ACF Fall 2006
Tossups by Matt Weiner and Brown
1. His self portaits include one “between clock and bed” and another as “the wanderer.” A girl stands in front of a boat in his The Voice, and the title figure is naked and convulsing in his Madonna; those works join with his Ashes, Jealousy, and Melancholy in a large series consisting of most of his thematic works. He depicted the death of his sister from tuberculosis in The Sick Child, while the reactions of family members to a similar event are the subject of his Death in the Sick Room. He considered most of his paintings to be a part of his series The Frieze of Life, including a work inspired during a walk along the Ljabrochaussàen, which shows the influence of Krakatoa in the red sky above the bald and elongated central figure who is clasping his head in anguish. FTP, name this Norwegian painter of The Scream.
ANSWER: Edvard Munch
2. This man’s daughter released a novel in 2006 which tells of Eva’s encounters with the farmhand Ezekial, entitled Skinner’s Drift, while his wife is the author of Rite of Passage, Threshhold, and Castaways. This man himself wrote a play in which Marius Byleveld’s attempts to put Miss Helen in a nursing home are stopped by Elsa Barlow, and another in which Gladys, who has recently returned from the Fort England Clinic, repeatedly hides a diary before denying that Piet sold Steve out to the police. The major works by this author of A Lesson from Aloes and The Road to Mecca are known as the Port Elizabeth plays. Those include include the story of Sam training Willie for a dance contest at St. George’s Park Tea Room, as well as the plays Hello and Goodbye, Boesman and Lena, and The Blood Knot. FTP, name this author of such anti-apartheid plays as No-Good Friday and Master Harold and the Boys.
ANSWER: Athol Fugard
3. This man was the first person to sum a series with infinite number of terms when he calculated the area under a parabola, which may have been the first use of integral calculus. Although he didn't use the name pi, he proved that that number enters the formulas for the area and circumference of a circle, and gave a method of calculating the number to arbitrary accuracy. In physics he invented the field of statics, was the first to identify the center of gravity, and formulated the law of equilibrium of fluids and the law of the lever. FTP, identify this Greek mathematician and namesake of a spiral with equation r equals a theta, who was killed by a Roman soldier while presumably studying the squaring of the circle and is probably best known for his principle of buoyancy.
ANSWER: Archimedes
4. It is a leading exemplar of a mould theory, as opposed to a cloak theory. Its original formulation involved the direction that a canoe on a beach is pointing, which led to this idea being lambasted as derived from a “limited, badly analyzed sample” and the product of “long-time leanings toward mysticism” in a critique by Steven Pinker. Loglan was created as an attempt to avoid the consequences of this idea, which was originally conceived to demonstrate that the Hopi do not experience time in the same way as English speakers. FTP, identify this principle, named for the two linguists who developed it, which states in general form that one’s language determines one’s perception.
ANSWER: the Sapir-Whorf-Korzybski hypothesis [accept the Whorfian hypothesis; prompt on Sapir hypothesis; prompt on “principle of linguistic relativity” or equivalents]
5. Its 3 and 4 forms work in tandem with XRCC1 and XRCC4, respectively, and in some cases, its major function is assisted by the Ku protein. The activity of the most common form of this molecule can be inhibited by both sodium chloride and potassium chloride, and increased by the addition of polyethylene glycol. NAD is used as a cofactor for the one derived from E. coli, but the most commonly used one requires ATP as a cofactor and is derived from the T4 bacteriophage. It functions through the formation of phosphodiester bonds between the 5-prime phosphate and the 3-prime hydroxyl. FTP, identify this enzyme, responsible for joining Okazaki fragments into a single DNA strand.
ANSWER: DNA ligase
6. This author, who was contrasted with Samuel Beckett in Ihab Hassan’s The Literature of Silence, discussed his decision to drop out of college rather than read The Faerie Queene in his Stand Still Like the Hummingbird. In one of his novels, the narrator sees a universe in a cabbage leaf and works at the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company. He also wrote about a man who pockets Fillmore’s money and decides not to return to Mona in New York. That character is based on this author’s actual time sponging off Alfred Perlés and diarist Anaïs Nin in Paris. FTP, name this creator of the “Land of Fuck,” the author of Black Spring, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, the Rosy Crucifixion trilogy, and two books which ran afoul of U.S. obscenity laws, Tropic of Capricorn and Tropic of Cancer.
ANSWER: Henry Valentine Miller
7. Thomas Shepherd and Billy Kaplan were discovered, in 2005, to be the long-missing sons of this woman. She had previously enlisted the aid of Agatha Harkness to forget the existence of those children, who first appeared after her move to Leonia. Born at Wundagore under the supervision of a cow who was transformed into a nurse, she later teleported Century to Earth in her role as the founder of Force Works. More recently, she uttered the phrase “no more mutants,” ending the House of M saga and depowering many background Marvel characters. The world-altering abilities of this wife of the Vision come from her new “chaos magic” abilities, which enhance her former power to alter probabilities in her favor. FTP, name this former member of the Avengers who is the twin sister of Quicksilver and daughter of Magneto.
