The Con

[Douglas Alan <nessus@mit.edu>]

Hello!  I'm back from England.  I had a blast at the Kon, meeting many
other Love-Hounds, and driving down narrow, windy English country
lanes at 60 miles per hour on the wrong side of the road with a line
of cars tailgating me!

> Peter Chow from Brighton (UK) writes:

> I like the film with an exception and a half. The clip for Moments
> Of Pleasure still makes me feel nauseous. The sight of a woman
> spinning on a 20' screen for 4.5 minutes is enough to induce motion
> sickness in any one. The key problem is that it is the same shot
> throughout; It's just not visually interesting.

I disagree about this.  This scene is brilliant.  The shoes are
forcing Kate to do a very large number of pirouettes during this
scene.  You can tell by the way that Kate spots her head, the way a
dancer would.  The sense of virtigo instilled in the viewer does a
perfect job of making the viewer feel a little of what the character
would be feeling.

>> [Scott Telford:] Despite at least four different Love-Hounds quiz
>> teams, including a A-team of IED, Doug, Chris and Uli, the quiz was
>> won by The Norfolk Alchemists team again.

> [Graham Dombkins:] WOW! Does anybody have a list of the questions??
> We send in the gaffa "brains-trust" and still didn't make it?? If
> you could, send just the questions in first and let us see how well
> we do ourselves with them before you post the answers.

In order to be fair, you'd have to reproduce the environment too.
First, make sure that you are so excited you can't think straight.
Second, make sure that there are lots of flashing lights blinking from
all directions to distract you, and cold air blowing on you.  Thirdly,
have the questions read off so fast that you barely have time to write
the question down before the next question is read off.  Fourthly,
only give yourself about ten or twenty seconds to answer each
question.

I think that the A team was also at a disadvantage in one sense,
because I think we are all the type of scholar who remember where
information can be found, rather than remembering every detail of the
information itself.  If we'd had a bit more time, and access to our
libraries and computers, we would probably been able to get all of the
questions right.  One particularly frustrating question was the
question of which of Kate's songs have the English word "Love" in the
title.  This was frustating for me because it is the type of the
question that I could answer in ten seconds if I were sitting at my
computer.  Or given half an hour I could answer it by going through
every album in my head and writing down every song in order and
circling the songs with "Love" in the title.  But my mind doesn't free
associate well enough for them all to just pop into my head in a few
seconds, especially when excited and distracted--it tends to get stuck
on a couple of them in a tight circle.

Other frustating questions were:

   - "Which song has the lyric 'You know that I'll be waiting'?".
     This was frustating because the song "Under The Ivy" has the
     words "I'll be waiting", but not the "You know".  Once your mind
     gets stuck on something, it is hard to get it off it though, and
     none of us has listened to "Home for Christmas" enough for it to
     be prominent enough in our minds to push away one of our very
     favorite songs, even though we knew it was not quite right.

   - "Which song was inspired by the folk song 'Cerve, Cerve'?"  This
     is the kind of question that you are sure you heard the answer to
     once a long time ago and you can't quite dredge it out of you
     memory.  The answer is probably "Babooshka".

   - "Name the Roy Harper track which has the line 'Endless lovers
     follow you' in it."  This is a really frustating question because
     we certainly knew the song ("You (The Game Part II) The two
     halves in Flight"), but it has two subtitles, and we couldn't
     remember the second subtitle ("The two halves in Flight").  I
     knew that it had something to do with DNA (the song is addressed
     to DNA), but I couldn't remember exactly what.  I hear that Peter
     Fitzgerald-Morris is a stickler for detail on these quizzes!
     This is again especially frustrating because I knew that with my
     computer I'd be able to answer it in a few seconds.  (My computer
     really is part of my brain, you see....)

I think that we definitely got the following thirteen questions right:

  - Who mixed the recent 'Shoedance' mix of 'The Red Shoes'?

    A: Karl Blagan

  - Which of Kate's video did Roy Harper appear in?

    A: Breathing

  - Which Go West song did Kate provide backing vocals for?

    A: The King is Dead

  - Which song has the lyric 'You and me babe against the world'?

    A: Burning Bridge

  - Name the guardian angels mentioned in 'Lily'?

    A: Gabriel, Raphael, Michael, Uriel

  - Who played guitar on 'Big Stripey Lie'?

    A: duh.....

  - Which of Kate's Video did Albert Einstein appear in?

    A: Hounds of Love

  - Who originally recorded 'Lord Of The Reedy River'?

    A: Donovan

  - Which Kate song did Hue And Cry cover?

    A: The Man With The Child In His Eyes

  - Which Kate track was inspired by a Ken Russell film?

    A: Delius (Song of Summer)

  - What is the name of a person mentioned in one of Kate's songs who comes
    from Iraq?

    A: Kashka

  - Which Kate song mentions 'Bolan and Moony'?

    A: Blow Away (For Bill)

  - Who was historical figure who inspired the song 'Heads We're Dancing'?

    A: This one is kind of a trick question because the obvious answer is
       Hitler, but we believe that the answer being looked for is Oppenheimer.

IED seemed to know the answers for these questions, but I don't recall
whether he actually got them right or not:

  - Who directed the 1948 film 'The Red Shoes'?

  - Name the location used for the 'Cloudbusting' video?

  - Who was 'Teddy' as mentioned "spinning in the chair at Abbey Road"
    in 'Moments of Pleasure'?

Even if we got all of these last three right, however, that would have
only given us sixteen, and the winning team had seventeen.  If Peter
isn't as much of a stickler as I've been led to believe on the Roy
Harper song, and we got all the last three right, we would have tied.
Since Peter said that no one even came close, I must assume that Peter
was a stickler on this, and we got several of the last three questions
wrong.

|>oug
   <nessus@mit.edu>

"We take all the telescopes
 And we turn them inside out"