Max Foy's Mad April Prize Competition - Results!

Thank you very much for the excellent response to the photo competition – I got a total of 37 entries, which is (by far) the best ever.

The standard was really very good indeed – I am most impressed. Just about everyone placed the camera within a few kilometres of the actual spot. The most common causes of lost marks were (1) being a bit short on gratuitous artistic content, and (2) making no attempt at the question about dying at this location. The more accurate the identification of the actual place the better, obviously. Thanks again for all the effort that went into this.

The photograph was taken in Italy, near the top of the footpath from Sorrento up to Sant’Agata sui due Golfi – the bit of roadway in the foreground is part of the Via Talagnano, just below Sant’Agata itself. We are looking very slightly east of due north, over the town of Sorrento, straight across the Bay of Naples towards Vesuvius. The pale line below the volcano is the sprawl of the suburbs of Naples – Torre del Greco and Torre Annunziata – along to the left is Naples itself. Since you can just about see Naples from this point, it seems logical that it would be just about OK to die up here – see Naples and die – vedi Napoli e poi muori.

There were some interesting references to people dying during the Pompei disaster, to the local Sirens, and – especially – the ancient Greek necropolis on the hills near St Agata, which was subsequently buried under the convent of Il Deserto. However, I was simply looking for the Naples quote.

I offer my humble compliments to all who entered - it took a good while to sort out a finishing order. After much head scratching and chewing of my pencil I decided - and it wasn't easy! - that eight of the entries were sufficiently outstanding to form the final list of prize winners. I have email addresses for some of you anyway, but could the following fine fellows please send me a blog comment (if you didn’t already enter by email!) stating your current/preferred email address – I shan’t publish these, obviously, and will delete them after perusal – you may encrypt the address as you wish – assuming I can still work it out!

1^st – Chris Grice

2^nd – Michael Peterson

3^rd – Steve-the-Wargamer

4^th – nundanket

5^th – Steve Curry

6^th – Gary Amos

7^th – Wellington Man

8^th – Francisco Goya

I’ll contact each of you in turn, listing the prize lots which are still available and asking you to make a choice from what’s left. This may take a week or two, but that gives me a chance to get my collection of boxes and bubblewrap sorted out.

Thanks again – over to you.

Max Foy's Mad April Prize Competition - Update

This is just to thank everyone who has submitted an entry for the photo-quiz (I've had a great response this time), and to remind anyone who wishes to have a go and hasn't done so yet that the closing date is 23:00 UK Summer time tomorrow (17th April) - also please remember that you must be an official follower or regular email correspondent of this blog to enter, and if you wish to enter for glory only, and are not interested in the prize lots, please say so, and you can be entered in Category B.

No supplementary clues were required this year, though I can confirm that the place in the photo is neither Scarborough nor Gallipoli. You see me above, considering the excellent submissions to date - great fun.

Max Foy's Mad April Prize Competition

It’s been a while since I had a clear-out, so here’s Max Foy’s Mad April Prize Competition. If you can bear it, I’ve gone once again for the photo-detectives format, which has produced a lot of entertainment (for me, anyway) on previous occasions.

First of all, then, here’s the quiz photo. The photo is one of mine, so you won’t find it on Google Image. It was taken in midsummer, in Europe, at about 11:15am, after a fairly strenuous walk up through woods from the town below.

Please, what can you see, and from where was this photo taken (as exactly as you can make it)? Also (and importantly), in a sense, why is it just about all right to die up here?

As ever, I shall judge entries on a totally unfair, subjective basis, and many marks will be available for humour, unnecessary detail and implausible stories – a hilarious incorrect answer is quite likely to score as highly as a glib one-liner giving the correct GPS reference.

