Ken Jennings's Trivia Almanac (175 page)

OCTOBER 20

1942
A
CTOR
E
ARL
H
INDMAN
is born in Arizona. He will become best known for playing Wilson, the avuncular but always half-obscured neighbor on the Tim Allen sitcom
Home Improvement.

FACE OFF

What live-action TV show regularly featured the voices of these unseen actors?

Easy

1.
William Daniels

2.
Bob Saget

3.
John Forsythe

4.
Orson Welles

5.
Daniel Stern

Harder

1.
Lorenzo Music

2.
Janeane Garofalo

3.
Mary Tyler Moore

4.
Kevin Pollak

5.
Ann Sothern

Yeah, Good Luck

1.
Ralph James

2.
Bob Johnson

3.
Vic Perrin

4.
Burt Reynolds

5.
Paul Frees

1976
D
IEGO
M
ARADONA, PERHAPS
the greatest soccer player of all time, makes his professional debut for the Argentino Juniors. He’s only fifteen years old.

PAMPAS AND CIRCUMSTANCE

1.
What one-word catchphrase did the Argentine-born Andrés Cantor make famous?

2.
Martin Fierro is the greatest of what epic heroes of Argentine literature?

3.
Whose first film,
¡Segundos Afuera!,
debuted in Buenos Aires in August 1937?

4.
An Argentine would call them the Malvinas. What are they called in English?

5.
What iconic Rita Hayworth title character is the wife of a Buenos Aires casino owner?

1992
K
ENNY
G
RELEASES
B
REATHLESS,
which will go on to sell 15 million copies, making it—sorry, jazz purists—the most successful instrumental album of all time. (The
G
is for “Gorelick,” by the way.)

G WHIZ

1.
Who was the credited author of the 1941 detective novel
The G-String Murders
?

2.
What country joined the G7 in 1997, forming the G8?

3.
What food item is the only common word in American English in which a
g
is pronounced as
j
though it precedes a vowel that’s not
e, i,
or
y
?

4.
What’s the only Pixar film not to be rated G?

5.
What company traded on the New York Stock Exchange with ticker symbol G before its 2005 merger with Procter & Gamble?

OCTOBER 21

1939
T
HE
B
RIGGS
A
DVISORY
C
OMMITTEE
on Uranium meets for the first time, because President Roosevelt is alarmed by a letter he received from Albert Einstein and other physicists about the possibility of Nazi Germany developing an atomic bomb. It is the beginning of the Manhattan Project.

NUCLEAR FAMILY

1.
What U.S. state is home to Three Mile Island?

2.
What atomic bomb test got its name from J. Robert Oppenheimer’s love for the religious poetry of John Donne?

3.
Three of the last five U.S. presidents have pronounced nuclear “nucular.” Which two got it right?

4.
What password lets Matthew Broderick play Global Thermonuclear War in the film
WarGames
?

5.
The Cuban Missile Crisis was defused by a U.S. offer to remove nuclear missiles from what country?

1954
T
HE FIRST ADAPTATION
of Ian Fleming’s James Bond books hits TV screens.
Casino Royale
airs as an episode of CBS’s anthology
Climax!,
with American (!) Barry Nelson playing Jimmy “Card Sense” Bond.

FOR YOUR ISLES ONLY

For an English icon, 007 sure hasn’t been played by an Englishman very often. Match the first five Bonds to their ethnicity of birth.

1992
M
ATTEL ANNOUNCES THAT
Teen Talk Barbie will no longer say “Math class is tough!” after widespread public complaints that the sound bite is sexist.

HELLO, DOLLY

1.
What kind of doll has Xavier Roberts’s signature on its left buttock?

2.
What traditional dolls represent the sacred spirits of Hopi religion?

3.
What lounge singer persona did David Johansen adopt after leaving the New York Dolls?

4.
The gender-confused title character in
Seed of Chucky
is named either Glen or Glenda in honor of what director?

5.
Which dolls were friends with the Camel with the Wrinkled Knees?

6.
What gambling game is the subject of the
Guys and Dolls
song “Luck Be a Lady”?

7.
Though it was written in Italy, what country is the setting of the play
A Doll’s House
?

8.
On NBC’s
The Office,
Angela gave Dwight a bobble-head doll version of whom?

9.
What do
matryoshka
dolls famously do?

10.
What film critic wrote the screenplay for Russ Meyer’s
Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
?