4. ANSWER Lily Ledbetter, after whom the recent Ledbetter Act guaranteeing fair pay for women is named. Barack Obama is seen affixing his signature to the legislation.
6. ANSWER To quote Salon Magazine “ Air Force Lt. Col. David Hanson takes a phone call from a Florida child Friday at NORAD's Santa Tracking Operations Center near Colorado Springs, Colo., where operators take as many as 80,000 phone calls each year. The exercise began in 1955 when a Colorado Springs newspaper ad invited kids to talk to Santa on a hotline. The phone number had a typo, and dozens of kids wound up dialing the Continental Aerospace Defense Command in Colorado Springs, the predecessor to NORAD. The officers on duty played along and began passing along reports on Santa's progress. It's now a cherished and elaborate ritual, staffed by volunteers and supported by some of the nation's largest technology companies. ”
8. ANSWER Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong The film Chungking Express takes its English title from the fact that one half of the film is shot here. The Express bit comes from Midnight Express, the takeaway joint where the romance between Faye Wong and Leslie Cheung takes off.
10. ANSWER Wormstone , at Down House, where Charles Darwin lived . Darwin used changes in the level of this stone as a way of measuring the activity of earthworms in the ground below. His son Horace was involved in the project and reconstructed the device in adult life.
12. ANSWER The Three Stooges riding a Cushman motor scooter . The Americans took these scooters along to Italy in WW II in order to deal with a landscape where bombing had left roads and bridges unusable for heavier transport. Said to be a primary inspiration for Corradino D’Ascanio’s Vespa design .
23. ANSWER Vincent Villafranca’s design for the Ray Bradbury Award for Excellence in Screenwriting alludes to his work as well as to the IBM Selectric typewriter on which he hammered out many of his books.
27. ANSWER This is the British Museum. The illustrator Joshua Armitage took the pseudonym Ionicus from the Ionic pillars in the first cartoon he ever submitted to Punch. Remembered in India for the delightful cover illustrations he provided for PG Wodehouse in paperback. Ionically, the British Museum figures here only because of its pillars.
29. ANSWER Stephen Colbert proposed that all tweets should be renamed gurgles in tribute to the oil-soaked birds affected by the BP oil spill. “ in honor of oil-soaked birds, 'tweets' are now 'gurgles. http:// bit.ly/cIhZNf “
30. 11. Hidey-hole offering a shape metaphor. Whose head did it land on? (2)
31. ANSWER Pill-boxes of the World War era, named because they resembled such objects. Pillbox Hats, popularised by Jackie Kennedy, owe their name to these thingies.
37. ANSWER The Twins Festival. It is held on the first full weekend of August each year (that's 7th-9th August for 2009) in the city of Twinsburg, Ohio, 30 miles south of Cleveland. The town was named after identical twin brothers, Moses and Aaron Wilco, who settled there in 1819.
38. 15. Ritual from where. What small addition was incorporated in 2007? (3)
39. ANSWER The Funeral of the Sardine, part of the Tenerife Carnaval . The papier-mache object is accompanied by a raucous crowd of cross-dressing men representing the widows of the sardine. Some residents protested and got the courts to ban the practice for noise pollution in 2006. In 2007, participants burned an effigy of the lawyer who represented those irate folk along with the sardine.
40. 16. What record comprises Vietnam, Tajikistan, Russia, Pakistan, North Korea, Nepal, Myanmar, Mongolia, Laos, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, India, Bhutan and Afghanistan? Shared with whom?(2)
41. ANSWER China , which shares borders with 14 countries . The only country with an equal number is Russia .
42. 17. The set W came up with X inspired by, according to differing accounts, the behaviour of drying shirts and scraps of paper. Tested using three non-humans. The set Y came up with Z (aided by their capacity to combine silk and rubber) a few weeks later. Z was perhaps more easy to use and won adopters in several countries. ID W,X, Y and Z. (4)
43. ANSWER W– The Montgolfier Brothers X-- Hot-air Balloon Y– Jacques Charles, Nicolas Robert Z—Hydrogen Balloon
44. 18. Behead one attributed to the master and all you will have is/are a foot/feet? Behead another rediscovered in 1904 and the remainder is science. Behead a third to hold a thread Put the heads together to arrive at a calendar guy’s contribution. Explain why there are only three. (5)
47. ANSWER The Rev. Chad Varah (L) set up a suicide helpline called The Samaritans . The author Monica Dickens set up the American chapter and even wrote a novel about the organisation titled The Listeners.
