Ken Jennings's Trivia Almanac (31 page)

FEBRUARY 23

1985
I
N A TIGHT GAME WITH
P
URDUE,
Bobby Knight expresses his dissatisfaction with a referee’s call by hurling a plastic chair across the basketball court.

SIT ON IT

1.
In which Hitchcock movie is the protagonist confined to a wheelchair?

2.
In what ominous numbered room is Winston Smith strapped to a chair at the end of
Nineteen Eighty-four
?

3.
Who sits behind the “
Resolute
desk,” made from the timbers of the HMS
Resolute
of the British navy?

4.
What’s the smallest nation with a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council, in both population and area?

5.
Today, the Smithsonian is home to the high-back wing chair used by what fictional character from 1971 to 1979?

6.
Who was sent to the electric chair on the testimony of her brother David Greenglass?

7.
The Siege Perilous was the name for the empty seat where?

8.
What competition was dreamed up by the eccentric “Chairman Kaga”?

9.
Marseille, Barcelona, or Naples—architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe named his famous modernist lounge chair after what Mediterranean city, where it debuted?

10.
What duo’s biggest hits are found on 1985’s
Songs from the Big Chair
?

2003
M
ARIO
L
EMIEUX BECOMES
the only player in NHL history ever to complete an “ultimate hat trick” by scoring goals in all five possible ways in one game: on a power play, shorthanded, at even strength, on a penalty, and into an empty net.

TEN GALLANT HATS

Match each famous name to its owner’s characteristic headwear.

FEBRUARY 24

1784
A
CCORDING TO A CHURCH REGISTER,
the mysterious adventurer and alchemist called the Count of Saint Germain dies in Schleswig, Germany. But a string of rumors and sightings will have Saint Germain, “the man who does not die,” popping up all over Europe well into the twentieth century.

DOWN FOR THE COUNT

1.
Who killed Count Rugen?

2.
What werewolf-themed cereal briefly joined Count Chocula on store shelves in 1974?

3.
Whose death is a result of the souring of her relationship with her lover Count Vronsky?

4.
What instrument did jazz bandleader Count Basie play?

5.
What famous occultist, thrown into the Bastille for his role in “the affair of the necklace,” may have actually been a Sicilian peasant named Giuseppe Balsamo?

6.
Who killed Count Dooku by cutting off his head?

7.
What country’s kings were also counts of Holland and Flanders in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries?

8.
Who built the French country house he called the Château de Monte-Cristo?

9.
The real-life Hungarian nobleman Count László Almasy was the basis for what ironically misidentified title character of literature and film?

10.
What’s the surname of
Sesame Street
’s The Count?

1969
J
OHNNY
C
ASH’S FAMOUS
performance for the inmates of San Quentin includes Shel Silverstein’s novelty song “A Boy Named Sue.” The live “Sue” will become the only Top Ten pop single of Cash’s long career.

HE SAID, SHE SAID

Poor Sue isn’t the only famous person with a gender-bending first name.

1.
What novelist of westerns went by his middle name, since he was given the first name “Pearl”?

2.
What actress had the word “Miss” listed before her first name in the credits of
The Waltons
?

3.
According to a university tradition, whose most famous poem was inspired by a white oak on the campus of Rutgers’s agriculture school?

4.
Who has played a U.S. vice president on the big screen and a U.S. chief justice on the small screen?

5.
What TV host’s father was a longtime
Washington Post
sportswriter once erroneously listed in
Who’s Who of American Women
because his given name was Shirley?

6.
“Madison” is now one of the most popular baby girl names in America, thanks mostly to what actress, who sported it in a 1984 comedy?

7.
A Christmas Story
was inspired by the childhood reminiscences of what radio personality?

8.
Agatha Christie’s
The Mirror Crack’d
was inspired by an incident from the life of what actress, who gave birth to a severely handicapped child because an obsessed fan had given her German measles at a USO event?

9.
What British satirist was briefly married, in the late 1920s, to a woman who spelled her first name the same as his?

10.
Who originally sang the 1975 song that became the Dixie Chicks’ biggest pop hit ever in 2002?