I wanna make a supersonic man out of you

[venta]

Someone just passed me a copy of the Daily Telegraph's Guide to Almost Everything, complaining that they couldn't understand the first question on the cover.

The back cover does indeed have a few general-knowledge questions on it, presumably with the implication that you can find the answers inside. The question in, er, question was:

"What can be Big Boy, Early or Supersonic ?"

He claimed it didn't make sense as a question. Being a veteran of quizzes, I'm used to the syntax, and could explain: you're looking for some noun which can be prefixed (or occasionally suffixed) by each of the words in the question. (My rather poor off the cuff example was "What can be Wind, Dartmouth or Railway?" to which the answer is "tunnel".)

We still couldn't work it out, though. I tried to look it up, but the tome (which claims to be a compendium of general knowledge) has dispensed with such tedious pagewasters as, say, an index. So, not knowing the answer, I'm completely unable to work out what section I should look it up in. So while the book may well contain the answer, I have no way of finding it.

While various solutions were suggested, we fell to arguing over what one of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima was called - Fat Boy, or Fat Man. I tried looking it up in the Military section, but failed to find it. I remain unimpressed with the Telegraph's efforts at a usable reference book.

If anyone can tell me, without googling, what can be Big Boy, Early or Supersonic, I'd like to know.

Oh, and I'll probably post up the results of the lyrics quiz tonight, so if anyone else wants to have a guess, get on with it.

Comments

Re: Blame the family, 'cos I do know this one...

[venta.livejournal.com]

Supersonic tomatoes ?

Mrph, are you feeling ok ?

Both of the above people are right!

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

Check out this page... which I Googled for...

Re: Blame the family, 'cos I do know this one...

[mrph.livejournal.com]

Actually, no [I'm fuelled by lemsip right now]. But I'm not sure that's relevant. I'm fairly sure it's tomatoes, but they're certainly varieties of something of a vegetable nature.

[and I'm suddenly reminded of the days when casilda worked for the HDRA and assorted Coventry people used to exchange obscure vegetable varieties as birthday presents - I think godgirl got an endangered aubergine one year (the adoption certificate promptly vanished in Birmingham's Edwards nightclub, never to be seen again...) and I know dmh got the 'WallaWalla Sweet' onion because the certificate is still somewhere here...]

An endangered aubergine ?

[venta.livejournal.com]

What a fantastic idea for a present.

Re: An endangered aubergine ?

[mrph.livejournal.com]

We thought so. And godgirl has always been very much in favour of aubergines.

Details are here: http://www.hdra.org.uk/support_us/adoptaveg_varieties.htm

I see someone named a variety of french bean "District Nurse". Well, that just proves my point about the choice of names (see other comment), now doesn't it? ;)

Re: Blame the family, 'cos I do know this one...

[kate-r.livejournal.com]

I was going to say tomatoes as I know early and bigboy are varieties and wouldn't put it past the breeders to call one that's fast growing supersonic. My grandad used to grow Big boy one's - they're a beefsteak variety but they're fabulous. In other tomato related trivia they are also know as love apples and their latin name is the earliest bit of Latin I learnt when I was about 5 IIRC. I have my granded to thank for this info and you to thank for reminding me of him, he was a truly great man.

Re: Blame the family, 'cos I do know this one...

[venta.livejournal.com]

Tomatoes are clearly a very family thing - mrph is blaming his family too, and I also used to help out with growing tomatoes when I was little. (Technically I helped someone who wasn't a relative, but they were one of the extended family I co-opted to make up for my shocking lack of real relations.)