Trochaic tetrameter, or How I Stopped Worrying And Learned To Love Blogging

Here is an April quiz for you. It is not a quiz about April; it is a quiz in April. Though April quizzes may come your way, they bring the diplomas that bloom in May:

1. Ginkgo Biloba is (A) a distant relative of the Spanish explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa; (B) a common lizard whose scientific classification is Kingdom Animalia, Phylum Chordata, Subphylum Vertebrata, Class Reptilia, Order Squamata, Suborder Gekkota, Family Gekkonidae, one Genus of which, Hemidactylus, includes about 90 different species, which are listed here; (C) a tree.

2. Garcinia Cambogia is (A) a suburb of Phnom Penh; (B) the former president of Argentina; (C) a tree.

3. “By the Shores of Gitchee Gumee” is (A) a line of a famous poem by Henry Wadworth Longfellow; (B) the opening line of an oath made famous during the time of Oliver Cromwell (“By the shores of Gitchee Gumee, by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin, by all that is holy, curfew shall not ring tonight.”) ; (C) a satirical novel by Tama Janowitz about the Slivenowiczes, a trailer park trash family who are forced to leave their home in a polluted swamp area in upstate New York (as Maud claims on p. 194 of the hardcover version) and who beg, steal and borrow their way across the United States until they end up in Hollywood. The characters’ hyper-intelligent witty repartee, reminiscent of New Yorkers in a Tama Janowitz novel, highlights the tragedy of the family’s social and economic descent. The first person narrator of the novel is 19-year-old Maud Slivenowicz, whose major source of knowledge is Reader’s Digest. Her mother, Evangeline, has five children by five different deadbeat fathers. Without a regular income, the Slivenowicz family dream of becoming movie stars, and at the end of the book it seems one of Maud’s brothers might actually be given a role in a television commercial.

4. Speaking of the shores of Gitche Gumee, why did Hiawatha wear a toupee?

5. Which of the following is an example of trochaic tetrameter?

A.
By the shores of Gitche Gumee,
By the shining Big-Sea-Water,
Stood the wigwam of Nokomis,
Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis.
Dark behind it rose the forest,
Rose the black and gloomy pine-trees,
Rose the firs with cones upon them;
Bright before it beat the water,
Beat the clear and sunny water,
Beat the shining Big-Sea-Water.

B.
Not far from the great Pacific,
Snug within the Gate called Golden,
By the Hill called Telegraph,
Near the Mission of Dolores,
Close by the Valley of St. Ann’s,
San Francisco rears its mansions,
Rears its palaces and churches;
Built of timber, bricks, and mortar,
Built on hills and built in valleys,
Built in Beelzebubbian splendor,
Stands the city San Francisco.

C.
From his shoulder Hiawatha
Took the camera of rosewood,
Made of sliding, folding rosewood;
Neatly put it all together.
In its case it lay compactly,
Folded into nearly nothing;
But he opened out the hinges
Till it looked all squares and oblongs,
Like a complicated figure
In the Second Book of Euclid.

6. Phnom Penh is (A) the sister of actor Sean Penh; (B) the five times great-granddaughter of English explorer William Penh, who invented Quaker State Motor Oil; (C) a city in Cambogia.

7. True or false: Most ginkgos cannot blink, but they often lick their eyes to keep them clean and moist.

Look for answers in my next post.