The Online Geography Game
An Alascattalo is what you would get if you crossed a moose with a walrus. This fictional creature is the basis of an annual quirky holiday and parade held on November 21st each year.
The parade lasts about 3 minutes and goes the length of the alleyway behind a bar where the holiday started. Here is a video of the 2017 parade.
Those who found it before the hint included:
And after the hint:
The entire parade route is down the alleyway between the buildings in the center. The holiday celebrates a fictional animal which also has a stony Flora asteroid (discovered in 1926 by Karl Reinmuth) named after it.
This week’s contest involves a holiday on the small island of Sint Eustatius in the Caribbean. The holiday, Statia Day, celebrates an event that occurred on November 16, 1776.
On that day, the ship “Andrew Doria” flying the banner of the newly minted United States sailed towards the anchorage of Fort Oranje in the capital Oranjestad. As she approached, the captain offered a 13 gun salute (one for each state in the new union). The governor of the island responded with 11 guns. Those 2 guns difference were HUGE to the crew of the ship.
In naval tradition at the time, the response to a salute from an approaching ship flying the flag of a sovereign nation would be 2 guns less than the salute. Governor de Graaff’s response indicated that Sint Eustatius recognized the sovereignty of the US, the first foreign entity to do so.
This event is, to this day, referred to as “First Salute” and the observance is called “Statia Day” (Statia is also what the natives call the island). Photos of some of the festivities from this year can be found on the government’s website here
Those who located this island before the hint were:
And after the hint:
Once again, our hints have been the subject of ire for one of our contestants. As such, it has been requested that I explain my reasoning on this particular hint.
The wording of the hint was: “On Monday they celebrated here the anniversary of when 13 was answered by 11, which was the very first recognition of something big.” Since the sentence was past tense, I would have expected someone to glean that “Monday” referred to the day 2 days before the hint posted, i.e. Monday, November 16. From here there were a number of possible paths forward, here is the one I started with.
From the hint, you know it is an anniversary and a celebration. A quick look at the Wikipedia page shows that the entry for “November 16” has a section called “Holidays and Observances”. Within this section, there are 16 links for “Christian Feast Days” and 6 other holidays. The last of the 6 holidays listed is “Statia Day”.
For those of you who absolutely refuse to use Wikipedia, there’s also this. The word “recognition” seems important in the hint. How about googling “November 16 recognition”. The 3rd item down in that search (for me) was Britannica’s article on that day of the year, and it includes a blurb on “Statia Day”.
My point is this: Our hints are not designed to hold your hand and lead you directly to the spot. We fully expect you to bring some critical thinking skills to the party. My understanding of our amazing and incredibly talented user base is that you would want that as well. In fact, I suspect that many of you would stop playing if we dumbed down the game to feed the ego of one or two users, and we simply refuse to do so.
The user in question has been invited to stop playing if that is a problem for them, yet they continue to berate us for “stupid” hints that are “impossible”.
This will be our last response to them, and I fully apologize to those of you who had to sit through this.
On Monday they celebrated here the anniversary of when 13 was answered by 11, which was the very first recognition of something big.
Wow, very first contest in a new series, and I messed up the hint. Yes, Martin de Bock, you are absolutely right, I did mean “Saturday”!!
Ferenc Erkel, Hungary’s most famous opera composer, was born on November 7, 1810. This building was named after Erkel in 1953, and underwent significant renovations between 2007 and 2013. To celebrate the reopening of the theater, Erkel’s birthday was declared A Magyar Opera Napja (Hungarian Opera Day).
The holiday, which occurred last Saturday is marked with special opera performances here and throughout Hungary and awards presentations for Hungarian opera performers.
According to Wikipedia (and perhaps Horváth (hhgygy) can give us some indication as to what this means and whether or not it is true), “It is traditional for a man to buy flowers on Hungarian Opera Day for a woman returning to work soon.”
If anyone missed the contest because I made the mistake, let us know in the comments of this post, and we’ll award you 1 point (since it was in the hint).
Those who found the site, all before the bad hint included:
This last Sunday was a holiday that is all about this site, what happens here, and the man for whom the building is named.
In 1944, traveling circuses would waterproof their canvas tents with a paraffin mixture dissolved in gasoline. While an extremely effective waterproofing recipe, it was also a recipe for disaster.
Such a disaster happened on July 6, 1944, in Hartford. There is some confusion as to whether the fire was started by a carelessly tossed cigarette or was deliberately started, but once the fire caught hold, it spread very quickly.
Once the ringleader realized that a fire had started, he told the band to play “Stars and Stripes Forever”, which is a universally understood signal among circus workers of an emergency. The ringleader started to announce that the crowd should calmly leave the tent, but the power went out as he started. Instead of a calm, orderly evacuation, panic ensued once the audience started to smell smoke. Of the 169 who died, over half were found in piles near the exit, trampled or asphyxiated under layers and layers of other victims.
The best-known victim and face of the tragedy was “Little Miss 1565”. The body of this young girl, approximately 5 or 6 years old, was never claimed and was eventually buried in an unnamed grave. In 1991, Connecticut state officials concluded that the girl was Eleanor Emily Cook and re-interred her in a grave next to Eleanor’s brother who had also died in the fire. However, Eleanor’s mother, when shown the picture, denied that this was her daughter, and there are a number of unresolved issues with the identification (e.g. Eleanor had brown hair, while Little Miss 1565 had blond hair).
Those who found this site before the hint:
And after the hint:
And thus ends this thoroughly depressing disaster series. Apparently, there are a lot of you WOGErs who are good at tracking down disaster sites, because we had a record number of perfect scores this series. Congrats to Garfield, hhgygy, Eloy Cano, Phil Ower, Paul Voestermans, Martin de Bock and Lighthouse. A close second to Kirbatian Jacob with 18, and thoughts for the recovery of his nation, family, and friends following the Aegean Sea Earthquake last Saturday.
The next series will be more upbeat (and with a much smaller death count).