The Thursday Quiz Ninth Season Wrap-Up!

But first! I was highly negligent after TQLXXXIX not to introduce two new Quiz Legends! That was the Opera Plots Quiz, in which fingerstothebone took the Blue and Elaine took a Green. In both cases, they assembled a complete set of TQ Stars, thus becoming the 16th and 17th contestants to reach that pinacle of achievement. There accomplishment is forever inscribed in HTML upon the Quiz Leaderboard.

Ninth Season Champions!

Taking her second consecutive season title, it's Mrs.5000. With a Gold, two Silvers, a Blue, and a Green, she put in one of two Legendary performances in this season alone.

Also with five Stars spread across the entire spectrum -- she had a pair of Greens -- la gringissima put in a powerful performance for the season's second spot.

In third place, with three Blues and a Green, its the irrepressible Eversaved!

Honorable mention to Elaine and d, with three Stars apiece, and also to Cartophiliac and Rex Parker, both of whom only collected two Stars this penultimate season -- but made sure they were both Gold ones.

Field Report: The Denver Art Museum

So Mrs.5000 and I found ourselves with a few spare hours in downtown Denver and drifted towards the art museum. It has recently had a major new addition designed in the highly tasteful "Materials Science Allows Us to Cobble Together Any Damn Thing We Want to Now" Style, yielding a building that is kind of Imperial Star Destroyer on the outside....


...and features a vast, asymetrical, pointless atrium within. The galleries and public areas are fine, though, except for the cramped, underlit, and glacier-slow ticket area. Seriously, you might want to bring something to read while you wait in line for your ticket. In a big friendly Colorado-style "Welcome to Denver," non-residents pay extra.

The Denver Art Museum permanent collection has two main foci. One is regional art of the American West, which makes excellent sense. Denver is the biggest cow town in the world, and it makes sense for its art museum to house the premium collection of cowboy art. I can dig it. But, you know, Zzzzzz.* It also has an apparently important of Native American art. Again, admirable and appropriate, but not exactly my cup of Night Train.**

Instead, I headed up into the upper reaches of the star destroyer to find out what the Centennial State has to offer in the way of mainstream art history. And although it's not exactly the Rijksmuseum, it's got some reeeeal purty paintings in the collection. It was awesome, for instance, to see one of the Arcimboldo Summers.

Surprised? I was. But apparently Arcimboldo made a BUNCH of versions, so it's not like this is the only Summer around.

In the early American department, here's Benjamin West's Mrs. Benjamin West and Son Raphael from about ten years before the Revolution.



I think you can see here that it is a lovely painting; in person there is a gentleness and a softness to it that is really quite captivating. If you'll forgive me talking like this.

I don't think I had ever seen a Mondrian original before. It was cool:

...and some of you may be able to guess what will happen now that I have seen it.***

The more contemporary "Modern" collection was firmly focused on pieces from, and issues of, the 1980s, which are at the period of the aging process where they look more "dated" than "vintage." Of the newer contemporary stuff, my runaway favorite was "Fatherhood" by somebody named Wes Hempel. Couldn't find a great image of it, unfortunately:

Finally, in the category of I Don't Usually Go For This Kind of Thing, But Here's an Exception, it's William-Adolphe Bouguereau's 1900 Childhood Idyll. It's sentimental and verging on the frou-frou, but the personalities of the two girls are captured so vividly, and the color balance and composition work so well, that it totally busted out of the limitations of its genre.

So! Denver Art Museum! Denver, Colorado! Not bad!

----

* Unless you are sister jen, in which case please pretend you didn't see this sentence.

** There was also a special exhibit**** on Psychodelia in the 1960s, which we skipped but apparently nichim checked out. Maybe she'll give us a quick review if we all look encouraging and make no sudden movements.

*** Here's a hint.

**** Also, there was a pretty cool exhibit of vintage quilts, which totally WAS my cup of Night Train, but I don't want this post to go on forever.

The Great Movies: "Pinocchio"

Pinocchio
Walt Disney (Producer), 1940

In his review of Pinocchio, Roger Ebert praises the famous children's cartoon both for its groundbreaking animation and for its enchanting storyline. I'm willing to stipulate the former, although as someone born after mid-century the "classic" Disney animation is to me merely the baseline, the ordinary animation that anything else must exceed in order to be any good. That is arguably a pretty strong tribute to its achievement, though.

As far as the storyline, it is just fairytale pablum with no distinction or edge. Ebert praises it for employing archetypes, but how hard is it to employ archetypes? They're archetypes! They're what will pop into our head naturally when we can't be bothered to come up with an original story! And the storytelling here is very slapdash, with the random behavior of the good fairy, the strange role of the narrator cricket, and the plot-generating "father-son" relationship based on an acquaintance of a couple of hours. Pinocchio's real claim to the Lazy Plotting Hall of Fame, though, is in the sequence when the boy-puppet returns to his "father's" home to find it abandoned. At this point, a bird flies by and drops a scroll informing our hero that the old woodworker has been swallowed by a notorious whale. What the hell?

