Ken Jennings's Trivia Almanac (114 page)

Yeah, Good Luck

1.
Team handball

2.
Ultimate Frisbee

3.
Polo

4.
Australian rules football

5.
Quidditch

JULY 10

1066
T
HE
S
PANISH NATIONAL HERO
Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, aka El Cid, dies in Valencia.

RAISING “EL”

1.
What Mexican
ciudad
sits across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas?

2.
What sheriff’s alter ego was the masked “El Kabong”?

3.
What 1995 film was Robert Rodriguez’s big-budget follow-up to the $7,000 hit
El Mariachi
?

4.
What pitcher with four World Series rings is nicknamed “El Duque”?

5.
El Greco painted a famous
View of
what Spanish city, his adoptive hometown?

1882
F
ORMER
T
EXAS GOVERNOR
James “Big Jim” Hogg officially becomes the worst father in world history when he names his newborn daughter “Ima.”

THY NAME IS WOMAN

1.
What’s the first book of the Bible named for a woman?

2.
Jennifer’s sudden 1970 leap to become America’s most popular name for baby girls, a title it held until 1984, is often attributed to what novel and movie?

3.
What tiny Idaho town of 128 residents leaped to fame in 1994 thanks to its namesake’s Olympic performance?

4.
Up until the 1980s, the vast majority of Japanese girls were given names that ended with what syllable?

5.
Mabel, Maisie, or Mary—what’s the real first name of Tyler Perry’s most famous creation, Madea?

6.
What two late-1950s Broadway musicals featured songs titled “Maria”?

7.
What woman’s name has one
l
according to Elvis Costello but two according to the Pixies?

8.
Both of TV’s
Gilmore Girls
have what first name?

9.
What given name appears in the title of the debut novels of both Stephen King and Theodore Dreiser?

10.
What city—America’s twentieth largest—is the most populous U.S. city named for a woman?

1967
T
HE “KIWI” DOLLAR REPLACES
the New Zealand pound, as the Southern Hemisphere nation decimalizes its currency.

OLD MONEY

Which European countries replaced, or will replace, these currencies with the euro?

Easy

1.
Escudo

2.
Deutsche mark

3.
Drachma

4.
Pound

Harder

1.
Schilling

2.
Markka

3.
Zloty (2011)

4.
Guilder

Yeah, Good Luck

1.
Lev (2010)

2.
Forint (2010)

3.
Tolar

4.
Kroon (2010)

JULY 11

1754
P
HYSICIAN AND PRUDE
Thomas Bowdler is born near Bath, England. Bowdler will give us the word “bowdlerize” with his expurgated 1807 version of Shakespeare, in which Lady Macbeth says “Out, crimson spot!” instead of “Out, damned spot!” and Ophelia didn’t really
mean
to kill herself—she just slipped!

DEAR PRUDE HENS

Five family-friendly questions about good old-fashioned puritanism.

1.
What food is named for a nineteenth-century Connecticut minister who believed that eating whole-wheat-flour biscuits would curb sexual urges?

2.
What’s the only NC-17-rated movie ever to open in wide U.S. release?

3.
What state, ironically, cast the thirty-sixth and deciding vote to repeal Prohibition in 1933?

4.
In 1970, psychologist Linnda Caporael claimed that a crop of fungus-infested rye was responsible for what historical event?

5.
Though Little Ricky’s birth on
I Love Lucy
was the highest-rated show in TV history at the time, what word did CBS forbid the show from using that season?

1989
T
HEIR NEW ALBUM
Mind Bomb
introduces the newest member of English pop band The The: Johnny Marr of the Smiths.

THE THE

1.
What long-running soap opera dropped the “The” in its title in 1975?

2.
What tiny West African nation added a “The” to its name when it gained independence on April 24, 1970?

3.
What H. G. Wells title would become a Ralph Ellison novel without the initial “the”?

4.
What famous goof occurs in the credits of the 1965 B-movie
Attack of the Eye Creatures
?

5.
“The” is the most common word in spoken English. What other three-letter word comes in second?

1997
G
RIGORIO
F
UENTES TURNS
100. Fuentes, a Cuban fisherman and first mate to Ernest Hemingway, spent the last decades of his life claiming to have been the model for Santiago in
The Old Man and the Sea,
even though he was only 52 when the book was released.

TITLE WAVE

Name these literary works from their title characters.

Easy

1.
Willy Loman

2.
Edmond Dantès

3.
Bilbo Baggins

4.
Quasimodo

5.
Henry Higgins

Harder

1.
Bigger Thomas

2.
Chingachgook

3.
Oliver Mellors

4.
Roy Hobbs

5.
Isabel Archer

Yeah, Good Luck

1.
Offred

2.
Prince Myshkin

3.
Michael Henchard

4.
Frankie Addams

5.
Meursault