Wikipedia:Wikifun/Round 14/Answers/Question 14

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95

If the answer is US dollars. Yomangani ^talk 16:36, 11 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Hand and foot

Abraham Lincoln ("A") was a famous victim of assassination, killed by by John Wilkes Booth.
John Wilkes Booth's father was Junius Brutus Booth, named after Julius Caesar's most famous assassin, Marcus Junius Brutus.
John Wilkes Booth was himself named after the notoriously ugly English radical John Wilkes.
John Wilkes (not Booth!) was also (probably) a member of the Monks of Medmenham, the official name of the most famous 18th century Hellfire Club.
Another member of the Hellfire Club was John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich, who invented the snack with a slice of meat between two slices of bread, so that he could eat without leaving the gambling table (or, perhaps, his desk at work).
The founder of the Hellfire Club was the notoriously dissolute Francis Dashwood, 15th Baron le Despencer.
Dashwood produced an Abridgement of the Book of Common Prayer (including its funeral service, no doubt) in 1773 with Benjamin Franklin ("B"), as both thought that church services were too long.
The seated statue of "B" at the Benjamin Franklin National Memorial in Philadelphia is 20 feet high; that of "A" at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. stands 19 feet high: so "B" is 1 foot higher than "A". (I guess you could measure from mean sea level or ground level or something, or pick another statue...) -- ALoan (Talk) 16:59, 11 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, while I was typing this out, I see Yomangani has just suggested that Franklin is on the US$100 bill, whereas Lincoln is on the US$5 bill. :) -- ALoan (Talk) 17:02, 11 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Correct in every particular. The bit about the funeral service comes from the article on Franklin which mentions the Abridgment of the Book of Common Prayer and states: 'Among the unusual features of this work is a funeral service reduced to six minutes in length, "to preserve the health and lives of the living"'. However it was the different values of the money on which they appear that I wanted so Yomagani was correct with $95. As Lincoln also appears on the 1 cent coin and Franklin appears on a $1000 savings bond, the other possible answers are $99.99, $995 and $999.99.

I think Yomagani did work through the clue and got enough parts to get the right answer but the answer alone doesn't get all the points. ALoan got every single component part and only a misinterpretation of my ambiguous language prevented a perfect answer. So I'm awarding 1 point to Yomagani, 2 points to ALoan --Spondoolicks 19:14, 11 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]