Also, let the record show that the title character is vapid and annoying. As is the very idea of a Hollywood film for children that piously warns against the corrupt lifestyle of show-biz types.

Now no doubt you are thinking that little kids just don't care about this kind of thing, and that Pinocchio and the other similarly lousy Disney animated features have enchanted whole generations of children, and obviously you would be right on both counts. However, it is important to remember that children are not famous for their powers of discrimination. They'll be enchanted by any bright moving object you park them in front of. Starting them off with the classic Disney product isn't likely to do them any harm, but it's setting the bar pretty low.

On an unrelated but noteworthy topic: the Disney studio appears to have had an almost obsessive fascination with the buttocks. There are literally dozens of ass-related gags in Pinocchio -- they come at a rate of almost one per minute in the early scenes -- and it seems like every second shot features one or another character's rear end in an abnormally high, prominent, thrusting position. Once you notice it, it's kind of creepy.

Plot: Italian woodworker, unsatisfied with his prosperous lifestyle, fulfilling work, and hyperintelligent animal companions, whinges about his childlessness until a fairy appears to transform one of his handcrafted puppets into a "real boy." After the blank slate of a child has accumulated two or three hours of world experience, the woodworker sends him out into the world on his own, and the predictable dire consequences ensue. These problems are resolved through supernatural intervention, but then somehow (?) the woodworker gets swallowed by a whale. Whatever.

Visuals: A somewhat more complex version of Saturday cartoon animation, with the exception of the good fairy, who seems to drift in from a different cartoon altogether. A poorly-drawn one.

Dialog: Many gags, little wit, bad music.

Prognosis: My particular DVD copy happened to end with the video for a dance-pop version of "When You Wish Upon a Star" featuring some teenybopper chanteuse and that electronic pitch correction that will soon mark so much current pop music as being contemptibly late aughts. This had the effect of suddenly making the film itself seem like an intellectual masterpiece. But it isn't, really. It's just a kiddie cartoon, and it's not even in the same league with the many far superior kiddie cartoons that have made in the last few decades. Be my guest and let it rest.

The Monday Quiz: Eighth Season Wrap-Up

But first: in all the excitement of the Quiz's trip to the Netherlands last Monday, I never even said who got MQLXXX Exclamation Points! The list includes Mrs.5000 and la gringissima in a fierce battle for the top of the leaderboard, with Cartophiliac not far back in fourth place. Other winners were fingerstothebone, The Calico Cat, Eversaved, mhwitt, and Balaywho. Elaine, who has done a lot of winning on Thursday, broke the Monday barrier to become the 66th human to win an Exclamation Point! And Rebel took the last MQLXXX EP, which was the 400th Monday Quiz Exclamation Point.

Even more exciting than that, if such a thing is possible, is that la gringissima's MQLXXX EP breaks the record for consecutive Monday Quiz wins! The previous record was five in a row, a feat DrSchnell achieved twice (MQXXIV - MQXXVIII; MQLI - MQLV) and la gringa herself matched once (MQLII - MQLVI). With her current run from MQLXXV to MQLXXX, la gringissima pushes the bar up to SIX in a row. Will she push it to seven? We'll have to wait until next week to find out!

Eighth Season Champions

Given the above, it's not surprising that la gringissima is the Eighth Season Champ; she took EPs in an amazing 8 out of 10 Quizzes to dominate "the 70s."

Usually, 6 of 10 would be enough to win; Eversaved will just have to settle for second place and the respect and admiration of all.

Scoring 4 of 10 are four Quiz long-timers: Mrs.5000, DrSchnell, Rebel, and Cartophiliac. They get the respect and admiration of all, as well.

As does everyone who plays the Monday Quiz! See you next week for the 9th Season kick-off!

The Reading List Index!

Another bit of metaposting, here.

The Reading List consists of 63 books and book series from a variety of genres, and was compiled for me by this blog's readership in the late summer of 2007. Until I finish these books, barring any premature and unfortunate demise on my part, I will be doggedly reading my way through them and posting my findings.

Books Completed

• Ivo Andric, Bridge on the Drina. Completed April, 2009.
  
• Beowulf. Completed August, 2008.
  
• Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita. Completed February, 2008.
  
• Cervantes, Don Quixote. Completed June, 2009.
  
• Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep. Completed November, 2008.
  
• Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov. Completed January, 2008.
  
• Graham Greene, The End of the Affair. Completed July, 2009.
  
• Kafka, The Trial. Completed January 2009.
  
