Ken Jennings's Trivia Almanac (103 page)

JUNE 24

1880
“O C
ANADA” IS FIRST
performed at a Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day banquet in Quebec.

TYPE “OH”

1.
Whose first big hit, “Oh, Carol,” was about his ex-girlfriend Carole King?

2.
What future
Grey’s Anatomy
costar played Sandra Oh’s lover in
Under the Tuscan Sun
?

3.
What state is home to the singer of Stephen Foster’s “Oh! Susanna”?

4.
Whose last book was
Oh, the Places You’ll Go
?

5.
What did Sadaharu Oh do 868 times, a professional world record?

1902
A
MERICAN POLAR EXPLORER
Evelyn Baldwin writes an urgent note and throws it into the Arctic Ocean: “Five ponies and 150 dogs remain. Desire hay, fish, and 30 sledges.” The bottle will be found by a Russian fisherman…but in 1948, far too late to send for help. (Baldwin returned safe and sound and died in his bed in 1933.)

BOTTLED UP

1.
What hit sitcom was based on the 1964 Tony Randall film
The Brass Bottle
?

2.
What German mathematician devised an impossible one-sided bottle in 1882?

3.
How many bottles unexpectedly appear in the last verse of the Police song “Message in a Bottle”?

4.
What comes in the “hobble-skirt” bottle designed in 1915 by Earl Dean, who based it on an encyclopedia picture of a cocoa pod?

5.
Balk, dunk, or punt—what sports term is also the name of the dimple at the bottom of a wine bottle?

6.
On what planet did the bottle city of Kandor originate?

7.
Molotov cocktails were first used by what country after the Soviets invaded it in 1939?

8.
Frank Sinatra was buried with a bottle of what whiskey, his favorite drink?

9.
What did Antarctic explorers Paul Siple and Charles Passel first calculate in 1945 by leaving water bottles outside until they froze?

10.
What playwright, whose real given names were Thomas Lanier, died in 1983 when he choked on the cap from a bottle of eyedrops?

1973
I
N
T
WIN
F
ALLS
, I
DAHO
, Evel Knievel fails to make it across the Snake River Canyon in his second and final test of the X-2 Skycycle.

A DESCENT PLACE TO LIVE

Match these fictional characters to their hometowns.

JUNE 25

1977
V
IRGINIA FOREST RANGER
Roy Sullivan is hit by lightning while fishing, the record-setting
seventh
time he has been hit over the course of his lifetime. Seven—that’s good luck!

ZAPPED!

1.
Which of Santa’s reindeer have names that mean “thunder” and “lightning” in German?

2.
What movie’s protagonist is named Lightning McQueen?

3.
Who invented the lightning rod, though he refused to patent it, claiming to be uninterested in profit?

4.
Actor Jim Caviezel was struck by lightning during the filming of what film?

5.
What NFL team replaced its AFL-era horse logo with a bolt of lightning?

6.
Whose 1984 album
Ride the Lightning
features an electric chair on the sleeve?

7.
Who were Arges, Brontes, and Steropes, who forged Zeus’s thunderbolts in Greek myth?

8.
What happened to police scientist Barry Allen after lightning struck the chemicals in his lab?

9.
What’s the name of the baseball bat that
The Natural
makes from a lightning-felled tree?

10.
What’s the name of this mad-scientist device, a reference to Genesis 28?

1984
O
N THE ORDERS OF
nutball dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, construction work begins on “the House of the People,” a giant government building in Bucharest, Romania. With its tons of steel, crystal, and Transylvanian marble, the giant boondoggle still stands today as the heaviest building on Earth.

WEIGHTY MATTERS

1.
According to its first line, in what city is the Band’s song “The Weight” set?

2.
What Italian wrote, in 1643, “We live submerged at the bottom of an ocean of elementary air, which is known by incontestable experiments to have weight”?

3.
According to Modest Mouse, “even if things get too heavy,” what will we all do?

4.
What’s the heaviest chemical element on the periodic table that has a one-letter abbreviation?

5.
After losing 60 pounds to play the lead role in
The Machinist,
who then had to gain 100 pounds in six months to play a super-hero?

6.
What word, from the French for “goods of weight,” names our old-fashioned pounds-and-ounces system?

7.
In 1997, what Oscar winner was replaced by Sarah Ferguson as Weight Watchers’ spokesperson?

8.
What’s the heaviest internal organ in the human body?

9.
In what 1952 play is Giles Corey “pressed” to death, his last words being “More weight”?

10.
What’s the significance of the four-centimeter-tall platinum-iridium block sitting in a high-security vault just outside Paris?

11.
What tree’s edible seeds were once used to weigh diamonds?

12.
Who’s the heaviest football player ever to score a Super Bowl touchdown?

13.
What 1968 hit was the first song to use the phrase “heavy metal”?

14.
Which two boxing weight classifications are named for animals?

15.
What 1979 movie’s title character uses, as his carnival spiel, “For one dollar I’ll guess your weight, your height, or your sex”?