March 19, 2006

Quiz time

Who is John Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum? What is his connection to Alfred Hitchcock? What is his connection to David Duke?

No Google/Wiki.

***

I completely forgot that a couple of weeks ago, I had this in a post titled Funeral procession:
    Alkaid, Mizar, Alioth, Megrez, Phecda, Merak and Dubhe.

    What am I talking about?

    Bonus #1: Why are Merak and Dubhe useful?

    Bonus #2: At least two things are special about Mizar. What are they?

    Bonus #3: Why does this post have that title?
Answers: as Akshay and Venu pointed out there, these are the stars in Ursa Major (the Great Bear).

Why are Merak and Dubhe useful? Because they are the pointers to Polaris, the North Star.

At least two things are special about Mizar. What are they? One, Mizar It has a companion star called Alcor; together, they make a good test of normal vision. If you are able to tell them apart with the naked eye, your eyes are in good shape. Two, Mizar itself is a double star, in fact the first known one, discovered in 1650.

Better still, each of those double stars is itself a double; thus Mizar is a quadruple star, and the quartet has Alcor as a companion.

Why does this post have that title? Because various people have seen the constellation as such, its motion around Polaris reminding them of a funeral procession.

This constellation is, as Venu also points out, called Saptarishi in India.

4 comments:

zap said...

Mothe Borglum was the sculptor who created Mt. Rushmore.
David Duke runs a KKK group. Was Borglum a KKK member??
Cant figure the Hitchcock connection, unless he made a movie on Borglum. That is a wild guess though.

Sunil said...

According to a PBS documentary, John Borglum was the man behind the Mt. Rushmore statues. But his connection to Duke was not at Rushmore, but at stone mountain, Georgia (where he started off carving a bust of Robert Lee, thanks to the Daughters of the Confideracy). It was in Stonemountain that Borglum became associated with the Ku Klux Klan. So, i'm assuming that's the Duke connection.

I don't know what connection he has to Alfred Hitchcock, unless it's the "Three investigator" books i used to lap up as a kid. I think Jupiter, Pete and Bob end up in either Rushmore or Stone mountain in one of the novels. And as we all know.....these books were famous for the foreword by Hitchcock.

(please don't tell me Hitchcock was a klan member. that will make me extremely sad).

kuffir said...

didn't one of hitchcock movies end with a climax on mt.rushmore? i think it was north by northwest.

Taruna said...

Gutzon Borglum was the famed sculptor behind the Mt.Rushmore Wall of President faces. He was a prominent member of Ku Klux Klan. David Duke was a leader of the Klansman.

I guess Hitchcock is related to Borglum via the climax scene of North to Northwest (Cary Grant movie).