ANSWER: The Scarlet Witch [or Wanda Maximoff; prompt on Maximoff; prompt on Gypsy Witch; prompt on Wanda Frank; prompt on Wanda Magnus; prompt on Ana Maximoff]
8. In one part of this work, a low note played after an ascending scale represents several drunken partygoers’ unsuccessful attempts to stand up. Many modern performances play the melody louder than the plucked strings representing rain on a window, assuming that the composer’s instructions to make the rain sound louder are erroneous. In another part of this piece, several violins represents a brook, the lead violin plays a shepherd, and a viola plays the part of a sheepdog. The shepherd’s fear of Zephyr and Boreas are discussed in one of the poems which accompany this cycle, which is part of a larger work dedicated to Wenzel von Morzin entitled The Contest Between Harmony and Invention. FTP, name this concerto series depicting “La Primavera,” “L’estate,” “L’autunno” and “L’inverno,” which was composed by Antonio Vivaldi.
ANSWER: The Four Seasons [or Le Quattro Stagioni; accept The Contest Between Harmony and Invention or Il Cimento dell’Armonia e dell’inventionebefore “larger work” is read; accept “L’autunno” or Autumn before “louder than the plucked strings” is read; do not accept individual movement names after that point since information about multiple movements has been given]
9. The 1875 Andrassy Note demanded religious freedom and an end to absentee tax farming in what is now this country. A “crisis” named for this place was exacerbated by the Russian diplomat Izvolsky’s flip flopping and sparked by Count von Aehrenthal’s ultimately succesful attempt to annex this territory to Austria in the wake of the Young Turks accession in 1908. Later, its governor, Osakar Potiorek, instituted harsh rule in this province, which was followed by a disastrous visit from the heir apparent to the throne. FTP, name this country where Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Ferdinand in Sarejevo, and which became the site of anti-Muslim atrocities by Serbs in the 1990s.
ANSWER: Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina [or Bosna i Hercegovina]
10. In Herman Hesse’s Klingsor’s Last Summer, the title character addresses his cruel friend Louis as one of these, while in Garcia Marquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch, the title character’s mother spends her days adding color to them. Nikolai Diakonov is restored to the good graces of the Czar in a Rebecca West novel where these “fall down,” and Croft kills one that is rescued by Roft in Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. A seller of decrees, a man who wishes to kill his father, and the surveyor Meton all attempt to gain favors from them in a play where Pisthetaerus becomes their king. In that play, Epops and Trochilus establish Nephelococcygia and displace the worship of Zeus. FTP, name these title figures of an Aristophanes play, also found in Jerzy Kosinzki’s book about a “painted” one and in a “chronicle” by Haruki Murakami about the “wind-up” kind.
ANSWER: birds
11. Menstrauting women are exempt from this in the period that Ba’hai dedicates to it in March. George Whitfield’s sermon, “The Almost Christian,” argues that this practice, along with mortification, is essential to Christianity. The Eastern Orthodox Church dedicates four “seasons” to it, and Tertullian was the first Christian to advocate it as part of regular worship. The assassination of Gedalia is one day on which it is practiced in Judaism, while in Islam, it is interrupted by an itfar. Esther did it for several days prior to visiting Ahashverash, and a noted example of it ends with the Eid al-Fitr. FTP, name this religious practice observed during Yom Kippur and the daylight hours of Ramadan.
ANSWER: fasting [accept obvious equivalents]
12. Scallenberger Ridge is found within the state park by this name, which sits to the north of ColdstreamCanyon. The park abuts the lake of the same name, which is fed by Gregory and Summit Creeks and is the source of a namesake creek which flows into the TruckeeRiver about ten miles north of Lake Tahoe. Sitting a hundred miles east of Sacramento, the mountain pass by this name sits upon the major travel route between San Francisco and Reno through the Sierra Nevada. All those features are named for a group which decided to take Hastings Cutoff and became delayed in the WasatchMountains in an attempt to reach Sutter’s Fort. FTP, give this common name, derived from the brothers Jacob and George who led that ill-fated expedition which became notorious as a “party” of cannibals.
ANSWER: Donner
13. The Hay test for jaundice makes use of this property because bile can alter its value for urine. Thermodynamically, it is defined as the partial derivative of Gibbs free energy with respect to area at constant pressure and temperature, and it is related to temperature via the Eotvos equation. LaPlace's law relates the collapsing pressure of a spherical bubble to twice the value of this property, which is also the driving force of capillary action. Measured in dynes per centimeter and explained by the cohesive forces between molecules with nothing above them, FTP name this quantity that can be lowered by surfactants and allows certain bugs to walk on water.
