University challenge

[RedCelt69]

Wouldn't say labouring, just struggling to understand the motivation to quote and scrap and quote and scrap thread after thread (my own little foray into just this one has been *quite* enough for me) . But hey-ho, as I said, if all this gets thee thy kicks, carry on squire. You against the world! Go get'em tiger, grr...I eagerly await your next fearsome crusade.

Motivation? I enjoy debating stuff I have an interest in. The "quote and scrap.." format is something I've been familiar with since 1996 on usenet... back when newsgroups were the most interesting thing on the internet. When you had a choice of one(?) browser (Mozilla) and the best search engine was Alta Vista... not that the websites it would find were up to much.

Nothing to do with crusades, btw... if I wanted to go on a crusade to change perceptions I can think of better (populated) places to do it than The Sinner.

[WashingtonIrving]

Hahahaha. Sorry. Just always amuses me to hear Burns being heralded as any kind of literary figure; I make it a rule not to take seriously anybody who writes in dialect.

I think this is good reason to not take your opinion on literature too seriously. Should we stop taking Faulkner's As I Lay Dying seriously because it's mostly written in a regional dialect?

Oh the glares in history classes which were ENTIRELY Scottish-centric, but did I bitch and complain to my teacher? No. I just dealt with it. "Please don't ask me about James V, I'm ENGLISH".

You got taught scottish history? At a scottish school? Under a scottish educational system? Wow. Maybe you didn't bitch and complain at the time, but you're making up for it now so good job.

Otherwise this thread has descended into general farce.

[RedCelt69]

I think this is good reason to not take your opinion on literature too seriously. Should we stop taking Faulkner's As I Lay Dying seriously because it's mostly written in a regional dialect?

I've often found it strange that some people think that the Angles stopped at Hadrian's Wall. The lowlands of Scotland were populated by Angles, too... and the Scots language grew from there in parallel with the Old English that became Middle English that became modern English south of the border. If the Scots language is a dialect, then so is modern English; of the same version of the language that they both sprang from.

[Power Metal Dom]

The Sinner...where battles are fought over the honour of cricket and poets This is quite an odd slice of the interwibble.

[threekings]

i refer you to the many questions i've heard on robbie burns on UC

I'm sure that in your mind there is some relevance between the point in hand (a fringe sport in one of the four British countries) and a literary figure. Now, if you'd compared it to the game of shinty, you might have had a point. Have there been many rounds on UC covering shinty? Or Gaelic football? Any English university teams sat struggling to answer questions on a sport that has little-to-no-following in England?

and i assure you people in england give as much of a fuck about him as you do about cricket.

Oh, well. So long as you assure me, that's OK then.

Ah, hang on... actually, no. It isn't OK. I don't need your assurance.

I grew up in England. Through the entirety of my time there (between leaving school and leaving England) I met 3 people who were keen followers of cricket. That's 3 people amongst all personal acquaintances and all work colleagues. Followers of football would run into the hundreds.

Not exactly a scientific test of the popularity of the "sport" in England, but it gives a rough idea of just how passionately the English follow cricket. I recently had a look to see if there were any reliable statistics about the game's popularity in England... without much success. Perhaps you could enlighten me?

And whilst you're at it, enlighten the quiz-compilers at the BBC.

wow, you really have a bee in your bonnet about this dont you! the point i was trying to make, and that you've missed, is that there are often questions about a topic which is more well known to one of the nations of the union than the others.

[vitailampada]

Brian Viner's take on the issue in Saturday's Independent:

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/co ... 00488.html

[RedCelt69]

wow, you really have a bee in your bonnet about this dont you! the point i was trying to make, and that you've missed, is that there are often questions about a topic which is more well known to one of the nations of the union than the others.

I would say that an accurate summation of my position in the matter could be expressed in terms of bees in bonnets, wasps in trilbies... or hornets in bearskins. Hell, pick an irate winged insect, shove it in a piece of head-gear... and I'll sign up to it.

I didn't miss your point, btw. I went on (in the rest of the thread) to make my point (about your point not really being a point).... so much so, that I'm not going to repeat myself... and will restrict myself to merely saying: see above.

[threekings]

lol, fanks

[DACrowe]

Brian Viner's take on the issue in Saturday's Independent:

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/co ... 00488.html

I... hope he's taking the piss. I can't quite tell. Much as I (controversial!) think it's acceptable to ask questions about cricket, I certainly think it's acceptable to know and care nothing about it. Sure, many people care about it but a lot of people care about Zoroastrianism, and all I really know about that is that it involves keeping particular fires burning; and that description pretty much covers the Olympics too.

[RedCelt69]

a lot of people care about Zoroastrianism, and all I really know about that is that it involves keeping particular fires burning

This is all from memory, therefore may contain nuts. Sorry, errors...

Zoroastrianism is an ancient Persian religion. Zoroaster is also known as Zarathrusta (as in "Also Spracht..."). The priests were known as magi (which is where we get the word "magic") and it is they who allegedly followed the star to Bethlehem. On a tangential note, the text of the NT didn't say that there were 3 magi... merely that they carried gold, frankincense and myrrh. It might have been 2. It might have been 22. Which is akin to arguing over the colour of a unicorn's horn... or the number of Robin's Merry Men. It didn't happen. But if it did (it didn't) the gifts were numbered 3, not the magi. And to emphasise the point... the magi were priests... and certainly not "kings of orient, are" despite the xmas carol. Honest.

Back from that tangent, a notable aspect of the culture was that the dead were "buried" on raised platforms for the birds to pick clean - which was mirrored in Native American cultures.

With an existing (if small) following in modernity, if it has had an unbroken chain of adherents, it has a good claim to being the longest-surviving religion in the world.

An off-shoot (sect/cult) of Zorastrianism was Mithraism. Mithra was the model for Jesus (born on the 25th December of a virgin... blah-de-blah... and was crucified). Mithraism was very popular for a time amongst Roman legions.

So if it came up in a BBC quiz, I'd do fairly OK (if the question didn't go any deeper than the above summation).

Just don't ask me about fucking cricket.