Feeling too lazy to make up a question today, so just picked up a few from a quiz I did at IITK earlier this year:
1. The Tracey Ullman Show was premiered on the newly launched Fox Television Network in 1987. It was a madcap song-and-dance comedy, featuring a British comedienne named Tracey Ullman as the central character. Guest stars included Keanu Reeves, Kelsey Grammer, Glenn Close and Martin Short. It became the first Fox show to be nominated for five Emmy awards and it won a total of eight, including two for Outstanding Variety, Music or Comedy Program. It was the show that launched Fox network in a big way among the American viewers. On April 17, 1987, it ran a 5-minute short entitled “Good Night”, which received favourable reviews. The director of the Tracey Ullman Show decided that the short was good enough to become a show on its own. What did this result in?
2. "Not a Nice Man to Know" was a talk show anchored by Khuswant Singh on Star plus 2 years ago. It seemed to go well, but was pulled off the air after a few episodes for a strange reason - guests were unwilling to appear on the show. Why?
3. Long before he appeared on a famous magazine's cover in January 1955, he appeared in several ads for dentists in the 1800's. People who have appeared with him on the cover range from Batman to Jerry Seinfeld. He has jug ears, a missing front tooth and one eye higher than the other. He has a girlfriend named Moxie Cowznofwski, and even ran for President in 1960! Identify this famous fictional character.
4. This was a Greek island in the Aegean, off the coast of Asia Minor. Its inhabitants were primarily female, with its most famous inhabitant being a (female) poet called Sappho. Today, a Sapphic poem is a poem with a stanza of three lines, of five or six stresses each, followed by a short line. Apart from this, a word has originated from the name of the island, which is quite common in today's liberal world. This word is also synonymous with a secondary meaning of "sapphic" in some (completely different) context. Identify the island & hence the word.
5. This term referred to (literally, wave man - one who is tossed about, like a wave in the sea) a master-less samurai during the feudal period of Japan that lasted from 1185 to 1868. A samurai became master-less from the ruin or fall of his master, or after the loss of his master's favour or privilege. Identify this term which is also the nickname of a famous software cracker, who published the cheats for Quake III Arena.
Answer to the previous question:
The reference is to Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, of course. The perpetrators were a certain Caleb Schaber and his associates, who innovatively called themselves "Some People".
The clues: Pink Floyd's "Echoes" is supposed to synchronize perfectly with the stargate sequence at the end of the movie and HAL is supposedly named for the preceding letters of IBM (though Arthur C. Clarke denied this).
Incidentally, I agree with Hussain that this is a movie to be watched with lots of patience (it's slow even by Kubrick's standards). Possibly the abstract ending put Sridhar off (as it did me), but that doesn't take away from the greatness of the movie.
Eyes Wide Shut is something entirely different, though. There is this interesting theory that Kubrick wrote a script for a movie about a director who is so revered that even when he makes a pornographic movie, his audiences lap it up. The movie was never made and apparently, Kubrick made EWS as a personal joke. It may not be a true story, but it fits what I think about the movie!