• China Mieville, Perdido Street Station. Completed March 2009.
  
• Nabakov, Lolita. Completed March, 2008.
  
• Robinson, Housekeeping. Completed May, 2008.
  
• Pamuk, My Name is Red. Completed June, 2008.
  
• J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter books: One & Two. (April 2009)
  
• Scully, Dominion. Completed October, 2008.
  
• Twain, Huckleberry Finn. Completed April, 2008.
  

In Progress

On Deck

• The Epic of Gilgamesh
  
• Wright, The Moral Animal
  
• Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
  
• Lucius Apuleius, The Golden Ass
  
• Fforde, The Eyre Affair
  

Books Remaining

• Ball, Bright Earth
  
• Blume, Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret
  
• Brown, Louis Riel
  
• Byatt, Possession
  
• Campbell & Campbell, The China Study
  
• Camus, The Stranger
  
• Chaucer, Cantebury Tales
  
• Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent
  
• Davis, One River
  
• DeWitt, The Last Samurai
  
• Diamond, Guns Germs and Steel
  
• Donaldson, the first Thomas Covenant trilogy
  
• Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
  
• Greene, The Quiet American
  
• Hansen, Motoring With Mohammed
  
• Homer, The Iliad
  
• Homer, The Odyssey
  
• Ishiguro, The Unconsoled
  
• Joyce, Ulysses
  
• Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies
  
• LeGuin, Earthsea trilogy
  
• L'Engle, A Wrikle in Time
  
• Levin, How the Universe Got its Spots
  
• McCall, Makes Me Want To Holler
  
• Moore/Gibbons, Watchmen
  
• Nabakov, Pnin
  
• Naipaul, A House for Mr. Biswas
  
• Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country
  
• Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
  
• Pullman, His Dark Materials
  
• Ramachandran, Phantoms in the Brain
  
• Rawicz, The Long Walk
  
• Rivoli, The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy
  
• Rossi, What Every American Should Know About the Rest of the World
  
• Rowling, Harry Potter books 3-7
  
• Sapolsky, A Primate's Memoir
  
• Schlosser, Fast Food Nation
  
• Singer and Mason, The Way We Eat and Why Our Food Choices Matter
  
• Smiley, A Thousand Acres
  
• Stegner, Angle of Repose
  
• Updike, the other Rabbit books after Rabbit, Run
  
• Voltaire, Candide
  
• Woolf, To the Lighthouse
  

The Reading List: "The End of the Affair"

Grahm Greene's The End of the Affair is a book that is unabashedly, almost didactically, about faith and religion. There are really only five characters, one of whom fills a plot function and provides some comic relief; the other four each represent a stance towards religious faith.

• The narrator is scornful of religion.
• The narrator’s girlfriend resists religion, but eventually has a powerful conversion experience.
• A rationalist with a crush on the narrator’s girlfriend is so passionately anti-religious that his life is effectively shaped by religion.
• The narrator’s girlfriend’s husband couldn’t really care less about religion, and is thus the only character in the novel whose life is not dictated by religion.

The essential idea of the novel seems to be that you can run from faith, but you can’t hide – unless you are like the husband character, a weak, passionless workaholic who, Greene seems to suggest, is barely living in any meaningful sense anyway. The rationalist, who spends his days publicly preaching the absurdity of Christianity, is depicted as someone with a deep, complicated, but obvious relationship with God. Someone who simply didn’t believe in God, in the logic of the novel, couldn’t possibly care enough to spend his life in this way.

The girlfriend, who is the central figure of the book, resists her own religious belief until an experience that she interprets as a miracle, after which she has a religious conversion and breaks off her relationship with the narrator. And as for the narrator, he keeps up an air of sophisticated dismissal of faith throughout, but ultimately we have to judge him the same way we judge the rationalist – after all, he as a character is obsessed enough with his relationship with God to be, within the fictional frame, writing the novel that we are reading.

It probably goes without saying that the book on balance – although it is not without subtlety – argues for the rationality, or at least the reasonableness, of Christian belief, and for the inevitability of some sort of religious faith. From this, you might reasonably guess that it presents Christian belief as key to a happy life. However, your guess would be wrong. Powerful religious experience is, for every character, a painful and heartbreaking force. They are happiest when they have the least faith, and it is only the husband, bland and shallow as he is, who makes his way through the days with anything like equanimity. As for the others, they experience less the “Peace of Christ” than the metaphorical pain of the crucifixion. The girlfriend’s religious experiences are so overblown as to suggest neurosis more than piety, and a series of miracles late in the book – it is implied that the girlfriend is, either symbolically or literally, a saint – seem to cause more suffering than solace to their supposed beneficiaries.

