Sunsets, Stars, West, Wind
How well do you know your Tolkien? Have you read The Silmarillion more times than you can count? Have you memorized the extended cut of Return of the King? Is Gollum your spirit animal?
Join us at the Pawn & Pint for a day of Tolkien themed trivia with our friends from the Tolkien Society of Kansas City!
Continue reading “Tolkien Trivia This Weekend”Io9 is on a roll today. Lots of goodies to share from SF classics including hands on (or minds on) information that can be useful in the real world.
Posted from WordPress for Android via my Samsung smartphone. Please excuse any misspellings. Ciao, Jon
From last Thursday on Jeopardy, I was a bit surprised none of the three contestants (none of whom were attorneys) got the answer right.
The final category was Law and the clue was: In 1790 the USA’s 1st law governing this protection gave it a term of 14 years; today it can extend well over a century.
The first contestant stated: “What are Patents?” … wrong
The second contestant stated: “What is haebius corpus?” … wrong
The third contestant stated: “What is witness protection?” … wrong
The correct answer was: “What is a copyright?” … which my husband can confirm I got way before the end of the thirty second song.
Kudos to Terry for getting “What is amnesty?” from this clue: This pardon, especially for political offenses against government, is from a Greek word for “forgetting” in the category From the Greek.
Another Tuesday is upon me and I survived the Holidays … barely. Last week, in my A Trivial Holiday post, I shared seven mid-winter holiday themed trivia questions, courtesy of Ken Jenning‘s weekly Tuesday Trivia e-mail service.
And now, the answers you’ve all been waiting for:
1. How many tiny reindeer pull Santa’s sleigh, in the poem that begins “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas”? Eight tiny reindeer–Rudolph was a later addition.
2. What sitcom featured a character with the very festive full name of “Christmas Noelle Snow”? Chrissy Snow, Suzanne Somers’s character on Three’s Company, was saddled with that wintry nightmare of a name, for which at least three different explanations were given on the show.
3. Which of the three traditional gifts brought by the three wise men has the highest market value today? Frankincense and myrrh, being nothing but tree sap with vaguely aromatic/medicinal properties, retail for just a few dollars an ounce. Gold is about a hundred times more valuable.
4. Rod Carew was a Minnesota Twin, but who are the only *real* twins name-checked in Adam Sandler’s “Hanukkah Song”? Ann Landers and her sister Dear Abby. (Harrison Ford’s a quarter Jewish–not too shabby!)
5. Most commercial Advent calendars begin on what date? The actual dates of Advent move around, since the period officially begins on the fourth Sunday before Christmas, but the eponymous calendars typically just start on December 1.
6. “Christmas disease” is another name for the ‘B’ type of what disease, most famously suffered by Alexei Romanov? Hemophilia B was named for Stephen Christmas, the first patient in which it was identified.
7. What unusual distinction is held by these countries in this order, and no others? Spain, Saudi Arabia, China, Russia. These are the (modern-day) sources of the four “ethnic” dances in the second act of Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker: a Spanish dance, an Arabian dance, a Chinese dance, and a Russian dance. When I first came up with this question, I thought there were a few more countries on this list, but it turns out the list just SEEMED longer when I took my four-ear-old daughter to The Nutcracker a couple weeks ago.
If you’d like to see this week’s questions, submit a comment replying to this post and I’ll see what I can do.
Merry Christmas (on the 4th day of Christmas)
Re-posting this from the weekly e-mail I subscribe to from Ken Jennings, which he coins as “Tuesday Trivia”:
Season’s greetings from Tuesday Trivia! Christmas and trivia go together like a creepy Bing Crosby-David Bowie duet, so we hope you enjoy this Christma-Hanuk-Kwanzaa-themed installment of our weekly quiz.
Now BRING US OUR FIGGY PUDDING! We won’t go until we get some. And some pudding.
THIS WEEK’S QUESTIONS
——————————————-
As with all good trivia, it would take you about 30 seconds to Google the answers to the first six questions above. So you’re on the honor system here: no peeking, and only send in the answers you knew off the top of your head. Answers will appear in next week’s mailing.
The seventh and final question every week is a “What do they have in common?” question, designed to be harder to Google. As I arrange to send out goodies to high scorers, it will be on the basis of these seventh questions only.
Send responses to tuesdaytrivia@ken-jennings.com by noon Pacific each following Monday. That’s also the address to contact if you missed the quiz one week and need to request a replacement.
——————————————-
Enjoy and Merry Christmas!
Jon