Ken Jennings's Trivia Almanac (69 page)

APRIL 28

1926
A
GIANT SEQUOIA
named “General Grant,” the world’s second largest organism, is officially proclaimed “The Nation’s Christmas Tree” by President Calvin Coolidge.

VOCAL QUINTETS

Each answer will, just like “sequoia” and “vocal quintet,” have only five vowels: a, e, i, o, and u, once apiece.

1.
What song was the Beach Boys’ first
Billboard
number one hit?

2.
What Lamborghini model, whose name is Spanish for “bat,” does Bruce Wayne very appropriately drive in
Batman Begins
?

3.
Harry Truman was the first U.S. president of what religious persuasion?

4.
According to the poem, how many spectators saw Mighty Casey strike out?

5.
What occupation is shared by TV protagonists Sean McNamara and Christian Troy?

6.
What noisy word comes from the capital of Hell in Milton’s
Paradise Lost
?

7.
Whose production company is Red Om Films, named for her husband?

8.
What does Ringo Starr play rather than drums on the Beatles’ first single, “Love Me Do”?

9.
David Schmidt won the 2001 Ig Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering the horizontal vortex that makes what household item blow inward?

10.
What word for a wimp comes from the title character of Harold Webster’s comic strip
The Timid Soul
?

11.
Until
Ben-Hur
broke its record, what was the bestselling novel of the nineteenth century?

12.
What ingredient appears alongside potatoes in the Indian dish aloo gobi?

13.
Who revealed he was HIV-positive in his 1995 autobiography
Breaking the Surface
?

14.
World champion sky surfer Rob Harris was killed in 1995 while filming a TV commercial for what product?

15.
Who moved in 1994 to Wyoming, the setting of her most famous short story?

16.
The father of Austin Powers’s nemesis, Dr. Evil, would drunkenly claim to have invented what?

17.
What musical did
Cats
surpass as the longest running in Broadway history?

18.
What African country is the only member of the Commonwealth of Nations that was never part of the British Empire?

19.
What cabinet department has recently been led by the appropriately named Rod Paige and Margaret Spellings?

20.
What city is home to the University of Haiti?

1950
R
AMA
IX,
KING OF
T
HAILAND,
marries his wife, Queen Sirikit, at Bangkok’s Pathumwan Palace. He fell for his fifteen-year-old cousin (yikes!) when both were studying in Europe.

WITH THIS KING I THEE WED

Name the royal spouses who married…

Easy

1.
Grace Kelly

2.
Anne Boleyn

3.
Sarah Ferguson

4.
Prince Albert (of piercing fame)

5.
Marie Antoinette

Harder

1.
Peter III of Russia

2.
Amenhotep IV

3.
Wallis Simpson

4.
Rita Hayworth

5.
William III of England

Yeah, Good Luck

1.
Lisa Halaby

2.
Princess Sophia of Greece

3.
Timothy Laurence

4.
Anne of Austria

5.
Farah Diba

APRIL 29

1852
P
ETER
M
ARK
R
OGET,
the founder of the University of Manchester School of Medicine and inventor of the log-log slide rule, performs his most lasting accomplishment: publishing a book of 15,000 synonyms he calls a “thesaurus.”

FOR FUTURE REFERENCE

1.
What reference classic is still named for the defunct New York newspaper that first published it in 1868?

2.
What was the last name of George and Charles, two brothers who revised Noah Webster’s dictionary after his 1843 death?

3.
What kind of information resource takes its name from a Hawaiian word for “quick”?

4.
What Cambridge bookstore manager wrote “What is familiar to one class of readers may be quite new to another” in the introduction to his famous work?

5.
When subjects of
Who’s Who
pass away, what companion volume do they move to?

1856
T
HE
USS
SUPPLY
ARRIVES
at Indianola, Texas, with a cargo of thirty-four Egyptian camels for the U.S. Camel Corps, a pet project of Secretary of War Jefferson Davis. But the smelly, bad-tempered camels aren’t popular with the men, and the corps is soon disbanded, leaving the camels to wander the American Southwest.

CAMELCASE

Give these “CamelCase” words—that is, words with an intermediate capital letter, like “MasterCard” or “PlayStation.”

1.
What did Teleworld, Inc., rename itself in 1999, after its flagship product?

2.
Who was sued in 1999 by Rosa Parks after they used her name to title a hit song?

3.
What was originally sold in 1965 under the name “Chemgrass”?

4.
Hitwise announced in 2006 that, for the first time, what site had passed Yahoo! to become America’s most popular website?

5.
What show debuted on September 7, 1979, with George Grande anchoring?

1939
“M
ARYLAND
, M
Y
M
ARYLAND
” is officially adopted as Maryland’s state song. This despite the fact that the 1861 ditty is a plea for Marylanders to join the Confederacy and begins by dissing Abraham Lincoln: “The despot’s heel is on thy shore!”

ALL GONE TO LOOK FOR AMERICA

Can you pick out the musical acts that sang these stately songs?