Every industry has its own jargon and the rag trade is no exception. Puzzler Rose Riordan recently wrote to say she was flicking through a clothing catalogue and realised she needed a dictionary to work out what was on offer.
I see what she means. I picked up a current catalogue, and read ‘marled cable [more…]
When we hear the story of the Tasmanian teenager who met the 33 year old State Minister for Education when she was only 15 and married him two years later, we feel this could be a partnership doomed to failure in the future. Yet this particular couple went on to have 12 children and [more…]
Hot on the heels of Tasty Trivia comes Royal Fever …
With the upcoming wedding of William & Kate on April 29, Royal Fever is upon us. But how much do you really know about royalty?
YouPlay.com, the online gaming arm of Lovatts Interactive, has released Royal Fever Trivia, an iPhone App containing over 900 [more…]
Nearly all the words associated with the classical music world come from the ancient Greek language, with a few Roman terms thrown in.
In the days of ancient Greece, the earliest form of drama was a series of odes, sung and danced by a chorus directly in front of the stage. This area became known [more…]
Wills and Kate
“When I am king, dilly, dilly, you shall be queen..” as the song goes. Titles of kings and queens sometimes crop up as crossword clues, so here’s some royal trivia.William and Kate will be tying the knot this month and her surname will officially be Windsor. Kate will be known as [more…]
Regardless of what some people might say, our computer is simply another source of reference. It’s no different to any other, whether it be a dictionary, a thesaurus or an encyclopaedia, or whatever, so if I’ve got one and it finds an answer for me, I win, and I learn something new in the [more…]
A Penny For Your Thoughts
Which of the following countries: Algeria, Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, Serbia or Tunisia has the dinar as its currency?
The answer is all of them.
The dinar sometimes crops up in our crosswords, and may be clued as Middle East currency. It comes from the Roman coin denarius which means 10 [more…]
Names of well-known music bands and singers often crop up in crosswords, and the origins of some names are quite interesting.
Uriah Heep is named after an insincere fawning character in Charles Dickens’ novel David Copperfield and the rock band Utopia is named after Thomas More’s 1516 novel, his view of an ideal world.
60s band [more…]
