Sometimes KJ really has his wits about him & this week is one of his best. So I'm posting the whole email - intro & both this week's questions & last week's answers with his witty comments.
It's the 53rd and final Tuesday of 2009! Most weekly mass e-mails only give you fifty-two installments a year, but Tuesday Trivia goes the extra mile. No, really--check a calendar.
The end of 2009 means this is probably my last chance to ask trivia questions about The Love Guru, Joe the Plumber, "I Kissed a Girl," and trucker hats. I'll try to resist the temptation...
THIS WEEK'S QUESTIONS
1. Orchestras tune up to the sound of an oboe playing what note?
2. What remarkable win-loss record was shared by both Twins pitcher Terry Felton and the 2008 Detroit Lions?
3. What word appears in the titles of *both* the Pulitzer-winning plays of author Thornton Wilder?
4. What scientist's 1859 work most famously supplanted the popular 19th-century theory of Lamarckism?
5. What TV network uses the new slogan "Chime In"?
6. Hundreds of thousands of orders have poured in for the Ducati Model 271, a model of what made famous last month by Muntader al-Zaidi?
7. What unusual distinction is shared by these films? Face/Off, Mary Poppins, La Ronde, Ronin, Ruggles of Red Gap, The Spanish Prisoner, The Sting, and Strangers on the Train.
LAST WEEK'S ANSWERS
1. What career does Hermey the Misfit Elf think he'd prefer to toymaking?
Dentistry! (Oddly, misfit dentists often wish they were making toys for Santa.)
2. What movie was adapted from the book "In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash"?
That Jean Shepherd book inspired many of the anecdotes in A Christmas Story.
3. What botanist sent a namesake Christmas symbol back to the U.S. in 1828 while serving as the first U.S. minister to Mexico?
Joel Roberts Poinsett first introduced North America to the flower the Aztecs called "cuetlaxochitl."
4. What two animals "kept time" for "The Little Drummer Boy"?
The ox and lamb kept time. But the lamb, being white, kept clapping on the one and three.
5. What's the name of the Wookiee holiday analogous to Christmas in the infamous 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special?
Life Day! The other day my six-year-old son asked me whose birth we celebrate on Life Day--Darth Vader's? Thank you, Star Wars, for this early theological confusion.
6. What was George Washington famously doing on Christmas Day, 1776?
Crossing the Delaware. (Ironically, he was Benedict Arnold's "secret Santa"!)
7. What unusual distinction (at least in their respective fields) did these famous people share with the historical St. Nicholas? Ansel Adams, Marlon Brando, Copernicus, Albus Dumbledore, Stephen Fry, Charlton Heston, Michelangelo, Robert Mitchum, Thackeray, Owen Wilson.
All sport (or sported) visibly broken noses. In St. Nicholas's case, we know this from modern analysis of Santa's skull. "His ears were like cauliflowers, his nose like a cherry..."