The Goodies (I hope this lot is interesting…)

Books

Lot 1 – Signed Copy of Bernard Cornwell’s “Waterloo” – mint

Lot 2 – “Out of Nowhere – A History of the Military Sniper” – Martin Pegler – minor shelf wear, otherwise perfect, clean copy

Lot 3 – “The Sleepwalkers” - Prof Chris Clark’s highly-praised account of the political slide into WW1 – pretty much mint

Lot 4 – Michael Glover’s “The Napoleonic Wars” (exc cond) plus John Keegan’s “Mask of Command” (a little brown around the edges, but decent nick).

Lot 5 – “The Smoke and the Fire” by John Terraine plus John Foley’s “The Boilerplate War” – both in vgc.

Lot 6 – Biographies – Vincent Cronin’s “Napoleon” (goodish cond) plus a paperback edition (vgc) of “The Green Dragoon” by Robert D Bass, an (American!) bio of Bloody Ban Tarleton, the notorious Scouse cavalryman

Lot 7 – Alternative Napoleonic History – David Hamilton-Williams’ two much-criticised works – “Waterloo – New Perspectives” (hbk vgc) and “The Fall of Napoleon – the Final Betrayal” (pbk – vgc). Too much has been said about the mystery surrounding the true identity of DHW, his credentials and his tendency to quote himself as a source. These books are very entertainingly written, provide some challenging interpretations of the history, and – let’s face it – say some things which needed to be said. Keep the salt handy, but these are great fun – don’t make them your standard references, though.

Toys & Games

Lot 8 – A good little Spanish boardgame - "2 de Mayo" (about the 1808 revolt in Madrid) – complete and in exc cond – plus a toy bus(!) – all right, this is the wrong scale for my collection, but a lovely 1/50 1950s-style Corgi Leyland Tiger in Ribble colours (NW England) – complete with COA – the model is mint, the box a little distressed.

Lot 9 – “The Hunters” – excellent Consim Press game about WW2 U-Boat warfare – punched, but complete and in perfect cond.

Lot 10 – “Empire” Napoleonic wargame system (1^st edition? – 1990 anyway) plus the companion “Empire Campaign System” – both complete and unpunched, boxes a little scuffed at the edges.

Lot 11 – 6 boxes of Italeri set no. 6030“Battlefield Accessory Set” – a lifetime supply of 1/72 scale gabions, gun positions, temporary bridges, fascines, chevaux de frises and so on. Left over from yet another Grand Plan of mine which was overtaken by events – perfect.

Regulations and Stuff (please do read this bit)

Send entries to me, please, before the closing date (23:00 UK Summer Time, Sunday 17^th April) – you can send as email to the address in my profile, or as comments to this post (which I shall not publish). You must be an official follower of this blog, unless you are a regular, non-Google correspondent known to me. If you want to have a go at the competition but you don’t want any of the prizes, please say so and you’ll be entered in Category B…

When the days are accomplished, and I’ve decided which entries entertained me most, I’ll post some names of winners, and we can start a background dialogue of who gets what – I’ll rank the winners, and the top of the list gets first choice (I hope this is going to work). One slightly niggardly rule, if you don’t mind – I’d appreciate it if winners could help me out with the postage – I promise I’ll do the mailing at the cheapest effective rate, but sending parcels of books to Foreign Parts can be a bit of an overhead.

Foy’s Almost-Summer Prize Competition 2014 – Awards Night

Thanks very much to everyone who sent an entry. I am very impressed – and mightily entertained. Because I was concerned that it might be too difficult, I think I was perhaps a little too generous with the clues, but my compliments to those who identified the right location and the associated Napoleonic event.

I received a total of 17 entries, of which 10 were correct, or at least on the right lines. The supersleuths used Google Search, Google Earth – some cunning devils even stalked my whereabouts in the month of August through my blogging activities, so there is a pervasive whiff of Google throughout.

A couple of entries provided an exact location – down to street corner level, which is scary, and the quality of the answers provided was generally so good that a lot of weight fell on the big proportion of points available for (subjective) entertainment value. Again, the standard was really very high, though I am a famously unfair and waspish marker.

