Bulldogs Over Broadway 2007
Packet by Rutgers University (Jason Keller, Jeremy Hixson, John Massari, and Chris Horng)
Edited by Aaron Sin
Tossups:
1. Early in this work, one character remarks on his response to Kant when the latter made his proposed proof of God’s existence. That story is told to two men, one of whom, Berlioz, as per an earlier prediction, is decapitated by a streetcar. The other begins pursuit of a cast of odd characters, which includes a man dressed in oddly checkered clothing named Bassoon, Behemoth, a talking cat who tries to ride a trolley, and their leader, Woland. Eventually, Ivan Bezdomny, “the Homeless”, is placed in an asylum, where he meets an author driven mad by rejection of his work, an excerpt of which is told by Woland in the second chapter of the novel and relates the first meeting of Pontius Pilate and Jesus. FTP, name this work which features the devil, Jesus, and the titular writer and his lover, the best known work of Mikhail Bulgakov.
ANSWER: The Master and Margarita [or Master y Margarita]
2. Ducks have this protein with two amino acid residues different from humans whereas chickens have only the penultimate serine that differs in structure. At the level of the enzyme carnitine fatty acid transferase, it allows free fatty acids to translocate into the mitochondria and make ATP by using up the resulting ketone bodies. Murlin and Kimball discovered this hormone, which activates the gene transcription of PEPCK and thus regulates gluconeogenesis in hepatocytes. FTP, name this hormone produced by the liver’s alpha cells that acts to increase the amount of blood glucose, thus opposing the effects of insulin.
ANSWER: glucagon
3. The first ruler of this line retired to a monastery due to illness, passing the throne that he had taken from Michael VI to a friend and fellow general, Constantine X. Its last ruler was tortured by a mob for over a day, losing an eye and all of his teeth, before his execution. That ruler, Andronikos I, had murdered his cousin, the young son of Manuel I, while another member ascended the throne over Nikophoros by taking the signet ring from his father’s dying hand, John II. It is connected to the Doukas and Angelos dynasties, which preceded and succeeded it, while its “Great” line ruled Trebizond after the 4th Crusade. FTP, name this Byzantine dynasty, which is best remembered for its longest-ruling member, Alexios I, who called for aid from the West, which became the 1st Crusade.
ANSWER: Komnenos Dynasty [or Komnenoi or Komnenids]
4. One figure by this name committed suicide with her sister Protogeneia when another sister Chthonia was sacrificed, but in another story, she and Protogeneia were themselves sacrificed to Poseidon by their father Erechtheus to win a war against the Boeotians. Another figure by this name was the daughter of Deukalion and Pyrrha, the survivors of Zeus’s deluge, and was named for Pyrrha’s mother. That namesake grandmother was bedecked by Peitho, the Horae, and the Kharites after she learned the deceitfulness of Hermes and the skills of Athena. Her husband was warned not to accept her by Prometheus, his brother, but he did not heed and married, FTP, which woman who, according to Hesiod, unleashed all evils on the world from her jar?
ANSWER: Pandora
5. The chauvinism of this work’s title character is apparent when he tells his wife that “[i]t becomes [her] to submit” and earlier, when Tecmessa is told “Woman, a woman’s decency is silence”. This play’s chorus of Salaminian sailors is admitted by the title character as his only friends after he commits the deed which will later earn him derision and condemnation: the murder of the flocks. Like another play by its author, this work features a contest to determine the rightness of burying the dead, as first Menelaus and then Agamemnon challenge the right of Teucer to see to the burial of the title character, his half-brother. FTP, name this play, which describes the aftermath of the title character’s contest with Odysseus for the armor of Achilles and which was written by Sophocles.
ANSWER: Ajax
6. One version of it, now part of a collection in Princeton, New Jersey, is thought to be the work of Bartolomeo Cavarozzi. The version currently found in the Uffizi features a landscape in the background on the right that may be Rome’s Alban hills, while the central figure, who resembles the title figure in the artist’s The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew, wears a red robe and wields a knife while holding the head of the alarmed title character down, but an angel seems to stop the central figure, pointing out the ram whose head appears on the right. FTP, name this depiction of a scene from Genesis in which Abraham is asked by God to perform the title action, a work by Caravaggio.
