2011 Moon Pie Classic Round 1
Packet by Carol Guthrie, Bronson Messer, Chuck Pearson, Mike Bentley, and editors
TOSSUPS
1. Among this author’s opinions include one stating that “capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal’s deed, however calculated, can be compared”, expressed in his essay “Reflections on the Guillotine”. Such an opinion seemed to influence his portrayal of the ultimate end of a real-life murderer of Grand Duke Sergei Romaniv in one of this works. However, on the topic self-destruction, this man wrote “even if one does not believe in God, suicide is not legitimate” in the preface to the 1955 American printing of a work that suggests that living a an absurd life is better, a work dealing with the futility of the everyday much as the mythological figure of the title deals with his own burdens. Perhaps his most famous character faces the dilemma of execution or suicide for killing an Arab in what may be this man's best known work. For 10 points name this author of The Just Assassins, “The Myth of Sisyphus”, and The Stranger.
Answer: Albert Camus
2. While French ambassador to England in the 1830’s this man proposed a partition plan for the newly independent Belgium. For a time, he was a house guest of Aaron Burr while exiled in America between 1794 and 1796. As Bishop of Autun, he represented the First Estate at the 1789 meeting of the Estates General, making somewhat ironic his later proposal of a Civil Constitution of the Clergy which nationalized the Church. Although named Grand Chamberlain of the Empire after the Revolution, he later turned coat and provided guidance to Tsar Alexander I on how to defeat Napoleon. For 10 points name this French statesman who engineered the restoration of the Bourbons and represented France at the Congress of Vienna.
Answer: Charles Maurice de Talleyrand Périgord, 1st Prince de Bénévente
3. In 1867, astronomers using the 40 cm Foucault telescope at the Paris Observatory discovered three stars in the constellation Cygnus that displayed broad emission bands on an otherwise continuous spectrum. By 1929, the width of the emission bands was being attributed to the Doppler effect, and hence it was obvious the gas surrounding these stars must be moving with velocities of 300–2400 km/s along the line of sight, and thus were examples of these. For 10 points name this class of massive stars, named for their discoverers, that lose up to 10 to the negative five solar masses a year in high-velocity stellar winds.
Answer: Wolf-Rayet stars
4. Through his mother Archippe or Nicippe this man descended from Pelops, would employ as his herald Copreus, a son of Pelops whom he had purified for murder, and later called in Atreus descendant of Pelops to rule his kingdom as regent when he went off on his final campaign. Father of the daughter Admete, his sons Perimedes, Eurybius, and Eurypilus were killed when he tauntingly gave a demigod the portion of a slave during a sacrifice, though he was piously devoted to Hera, to whom he dedicated several of the trophies won by his enemy and erstwhile servant and returned some of the things he had directed that servant to steal for him. A coward who spent a great deal of time hiding in a bronze jar after every return of that divine servant, whose birthright this figure and his father Sthenelus had usurped with divine aid, for 10 points name this man finally killed by Hyllus before having his head presented to Alcmene, who gouged out his eyes for having tormented Heracles through the labors this man directed.
Answer: Eurystheus
5. One later critic described a work by this man as one which “went into the defects and dangers of democracy with acrid realism”; this was a commentary on his The American Democrat. More hostile to the writing of this man were those he later sued for libel for their attacks on his History of the Navy. A more savage critic charged that this author “hadn’t any more invention than a horse; and I don't mean a high-class horse, either; I mean a clothes-horse”, later observing “It is a restful chapter in any book of his when somebody doesn't step on a dry twig and alarm all the reds and whites for two hundred yards around”. This criticism was aimed at his most famous set of works, of which one is described as a “tale [which] accomplishes nothing and arrives in the air”, among the eighteen rules of literary art this man was accused of violating, presumably beginning with Precaution. The Deerslayer is singled out by Mark Twain as being rife with the literary offenses of, for 10 points, what author of the Leatherstocking Tales?