Special mention must go to Rod, who provided a hilarious and very detailed explanation of why the location was Goole (in Humberside), but thus lost marks for accuracy.

Otherwise, in no particular order, I must applaud the very fine, well-thought-out entries of Steve the Wargamer, Edwin King, Ivan Fairchild (“Ivan the Tolerable”), Ludovico and James Saul, before coming to my final short list of three. These were all truly excellent, and I’ve spent a couple of days agonising over the ranking. Eventually it was a very close call indeed – thus the runners-up are Pyotr (stupefying accuracy and amusing explanation) and Johnny Rosbif (not so precise, but pulled out all the stops on the comic explanation), but the winner is Ubique Matt, whose overall score just takes the prize by a whisker(!).

If Matt can email me through my Blogger profile with postal details, I shall arrange shipping forthwith…

The photo was taken on the corner of Leopoldstrasse and Neurauthgasse in Innsbruck, Tirol, Austria, in August 2011, looking slightly west of south. There are a few misleading items (Italian and German car registrations, and the Italian-owned Agip garage, which threw a couple of people). The big clues are the Austrian-style church, which appears in a couple of old paintings of the battle, and the odd tower in the distance, which is the ski-jump from the 1964 Winter Olympics. Between the camera position and this tower there is a steep hillside which was the scene of the Battles of Berg Isel in 1809. The number of these battles is three or four, depending upon whom you ask. The first three were notable because the Tirolean partisans under Andreas Hofer (he of the whiskers) gave a series of salutary whuppings to the Bavarian regulars (who must have been puffed out with the climb). The fourth is seldom mentioned since the Tiroleans lost that one.

Hofer, on his night off

The blog post from 2011, describing my visit to the place, and showing pictures of the panorama, is here. Thanks and congratulations to everyone who took part – here is Matt’s winning entry:

Very interesting set of questions/challenges on your blog. With reference to your comp, you're standing I believe on Brennerstrasse near it's the junction with Neurauthgasse looking south, in Bergisel, just south of Innsbruck. This was near the site of the Battle(s) of Bergisel. [Ed: Brennerstrasse is the continuation of Leopoldstrasse, on the other side of Neurauthgasse, so this is certainly close enough – within the burst circle…] 

Using my Google fu powers and a bit of luck - I looked down your blog roll to August last year to find out where you had gone on your holidays and saw that it was Austria. The ski jump seemed vaguely familiar (I eventually recognized it the one near Innsbruck as I've stood at the top of it during a mad dash around Europe in my youth - how people can launch themselves off those things I'll never know).

Using Google Earth I traced the line of the street directly back looking for the church and Agip petrol station (seen on the photo) until I spotted the likely site of where you stood (Brennerstrasse near Neurauthgasse) to take the photo.

With reference to whiskers all I can think of is Andreas Hofer, who had a particular impressive set of whiskers himself. I know there's a monument to him in Bergisel because we saw it and none of us had any idea who he was at the time (this was before the dark days, before we all had mobile phone with internet access). So we asked around to find out who he was, interesting chap.

Christmas Prize Competition 2013 - results

Thanks to everyone who submitted an entry, and also to those who thought about it but found something more interesting to do. The challenge, you may recall, was to guess what message was in Napoleon’s cracker, which might explain his grumpy demeanour.

I received a goodish number of entries, mostly by email this time. Since they ranged in style from one-liner gags, through the philosophical to the patently bizarre, I applied a methodology which awarded points under a number of headings:

• Originality

• Humour

• Relevance

• Some kind of cute historical tie-in

• Anything else which appealed to me at the time

In the time-honoured, runners-up-first system much loved by award ceremonies the world over, I’ll start with some decent efforts which pleased me enough to get into the short list.

