Page 62 Daily Mail, Tuesday, March 3, 2020
questions
SHARP, tangy
Dye job was flavours. Serves: 6.an own goal
Compiled by Charles LeggeCompiled by James Blacktoday’s recipe: rhubarb
fool with pistachios
MethodQUESTION
Why did the
Romanian
football team bleach their hair during
the 1998 World Cup?
The hair bleaching episode is seen as a
disaster in Romania. It marked a farcical
end to the team’s most successful era in
international football.
In the Nineties, Romania had a glorious
World Cup run, qualifying for Italy ’90,
USA ’94 and France ’98.
They were led by their iconic captain
Gheorghe hagi, the Maradona of the
Carpathians, regarded as the greatest
Romanian footballer of all time.
The 1998 World Cup got off to a terrific
start. They defeated Columbia 1-0 and
england 2-1 in their opening group
matches. having qualified after two
games and feeling full of confidence, the
entire team bleached their hair.
According to former Romania and
Valencia winger Adrian ‘Cobra’ Ilie, the
idea had cropped up at a strategy meeting
before the World Cup.
The team had persuaded manager
Anghel Iordanescu to shave his head if
they qualified after two group games. As
an act of solidarity with their manager,
the players agreed to bleach their hair.
The night before their final group game
against Tunisia, two hairdressers were
summoned to the team hotel. The next
day they shocked the world with their
bizarre barnets.
In a 2010 interview, striker Gheorghe
Craioveanu revealed that the bleach
burned his scalp: ‘They butchered us. It
was so painful I could only sleep on one
side of my body for three nights.’
It also destroyed the team’s winning
mentality: ‘The players had slipped into a
relaxed, holiday mood.’
The team secured a 1-1 draw with lowly
Tunisia before they were dumped out of
the tournament by Croatia in the round
of 16. Anghel Iordanescu resigned and it
was the last time Romania qualified for
the World Cup.
L. D. Fischer, London NW11.QUESTION
How are birds
able to fly at
speed into hedges without causing
harm to themselves?
IT hAS long been assumed birds have
incredibly fast perception and thus can
avoid collisions. This was finally proven
in Ultra-Rapid Vision In Birds, a 2016
study by Swedish researchers.
They took three wild species, blue tits,
collared and pied flycatchers, and
investigated their critical flicker-fusion
frequency (CFF).
When a light flashes at a slow rate,
vertebrates see a distinct series of flashes
separated by dark intervals. As the flash
rate increases, the distinctness of the
flashes changes to a continuous flicker.
A further increase in the flash rate leads
to the appearance of a steady light. In
humans, these changes occur within a
range from 5 h z to 50 h z.
A TV screen or movie projector is viewed
as steady because the light is flickering
faster than our CFF. For the purposes of
presenting moving images, the human
flicker fusion threshold is taken at 60 h z.
The researchers trained wild-caught
birds to receive a food reward by
distinguishing between a pair of lamps,
one flickering and one shining a constant
l i g h t. Te m p o r a l r e s o l u t i o n w a s
determined by increasing the flicker rate
to a threshold at which the birds could
no longer tell the lamps apart.
The birds were able to resolve alternat-
ing light-dark cycles at far greater rates
than humans, on average 127 h z for
collared flycatchers, 129 h z for blue tits
and 137 h z for pied flycatchers.
One pied flycatcher could distinguish
flashes at 145 h z — 50 h z over the highest
frequency for any other vertebrate.
For birds, the world might to be said to
be in slow motion compared to how
humans see it. This means small birdscan pluck fast-moving insects out of the
sky, avoid swaying branches or rapidly
seek sanctuary in a hedgerow without
fear of impaling themselves.
Brian Stern, Newcastle-upon-Tyne.QUESTION
How many times
did the Germans
surrender at the end of World War II?
FIeld Marshal Bernard Montgomery
accepted the first major surrender,
encompassing German forces in holland,
northern Germany and denmark, at
luneburg on May 4, 1945.
German generals pushed for local
surrenders to the western Allies to shield
their men from a more vengeful Russia,
but Allied Supreme Commander dwight
d. eisenhower rejected this and took the
surrender of all remaining German forces
in europe early on May 7 in Reims.
A ceasefire was due to start on May 9 so
Russia could be informed. The country
was not properly represented at Reims
as its army was pushing on from the east.
Though embargoed, the news was leaked
by a U.S. reporter and it was announced
that the next day, May 8, 1945, would be
Victory in europe day.
Senior German commanders were made
to sign again that day in Berlin to confirm
the surrender for the Soviet Union, which
still marks Ve day one day after the rest
of the world. The war in europe was over,
but the resentment caused in Russia was
one of many steps towards the Cold War.
Chris Rogers, Edgware, Middlesex.QUESTION
What was a
comptometer?
FURTheR to earlier answers, I worked
for a large audit practice in the Nineties
and I remember one job in 1995 when I
arranged for a comptometer operator to
check the stock list of a client. It was A3
sized and 3 in thick.
The financial director complained this
was a waste of time and money because
the computer print-out would add up.
The operator added it up three times
and got the same answer each time, but
it didn’t match the total on the print-out.
It turned out that the client’s stock
program had ‘glitches’. The stock was
massively overvalued and this resulted in
a significant audit adjustment. The
financial director was left red-faced.
Eddie Green, Southport, Merseyside.: When was the single railway track
through the jungle from
Butterworth towards Kuala Lumpur
upgraded to the modern double
track featured in Michael Portillo’s
TV railway journey through Malaysia?
Mike Thompson, Plymouth, Devon.
: What’s the origin of the dimensions
of the standard house brick?
Stuart Miller, Swanley, Kent.
: Since the construction of the
Aswan Dam, the Nile no longer
floods and deposits fertile silt on
the land. Does this mean Lake
Nasser is gradually silting up?
David Mawson, Birmingham.QQQingredientsPicture: reuTersBlond wall: Romania’s World Cup team400g rhubarb, cut
into pieces
80g caster sugar
3 cardamom pods
1 blood orange,
zested and juiced
½ lemon, juiced100g condensed milk
2cm piece ginger,
peeled and grated
300g double cream
2 tbsp pistachios1 Heat oven to 180c/160c fan/gas 4. Line a roasting
tin and arrange rhubarb in a layer. scatter over
sugar, cardamom, orange zest and juice, and
lemon juice. Cover and roast for 20 mins. remove
from oven, uncover and leave to cool in its syrup.
2 Discard cardamom pods, then use a slotted
spoon to transfer half rhubarb into a food
processor. Add a couple of spoonfuls of syrup and
blitz to a puree. Combine puree with condensed
milk and pinch of salt. stir in ginger. Whip cream
to peaks in a bowl, then fold in rhubarb mix.
3 spoon mousse into glasses and chill for a few
hours until set. Top with remaining rhubarb, along
with syrup, and scatter over chopped pistachios.
n RECIPE of the Day brought to you in association
with BBC Good Food Magazine. Subscribe today and
get your first five issues for £5 (direct debit). Visit
buysubscriptions.com/goodfood and enter code
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