At a table quiz in Dublin the other night, questions included this: “Who was the first woman on the moon?” Cue mild consternation as most teams re-examined their certainty that no female anywhere had yet achieved such a distinction.
Was it a trick question, we wondered? Had it happened in a film? Could one of the actual male astronauts of half a century ago have undergone gender reassignment since and self-identified retrospectively as a woman trapped in a man’s spacesuit?
Or was it possible that the question setters were just deluded? And if so, should we second-guess their misinformation and answer accordingly?
This does happen in quizzes. I did one in a GAA club once, for example, where it became clear after a round or two that the quizmaster was working off an old set of questions, some of them outdated.
Councillor Claus of Alaska – Alison Healy on the other Santa
A rebate Christmas – Alison Healy on the surprising ways people spend their time on the big day
Name Shame – Frank McNally on the continuing tragedy of the forename “Kevin” and a bad night for “Shamrock” in London
Kiss of Death? – Frank McNally on the rise and fall of mistletoe
That was circa 2007 and to one of his questions – how many member states are there in the EU? – the correct answer was 27.
But being anoraks, we had worked out that in the quizmaster’s world, it was still 2006 at the latest and Romania and Bulgaria hadn’t acceded yet. So we put down “25″, which was the right wrong answer.
The winners’ prize for that quiz, by the way, was a set of actual anoraks. I wore mine with pride for years.
At this latest quiz, we were tempted to put down “Valentina Tereshkova”, who was the first woman in space, although a long way from the moon. Instead, in the end we said “nobody”. And there followed even greater consternation when the correct answer was said to be “Christina Koch”.
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But lo! It had indeed been a trick question. Or more precisely, it had been a “Mountweazel”, a subject itself worthy of quiz-question status.
The name derives from Lillian Virginia Mountweazel (1942-1973), an American photographer who specialised in picture essays about New York city buses, the cemeteries of Paris, and rural American mailboxes.
Tragically, she died in an explosion when on assignment for the ominously named Combustibles magazine, aged only 31. But on a more cheerful note, she had never existed, except as a fake entry planted in the New Columbia Encyclopedia, to expose plagiarists who might lift the material wholesale.
Our quiz-mistress, a woman named Fiona, had warned earlier that there would be a Mountweazel planted among her questions to expose surreptitious research. Now the trap was sprung.
Several of the 40-odd teams had answered Christina Koch correctly, perhaps after consulting ChatGPT and getting a truncated version of the truth, which is that Koch will be part of a Nasa lunar mission (though not a moon landing) in 2025. They were all disqualified.
Great was the righteousness in other parts of the room. For those of us who had tried to keep our anoraks clean during the long, dark era when smartphones were doing to our sport what EPO had done to professional cycling, this was a biblical smiting. Among the sinners, meanwhile, there was weeping and gnashing of teeth.
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By a strange lunar coincidence, I received an email from graphic artist Bernie Sexton recently asking if I might mention a publication she and others have prepared, aimed at the Christmas gift market. This wouldn’t normally be diary material, except that it is a diary/journal, for women.
And it’s called – of all things – Moon Mná, combining as it does lunar phases for every day of 2025, accompanied by inspiring stories, craft projects, and self-care rituals on a related theme. Now in its ninth edition, the journal is priced at €20, from moonmna.store. I’m told it might make a charming present for the women in your life.
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Getting back to the quiz, my team was looking very good for a while. After a slow start we had climbed to second place by the interval. Then we went outside for fresh air, to regather our thoughts – and our command of useless information – for the second half.
There was an almost full moon – “waxing gibbous” is the technical term, I think – shining, And I knew that by this weekend it would be what native Americans call the “Beaver” Moon. Gazing at it, I also remembered in passing that the name of a former neighbour of my parents was up there somewhere.
Known locally as Benny Callan, he emigrated to the US in 1928 and became a space engineer, working on the Apollo 11 mission and so gaining the right to have his name inscribed alongside others on a plaque left behind on the Sea of Tranquility.
I knew a nephew of his, Mickey Birdy, well. But I never heard the story until it featured some years ago in the RTÉ radio documentary entitled, with only slight overstatement: “The man in the moon’s from Carrickmacross.”
Alas, none of this helped during the second half of the quiz. If anything, the interval air seemed to have a deleterious effect on our brains. Or maybe it was the lunar waxing that caused a tragic loss of focus. Whatever the cause, like a 20th-century space rocket, we crashed and burned on re-entry.