Mt Whitney Zone Forums The Chat Room What In The World Happened Here?

The skeptics will say, "Inconceivable!
The OEDILF, in a word: unbelievable!"
But I'm feeling secure
If we only endure
It's a goal that is wholly achievable.

(Chris J. Strolin), from the OEDILF.

No valid answer as yet. Are you all still stumped?

Whoa, Nellie! I've been there but not often enough to be accused of a monomaniacal fixation. Did something actually happen there?

You're telling me that the Olympic business plus Eddy Merckx is not valid? Man, you're tough.

OK, I give up on the velodrome. Moving to the foreground, is Louis de Broglie involved?

You are clearly still stumped.

for the record, de Broglie was a really unique guy and is buried in that picture.

Do I really have to go back to that velodrome? And do we have to drag cricket into this?

Cricket was an Olympic sport exactly one time, at the Paris non-Olympics of 1900. The British played the French and, of course, the French did not win. They got slaughtered. The Brits did not win gold medals because there weren't any. They got models of the Eiffel Tower.

Now, that's unique.

What In The World Happened Here? LXXVII (97):

Given our recurring themes of really big explosions, Nobel Prizes, floods, cemeteries, HHGTTG and cricket - this should have been a full toss.

I had better recuse myself because I was planning on posting on that area at some point. It all started around 50 years ago.

That would level the playing field!

Back then on Saturday nights - it was n 1 n a 2... Did Welk ever get a Nobel Prize?

Hungarian = Edward Teller

Is that a Klew?

only if you read Welk backwards,
but somehow I don't think we are talking about champagne bubbles here, are we?

Yeah, it was too easy. But at least it has some relationship to WhitneyZone. I guess the sage / desert landscape surrounding an oasis with so many cars is pretty easy to identify.

AlanK wrote: Whoa, Nellie! I've been there but not often enough to be accused of a monomaniacal fixation. Did something actually happen there?

Only thing is the great food and sometimes fun music too.

I liked this one. My initial reaction was "Owens Valley" -- the terrain is quite similar to that near the Eastern Sierra Interagency Center south of Lone Pine. When that turned out to be obviously wrong, I ran through the Owens Valley in my mind and then headed rapidly north.

This thread is the "What in The World Happened Here" not "What in The World Happens Here".

We'll try to see that it never happens again, Mike.

A lot of the players rest on laurels when they discover "Where".
Not good enough.

This was a good easy post - make it enticing for some of the lurkers to actually come in & play. I'm amazed that Bee didn't jump in, though.

Answer: What In The World Happened Here? XCIII: (93)



This a photo of James Murray in the Scriptorium at Banbury Road.
The Scriptorium was a tin shed where the volunteer's word usage slips were collected in pigeonholes.

This, of course, was the manual method of organizing content for the Oxford English Dictionary.

"According to the publishers, it would take a single person 120 years to 'key in' text to convert it to machine readable form which consists a total of 59 million words of the OED second edition, 60 years to proofread it, and 540 megabytes to store it electronically.[3] As of 30 November 2005, the Oxford English Dictionary contained approximately 301,100 main entries. Supplementing the entry headwords, there are 157,000 bold-type combinations and derivatives; 169,000 italicized-bold phrases and combinations; 616,500 word-forms in total, including 137,000 pronunciations; 249,300 etymologies; 577,000 cross-references; and 2,412,400 usage quotations. The dictionary's latest, complete print edition (Second Edition, 1989) was printed in 20 volumes, comprising 291,500 entries in 21,730 pages."

That's 375 floppy disks.

J. R. R. Tolkien was employed by the OED, researching etymologies of the Waggle to Warlock range.

An odd note: In High School, I accidentally dropped Follow-Hat in the library. It landed exactly flat and sounded like the crack of doom.

I do have two copies, the First & Second Editions. The Second is on CD and doesn't hurt my back at all.

And, finally, the book "The Professor and the Madman" (AKA The Surgeon of Crowthorne") is a great read.

Answer: What In The World Happened Here? XCV: (95)



There is a body of opinion that a cricketer actually hit the clock (that would be a Sixer). Probably an Urban Legend.

Given the Soccer Riot deaths in Egypt, my first thought was that "Cricket Riot" would return zero Google entries. Millions of results for "Soccer Riot", but the riot at the SGC at the 4th International Test was a surprise for me. And I traveled past the SGC most every day on the way to UNSW.

The obligatory wiki is here.

Of note is that one Umpire was Edmund Barton, who later became the first Prime Minister of Australia. He was a good bloke, and makes me think that "Umpire" is a better qualification for high political office than "Lawyer".

Also present - a rioter! was Banjo Patterson, who wrote "Waltzing Matilda".

The lesson here is to not pick a footballer to umpire cricket.

Finally, the top 5 riots in Australia.