Answer: James Fenimore Cooper
6. While a law student in London, he assisted with the 1892 campaign of Dadabhai Naoroji, the first Indian born member of Parliament. He proposed his own “14 points” at the Round Table Conference held in London from 1930-32, but when his proposals were ignored, he stayed on in London until 1935 practicing law before the Privy Council. When the 1937 elections in India resulted in an absolute Hindu majority in six provinces, he revitalized the Muslim movement and in 1940 oversaw the adoption of a resolution to form an independent Muslim state. For 10 points, name this leader of the Muslim League, the “father” of modern Pakistan.
Answer: Muhammad Ali Jinnah
7. This element is found at relatively low velocities in Type Ia supernovae and is believed to be the end product of the supersonic detonation of the progenitor white dwarf material. It also forms roughly the innermost 1.5 solar masses of massive stars near the end of their lives. Both of these occurrences stem from the fact that this element has the highest binding energy per nucleon. The sixth most abundant element in the universe, for 10 points name this metal used by humans for tools since the time of the Hittites, atominc number 26.
Answer: iron
8. Its French name, from the same Latin root as the genus of deer that includes elk, is Cervin. The usual climbing route up it is via the Hörnli ridge on the northeast, which is the central ridge seen from Zermatt. In 1931, Franz and Toni Schmid were the first to climb up its dreaded North Face, and the first group to ascend it was led by Edward Whymper in 1865. Its more familiar name derives from combining the German words for “meadow” and “peak”. For 10 points name this 14,692 feet mountain located between Switzerland and Italy.
Answer: The Matterhorn
9. Upon leaving this project its initial artist destroyed his models for which he faced prosecution in spite of the fact that he insisted that the models were flawed, and that executing the sixty-five separate sculptures he originally planned would destroy the work. That first artist had developed a new type of magic lantern to help with the sculptures for this project, which was scaled back considerably when Augustus Lukeman took over; he planned far fewer figures, but envisioned a sort of temple and reflecting pool to accompany this work. Lukeman ultimately provided the inspiration for the finished project which was executed with the aid of thermojet torches by a crew under Walker Hancock, but when completed in 1970 the temple and reflecting pool were scrapped in favor of just three gigantic equestrian scultptures. For 10 points name this monument just outside of Atlanta begun by Gutzon Borglum, featuring the likenesses of Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, and Jefferson Davis.
Answer: Stone Mountain
10. An article on Cracked.com entitled “The Five Most Famous Musicians Who Are Thieving Bastards” notes the distinct similarity between the opening of the Gil Evans/Astrud Gilberto collaboration “Maria Moite” and the central riff of this song, which is built on power chords of G-A sharp-C-G-A sharp-C sharp-C. The fact that one of the songwriters of this piece was a one-time jazz pianist makes it more likely that the music, at least, was a direct rip-off. Released on the same album as the much-superior song “Black Night”, its lyrics at least are original and describe an event from a 1971 concert in a casino in Switzerland, which went up in flames when an idiot with a flare gun launched one during a performance of Frank Zappa and the Mothers. Arguably the best known song of its band, for 10 points name this song from Machine Head ostensibly written by Deep Purple.
Answer: “Smoke on the Water”
11. In her food memoir Eating With Friends, she fondly recalls the gumbos, etoufees and po’ boys she enjoyed during her New Orleans girlhood, and venomously espouses her negative opinions of both the actress Alexis Smith and undercooked baked potatoes. Though Eating With Friends is her only foray into food writing, it was far from her first time writing memoirs; another relates her beloved fig tree from which she threw herself when she found out about her father’s marital infidelity, and another in which a chapter named “Willy” describes a great-uncle for whom she experienced early sexual yearnings. She is perhaps better known for her plays involving the accusation of sexual immorality at a boarding school, and two involving the scheming siblings of the Hubbard family. For 10 points name this author of An Unfinished Woman, Pentimento, The Children’s Hour, Another Part of the Forest, and The Little Foxes.
