Ken Jennings's Trivia Almanac (196 page)

NOVEMBER 25

1851
A
TTORNEY
H
ENRY
W
ELLES
S
MITH,
feeling that there are already too many “Smiths” practicing law in the city of Boston, has the Massachusetts legislature change his name to “Henry Fowle Durant.” Using his sexy new name, the former Mr. Smith will go on to found Wellesley College.

JOB DESCRIPTION

Those Smiths probably all had ancestors who were blacksmiths, but what would each of
these
famous people make if their surnames still reflected their occupations?

1.
Anderson Cooper

2.
Rufus Wainwright

3.
Raymond Chandler

4.
Louise Fletcher

5.
Noah Webster

1851
I
T’S FUN TO STAY
at the YMC, eh? The first Young Men’s Christian Association in North America opens in Montreal.

ASSOCIATIVE MEMORY

How much do you know about
these
associations?

1.
What former U.S. president was elected to head the National Rifle Association in 1883?

2.
What sport gets its name from a contraction of the word “association”?

3.
What hit by the Association was, according to BMI, the second-most-aired pop song of the twentieth century?

4.
What disease was the American Lung Association originally founded to fight?

5.
What fraternal association, named for a part of a sea-based aircraft, made headlines for its 1991 Las Vegas symposium?

6.
What legendary NBA center was the first commissioner of the American Basketball Association?

7.
What association awards the yearly Spingarn Medal?

8.
What Steven Spielberg movie inspired the Motion Picture Association of America to create the PG-13 rating?

9.
Who invented the “free association” technique in 1896?

10.
What Fort Payne quartet is the only band ever named Entertainer of the Year at the Country Music Association awards?

1956
H
UNGARY’S NATIONAL CARRIER,
Malév Hungarian Airlines, is born. Dear Hungary: Maybe
“Malév”
means “awesome airline” in Hungarian, I don’t know, but in English it sounds a
little
too much like “malevolent.”

FLIGHT TESTING

Name the home country of these airlines.

Easy

1.
Qantas

2.
KLM

3.
Aeroflot

4.
Lufthansa

5.
El Al

Harder

1.
Aer Lingus

2.
Varig

3.
ANA

4.
Sabena (until 2001)

5.
Air Astana

Yeah, Good Luck

1.
Asiana

2.
Copa

3.
Avianca

4.
Garuda

5.
Druk Air

NOVEMBER 26

43
B.C
T
HE
S
ECOND
T
RIUMVIRATE
forms and takes over Rome. The triumvirs mostly hate each other, despite their complicated family relationships: Mark Antony was married to Octavian’s sister, while Octavian was married to Antony’s stepdaughter.

SECOND TIME AROUND

You’re just seconds away from a quiz about “second” things.

1.
Back when developing nations were still called “the Third World,” what was the Second World?

2.
What large religious denomination believes that Christ’s Second Coming
already happened,
back in 1914?

3.
Which two original
SNL
Not Ready for Prime Time Players got their start with Chicago’s Second City comedy troupe?

4.
What active slugger has more homers than any other second baseman in major-league history?

5.
What novel’s narrator is referred to only as “the second Mrs. de Winter”?

1927
N
OVICE NUN
M
ARIA
K
UTSCHERA
marries Austrian naval hero Georg von Trapp, a story that will later inspire a little musical you may have heard of. Just two months later, according to official records, Maria’s first daughter with the captain will be born, so it looks as though someone might have been playing “hide the lonely goatherd” a little early.

NUN OF THE ABOVE

In what film did these people portray nuns?

Easy

1.
Ingrid Bergman

2.
Debbie Reynolds

3.
Whoopi Goldberg

4.
Eric Idle

5.
Susan Sarandon

Harder

1.
Audrey Hepburn

2.
Meg Tilly

3.
Deborah Kerr (two options)

4.
Rosalind Russell (two options)

5.
Shirley MacLaine

Yeah, Good Luck

1.
Loretta Young

2.
Betty Aberlin

3.
Gladys Cooper

4.
Kathleen Freeman

5.
Mary Tyler Moore

1991
W
ITH THE END
of the Cold War, the
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
magazine resets the symbolic “Doomsday Clock,” which has been ticking down to nuclear midnight since 1947, back to 11: 43
P.M.
It’s the clock’s biggest move ever and its all-time low.

BEAT THE CLOCK

1.
Which Coldplay album features the band’s Grammy-winning song “Clocks”?

2.
How much longer is the NFL play clock than the NBA shot clock?

3.
On most clock faces, the number four is displayed in what nonstandard Roman-numeral fashion?

4.
What chemical element is most often used in atomic clocks, since the frequency of radiation it emits is used to officially define the length of one second?

5.
What TV series used “Rock Around the Clock” as its original theme?

6.
Which three digits, on a standard seven-segment clock radio display, are made up of the same number of dashed line segments as the numbers they express?

7.
What song does Bill Murray’s alarm clock play every morning in
Groundhog Day
?

8.
What’s the modern word that means the same thing as “widdershins”?

9.
What silent comic hangs from the hands of a clock in his movie
Safety Last!
?

10.
Whose first case involved discovering
The Secret of the Old Clock
?