ANSWER: The Sacrifice of Isaac
7. It finished second as the host of the Food Network’s 2005 George Foreman College Grill-Off. Notable graduates of this school include actresses Tia and Tamera Mowry as well as the Denver Nuggets’ Yakhouba Diawara and tennis coach Brad Gilbert. On an episode of Joey, one character is ridiculed for attending its law school, even though it has given JDs to former L.A. mayor James Hahn and Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, and also boasts Kenneth Starr as its current dean. FTP, name this school whose sports teams are nicknamed the Waves, located in Malibu, California.
ANSWER: Pepperdine University
8. In this work, the main character loses interest in his work and is unsure if he sees himself or the subject of his research in the mirror. A stone, a glass of beer, and a wet piece of paper in the street also cause him problems. Prominent characters in the work include the main character’s on and off lover, the barkeeper Françoise, and a woman who longs for the man the main character used to be, his former lover, Anny. The main character and narrator is in Bouville researching a French aristocrat, the Marquis de Rollebon, and this man, Antoine Roquentin, writes down his strange feelings in diary format. FTP, name this work whose title suggests the sickness Roquentin feels from his own existence, written by Jean-Paul Sartre.
ANSWER: Nausea or La Nausée
9. On an episode of Family Matters, Rachel rents Harriet a Halloween costume based on this work’s title character. It is the basis of a Richard Cocciante musical with lyrics by Luc Plamondon, as names a 1997 concept album for a musical by Styx’s Dennis DeYoung, which is scheduled to be staged in 2008. Jean Dellanoy directed a 1956 version starring Gina Lollobrigida and Anthony Quinn, while the 1996 animated Disney featured the song “God Help the Outcasts” and a voice credit for Tom Hulse, who plays a deformed bell-ringer. FTP, name this Victor Hugo novel that features Quasimodo as the title character.
ANSWER: The Hunchback of Notre Dame
10. It absorbed the New Republic, which was created in the aftermath of the civil war which saw Diniszulu’s rise, and for the first part of its history was governed under the framework of the Rustenburg Grondwet. The Sand River Convention had secured its independence, but negotiations in its city of Vereeniging, saw that independence lost. Following the commencement of gold mining in the Witwatersrand, a famed invasion, organized by Cecil Rhodes to spur uprisings among British citizens here, took place under Leander Starr Jameson. Prior to conquest by the British after the Second Boer War, it took its name from the river forming its southern boundary. FTP, name this Boerstadt found north of the Orange Free State, with capital at Pretoria.
ANSWER: Transvaal Republic [or South African Republic or ZAR or Zuid-Afrikaanse Republiek; prompt on South Africa]
11. In meteorology, the adaptive iris hypothesis, which states that an increase in sea temperatures in the tropics would create global cooling, is derived in part from a solution to this equation, though a necessary saturation vapor pressure is never reached. The Antoine equation may be used in its place, as it gives a more accurate result, but in situations far from the critical point, the assumptions of an ideal gas, no change in Gibbs free energy, and no change in volume produce reasonable estimates. FTP, name this equation which gives the slope of the coexistence curve that characterizes a phase transition, named for two physicists.
ANSWER: Clausius-Clapeyron equation
12. In 1925, he resigned from his seat in Parliament, claiming widespread electoral fraud by the opposition, and though he then retired from politics, he ran and lost in the 1948 presidential election to Luigi Einaudi. Rallying his nation behind the Allies, due in part to the promise of gaining territory in Dalmatia via the Treaty of London, he was also credited for achieving victory at Vittorio Veneto. Nicknamed “the Weeper” by Georges Clemenceau, he butted heads with Woodrow Wilson over the fate of Fiume. FTP, name this man who held little sway though he was part of the Big Four, the Prime Minister of Italy at the end of World War I.