“It’s from Ney, he says the NapoleoN miniatures will definitely arrive........” - sent by Rod

“Q. Where did Napoleon keep his armies?  A. Up his sleevies!”   - amazingly(?), this identical entry was sent by no less than 6 people, which seems suspicious to me - Jacko, Stryker, Fran, Jurgen Altdorf, someone known only as Anonymous and one other whose entry I managed to delete by mistake (oops) – it is, of course, an established cracker joke, and very amusing, but I’ve heard it before…

“When Massena said he would help me 'pull a cracker' I did not imagine this...”  - Arthur1815

“Napoleon says ‘Who is this Tom Conti guy anyway?’" – submitted by Arlen Vane (come on – that can’t be a real name, surely) – I had to do some research on the Internet to understand this one – I got there, but it isn’t really all that funny

“How many generals does it take to change a lightbulb? It only takes 2, but then it takes millions of people to fight a war over whether it needed changing, and whose lightbulb it was, and then a lot more millions to bring civilization back to the stage where they have lightbulbs” - Minnie the Moocher – this was certainly one of the more weird entries - presumably Napoleon is bemused by the reference to lightbulbs 

“Tell Murat that I left him in charge of the army, and I am coming down to Naples to stick his bucket and spade up his ----!” - Martin Corlett

“It’s a requisition from Berthier for 600,000 pairs of Wellingtons” - Mikey Mac

OK – modest fanfare – we now come to the winners…

Dr I H De Vries, who is not interested in the prizes (which is a shame, since he would be able to understand the film with the Dutch subtitles), sent a quote from Epictetus:

“You may be always victorious if you will never enter into any contest where the issue does not wholly depend upon yourself” – which is hardly a good laugh, but has a pleasing resonance, given the nature of Napoleon’s ultimate military downfall. You may dispute this, but it doesn’t really matter, since the Professor is my List B Winner and gets nothing anyway.

And (at long last…), the prize of 2 moderately-rubbish DVDs goes to David Bean, who offered the following:

 “How does Napoleon keep warm in Winter? He wears his Corsican Ogre-coat!”, which I embrace as a snappy, previously unheard effort entirely in keeping with the traditions of awfulness appropriate to Christmas crackers.

I’ll get the films in the post next week – thank you all, once again. Thanks, also, to PaK for his super cartoon – if you haven’t checked out his website, please do so.

Christmas Prize Competition 2013

As you see, young Bonaparte is not looking very festive, despite his fancy party hat. What do you think the message in the cracker said? Send it to me as a comment to this post (which I won’t publish), or email it to the address in my Blogger profile. The sender of the entry which I find most amusing will win a couple of Napoleonic DVDs – one is Ridley Scott’s noted “The Duellists”, featuring Harvey Keitel and David Carradine, the other is the more recent “Lines of Wellington”*, starring John Malkovich. These are both Region 2 – please note – so if you are outside Europe please check that they will play on your equipment.

Please get entries to me by 3^rd January – I’ll publish results shortly after that date. If you wish to have a shot but are not interested in the prize, please say so and I’ll pick a separate List B winner – for glory only.

The splendid artwork for this year’s competition was very kindly contributed by a good friend of mine, the award winning cartoonist and caricaturist PaK, whose work appears in Private Eye, Reader's Digest, The Oldie and elsewhere. PaK’s website is very entertaining and you can link to it here – he is always delighted to get commissions for caricatures and custom greeting cards.


* Late Edit: the only version of "Lines of Wellington" which is currently available is not (as advertised by Amazon) in English. I got my copies from Germany and from Austria. The language choices are a little confusing - it is a Portuguese production, and it's very nicely done, if you can handle Malkovich as Wellington; the Portuguese speak Portuguese, the French speak French and the English speak English, and the narration is in Portuguese. Subtitles are available in a choice of Dutch or French - if you don't understand Dutch but have some French, switch on the French subtitles and you'll be fine. It's an enjoyable film, and the dialogue is not complex. Authentic uniforms on the 1st Cacadores...