Answer: Lillian Hellman
12. During one siege in the conflict for which this man is best known he captured the wives of his opponent’s supporters and placed them upon the ramparts of his fortifications while he dug his position. Although he began hostilities when the Long Assembly cut off a lucrative source of income for him by imposing restrictions on trading with a nearby people, he attracted broad support from dispossessed persons, and Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States makes much of the fact that his most loyal followers included slaves. Before those hostilities he was elected to his territory’s legislative body due to his opposition to that body’s directive not to expand further into the continent, and was moved to action when the government suspended sessions twice to keep him out, leading his men to seize control of the capital. For 10 points name this colonial leader whose seizure of Jamestown and subsequent uprising petered out after his death on October 26, 1676.
Answer: Nathaniel Bacon
13. The solution to this paradox which presaged the modern idea of information as physical reality by several decades occurred in 1929, when it was posited that the increase in information collected every time the one-way gate essential for this gedanken experiment opened and closed exactly balanced the decrease in gas entropy. In this way, a major physical law was “rescued” from an “intelligent being with deft hands” first described fifty-eight years earlier. Capable of being created for real using cryogenic techniques, for 10 points name this creature dispelled by Leo Szilard, one invented by a namesake Scottish physicist in 1871.
Answer: Maxwell’s Demon_
14. At one time Delphi belonged to Gaea as well as to this god, but Apollo gave him Calauria as a compensation for it. He gratified the lust of Iphimedeia daughter of Triops and rewarded her erotically charged ablutions with two gigantic children, though he tricked Tyro into believing he was the river god Enipeus to father two others. In addition to such sons as Pelias, Neleus, Otus and Ephialtes and daughters like Benthesicyme, he brought a charge against Ares for having killed another son, Halirrhothius, trying him on a rocky hill in a city he attempted to win by giving it a salt spring and the first horse. According to some legends the father of Bellerophon, he would later make life very uncomfortable for Odysseus after the latter blinded his son Polyphemus. For 10 points name this Greek god, wielder of the trident and lord of the seas.
Answer: Poseidon
15. She is called Betty as a young woman and she twice marries men who die five years later. At least one of those marriages begins while she is married to another man, a match which started out as an attempt to marry above herself through passing herself off as a woman of means, but it turns out the husband is as penniless as she. She would end up with this man, a rogue named Jemmy, who was the third and fifth of her marriages, having first married the younger brother of her first sexual experience named Robin, and next her own half-brother, and after a stint in Newgate for her “twelve years a thief” she winds up in Maryland wealthy and happy. Such is the “Life of Continued Variety, for Threescore Years, Besides Her Childhood” of what character, the title heroine of a work by Daniel Defoe?
Answer: Moll Flanders
16. During the Civil War of 49 BCE this man sailed across the Adriatic and captured a number of enemy ships at Lissus, a naval victory of a kind he was seldom to repeat. The Berne Scholiast of Lucan reports that this man’s grandfather, a consul and prominent orator, was killed in 87 BCE by Caius Marius, who stuck a pin through his tongue and put his head and hands on the rostra, a surprising bit of foreshadowing to something this man would later do to an enemy of his own. That enemy earned this man’s hatred for putting to death Cornelius Lentulus, a Catilinarian conspirator and this man’s stepfather, as well as for stirring up Hirtius and Pansa to fight and defeat him at Mutina, as well as for a series of Demosthenes-inspired invectives leveled at him. Notable for a disastrous expedition against the Parthians, for murdering Cicero as repayment for the Phillipics, and his loss at Actium, for 10 points name this member of the Second Triumvirate also known for his love affair with Cleopatra.
Answer: Marcus Antonius (Marc Antony)
17. Many chemical pigments have this phenomenon as their origin. For example, in hydrocarbons, isolated double bonds cannot contribute color to the material. However, when single and double bonds alternate in these molecules, intense coloration can occur, as electrons can be excited to relatively-low energy molecular states and subsequently relax, emitting visible photons. For 10 points name this overlapping of one p- or d-orbital with another across an intervening sigma bond, leading to a delocalization of pi electrons.