WAMC's Ian Pickus and resident quizzer Mike Nothnagel make amends.
Last week's challenge
Start with the word DENOMINATOR. Rearrange the letters and you can spell a five-letter word for a type of person who often relocates, and a six-letter word related to navigation. What are the words?
Answer: NOMAD, ORIENT.
THIS WEEK'S CATEGORY: "M- A-"
On-air questions: Once again, the magic of radio allows me to be both in the studio and in Cambridge, Massachusetts for the annual MIT Mystery Hunt. No doubt I am knee-deep in puzzles of all sorts and will be for many, many hours to come. While I'm over in Massachusetts there doing that, I'll also be here asking you some questions for which each correct answer is a two-word name, title, or phrase whose initials are M. A.
1. While there are no exact beginning and ending points, what European historical period is commonly described as lasting from the year 500 to 1500, falling between the periods known as Antiquity and the Modern Period?
2. Who is the "I" in this passage from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar: “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears / I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him / The evil that men do lives after them / The good is oft interred with their bones"?
3. After the Daughters of the American Revolution denied her permission to sing in Constitution Hall, who performed a concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday in 1939, sixteen years before she would become the first African-American singer to perform at New York City's Metropolitan Opera, which she did eight years before performing again at the Lincoln Memorial as part of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom?
4. What geographical feature appears in the center of the current coat of arms of Armenia surrounded by water and with a depiction of Noah's Ark resting on top of it?
5. Who is probably the most famous woman to have a quote about eating cake during a famine – which was more likely to have been about brioche, not cake, and most likely not said during a famine – misattributed to her, despite the fact that she wasn’t in France at the time it was purportedly said?
Extra credit
1. The name of what street in New York City is commonly used as a metonym for the advertising industry in the United States?
2. In mathematics, what is the term for the longest diameter of an ellipse, which runs through both of its foci and ends at the widest points of the ellipse?
This week's challenge
Start with the phrase MESS AROUND. Rearrange the letters to spell a four-letter word and a six-letter word that each name a payment of sorts. What are the words?
ANSWERS
On-air questions
1. Middle Ages
2. Marc Antony
3. Marian Anderson
4. Mount Ararat
5. Marie Antoinette
Extra credit
1. Madison Avenue
2. Major axis
