The Wednesday Quiz: Why yes, it HAS been working out!

Returning from its sojourn in Australia looking relaxed, fit, and trim, it's:

...now with no fussy scoring system!  And no prizes!  Except the thrill of applying your knowledge, intuition, inductive reasoning, and willingness to risk public embarrassment in a friendly and moderately supportive environment!!

Ready?  Here goes!  Answers come out on Friday!

1. He was a key figure in the development of Vienese classical music -- the stuff we generally call "classical music" -- writing dozens of successful operas and including guys like Schubert, Beethoven, and Liszt on his list of students. But his music all but disappeared from the late 1800s to the late 1900s. Who are we talking about here?

2. What is the word that means: "A figure or trope by which a part of a thing is put for the whole, the whole for a part, the species for the genus, the genus for the species, or the name of the material for the thing made"?

3.

We are of course in _______________.


4. From the Wiki: He was born in 1878 to a cobbler in the town of Gori. At the age of seven, he contracted smallpox, which permanently scarred his face. At ten, he began attending church school where the Georgian children were forced to speak Russian. By the age of twelve, two horse-drawn carriage accidents left his left arm permanently damaged. At sixteen, he received a scholarship to a Georgian Orthodox seminary; though he performed well there, he was expelled in 1899 after missing his final exams.

Who is this famous guy?

5. What is this city?

6. What book does this passage come from?

People aren't supposed to look back. I'm certainly not going to do it anymore. I've finished my war book now. The next one I write is going to be fun. This one is a failure, and had to be, since it was written by a pillar of salt. It begins like this: "Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time." It ends like this: "Poo-tee-weet?"

7. Policies privilaging the majority language and religion of this country -- Sinhala and Bhuddism -- led to three decades of civil war that killed 100,000 people and displaced far more. Recently, things seem to have calmed down.

8. Why, it's the flag of __________!

9. Introduced in the 1980s, this class of drugs has become the best-selling pharmaceutical product in history. By dramatically reducing the mortality rate from heart disease, they have substantially increased life expectancy, thus making big trouble for healthcare and pension funding wherever they are used.

10. A 1994 drama set in the state of Maine, it initially performed sluggishly at the box office but subsequently became incredibly popular largely by word of mouth. It has been at or near the top of the Internet Movie Database's fan-generated list of best movies of all time since the late 1990s.

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The tie-breaker: How many major world cities -- with a population over 2 million say -- can you think of that start with this week's letter?

Go ahead!  Give it a try!  Put your answers in the comments!