The CLR Cryptic Christmas Quiz: Day 12

It’s Christmas, with its twelve days — well, thirteen days if you include both 25 December and 6 January — so we have a quiz with thirteen questions of varying degrees of difficulty to give you something to mull on over the holidays. The questions were devised by different members of the team at Cedar Lounge Revolution.

Each day we will post a new question. Here is today’s:

12 A small square sail at the top of a mast on a sailing ship was the eleventh in 1979 (or twelfth if you count the vehicle for a Dusty Springfield song in 1967). A ghost is the most recent, in 2015. The first, a negative, had a connection with the flower-head of Brassica oleracea, as did almost all of the others. What was that first called?

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For those who like the challenge of hacking the questions themselves, the comments here are closed so that you won’t have your fun ruined by accidentally seeing something below, but if you would like to discuss the questions or share hints (or curse the question setters), we have created a separate discussion thread here, craftily filed away in the posts for December 1915 so that it won’t pop on your front page by mistake. (If the link isn’t working, that post is at the following page: https://cedarlounge.wordpress.com/1915/12/25/the-clr-cryptic-christmas-quiz-discussion-thread/)

This is primarily for fun, but we hope to turn this into a competition with a prize, but our preferred supplier of the intended prize was closed for Christmas by the time we got around to contacting them. More on the competition near the final days of the quiz.

The previous questions are below the fold:

1 (a) What started between the release of Please Please Me and the verdict in the criminal trial R v Penguin Books Ltd, and (b) for whom was it rather late?

2 (a) Why in Ireland are there no 12th, 22nd, 24th, 25th, or 32nd?
(b) And why can we not yet say if the most recent, not included in this question, will remain in the list?
(c) In the USA, what happened to the 18th?

3 When most of the world, including sellers of Dublin’s evening paper, hear Mendelssohn, why do certain Dubliners and listeners to RTÉ radio hear Handel?

4 The one in Kerry is designated 08/26, the one in Donegal 03/21, as is the one in Waterford (although they may not be exactly parallel), and the one in Sligo 11/29. The location of the one in Co Clare has a different name, but it is designated 06/24. Apart from those we ask about, there is one other which we have not identified because it would give subject of the question away. What are the designations in Cork and Dublin?
[Update: an error in the original question has been corrected. It now reads ‘the one in Donegal 03/21’. (It originally omitted the first zero.)]

5 Pythagoras’s is bigger than Didymus’s and Oxford’s is altogether different. What are they?

6 In a ten year period starting in the early 1980s in the US there were eleven of them sent somewhere on behalf of an organisation that had no official name. What were they?

7 When it was first used, it included a queen, two kings, an elected monarch, two princes, an owl worth four and a musical instrument. Since then in the real world, the queen and both kings have been replaced by kings, the elected monarch by two other elected monarchs, and one of the princes replaced the other. These changes have been reflected in it through new additions although the originals are all valid. Two earlier additions arose because those in it with two of the monarchs did not comply fully with the guidelines. The musical instrument remains unchanged. It has been expanded to include an idol, and a cross. What is it?

8 (a) Where in 2015, colourfully, did Clochán an Aifir and Galway City Museum join Rathmines Road, did Cnoc an Anfa and NUI Galway join Grafton Street, and did An Blascaod Mór and the Latin Quarter join Oliver Plunkett Street?
(b) Why might it have been unfair to have used O’Connell Street, Patrick Street, Dawson Street or the Aran Islands in part a of this question?

9 This comes up too frequently, but what’s the next number:
587 659 698 587 659 587 523 493

10 It first occurred in 1963 and was not repeated until 1982. In 1983 it was done by a different state for the first time, but was not until 1994 that it was done by, technically, a further different state for the first time (although three other states had other firsts in this field in the intervening period). Then in 2012, the final state to have done it did it for the first time (although another state has had a first in this field since then). What is it?

11 How are Galway United, Longford Town and Kildare County related?