Ken Jennings's Trivia Almanac (130 page)

FINGER-LICKIN’ GOOD

Match these fast-food chains to their interchangeable-sounding slogans.

AUGUST 5

1903
E
DUCATOR
R
ENSIS
L
IKERT
is born in Wyoming. You don’t know Likert, but you’ve probably seen his namesake “scale.” The Likert scale is a question followed by some range of answers, such as Strongly Disagree, Disagree, Agree, and Strongly Agree.

DRAWN TO SCALES

Can you match these scales to the things they measure?

1912
I
NDIANA SENATOR
A
LBERT
B
EVERIDGE
coins a new political term when he tells the “Bull Moose” Party, at its Chicago convention, “This party has come from the grass roots.”

LAWN TERM MEMORY

Ten grass-roots questions—no mower, no less.

1.
What’s the only Grand Slam tennis event still played on grass?

2.
What plant is the largest member of the Poaceae family, the true grasses?

3.
Who was given a gift of a hat pin and a copy of
Leaves of Grass
on February 28, 1997?

4.
The critical clue in what movie turns out to be a Japanese gardener complaining that salt water is “bad for glass”?

5.
Tifgreen and Tifway, the best golf course grasses, are varieties of what kind of grass named for a British territory?

6.
Who shocked the public with his 1863 painting
Luncheon on the Grass
?

7.
What raconteur and
Topkapi
star joked that he wanted his tombstone to read “Keep off the grass?”

8.
What TV show is produced by Honolulu’s Grass Skirt Productions?

9.
According to Erma Bombeck’s best seller, where is the grass always greener?

10.
What Hollywood legend made his screen debut in 1961’s
Splendor in the Grass
?

AUGUST 6

1930
N
EW
Y
ORK
J
UDGE
Robert Crater enjoys a quiet dinner with his showgirl mistress and a lawyer friend, then hops into a taxi and is never heard from again.

VANISHING ACTS

1.
What union did Jimmy Hoffa head until his 1975 disappearance?

2.
What hero of the War of 1812 established his own “kingdom,” called Campeche, at Galveston, Texas, until disappearing overnight in 1821?

3.
What instrument did vanished bandleader Glenn Miller play?

4.
On what Caribbean island did Natalee Holloway disappear in 2005?

5.
What author of
The Devil’s Dictionary
disappeared while accompanying Pancho Villa’s army through Mexico in 1913?

6.
For what mysterious figure is the latch on the inside of some Boeing passenger jet doors named?

7.
In what South American country were Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid rumored killed in 1908?

8.
What explorer disappeared in 1928 while on a rescue mission for survivors of the crashed airship
Italia
?

9.
Over what ocean did Amelia Earhart disappear?

10.
Who saved thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Holocaust before vanishing into a Soviet prison in 1945?

1964
T
HE WORLD’S OLDEST TREE,
a Great Basin bristlecone pine called Prometheus, is cut down by researchers and the U.S. Forest Service so that—get this—its age can be determined.

TREE-VENGE!

Sometimes trees get people back. Match these famous names to the kind of tree that killed them.

1971
P
RINCIPAL PHOTOGRAPHY
on
The Godfather
ends. Paramount is queasy about the results—director Francis Ford Coppola insisted on an unknown stage actor, Al Pacino, in the lead, though the studio wanted Warren Beatty or Robert Redford.

THANK YOU, GODFATHER

What genre are each of these musicians said to be “godfathers” of?

1.
Neil Young

2.
James Brown

3.
Afrika Bambaataa

4.
Iggy Pop

5.
The Cure