Happy Thanksgiving all!

I’m heading out of town for a few days. Have a great holiday weekend. And since Thanksgiving happens to fall on a Thursday this year (what were the odds), here’s a special (silly) Thankgiving Day riddle. Enjoy!

I’m a country that’s trying a teenaged Berliner;
If you roll me in bowling you might be the winner;
When you’re quitting it cold without drawing it thinner;
And what most of you likely are having for dinner!

Who am I?

UPDATE: Riddle solved by Ro. See comments for answer.

Last week’s Conundrum about kings named Henry reminded me of a Shakespeare final I gave about five years ago. This was for an advanced graduate course on Shakespeare, and I actually decided to give the final exam as a takehome. What’s more, the first five questions were True or False. Surprisingly, only two students got all five questions right. Sounds like quite a Conundrum to me…

TRUE or FALSE?

1. Twelfth Night is named after a holiday in December.

2. Gloucester (in King Lear) has two sons; the bastard one is named Edmund.

3. Katherine of Valois was wife to Henry V, mother to Henry VI, and grandmother to Henry VII.

4. Based on evidence in Hamlet, it is reasonable to assume that Shakespeare may have read at least some of the writings of Sigmund Freud.

5. The title of The Merchant of Venice refers to a Jewish merchant named Shylock.

I should point out that the five questions combined were ten percent of an exam that was ten percent of the final grade, so these questions alone were not enough to affect anyone’s final grade. I don’t believe in trying to trick students, but I felt that a takehome exam deserved a little extra bite. The rest of the exam was short answer and essay and was very straightforward.

Can anyone answer all five questions correctly?

My friend DeLisa White is the queen of telling me things I’d rather not know. Usually it leads to me no longer being able to use a particular product or patronize a particular business because they’re – I don’t know – torturing kittens in the rainforest or something. But I trust her, so I paid close attention when she included me in this e-mailing about the writers strike, reprinted here with permission from the author.

(By the way, when I told DeLisa I was going to put her writing online and not pay her for it, she said “Wow, I feel like an official Guild member!”)

Dear Friends,

The studios, networks and producers of The Office made $13.9 million dollars last year on iTunes downloads of the show alone.

Amount the writers, directors, and actors got of that?

Zero percent.

While among the Writers Guild’s 12,000 members there are television writer-producers like Shonda Rhimes, the creator of “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Private Practice,” who take home up to $5 million a year, on the other extreme are junior writers who – if they work at all – make $50,000 or less (just like the rest of Americans.) Furthermore, about 48 percent of West Coast members are unemployed, according to guild statistics, and rely on residuals to do things like, well, eat.

IMHO, I think this is a thoroughly just cause – I support the writers and their creative colleagues completely. I was sick at heart to discover that the shows and movies I’ve downloaded from iTunes did not compensate the people who created them, without whom my joy in them wouldn’t exist. This should have been automatically addressed by producers and studios. It’s egregiously unethical for them not to have done so and that they continue to resist is unconscionable to me.

I have just read and signed the online petition:

“In support of the WGA strike”

hosted on the web by PetitionOnline.com, the free online petition service, at:

http://www.PetitionOnline.com/WGA/

I personally agree with what this petition says, and I think you might agree, too. If you can spare a moment, please take a look, and consider signing yourself.

Very best wishes,

DeLisa :-)

I don’t think I need to belabour the point. After all, the people who come to this site are here because of their adoration and admiration for an individual writer, and his tremendous contribution to our culture and language. But enough about me.

Let’s do what we can to support the writers who have brought so much joy to our lives, and who deserve to benefit from the fruits of their talent and hard work.

Posting has been light this weekend, but I’ve been at the NCTE conference. Perhaps I’ll blog about the conference later in the week. For now, enjoy this video of Weird Al as Obi-Wan Kenobi recounting the entire plot of The Phantom Menace to the tune of American Pie by Don McLean.

I’m an elegant garment of velvet or wool;
I am worn by a count, but removed for a bull;
A vacation location enjoyed to the full;
And when Superman visits you, Jim says don’t pull.

Who am I?

UPDATE: Riddle solved by Kimi. See comments for answer.

From the American Research Group:

November 13, 2007 – Impeachment

A total of 64% of American voters say that President George W. Bush has abused his powers as president. Of the 64%, 14% (9% of all voters) say the abuses are not serious enough to warrant impeachment, 33% (21% of all voters) say the abuses rise to the level of impeachable offenses, but he should not be impeached, and 53% (34% of all voters) say the abuses rise to the level of impeachable offenses and Mr. Bush should be impeached and removed from office.

The respondents didn’t specify whether they were specifically referring to the administration’s policy on torture. They didn’t say if they were talking about how they cherry-picked intelligence to justify a wrong-headed war, or how they compromised national security by outing a covert CIA operative, merely as retribution for her husband calling them on their lies. The respondents may not have been specifically responding to warrantless wiretapping and secret military tribunals. They may have simply been thinking of how the administration handed over all government regulation to the industries being regulated. The data doesn’t say. All they were asked was if President Bush abused his power, and 64% said he did. The data also doesn’t show what the other 36% were thinking.

When you look at the data, though, something else is striking.

I’m surprised, though I guess I shouldn’t be, that so few people gave Response 2. Imagine a graph of this data. Usually a distribution like this would slope up, slope down, or rise in the middle like a bell curve. That this data set has such a sharp dip in the middle is a testament to just how polarizing this president has been. 64% of Republicans feel that President Bush has not abused his powers as president at all, while 50% of Democrats feel he should be impeached for it.

Also, more than one-fifth of respondents in general felt that his abuses had risen to the level of an impeachable offense, but that he shouldn’t be impeached. Isn’t that being soft on crime? Or perhaps we just remember the last time an opposition Congress impeached a sitting president, and are unwilling to go through all of that again, even if it’s warranted this time.

Because for 36% of the population, warrants are sooooo 20th century.

England has had eight kings named Henry, all before Shakespeare was born.

How many of the eight appear as characters in Shakespeare’s 37 canonical plays?

For your answer to be valid, please list each such Henry, and at least one play in which he appears. It is not necessary to list all of the plays in which each Henry appears, but maybe we can do that after the Conundrum is solved.

Note: The Henry does not need to have been king at the time – nor, for that matter, called Henry.

UPDATE: Question answered by K-Lyn. See comments for answer.

There’s a new website called FreeRice that helps you improve your vocabulary and fight world hunger. When you go there, you play a simple but addictive vocabulary game, and every time you answer a question correctly, the site donates ten grains of rice through the UN World Food Program.

At first, I thought this was another site to get humans to participate in an automated task that computers can’t do, like read book scans or create picture captions. But it works by generating advertising revenue. When you click on the answers, you indicate your visit to the advertisers, and they pay for the rice.

I just donated 2200 grains of rice, and was able to reach a vocabulary level of 48. And I was worried I was going to be unproductive today!

From A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

Fetch me that flower; the herb I show’d thee once:
The juice of it on sleeping eyelids laid
Will make or man or woman madly dote
Upon the next live creature that it sees.

Shift around the letters, and it becomes:

Would these instant loves be hollow? Or is the market in cue for the demand? They let freewheeling pharmaceutical elements hoot with joy to fix date-rape medicine.