Ken Jennings's Trivia Almanac (198 page)

NOVEMBER 29

1907
C
RIMEAN
W
AR NURSE
Florence Nightingale becomes the first woman ever awarded the Order of Merit by the British Crown. An accomplished statistician, she was also the first woman elected to the Royal Statistical Society in 1858.

COT BEHIND ENEMY LINES

1.
Walter Reed, of V.A. hospital fame, was the surgeon who first discovered the transmission vector of what disease?

2.
Who was, ironically, laid up in a Germany military hospital with a leg wound when his 1968 dance hit boasted, “We dance just as good as we walk”?

3.
What 1942 invention of Dr. Harry Coover was used to close battle wounds in Vietnam?

4.
Stories of what controversial comic’s Navy cross-dressing inspired Klinger’s antics on
M*A*S*H
?

5.
Before they became writers, what did Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, E. E. Cummings, Somerset Maugham, and Dashiell Hammett have in common?

1920
T
WO
B
RITISH SILENT FILMS,
The Great Day
and
The Call of Youth,
hit London theaters. The movies are lousy, but their title cards are the first screen work of a young artist named Alfred Hitchcock.

TITLE CARDS

What movie titles are “illustrated,” using letters and symbols, in the cards below? For example, the first one is
Big Trouble in Little China.

NOVEMBER 30

1930
C
AT BURGLAR TURNED RADIO HOST
G. Gordon Liddy is born in Hoboken, New Jersey.

INITIAL CONTACT

Give the missing first initial of these folks who went by their middle names.

Easy

1.
_. Ross Perot

2.
_. Night Shymalan

3.
_. Scott Fitzgerald

4.
_. Ron Hubbard

5.
_. Edgar Hoover

Harder

1.
_. Epatha Merkerson

2.
_. Frank Baum

3.
_. Buckminster Fuller

4.
_. Emmett Walsh

5.
_. Thomas Howell

Yeah, Good Luck

1.
_. Whitney Brown

2.
_. Beam Piper

3.
_. Gary Gray

4.
_. King Jordan

5.
_. Gary Gygax

1954
A
NINE-POUND METEORITE
crashes through the roof of an Alabama house, badly bruising a napping housewife named Ann Hodges. She is the only person ever to have been injured by a falling meteorite.

IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE!

1.
A 1996 study of meteorite ALH84001 led scientists to announce that the stone might contain evidence of life where?

2.
How many rows of aliens are there in the original Space Invaders?

3.
Denver, Kansas City, or Houston—what U.S. city does Bill Pullman nuke in the hope of defeating the aliens in
Independence Day
?

4.
What was the name of Ziggy Stardust’s backing band?

5.
Who’s the only actor to appear in both film versions of
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
?

1974
T
WO ANTHROPOLOGISTS AT
H
ADAR,
Ethiopia, discover an amazingly complete fossilized skeleton of a female
Australopithecus afarensis.
Celebrating in camp that night with the Beatles on the tape player, the pair decide to name their specimen “Lucy.”

MISSING LINKS

1.
Link’s Awakening
is the only video game in its series not to feature what title character?

2.
The
Collision Course
EP is a mashup of Linkin Park songs with tracks by what rapper?

3.
What famed golf links were the first public course ever to be selected by
Golf Digest
as America’s best?

4.
Who started out gutting chickens in her mum’s Liverpool market stall before becoming the host of the BBC and NBC quiz show
The Weakest Link
?

5.
A, B,
or
C
—which letter of the alphabet is the element used to create hyperlinks in HTML Web documents?

November Answers

NOVEMBER 1

DA BOMB

1.
Little Boy

2.
Memphis Belle

3.
The Hell’s Angels

4.
Dresden

5.
“Love Shack”

FRANKLY, MY DEAR…

1.
The Nile

2.
The Colorado

3.
The Yangtze

4.
The Columbia

5.
The Missouri

SOCIETY PAGES

1.
The Boxer Rebellion

2.
Tupac Shakur

3.
John Birch

4.
The Kinks

5.
Tahiti

6.
Henry David Thoreau

7.
Alexander Graham Bell

8.
The Philadelphia Story

9.
The Jesuits

10.
John Kenneth Galbraith

NOVEMBER 2

“
20” QUESTIONS

1.
The Catskills

2.
“Bent”

3.
Jimmy Carter

4.
Law & Order

5.
7

6.
Four

7.
Feet

8.
He got ten wins for two different teams

9.
An (equilateral) triangle

10.
Your location

11.
Ronald Reagan (by being elected in a year ending with “0” and surviving his term)

12.
Billy Sims and Barry Sanders

13.
Borax

14.
“Twentysomething”

15.
Adam Smith

16.
Arrondissements

17.
The Wonder Years

18.
Chicago and New York

19.
Patrick O’Brian

20.
“Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”

TWENTY-ONE
QUESTIONS

1.
James Otis

2.
Nylon

3.
James J. Braddock

4.
Finland and the Soviet Union

5.
Jezebel

NOVEMBER 3

MASTHEAD HUNTING

Easy

1.
Boston

2.
Chicago

3.
Denver

4.
Washington, D.C.

5.
Cleveland

Harder

1.
Newark

2.
New Orleans

3.
Detroit

4.
Philadelphia

5.
Minneapolis

Yeah, Good Luck

1.
San Jose

2.
Orlando

3.
Akron

4.
Hartford

5.
Charlotte

BROADCAST STEWS

1.
The Barefoot Contessa

2.
The Frugal Gourmet

3.
The Naked Chef

4.
The Galloping Gourmet

5.
Two Fat Ladies

JAM BANDS

1.
Paul Weller

2.
MC5

3.
Mookie Blaylock

4.
“Human,” by the Human League