37 thoughts on “Who Am I – X?”

  1. I seem to be here on time. Trouble is I don’t know any of them and don’t want to have a wild guess. X is too hard for me. Michael McIntyre on his DVD spoke about the alphabet for kids. A for apple, B for ball, C for cat..etc. X flummoxed even the children’s writers and X will always be for Xylophone. Any of them called Xylophone? 🙂

  7. 3 = Xenophon,
    9 = Liu Xiaobo, current Nobel Peace Prizewinner and
    5 = Deng Xiaoping, former leader of Peoples Rupublic of China (1978 till early 90’s)

    Thats if folks. Will have a wee dram now.

  10. Boadicea is still in the land of nod.

    Papaguinea – Yes, 7 is Malcolm X
    Papaguinea – Yes, 8 is Bao Xishun
    Jan – Yes 2 is Xerxes
    Jan – Yes, 5 is Deng Xiaoping

  14. oh wow. I got two! That is a record. I’ll pop back to read Boadicea’s biogs. Haven’t got much idea about Xerxes except that he was Persian emperor.

  18. Papaguinea
    7. Malcolm X (1925 – 1965) was born Malcolm Little and also known as El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz. He was an African-American Muslim minister, public speaker, and human rights activist. To his admirers, he was a courageous advocate for the rights of African Americans, a man who indicted white America in the harshest terms for its crimes against black Americans. His detractors accused him of preaching racism, black supremacy, antisemitism, and violence. He has been described as one of the greatest, and most influential, African Americans in history. In 1998, Time named The Autobiography of Malcolm X one of the ten most influential nonfiction books of the 20th century.

    Malcolm X was born in Omaha, Nebraska. The events of his childhood, including his father’s lessons concerning black pride and self-reliance, and his own experiences concerning race, played a significant role in Malcolm X’s adult life. By the time he was thirteen, his father had died and his mother had been committed to a mental hospital. After living in a series of foster homes, Malcolm X became involved in hustling and other criminal activities in Boston and New York. In 1946, Malcolm X was sentenced to eight to ten years in prison.

    While in prison, Malcolm X became a member of the Nation of Islam, and after his parole in 1952, he became one of the Nation’s leaders and chief spokesmen. For nearly a dozen years, he was the public face of the controversial Islamic group. Tension between Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad, head of the Nation of Islam, led to Malcolm X’s departure from the organization in March 1964. After leaving it, Malcolm X became a Sunni Muslim and made a pilgrimage to Mecca, after which he disavowed racism. He subsequently traveled extensively throughout Africa and the Middle East and then founded Muslim Mosque, Inc., a religious organization, and the secular, Pan-Africanist, Organization of Afro-American Unity. Less than a year after he left the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X was assassinated by three members of the group while giving a speech in New York.

    8. Bao Xishun was born in China in 1951. Xi Shun was declared the world’s tallest living man, after being measured in January 15, 2005, at Chifeng City Hospital, Inner Mongolia, China as 7 feet 8.95 inches tall. However in 2007 he was overtaken by the Ukrainian, Leonid Stadnyk, as the world’s tallest living person.

    3. Xenophon (430-354 BC) was a soldier, mercenary and Athenian student of Socrates and is known for his writings on the history of his own times, the sayings of Socrates, and the life of Greece. While a young man, Xenophon participated in the expedition led by Cyrus the Younger against his older brother, the emperor Artaxerxes II of Persia, in 401 BC. In this effort, Cyrus used many Greek mercenaries left unemployed by the cessation of the Peloponnesian War. Cyrus fought Artaxerxes at Cunaxa: the Greeks were victorious but Cyrus was killed, and shortly thereafter their general, Clearchus of Sparta, was invited to a peace conference, betrayed, and executed. The mercenaries, the Ten Thousand Greeks, found themselves deep in hostile territory, near the heart of Mesopotamia, far from the sea, and without leadership. They elected new leaders, including Xenophon himself, and fought their way north through hostile Persians, Armenians, and Kurds to Trapezus on the coast of the Black Sea and then sailed westward and back to Greece. In Thrace, they helped Seuthes II make himself king. Xenophon’s record of this expedition and the journey home was titled Anabasis (“The Expedition” or “The March Up Country” ).