ANSWER: Vittorio Orlando
13. The collusion of various governmental agencies in control of the world forms the basis of this poet’s “Hadda Be Playin’ on a Jukebox”. In describing happiness with a new lover, this poet discovered the “imagination of a new eternal boy” in Malest Cornifici Tuo Catullo, and declares that “Poet is Priest” in Death to Van Gogh’s Ear. The poet describes a sexual encounter with a married couple which causes him to “rise up replenished with last intimate gestures” in Love Poem on a Theme of Whitman. “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical naked,” opens the best known work of, FTP, which Beat poet, the author of A Supermarket in California and Howl?
ANSWER: Allen Ginsburg
14. His negative views on prominent members of his profession are espoused in the works Kindergarten Chats and Autobiography of an Idea, and the ironwork of George G. Elmslie figures prominently in one of his constructions. Notable setbacks occurred when a famous architect left his firm after building the Harlan House and when his design for the Columbian Exposition of 1893, the Transportation Building, was rejected for those designed in a more neoclassical style. FTP, name this man known for the dictum “form ever follows function”, a collaborator of Dankmar Adler, and the architect behind the Wainwright Building in St. Louis and the Carson Pirie Scott & Company department store in Chicago.
ANSWER: Louis Sullivan
15. Morskoy Island lies in its northern section, while the largest island in it is the gas-rich Bulla Island. One project caused a “salt bowl” when its waters were separated from the Gulf of Kara-Bogaz-Gol, though its salinity still remains around 1/3 that of seawater. Ports on its shores include Oil Rocks and Aqtab, and it is abutted by the Elburz Mountains in the south. The Kuma-Manych Canal links it to the Sea of Azov, and the larger cities of Turkmenbashi, Astrakhan, and Baku are located on, FTP, what body of water that receives the Kura, Ural, and Volga rivers, the world’s largest inland body of water.
ANSWER: Caspian Sea
16. In one of its early sections, the author of this work discusses what it means for a man to chase a squirrel around a tree. He also classifies philosophers as either “tender-minded” or “tough-minded.” In the last chapter, in which the title concept is paired with religion, the author echoes his sentiments in The Varieties of Religious Experience, claiming that religion does not give a verifiable account of God, while its second chapter describes the meaning of the title concept and notes that it was an idea of C.S. Peirce. Subtitled “A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking,” FTP, name this series of lectures, collected in 1907 work that outlines William James’s views on truth, philosophy, and religion.
ANSWER: Pragmatism
17. In polymers, interactions between atoms of this type may be considered in the creation of low-packing-density crystal structures. In machinery, centric overload clutches limit the transmission of this quantity. The application of an external one in opposition to a body’s motion, causes shear stress and may result in twisting, while precession may be classified as being induced by or free of this quantity. The derivative of angular momentum with respect to time, FTP, give this quantity also given by the cross product of force and the length of a lever arm, the tendency of a force to rotate a body.
ANSWER: torque
18. One of its sections, the Bahman, describes first four, then seven, ages of the world, with the last marked by the rule of “the demons with disheveled hair”. It was codified under the Vologases I and supplemented with texts in Pahlavi. One section of this work records information about the usigs, karapans, and kawis, priests connected with worship of the Daewas. That section, the Gathas, consists of 17 chapters and is the oldest, while other sections include one recited at certain religious rites, the Yasna and the hymns to specific deities, the Yashts. Also included with this work are a series of carefully proscribed commentaries, known as the Zand. Claiming the supremacy of Ahura Mazda, this is, FTP, what work, the primary sacred text of Zoroastrianism?
ANSWER: Zend Avesta
19. In 2005, the Hubble Space Telescope spotted a debris disk around one of these objects, AU Microscopii, the first to be sighted, while more recently, material from another of these objects, Mira A, is thought to have the potential to form planets. Normally the secondary star in cataclysmic variables, recent debate has arisen regarding the habitability of their revolving extrasolar planets. Though it has been suggested that such planets would be subject to tidal lock and would not receive enough light for plants to perform photosynthesis, a habitable dwarf planet was recently found orbiting Gliese 581. FTP, name this type of small star larger than brown dwarfs of spectral class M or K, an example of which is Proxima Centauri.