No, Not THAT One, The Other One! Quiz

Answer: Playing cricket for England

Of course this is not the Julius Caesar who conquered Gaul, became dictator of Rome and began the line of Roman emperors. This question is about Julius Caesar (1830 - 1878) who played 194 first-class matches for Surrey and England. He was a member of the first ever overseas tour for an English side when he joined the England cricket team which visited the US and Canada in 1859.

Answer: Snooker

Not Arthur Neville Chamberlain, the British prime-minister who signed the Munich agreement with Adolf Hitler in 1938 and declared that he had achieved "peace in our time". The man in question is actually Sir Neville Francis Fitzgerald Chamberlain (1856-1944), British Army officer in India and later Inspector-General of the Royal Irish Constabulary.

Chamberlain claimed that he invented the game in 1875 by introducing coloured balls to billiards in the officer's mess of the 11th Devonshire Regiment in Jabalpur, India. Allegedly, the word 'snooker', meaning a wet-behind-the-ears new recruit, was originally used as an insult. When a player missed a shot, Chamberlain exclaimed "Why, you're a regular snooker!" When the player took offense, Chamberlain calmed him down by saying that all of them were still "snookers at the game" as it was so new.

Answer: Winston Churchill

Winston Churchill (1871-1947) was an American novelist whose novels, including 'Richard Carvel' (1899), 'The Crisis' (1901) and 'The Crossing' (1904), sold millions.

As the other Winston Churchill, the British wartime Prime Minister, was also a writer, their books sometimes get mixed up. The British Churchill wrote to his American namesake saying that he would sign his books "Winston S. Churchill" in future to avoid confusion.

Answer: Homer Simpson

Nathanael West's 1939 novel, "Day of the Locust" offered a dark and cynical view of 1930s Hollywood through the lives of a group of characters whose dreams hadn't worked out. One of the main characters was a hapless businessman named Homer Simpson. John Schlesinger directed the film adaptation in 1975, with Donald Sutherland playing the part of Simpson.

Answer: The first black settler in Washington State

Not President George Walker Bush but George Washington Bush (1779-1863), soldier, trapper and pioneer. In 1844, Bush, in a party of six families, travelled west from Missouri along the Oregon Trail. On finding that Oregon had just passed laws preventing black people from owning land, the party headed north and established a settlement named Bush Prairie in what is now Tumwater, Washington.

Answer: 'Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery' and 'Halloween'

Apart from their name, there is little similarity between Michael Myers, the expressionless serial killer of 'Halloween' and Mike Myers, the Canadian comic behind Austin Powers, Wayne Campbell in 'Wayne's World' and the voice of the grumpy ogre Shrek.

'Halloween' was released in 1978 when Mike was 15 years old. I wonder if this prompted him to be a class joker to avoid any comparison with his namesake.

Answer: Socrates

Okay, so the original Socrates (470BC - 399BC) may be considered one of the greatest of the Greek thinkers and the founder of western philosophy but I bet he couldn't do a back-heel pass like his Brazilian namesake.

Sócrates Brasileiro Sampaio de Souza Vieira de Oliveira (born 1954), usually just known as Sócrates, appeared 60 times for the Brazilian national team, scoring 22 goals. Unusually for a soccer player, he is also quite an intellectual. He has a doctorate in philosophy and is also a doctor of medicine.

Answer: He invented a process for mass-producing instant coffee.

Many Americans have been named after their first president but George Constant Louis Washington (1871-1946) was actually born in Belgium and did not move to the USA until 1897. He tried several business ventures, including cattle ranching and making kerosene lamps, but his most successful business venture was the G. Washington Coffee Refining Company, founded in 1910, which mass-produced instant coffee using a process he invented. The success of the company was assured with the massive demand from the army during the First World War. The G. Washington coffee brand was discontinued in 1961 but you may still be able to find G. Washington's Seasoning & Broth on sale in America.

The first American cinema was opened by Mitchell and Moe Mark in Buffalo, NY in 1896. Dental floss was invented by Levi Spear Parmly in 1815 in New Orleans. Spam email was invented by Satan in the lowest pit of hell.

Answer: Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon (1561-1626) had been an important statesman before the intrigues of the English court forced him to retire from politics and he turned to philosophy. He laid the groundwork for experimental science by asserting that philosophers must always begin with facts and build up to laws rather than trying to deduce the nature of the world by pure logic. He put this into practice himself and on one snowy day in April 1626, Bacon decided to try an experiment of stuffing a dead chicken with snow to see if the cold would preserve the meat for longer. He died of pneumonia three days later.

The artist Francis Bacon (1909-1992), a distant relative of the philosopher, was one of the most important British artists of the twentieth century. He was known for his nightmarish paintings of grotesque distorted figures.

Lucian Freud and Damian Hirst are modern-day artists while Thomas Hobbes was another 17th century philosopher and friend of Francis Bacon. He was with him when he had the bright idea about the chicken experiment.

Answer: Excuse Me (1915)

This is not, of course, the Harrison Ford born in 1942, who achieved fame with such roles as Han Solo and Indiana Jones. This is the other Harrison Ford, the famous silent movie actor who was a leading man in dozens of films in the 1920s. Like a number of other stars of the silent era, the advent of the 'talkies' in the 1930s marked the end of his film career.

The second Harrison Ford had not heard of his namesake when he arrived in Hollywood dreaming of making it as an actor, so he was astonished to find his name already on a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

The other three films were all big successes in their day. 'In Old California', directed by D. W. Griffith, was the first movie shot in Hollywood. 'The Mark of Zorro' was a swashbuckling adventure with Douglas Fairbanks. 'Cobra' starred Rudolf Valentino.