    9. Liu Xiaobo (born 1955) is a Chinese literary critic, writer, professor, and human rights activist who called for political reforms and the end of communist one-party rule in China. He is currently imprisoned as a political prisoner in the People’s Republic of China, and has been awarded the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize. He has served as President of the Independent Chinese PEN Centre since 2003. On 8 December 2008, Liu was detained in response to his participation with Charter 08. He was formally arrested on 23 June 2009, on suspicion of “inciting subversion of state power.” He was tried on the same charges on 23 December 2009, and sentenced to eleven years’ imprisonment and two years’ deprivation of political rights on 25 December 2009.

    During his 4th prison term, he was awarded the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize, for “his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China.” He is the first Chinese citizen to be awarded a Nobel Prize of any kind while residing in China and the fourth person to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize while in prison or detention, after Nazi Germany’s Carl von Ossietzky (1935), the Soviet Union’s Andrei Sakharov (1975), and Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi (1991). Liu is also the first person since Von Ossietzky to be denied the right to have a representative collect the Nobel prize for him.

  19. Jan

    2. Xerxes I (519-465 BC) Persian king (486 – 465 BC) of the Achaemenian dynasty. The son of Darius I, he had been governor of Babylon before his succession. He ferociously suppressed rebellions in Egypt (484) and Babylonia (482). To avenge Darius’s defeat by the Greeks at the Battle of Marathon, he spent three years raising a massive army and navy. When a storm destroyed the bridges he had built to cross the Hellespont, he had them rebuilt and for seven days oversaw the crossing of his army, numbering 360,000 troops by modern estimates, supported by more than 700 ships. The Persians broke through at the Battle of Thermopylae and pillaged Athens, but then lost their navy at the Battle of Salamis (480). Xerxes returned to Asia, leaving the army behind; it withdrew after its defeat at the Battle of Plataea (479). In Persia he began an extensive building campaign at Persepolis. Drawn unwittingly into palace intrigues, he killed his brother’s family at the queen’s demand. He was murdered by members of his court. His setback in Greece was regarded as the beginning of the decline of the Achaemenid dynasty.

    5. Deng Xiaoping (1904-1997) was a Chinese politician, statesman, theorist, and diplomat. As leader of the Communist Party of China, Deng was a reformer who led China towards a market economy. While Deng never held office as the head of state, head of government or General Secretary of the Communist Party of China (historically the highest position in Communist China), he nonetheless served as the paramount leader of the People’s Republic of China from 1978 to the early 1990s.

    Born into a peasant background in Guang’an, Sichuan, China, Deng studied and worked in France in the 1920s, where he came under the influence of Marxism. He joined the Communist Party of China in 1923. Upon his return to China he worked as a political commissar in rural regions and was considered a “revolutionary veteran” of the Long March. Following the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, Deng worked in Tibet and other southwestern regions to consolidate Communist control. He was also instrumental in China’s economic reconstruction following the Great Leap Forward in the early 1960s. His economic policies were at odds with the political ideologies of Chairman Mao Zedong. As a result, he was purged twice during the Cultural Revolution but regained prominence in 1978 by outmaneuvering Mao’s chosen successor, Hua Guofeng.

    Inheriting a country wrought with social and institutional woes resulting from the Cultural Revolution and other mass political movements of the Mao era, Deng became the core of the “second generation” of Chinese leadership. He is considered “the architect” of a new brand of socialist thinking, having developed Socialism with Chinese characteristics and led Chinese economic reform through a synthesis of theories that became known as the “socialist market economy”. Deng opened China to foreign investment, the global market, and limited private competition. He is generally credited with developing China into one of the fastest growing economies in the world for over thirty years and raising the standard of living of hundreds of millions of Chinese.

  20. Araminta
    1. Xenophanes of Colophon (c. 570-480) was known for criticizing the Greek pantheon. Knowledge of his views comes from fragments of his poetry, surviving as quotations by later Greek writers. To judge from these, his elegiac and iambic poetry criticized and satirized a wide range of ideas, including Homer and Hesiod, the belief in the pantheon of anthropomorphic gods and the Greeks’ veneration of athleticism. He is the earliest Greek poet who claims explicitly to be writing for future generations, creating “fame that will reach all of Greece, and never die while the Greek kind of songs survives.” He is reputed to have written: “If horses or oxen or lions had hands and could produce works of art, they too would represent the gods after their own fashion” .

