Solution to the weekend quiz.

The winner of last weekend’s quiz was Neha with Jenny a close runner up. Well done both of you!

The quiz was peppered with clues which are highlighted in red.

There are only six of them in the family and yet two of them make up everything. Hopefully that doesn’t leave you up and down simultaneously. To give you a flavour they are a gregarious lot who hate confinement, which they largely see as a colour issue.

Now the bulk of the quiz is to find the name of the dysfunctional family who were first spotted in California, although deciphering all the clues will give you additional points.

To find their family name you need to find your way to a certain Blogger’s home town. Here people have a way with English that eludes most English; we’ll ignore the Americans as they only speak pigeon English. The locals here savour words like ripe plums and always enjoy a rhyme (and rhymes are the key to this puzzle ). In this town they have a statue of Molly stood on her own. She has perhaps an overly ample cleavage and as a result the locals call her the ‘*r***** with the scallop‘, others call her the ‘**** with the fish’ and because she pushes a cart, others call her the ‘**r* with the cart.’ Hopefully by now you have found the town.

Now it’s not Molly we actually need, but that most famous of all writers who can be found nearby, known to the more vulgar as the ‘*r*** with the stick’ Now once you’ve found him you have your first clue as to the name of this mysterious family because our most famous of all writers invented their family name. Not found this writer? Well perhaps wake Finnegan up and ask him? His bark is worse than his bite -assuming you are still short of the mark.



The solution:

When we were at school we were taught that the fundamental building blocks of the universe were called atoms and that these atoms were made up of particles protons, neutrons and electrons. We were taught that these particles were as simple as things could get.

It is now known that there are even more fundamental particles than these, one is a family of particles called quarks. For example a proton consists of three quarks. There are six types or flavours of quarks: up, down, strange, charm, top and bottom. Which leads some to believe that the discoverers of quarks must have been gay…anyway I digress. A proton consists for example of two up quarks and one down quark. Quarks however can never due found on their own due to something called colour confinement.

The object of the quiz was to come up with the word: quark.

The key to solving the quiz was to pick out the clues, ie the bits that were deliberately made incongruous to the rest of the text and to take carefull note of certain words and those that rhymed.

The Blogger referred to is Dan who comes from Dublin. The statue of Molly (on her own) the tart with the cart is of course Molly Mallone. This clue should have led you to Dublin.
From there it should have been easy to find the Prick with the Stick, James Joyce.

Hidden in the text were further clues the title of one of his most famous books Finnegans Wake, from there judicious googling of certain key words such as Joyce, Finnegan, mark, bark etc would have brought you to the quotation from which quarks drew their name.

Three quarks for Muster Mark!
Sure he has not got much of a bark
And sure any he has it's all beside the mark.
—James Joyce, Finnegans Wake