The novel is told in a highly fractured narrative than weaves freely backward and forward through time, mixing straight first-person retelling of events, the narrator’s ruminations, and textual material read by the narrator. Key events are often given away long before they are described in full, so that you know basically how the book will end after just a few pages. The effect is fairly engrossing and entirely natural; it is much like hearing a friend tell a long and complex story in the typically shuffled way that stories are told.

Did I like the novel? Well, I admire its craftsmanship and am sympathetic to its attempt to plumb the nature of faith. It is also a fascinating look at the texture of life in London during the 1940s. The characters, unfortunately, are all in their separate ways rather shallow and unlikable. This made it hard for me to get too concerned about the state of their souls, which in turn rendered the book rather academic. The narrator, in particular, is self-absorbed to the point of obsession, in a manner which made me fear that this had more to do with Graham Greene’s own personality than with his intention to create an unsympathetic first-person character (although, I know nothing about Graham Greene, so take this with a grain of salt). On balance, then, I found The End of the Affair a reasonably engrossing novel of average interest, but one that perhaps falls short of its reputation.

Plot: After a chance encounter with his former lover’s husband, a British novelist decides to investigate why his lover left him. To his surprise, he finds that she has not been carrying on with a third man at all, but has instead been carrying on with God. Several possibly mystical events occur which bring peace, joy, and contentment to no one.

The Thursday Quiz XC

The Thursday Quiz!

The Thursday Quiz is a twelve item is-it-or-isn't-it test of your knowledge, reasoning, stamina, and moxie!

Remember always the Fundamental Rules of the Thursday Quiz:

1. The Thursday Quiz is a POP quiz. No research, Googling, Wikiing, or use of reference books. Violators will never be able to look at themselves in the mirror again.

2. Don't get all stressed out about it! It's supposed to be fun!

Cars!

Automobile sales figures are tough to compare because a single design may have several different names and variants, or several different generations of a design may all have the same name. That hasn't stopped those energetic amateurs who contribute to Wikipedia from trying, though! Some of the following cars are on the Wiki's list of the 15 best-selling vehicles of all time! But in other cases, I am lying right to your face. Which is which?

1. Chevrolet Xpress (1950-present) - Almost unheard of in the United States, the Chevy Xpress is marketed only in South Asia -- until 1990, more than half of the cars in India were Xpresses -- and in Brazil. Over 11 million of them have been sold.

2. Ford "F-Series" Trucks (1948–present) — These big trucks were the bestselling vehicle in the United States every year from 1983 to 2005. Ford has built about 32 million of the F-series Trucks over eleven design generations.

3. Ford Fiesta (1976–present) — Selling over 12 million units in seven design generations, the sub-compact Fiesta is among the Ford Motor Company's leading products. It has not until very recently been sold in the United States, however, because of that country's well known proclivity for very large vehicles.

4. Ford Model T (1908–27) — In one long design generation, the Model T became the first car to have 5 million units produced... and then the first car to have 10 million units produced... and then the first car to have 15 million units produced.

5. Honda Civic (1972–present) — Popular in the United States and a chronic best-seller in Canada, the Civic has sold over 16 million units over eight generations.

6. Lada Riva (1980–present) — Basically a copy of a 1960s-era Fiat, the Lada Riva sold around 21 million units in its native Russia and throughout Europe. Most of these cars were made before exports to Western Europe were discontinued in 1997, but smaller scale production continues in both Russia and Egypt.

7. Lamborghini Gallardo (1984–present) — Americans think of Lamborghini as a company that makes sports cars, but the Gallardo, a budget compact sedan sold throughout Southern Europe, is the Italian company's bread-and-butter product. It has made over 12 million of them.

8. Oldsmobile Cutlass (1961-81; 1997-99) - Originally designating a sporty compact, then a popular large car during the 1970s, then retired in favor of the "Cutlass Ciera," then slapped on a slightly modified Chevy Malibu for a year or two in the late nineties, the Cutlass name covered a variety of cars. Taken together, it was the name of almost 12 million individual vehicles.

9. Toyota Corolla (1966–present) — With around 35 million cars sold over ten design generations, the Corolla is the bestselling car model in the history of the world.

10. Volkswagen Beetle (1938–2003) — With more than 21 million cars hitting the road in one single, long design generation, the original Beetle was the bestselling single design in history and the first car to reach twenty million sales.

11. Volkswagen Golf (1974–present) — Including varients like the American "Rabbit," "Cabrio," and "Jetta" and the Mexican "Caribe," 25 million Golfs have been sold over six design generations, making it the third most popular automobile of all time.

12. The Yugo (1980-1992) - The sporty, inexpensive Yugo was among the best-selling cars in both Europe and North America for most of its production run, and around 14 million were sold. Its Yugoslavian designers had increasing problems meeting the demand for their product, however, and after the collapse of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s were put out of business by a supply-chain breakdown.


Submit your answers in the comments.