  21. Christopher

    4. Francis Xavier, born Francisco de Jasso y Azpilicueta (1506 –1552) was a pioneering Roman Catholic missionary born in the Kingdom of Navarre (Spain) and co-founder of the Society of Jesus, a priestly order of the Catholic Church. He was a student of Saint Ignatius Loyola and one of the first seven Jesuits who dedicated themselves to the service of God at Montmartre in 1534. He led an extensive mission into Asia, mainly in the Asian Portuguese Empire of the time. He was influential in the spreading and upkeep of Catholicism most notably in India, but also ventured into Japan, Borneo, the Moluccas, and other areas which had thus far not been visited by Christian missionaries. In these areas, being a pioneer and struggling to learn the local language of the indigenous people in the face of opposition, he had less success. He died at Sancian from a fever on the 3 December 1552, while he was waiting for a boat that would agree to take him to mainland China.

    He was first buried on a beach of Shangchuan Island. His body was taken from the island in February 1553 and was temporarily buried in St. Paul’s church in Malacca on 22 March 1553. Later in 1553, Xavier’s body was shipped to Goa. The body is now in the Basilica of Bom Jesus in Goa, where it was placed in a glass container encased in a silver casket on 2 December 1637.

  24. Claire

    Good to see you!

    6. Iannis Xenakis (1922 – 2001) was an ethnic Greek, naturalized French composer, music theorist, and architect-engineer. He is commonly recognized as one of the most important post-war avant-garde composers. Xenakis pioneered the use of mathematical models such as applications of set theory, varied use of stochastic processes, game theory, etc., in music, and was also an important influence on the development of electronic music.

    Among his most important works are Metastaseis (1953–4) for orchestra, which introduced independent parts for every musician of the orchestra; percussion works such as Psappha (1975) and Pléïades (1979); compositions that introduced spatialization by dispersing musicians among the audience, such as Terretektorh (1966); electronic works created using Xenakis’s UPIC system; and the massive multimedia performances Xenakis called polytopes. Among the numerous theoretical writings he authored, the book Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition (1971) is regarded as one of his most important. As an architect, Xenakis is primarily known for his early work under Le Corbusier: the Sainte Marie de La Tourette, on which the two architects collaborated, and the Philips Pavilion at Expo 58, which Xenakis designed alone.

  27. Soutie

    I thought you’d get this one!

    10. Xavier John Doherty (born 1982 in Scottsdale, Tasmania) is an Australian cricketer who plays Australian domestic cricket with the Tasmanian Tigers and for the Australia. He is a left-handed batsman and a slow left arm orthodox bowler. After continued one-day success for Tasmania, Doherty made his One Day International debut for Australia against Sri Lanka at the Melbourne Cricket Ground in November 2010. Later that month, he made his Test debut against England at the Gabba, when he replaced off spinner Nathan Hauritz in team.

  28. When I heard that you guys were ‘struggling’ with the X’s I fully expected to see a picture of this lady

    So I’ll put the shoe on the other foot, who is she? 😉

  32. Oops I fell asleep!

    I must admit not the most flattering picture of her, then again your pics aren’t always the most obvious!

    The book was published while I was still at school and immediately banned, hee hee, what better way to publicize the book than by banning it.

    I think that I eventually got a copy about ’76 or 7.

    Here’s her Wikki entry.

  35. Very probably Soutie, though that did not stop a few copies making the rounds of my school. The thing with our censors was that they ‘cut’ adult films (i.e. 18 age group as opposed to what is now the euphemism for porn) to pieces, removing bad language, violence and nudity, such that they made little sense. That is why we we all grew up to be so well balanced. 😉

  36. I had to go out. I wish I had heard of her – I would most certainly have included her – sounds an incredible character. 🙂

  37. Thanks for another fascinating quiz, Boa. I must look further into Deng’s life. How on earth in the 1920’s as the son of peasants, did he get out of the country to France and manage to study? Intriguing.

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