Ken Jennings's Trivia Almanac (171 page)

OCTOBER 12

1492
C
OLUMBUS
DOESN’T
DISCOVER
A
MERICA.
Sure, he takes all the credit, but land is first sighted by Rodrigo de Triana, the sailor who happens to be up in the crow’s nest of the
Pinta
at two in the morning.

EGGS MARKS THE SPOT

Go out on a limb with this quiz about other famous nests.

1.
What TV comedy show calls its set “The Eagle’s Nest”?

2.
What kind of nest is a vespiary?

3.
What Celtics legend got his nickname from a character in
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest
?

4.
What bird is the symbol of The Hague, since it’s considered good luck in the Netherlands to have one nest in your house’s chimney?

5.
The Boar’s Nest is the oldest restaurant in what fictional county?

1810
T
HE FIRST
O
KTOBERFEST IS HELD,
as Bavaria’s crown prince Ludwig I holds a massive horse race to celebrate his wedding to Princess Therese. (Back then, you apparently needed a real excuse for massive public drunkenness. Even in Bavaria.)

LIFE IN THE FEST LANE

Celebrate good times—come on!—with these festival questions.

1.
What is followed by the Eid ul-Fitr festival?

2.
What game takes its name from the Basque words for “merry festival”?

3.
The Woodstock Festival was actually moved from the town of Woodstock to what town forty miles away?

4.
Hemingway’s
The Sun Also Rises
is titled
Fiesta
in the U.K. What city’s famous festival does the title refer to?

5.
What’s the most prestigious prize given at the Cannes Film Festival?

1992
T
HE
N
IKOPAKA
F
ESTA
C
OMMITTEE
of Yoshii, Japan, sets a new record for the world’s longest sushi roll. This
kappa maki
is exactly one kilometer long.

A RAW DEAL

1.
What vegetable—which, ironically, is almost never eaten raw today—takes its name from the Narragansett for “a green thing eaten raw”?

2.
How can you quickly tell a raw egg from a boiled one without cracking the shell?

3.
What breakfast dish of uncooked oats and fruit was introduced by Dr. Bircher-Benner at his Swiss hospital in 1900?

4.
According to the old belief, raw oysters should be eaten only in months that have what letter in their name?

5.
What French name do we give to the dish that is, ironically, called raw
filet américain
in France?

OCTOBER 13

1962
W
HO’S
A
FRAID OF
V
IRGINIA
W
OOLF?
opens on Broadway. The Pulitzer committee will try to award it the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, only to have Columbia University’s trustees veto the selection, cowed by the play’s edgy content.

WHO’S AFRAID OF…

What are the fears of these things called?

Easy

1.
Heights

2.
Enclosed spaces

3.
Spiders

4.
Foreigners

5.
Open or public places

Harder

1.
Sunlight

2.
Death

3.
Blood

4.
Fire

5.
Public speaking

Yeah, Good Luck

1.
Cats

2.
Nudity

3.
Pain

4.
Clowns

5.
Childbirth

1972
U
RUGUAYAN
A
IR
F
ORCE
F
LIGHT
571, flying a Montevideo rugby team to a match in Chile, crashes in the Andes. The survivors subsist for two months by eating the frozen corpses of their dead teammates.

EAT ME!

1.
On what island did the practice of eating human brains and organs lead to the spread of a disease called kuru?

2.
Who made the satirical
Modest Proposal
to fight poverty by eating Irish babies?

3.
The Donner Party was trapped by a snowstorm in what mountain range?

4.
What was the occupation of the man whose liver Hannibal Lecter ate with fava beans?

5.
The word “cannibal” comes from the same root as what geographic feature?

6.
Sweeney Todd was “the demon barber of” what London thoroughfare?

7.
The University of Colorado food court is named for what first American ever to be jailed for cannibalism?

8.
What’s the only Shakespeare play to feature cannibalism?

9.
What movie was adapted from the novel
Make Room! Make Room!
but had its title changed so it wouldn’t be confused with
Make Room for Daddy
?

10.
Which of the planets is named for the Roman god who ate all his children?

2006
I
NFAMOUS,
THE SECOND FILM
version of Truman Capote’s
In Cold Blood
snooping, is finally released. It was held back a year to avoid a showdown with Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Oscar-winning performance in
Capote.

MULTIPLEXITY

Give the
other
similarly themed, easily confused films that were being developed at the same time as…

Easy

1.
A Bug’s Life

2.
Tombstone

3.
Deep Impact

4.
Dante’s Peak

Harder

1.
Madagascar

2.
The Prestige

3.
The Truman Show

4.
Mission to Mars

Yeah, Good Luck

1.
Prefontaine

2.
Dangerous Liaisons

3.
First Daughter

4.
Dr. Strangelove