General Knowledge Quiz #12

Better than Moose Knuckle

Regina actually rhymes with that.

Dolores, Colorado

Dont you know? There is a wormhole at each pole, for easy travel... guess that was classified info.. oops..

LMFAO for certain...not sure about any of the others though.

To be fair if you played Ride of the Valkyries I'd say most people would recognise it, they just wouldn't know who composed it.

Spaniards are hardly more white, by skintone, than morrocans.

Aside from all the battles.

love all the battles XD

Ok, I'll bite. How many other people do you know of just because they won the Booker Prize?

I mean, obviously I don't know you so maybe you're really into literature and peruse the NY Times Bestseller lists weekly, and follow any number of literary awards. Maybe.

But for the average person? I very much doubt that having won the Booker Prize is the sort of thing that would give an author nearly as much fame (and/or notoriety) as Rushdie has, among the populace at large.

Like: I'm reasonably well-read. And I'm on a trivia site like JetPunk, which gives me a bit of a head start already. But when I look over the list of Winners, I see that I've read (and enjoyed, to be sure!) maybe 10 of them.

But not a single one of those authors I would suggest (Yann Martel being the only possible exception) are in any way broadly famous (i.e.: among the populace at large) because of having won the Booker Prize.

I’ll definitely bite… Margaret Attwood, Ian McEwan, George Saunders, Alan Hollinghurst, William Golding, J.M. Coetzee, Iris Murdoch, Graham Swift, Kingsley Amis… from the top of my head.

It’s a very prestigious award, the fact that you’re unfamiliar with it doesn’t diminish that. Neither does it mean that everyone else is similarly unfamiliar. Also, he was already famous for winning the Booker for Midnights Children, without which it’s unlikely The Satanic Verses would have come to the attention of the Ayatollahs.

If you’re after doing a little self-improvement though, any of the above are worth a read, but my recommendation would be “The Inheritance of Loss” by Kiran Desai, a very good place to start.

Well then, I will bite your biting. I wouldn’t say that everyone is unfamiliar, but I imagine if you polled the general populace, the vast majority of people would have read at most one of these books (most likely Life of Pie, if any). Your own reading experience cannot be applied to everyone. Reading just is not a priority nowadays, and no matter how prestigious the award is, it does not mean everyone has read the books. I am fairly certain that I am more well read than the average person, and I have never heard of most of these books. Mrputter is correct in that the Booker award is not something that most people would know about.

@AlmostAGenius, let me present your own words back to you: "Your own reading experience cannot be applied to everyone." Apparently reading is not a priority for you, but I think you underestimate the popularity of reading among the general populace. Sure, not "everyone" has read the books on the list, but that's not what we're talking about. In my opinion, many people would recognize at least some of the book titles and authors on the list, and it seems fair to say that winning a prestigious award plays a role in that name recognition.

All that said, I agree that the fatwa likely raised Rushdie's profile quite a bit.

I’d imagine quite a lot of people lived in Camelot. The best name has to be Uther Pendragon though, no?

No need to use the past tense in relation to traditional Indigenous practices around sweatlodges (and other heat/steam related practices in what are now called the Americas). These practices are alive and well :)

As a side note, while sweatlodges encompass sacred/ceremonial purposes and have traditional protocols, they can also have health/family/social components, depending on the community and the situation.

On another note, here's a PSA: beware non-Indigenous for-sale fake-shaman "sweatlodge" events -- these can be dangerous because they are not built/conducted in traditional ways and there have been injuries and even fatalities at them.