News Quiz

No. 327: “Haider Go Seek”

Two weeks ago, Jörg Haider led his far-right Freedom Party to a stunning second-place finish in Austria’s national elections; two weeks from now, he’s coming to America. To do what?

Send your answer by noon ET Wednesday to newsquiz@slate.com.

Monday’s Question (No. 326)–“Scents and Sensibility”:

“This is a dream for me–to find the soft parts and touch them and even smell them. It’s very exciting.” Who said this about what?(Question courtesy of Jamie Smith and Andy Aaron.)

“A recently fired member of the Federal Aviation Authority’s South Dakota office.”–Beth Sherman (Tom Crawford and Eric Akawie had similar answers.)

“Joe Torre; Don Zimmer’s head.”–Bill Scheft

“Billionaire or no, Martha Stewart loves mulch.”–Michael Mannella

“My grandmother, in the Waldbaum’s produce department; about honeydew melons, ‘good for tomorrow.’ “–Larry Amoros

“All my answers have Peter Lorre accents.”–Ellen Macleay

Click for more answers.

Randy’s Wrap-Up

With so much news and so little News Quiz, many stories get neglected. However, it seemed important to provide the full text of Pat Buchanan’s speech on bolting the Republican Party. Unfortunately, for reasons of space, I had to condense his remarks, adding nothing, just making a few cuts and altering the punctuation to bring it into line with standard usage. Buchanan speaks:

“The junk yards of history are strewn with wreckage. Dust!

“Our own Elmer Gantry, Mr. Clinton, whose desecration of the temples of our civilization and personal misconduct are good and generous, first at the scene of natural disasters: Sir, your Turtle is in jeopardy.

“To those who prattle I’m not running: I’m running. All of us must learn our English language. We can get pot doing its magic again. We need a timeout.

“This land is our land. Pick up the whip. Insult a free people. Friends, the good manners are gone. Swagger! Homage to the great god mammon! This is our cause. And so it is, that in the name of the Founding Fathers we go forward to rescue our Lady America, and will not quit this fight as long as there is breath within us.”

Huge, Old, and Hairy Answer

Dutch paleontologist Dick Mol said it about a nearly intact woolly mammoth recovered from the Siberian permafrost last week.

A team of scientists was directed to the site by local residents who found a tusk sticking up from the ground, reports the Los Angeles Times wire service. The team dug up the head, which had partially thawed and decayed, then halted digging for fear of destroying their find. Using ground-penetrating radar to locate the carcass, they broke up the frozen soil with jackhammers. A helicopter lifted the 22-ton block of frozen dirt and flew it 150 miles to Khatanga, Russia.

Alexei Tikhonov of the Zoological Institute in St. Petersburg denies that the mammoth can be cloned, because during its “preservation in permafrost, dehydration destroyed the chains of DNA. Now we only have very small parts of the DNA chains.”

The mammoth, dubbed Zharkov after the local man who discovered its tusk, was a 9-foot-tall adult male, about 47 years old at the time of death; it would have looked like a hairy elephant to the modern eye, much like … oh, make up your own damn joke.

A. M. Extra

CBS’s new Early Show debuts next week, taking on NBC’s Today and ABC’s Good Morning America in the battle for moral suprema–sorry, for bigger profits in morning television, much as the Founding Fathers anticipated when they devised the three-network system. Competition, as we know, stimulates creativity, so these three shows no doubt offer diverse pleasures. Which of these shows possesses the following qualities?

1. Studio with view of New York streets.

2. Determinedly shallow news coverage.

3. Near-psychotic obsession with the weather.

4. Male and female co-anchors with eerie resemblance to flight attendants.

5. Inane celebrity guests promoting current projects, quack nostrums.

6. Tedious cooking segments include recipes for human flesh.

7. Guests strip to waist and fight with bowie knives.

8. Audience participation segment: “Which Clam Is Tainted?”

9. Subliminal messages urge audience to pelt Tony Randall with bottles.

10. Formerly hosted by a monkey.

Answers

1 to 4 are true of all three programs.

5 and 6 are half-truths, of which the true portion applies to all three programs.

7 to 9 are segment ideas none of the shows will even consider, or even bother to return my calls to discuss. Uptight bastards.

10 is true only of Today, but it would be a big improvement on nearly any show or congressional committee.

It Pays To Increase Your Word Power Extra

“We recognize the importance of making the narrow-band end of the funnel as robust as possible explicitly for the purpose of converting those users to broadband eventually.”–George Bell, CEO, Excite@Home, explains why he’s spending a billion dollars to buy a greeting-card company, marketing prepackaged sentiments for those unable to express themselves, until they can watch television on their computers. Or something.

Common Denominator

As requested by Greg Diamond, the tally is

Sex Jokes: 31

Death Jokes: 7

Conclusion: News Quiz–it’s life-affirming. (In a furtive sort of way.)