me no end by shrugging off all the complaints about canon violations I have about the Reboot; don't get me wrong, on the whole I like the Abrams-Verse, but ... hmph!)

As for starting out with the worst episode of a series, my first exposure to "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" was the season 5 opener, "Buffy vs. Dracula". As I'd grown up with all the old Hammer slashers (Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee), it wasn't all that bad -- and thanks to daily reruns on SKY, I was soon caught up ... and a fan. :-)

And yeah, as ST was marketed mainly to teenagers, the handwaving was most likely meant to "keep it family-friendly". Or some such rot.

Re: Oh, and AL?

[crystalcazzie]

Ooh, yes, I liked the Naughtiest Girl series too. I don't think I read any Rosemary Sutcliff though. I also liked Jill Murphy's Worst Witch books, but they're not really classics, having been published a lot more recently.

Yeah, I love TNG and Voyager especially. I liked DS9 but it did get a bit dark with the war arc and while dark can be good (The rebooted Battlestar Galactica being a brilliant example!) it's not what I want from Star Trek.

I don't mind the canon violations in the Star Trek reboot cos I just accept that it's a different universe and some things will naturally change! I also don't really consider it proper Star Trek though. I like it, but it's so different in so many ways I just consider it a completely separate film series with characters who happen to share names and some personality traits with Star Trek characters!

That's an interesting way to get introduced to Buffy! I honestly can't remember what the first episode I watched was. I don't think I started at the beginning, but I do think it was fairly early.

[crystalcazzie]

So close to a full house this week! Woot! Now I just need to see if any TV execs are interested in a brilliant new show about cat roommates. It'll be a guaranteed hit!

[germankitty]

I'd watch that! :-)

[digitaldiscipline]

Did something terrible happen to last week's answers?