ANSWER: surface tension
14. Weapons for this event were supposed to be supplied by the German ship Libau, disguised as the Norwegian trawler Aud. Upon learning that the Libau had been scuttled, Chief-of-Staff MacNeill sent orders to cancel the event, which delayed it by a day. The rebels eventually took up positions including Boland’s Bakery and St. Stephen’s Green, though the largest garrison occupied the General Post Office, along with commanders of the event such as Connolly and Pearse. FTP, name this Irish rebellion which took place in 1916.
ANSWER: Easter Rising/Rebellion
15. An attempt at seduction in this story goes awry when a girl protests that she is wearing the clothes of mourning, and her suitor suggests that she simply remove her dress. Following an argument over whether the only available sofa is yellow or green, one character leaves his room to avoid talking to his mother and attempts to claim that he took a walk in the garden afterwards. The trouble began when a man fixed up his unhappy wife and his former secretary, and then attempted to find a lover for himself at a brothel run under cover of a dress shop by Madame Pace. All ends with the girl drowning in a fountain, and the boy being killed by a mysterious gunshot, resulting in an argument over whether he is dead or merely pretending, and the director complaining “I’ve lost a whole day over these people.” An unnamed father, stepdaughter, mother, adult son, teenage boy, and young girl are the title figures in, FTP, what play by Luigi Pirandello?
ANSWER: Six Characters in Search of an Author [or Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore: Commedia da fare]
16. His daughter is often called the namesake of Beirut, and his story inspired the Apostrophia aspect of a certain deity which was displayed in Athens. He was conceived because his grandmother Cenchreis or Orithyia was away at the festival of Demeter, which allowed his mother Smyrna to conspire with a nurse and deceive his father, also Smyrna’s father and known as Cinyras or Thais, into an incestuous encounter. That mother later prayed to neither live nor die and was turned into a myrrh tree, from which he was born. After he died, that goddess sprinkled his blood with nectar, causing the anemone to be formed. One legend says that Calliope’s ajudication of an ownership dispute over a chest containing this man led a vengeful claimant to cause the death of Orpheus. FTP, name this person killed by a wild boar, a very attractive youth and lover of Aphrodite.
ANSWER: Adonis
17. Important quantities in it include the Nambu-Goto action and the Polyakov action, while one of its most important results is the AdS/CFT [read as initials] correspondence. That correspondence was shown in part due to the work of Juan Maldacena, and one problem in it is the discovery of its namesake landscape, which consists of something like 10 to the 500th power metastable vacua. Another of its important results is that the 5 consistent theories of this type could all be viewed as a limit of a single M-theory, due to Edward Witten. FTP, name this theory of physics, which predicts that we live in 26 space-time dimensions in the bosonic version, or 10 dimensions in its 'super' version, and which gets its name from the fact that its elementary building block is no longer an elementary point like particle, but rather a 1 dimensional object.
ANSWER: superstringtheory
18. One opera which this man composed and wrote the libretto for now exists only in rival orchestrations by Gunther Schuller , T. J. Anderson, and William Bolcom. That opera by this composer concludes with the dance “A Real Slow Drag,” after Remus rescues the title character from the “conjur men.” That character is the adopted daughter of Ned who is named for the place where she was found near a plantation in Arkansas. He also composed an opera about a 1902 dinner at the White House, A Guest of Honor, which, like his final dramatic work, If, is now lost. His first credited compositions were “Please Say You Will” and “A Picture of Her Face,” which he followed with the “The Strenuous Life,” “The Easy Winners,” “The Chrysanthemum, and the previously described opera Treemonisha. FTP, name this composer of “The Cascades,” “The Entertainer,” and “Maple Leaf Rag,” who was the pre-eminent ragtime piano writer.
ANSWER: Scott Joplin
19. In 2001, G.A. Cohen published a book-length defense of one of this man’s interpretive theories, which was previously denounced as a “farrago” in The Illusion of the Epoch by H.B. Acton and attacked as immoral in Karl Popper’s The Poverty of Historicism. That theory is found in his preface to A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy. An analysis of contemporary politics is found in his The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, while his predictions for the future are found in the Critique of the Gotha Programme. He responded to Bruno Baeur’s case for atheism by making a vague distinction between “political” freedom and “human” freedom in On The Jewish Question. He says that the need for “communal essence” pairs with alienation to create religion in Contribution to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, which also comments that “religion is the opiate of the people.” FTP, name this guy who had a theory of historical materialism and collaborated with Friedrich Engels on Capital.
ANSWER: Karl Marx
20. Montreal and Chevaliers castles were built to defend these, and several of them signed a commercial agreement with the Aydin dynasty. Balian of Ibelin’s surrender ended the existence of one, whose throne was earlier disputed by Hugh of Cyprus and Charles of Anjou. Those which spoke Latin were grouped together as the Outremer; that group included one which ruled by Queen Sibyl and King Baldwin, and another which was eventually reduced to a rump consisting of Belvoir and Tyre. FTP, name this group of principalities including Edessa, Tripoli, Antioch, and the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, established at the turn of the twelfth century by Christian knights warring in the Holy Land.