Ken Jennings's Trivia Almanac (141 page)

AUGUST 25

1835
T
HE
N
EW
Y
ORK
S
UN
BEGINS
a six-article series describing the fantastic new animals (unicorns, flying bat people, etc.) that English astronomer John Herschel has discovered on the moon. Thousands of readers fall for the hoax.

SATELLITE ENTERTAINMENT

These moons orbit what planet (or, in one case, “planet”) of the solar system?

Easy

1.
Deimos

2.
Io

3.
Luna

Harder

1.
Miranda

2.
Titan

3.
Charon

Yeah, Good Luck

1.
Mimas

2.
Leda

3.
Proteus

1916
C
ONGRESS CREATES THE
N
ATIONAL
P
ARK
S
ERVICE,
to “conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life and pic-a-nic baskets therein.” Okay, just kidding about the pic-a-nic baskets.

LONE RANGERS

What’s the only national park in these U.S. states?

Easy

1.
Kentucky

2.
Oregon

3.
Tennessee

4.
New Mexico

Harder

1.
Idaho

2.
Arkansas

3.
Virginia

4.
Michigan

Yeah, Good Luck

1.
North Dakota

2.
South Carolina

3.
Maine

4.
Nevada

1927
T
HE
F
RENCH TENNIS TEAM
takes on Japan in Davis Cup play. René Lacoste and his team captain have seen an alligator-skin suitcase in a Boston shop window and made it the prize in a little side wager on the match. This bet is the origin of Lacoste’s nickname “
le crocodile
” and, later, the alligator logo on his namesake shirts.

TOP FIVE

How much do you know about
these
shirts?

1.
What two metal bands are honored on Beavis and Butt-Head’s usual T-shirts?

2.
What famous clipper ship took its name from Scots words for “short shirt” in a Robert Burns poem?

3.
What TV show’s famed “puffy shirt” is in the Smithsonian today?

4.
In 1999, what redshirt freshman became the first Division I football player ever named his league’s Player of the Year and Rookie of the Year in the same year?

5.
What Thames River town lent its name to the collarless polo shirts first worn by its rowing team?

AUGUST 26

1862
W
ILLIAM
B
ANTING
B
EGINS
the fad diet that will lose him fifty pounds and, after he publishes his pamphlet “A Letter on Corpulence,” will make him history’s first weight loss celebrity. “Banting” becomes the English word for “dieting” for a time, and even today, dieting is called
bantning
in Sweden.

NOW AND THIN

1.
What’s the last name of svelte Subway spokesman “Jared”?

2.
What’s the more common name for “vertical banded gastroplasty,” or VBG?

3.
What New York cardiologist published his bestselling
Diet Revolution
in 1972?

4.
Who lost forty-three pounds for his one-scene role in
The Sixth Sense
?

5.
The South Beach Diet is named for a section of what city?

1910
S
TRUGGLING WITH SEXUAL IMPOTENCE
and suicidal impulses after learning that his wife has been having an affair with architect Walter Gropius, composer Gustav Mahler travels to Holland for a consultation with no less an authority than Sigmund Freud. Mahler will write that his four-hour chat with Freud worked wonders.

SHRINK RAP

1.
What’s the first of Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s Five Stages of Grief?

2.
Whose “Analyst” was James Coburn in a 1967 film?

3.
What word did Carl Jung coin to mean “temporally coincident occurrences of acausal events”?

4.
What director plays a psychiatrist’s psychiatrist—Dr. Melfi’s shrink—on
The Sopranos
?

5.
What did Freud call the female counterpart of the Oedipus complex?

1940
D
ON
L
A
F
ONTAINE IS BORN
in Duluth, Minnesota. Even if you’ve never heard Don’s name, you know his distinctive voice. His deep, booming tones have narrated more than 5,000 movie trailers and ads, earning him the nicknames “Thunder Throat” and “Mr. Voice.”

IN A WORLD…!

Match these movies with their (mostly) offscreen narrators.