Procol Harum

Beyond
the Pale

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Christmas Quizzes 2017–2018

Question of the Day (solved): 5 January


Useful resources
 
  Henry Spinetti | BJ Wilson | Trades Descriptions Act | Procol 40th Party | Bootlegs | 2007 gigs
 
Tonight's topic is   Ah … we now have the tracklisting for the dodgy CD mentioned the other day

 

... so tonight's 'questions' are actually suggested wordings – lines of attack, if you like – that can be used by the judge who will preside over the inevitable lawsuit.
 
The answer is of course   'We are guilty as charged, your Honour'
 

Choose the question below that is most applicable to the answer above. Make a note of the Question Number
 
Q12a
 
 


Are you aware that you have violated the Trades Descriptions Act, either deliberately or accidentally, in that Missing Persons – the Brooker/Reid song, not the Brooker solo song of almost the same title – was only ever performed at BtP's 40th Birthday Party for Procol Harum in MMVII, and never heard again in live concerts, especially not on the MMXVII tour?
'Missing Persons' was not played only at the BtP party ... it had several more airings in 2007. Even if you confused it with the similarly titled 'Missing Person', which is a different song, you'd conclude that this can't be the correct question

 

Q12b  


Do you admit that you have circulated an illegal CD whose music consists of Henry Spinetti playing drum solos over original BJ Wilson percussion tracks that have been extracted – without the written permission of the owner of the material – from the original recordings of each song specified?
Without hearing the CD – which needless to say does not exist – you would not be able to tell whether or not it consists entirely of drumming. But Clearly BJ Wilson was not the original drummer on some of the tracks specified, so there's a glaring fault in the question, which renders it ineligible

 

Q12c  

How can you and your associates have omitted to credit Procol Harum on this bootleg CD? I put it to you that your thinking is simply that ‘Procol Harum’ has an LAV [LAVs are Line-Average Values: work these out for each line by assigning a numerical value to each letter in the line (a=1, b=2, etc), adding those values up, and dividing the result by the number of letters in the line … for example, ‘dog’ > 4+15+7 = 26, divided by 3 = 8.666 … which is therefore the LAV] that contains a decimal, whereas your deluded reasoning was that every line printed on the artwork should have an LAV that is a whole number, an integer; this idiotic principle underlies not just the extremely perverse and unsatisfactory choice of songs, but also the irrelevant people – known mononymically, by their surnames – who are depicted

 

You may not feel like tackling the arithmetic, but all this stuff is TRUE. We can't think of any more Procol titles, or Procol players, whose names have whole-number average values when their letters have been converted into numbers. The people on the CD are Teller, Chaplin, Putin, Kafka and Marx (not Brahms!): their surnames also share the curious property mentioned above. In any event, since Q12a and Q12b are transparently bogus, this must the correct question for the answer given ... guilty as charged.

 


Good news ... you've done all the thinking, and all you need to do now is find your way to the tiny small exiguous little miniature answer that's going to put one of our fab prizes within your grasp. So please click here for the Final Instruction
 


Back to the how-to-play page for the 2017 'Beyond the Pale' Christmas puzzles | For the final, thirteenth instruction ... click here

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