Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Entertainment/2020 August 15

= August 15 =

The Kids in the Hall - "Who's on First?"
I saw a sketch where members of The Kids in the Hall played vaudevillians McGuillicutty and Green, performing a version of Abbott and Costello's Who's on First? routine. (See https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=110&v=jFhvmCgs_L4 for the relevant part of the sketch.) I recognize Dave Foley as the one playing Green (in the green suit), but I don't know the other members of the group well enough to know who plays McGuillicutty (in the yellow suit). Who is that? --Metropolitan90 (talk) 00:11, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Possibly Kevin McDonald, as hinted in one of the user comments. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 02:01, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks! --Metropolitan90 (talk) 02:19, 15 August 2020 (UTC)


 * I was a huge KITH fan back in the day, and have seen everything they've done more times than I can count. I concur with Bugs.  That's Dave Foley and Kevin McDonald. -- Jayron 32 03:04, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Yep. Kevin's face and voice are quite distinctive. —Tamfang (talk) 20:39, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
 * As the Will Do Guy, they're also downright haunting. InedibleHulk (talk) 23:06, 15 August 2020 (UTC)

a Linnaean clue
Someone has died. (Naturally, i think.) In his greenhouse, at least three plants have strange labels: None of these is the right name for the plant, nor indeed a genuine botanical name at all. They point (respectively) to the deceased's secret new will which is written on the Bellman's empty chart in The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll.
 * Arcana nieuwwilli
 * Cartavacua bellmanni
 * Ludovica caroli

Do you recognize this short story? Can you name the author? —Tamfang (talk) 20:54, 15 August 2020 (UTC)

I'll add that I believe I read this story in a collection of mysteries involving cryptography, probably published before 1972, that also included "The Adventure of the Dancing Men", "The Gold-Bug", and "QL696.C9" by Anthony Boucher (in which a victim's last act is to type the Library of Congress Classification code for Cypseloides, to finger her killer named Swift). —Tamfang (talk) 22:01, 15 August 2020 (UTC)


 * At Google Books, I found those plants in a Spanish translation of Trent's Last Case, but couldn't find them in the English version there. ---Sluzzelin  talk  10:51, 16 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Ah, scratch that, I probably wasn't looking very carefully. It appears to be from "The Ministering Angel" (by the same author, E. C. Bentley). ---Sluzzelin talk  10:55, 16 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Well done: 'In E. C. Bentley's "Ministering Angel," certain plants in the victim's garden are labeled with botanical names in Latin. These mean nothing to Trent, but a sense of duplicity seizes upon him when one of the names, "Ludovica Caroli," clicks in his mind'.  Alansplodge (talk) 13:50, 16 August 2020 (UTC)
 * The story can be found in the collection Trent Intervenes, which I happen to have been reading last week. Deor (talk) 18:45, 16 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Note: Actually, "The Ministering Angel" was first published in The Strand Magazine (1938) a bit too late to make it into the original edition of Trent Intervenes. It was first added to the collection in the edition I was reading, the Detective Story Club edition (HarperCollins, 2017). Deor (talk) 22:36, 16 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Deor, could you check the spelling of those plant species? (for obsessive compulsive nerds like me - Google failed with searching the exact spelling of some of them as spelled in Tamfang's original post). ---Sluzzelin talk  21:09, 17 August 2020 (UTC)
 * The first two names in the story are Arcana nieuwillia (with one w fewer than Tamfang used and an a on the end) and Cartavacua bellmannii (with an extra i on the end). Ludovica caroli is exactly right. I wouldn't expect much in the way of Google hits on any of them, since, as Tamfang said, they're "botanical names" that have no existence outside this one story. Deor (talk) 22:37, 17 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Thank you, Deor, I did understand that (Tamfang indicated as much in the original post). Now, with the correct spelling, Google Books did indeed lead me directly to The Strand Magazine, Detective Stories from the Strand, and Famous Stories of Code and Cipher (those were the first three hits). When I punched them in the way they were spelled in the question, Google Books gave me nothing. I found the Spanish translation by combining the three generic names. I know the question was about 'recognising' the short story, but I'd never read it, so I googled :-) ---Sluzzelin talk  07:58, 18 August 2020 (UTC)