Ken Jennings's Trivia Almanac (62 page)

APRIL 14

1881
E
L
P
ASO MARSHAL
D
ALLAS
S
TOUDENMIRE
becomes a legend when he kills three men in the famous “Four Dead in Five Seconds” gunfight.

CRIME SCENES

In what city were these famous people killed?

Easy

1.
Archduke Ferdinand

2.
Wild Bill Hickok

3.
Martin Luther King, Jr.

4.
Indira Gandhi

5.
Tupac Shakur

Harder

1.
Billy Clanton

2.
Rasputin

3.
William McKinley

4.
JonBenét Ramsey

5.
Rafael Trujillo

Yeah, Good Luck

1.
Bob Crane

2.
Veronica Guerin

3.
Medger Evers

4.
Elizabeth Short

5.
Anton Cermak

1966
T
HE
B
EATLES RECORD
“R
AIN
,” the B-side of “Paperback Writer” and the first rock song ever to feature “hidden messages” via back-masked vocals.

WHAT LIES BENEATH

Can you reveal these hidden answers?

1.
Who reveals “the man behind the curtain” in
The Wizard of Oz
?

2.
What hides the face of the bowler-hatted title figure in René Magritte’s painting
The Son of Man
?

3.
Who devised the Trojan Horse and led the men hidden inside it?

4.
In the
Harry Potter
books, the entrance to Gryffindor Tower is hidden behind a painting of whom?

5.
Whittaker Chambers hid Alger Hiss’s purloined State Department documents in a hollowed-out what?

2003
R
ESEARCHERS ANNOUNCE THE COMPLETION
of the Human Genome Project, a thirteen-year effort to decode the billions of nucleotides in the human genome.

GENE-HACK MEN

1.
How many pairs of chromosomes are there in each human cell?

2.
Housefly, horsefly, or fruit fly—what kind of insect is
Drosophila melanogaster,
the most studied organism in genetics?

3.
DNA was discovered in Cambridge in 1953. What famous person with the initials “D.N.A.” had been born in Cambridge in 1952?

4.
What scientist was also the sixth abbot of Brno’s Abbey of Saint Thomas?

5.
Which of the four bases of DNA
isn’t
found in RNA?

APRIL 15

1955
I
NCOME TAX DAY
in the United States falls on its current date for the first time. (It was originally March 1, after the passage of the Sixteenth Amendment, and was later bumped back to March 15.)

TAXING TRIVIA

1.
Gandhi’s famous march to Dandi in 1930 was an act of protest against Great Britain’s tax on what?

2.
What two British politicians of the 1960s are mentioned by George Harrison in “Taxman”?

3.
Which of the four biblical Gospels was written by an ex–tax collector?

4.
Where did Al Capone spend the majority of his 1931 sentence for tax evasion?

5.
What did the 1980s bands the Go-Gos, R.E.M., Black Sabbath, and Fine Young Cannibals have in common?

6.
What August 18, 1988, sound bite was later called “the six most destructive words in the history of presidential politics”?

7.
Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” was inspired by the jail time he did for refusing to pay a poll tax supporting what war?

8.
Whose 1990 double album
Who’ll Buy My Memories?
is also called
The IRS Tapes,
since that’s where all the proceeds went?

9.
With his famous “Taxpayer” character of the 1930s,
New York World
cartoonist Will B. Johnstone invented the famous image of a man wearing what?

10.
Which section of the Internal Revenue Code was created in 1978, intended by Congress as a way for executives to defer their salary tax-free?

1971
G
EORGE
C. S
COTT WINS
a Best Actor Oscar for playing
Patton
but isn’t there to receive the award. He had earlier telegrammed the Academy asking that his name be withdrawn. “The whole thing is a goddamn meat parade,” he says.

MEAT ON PARADE

1.
What’s the traditional meat on a Reuben sandwich?

2.
In an annual “index,” what item does
The Economist
use to express currency rates and buying power between countries?

3.
What cut of beef, often used for hamburger, is also called the “seven-bone steak”?

4.
In Britain, what kind of meat comes in rashers?

5.
What job, once held by James Garner and Robert Mitchum, is now filled by Sam Elliott?

6.
The “-am” in “Spam” is obviously for “ham.” What’s the “sp-” for?

7.
In the nursery rhyme “This Little Piggy,” what meat did the third little piggy eat?

8.
What snack did Teressa Bellissimo invent at the Anchor Bar, in upstate New York, on October 3, 1964?

9.
What kind of sausage would more authentically be called “mortadella” in its namesake city?

10.
What delicacy comes from Yagyu cattle?