Archive for the ‘trivia’ Tag
Well, how do you think you’ve scored? I found that I remembered the individual stories well enough but wasn’t too sharp with the small details. When I was a youngster my mother purchased a series of paperback pamphlets from the Catholic church (Who else?). Each pamphlet offered up a story from the Bible written specifically for young adults and kids. It’s nice to see that I finally found a use for all that knowledge all these years later. Here are the promised answers to the quiz.
* * *
1. The book of Esther.
2. According to Genesis 5:27, you would be 969 years old.
3. Pitch, or natural asphalt. This way
4. Darius the Mede (Book of Daniel, Chapter 6)
5. War (Book of Revelations)
6. To, Ruth and Esther.
7. Ahab, King of Israel (I Kings 16:28-31)
8. Joshua. The passages in Joshua 10:12-13.
9. The Dead Sea – which is known for it’s high salt content. The Arabs call it the sea of Lot; the Israelis, the Salt Sea.
10. The Babylonian king Belshazzar (Daniel5:1-5)
11. Balthazar, Caspar and Melchior.
12. Three days and three nights.
13. Aramaic – an ancient language in use on the North Arabian Peninsula at the time of Christ. A modern version of the languages spoken today in Syria and among Assyrians in Azerbaijan.
14. Seven according to the Bible (Judges 16:19).
15. On the third day (Genesis 1:9).
* * *
There you have it. I’ve already started work on a Food Trivia Challenge which will be posted within the next week or so.
Since I went into something of a religious kick yesterday I thought I’d continue along in the same vein today. I find it odd that so many people who claim to be religious also continuously complain about their religion. Not one particular religion but pretty much every religion collects its fair amount of criticism from its own practitioners as well as critics from other religions and of course the always ever present atheists.
This posting today is another one of my trivia challenges based fully and solely on the Bible. Believe me when I tell you I’m not an expert on the Bible. I’ve read virtually all of it at one time or another but I wasn’t seeking solace for help in maintaining my religious faith, I was just curious about what all the hoopla was about. So for those of you out there who feel that you’re a true person of faith with a fair amount of knowledge about the Bible, I’m here to challenge you today.
I’m going to increase the number of questions in this trivia challenge and instead of my regular 10 there will be 15. Let’s see how closely you’ve read and remember the information in your Bible.
1. The name of God is not mentioned in only one book of the Bible. Which one?
2. If you lived as long as Methuselah, what age would you live to?
3. According to the Bible, what substance was used to caulk Noah’s Ark and to seal the basket in which the infant Moses was set adrift on the Nile?
4. What biblical Babylonian king cast Daniel into the lions den for praying to God in defiance of a Royal decree?
5. In the Bible, which of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse rides a red horse?
6. How many books of the Bible are named for women?
7. In the Old Testament, who was Jezebel’s husband?
8. In the Bible, who did the sun and moon stand before?
9. Along what body of water is there a low-salt mountain some believe is the pillar of salt that Lot’s wife was turned into after the destruction of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah?
10. In the Bible, who saw the handwriting on the wall?
11. What were the names of the three wise men?
12. How much time did Jonah spend in the belly of the whale?
13. What language is Jesus believed to have spoke?
14. How many locks of hair did Delilah have cut from the mighty Samson’s head to render him powerless?
15. According to the Bible, on what day did God divide land and water?
I’m really proud of myself after scoring 10/15 on this trivia challenge. I guess some of the things I was taught during my misspent youth I actually retained. Tomorrow I’ll publish the answers with as much detail as I can give you to verify where in the Bible you can find them. Have fun.
Being a lover of history and geography started for me when I was no more than seven or eight years old. I loved map reading and studied the world map for years and even copied it twice by hand. I was like a gigantic sponge when it came to learning anything new on those two subjects. I loved reading about this country and the people who helped create it.
I find these days that attempting to converse about our history is difficult. People either lack the knowledge entirely or what they do know is incorrect. It seems that academia spends more time teaching them what might be wrong with this country than what is good. I’ll go so far as to say that many of our younger citizens couldn’t even pass the citizenship test that all immigrants are required to pass if they wish to become an American citizen. A number of years ago I recall some sort of half-assed poll that indicated that our own children couldn’t find the United States on a world map. I found that shocking then but I’m afraid the situation hasn’t improved much.
I’m going to post something today which may be a total waste of time. I thought maybe a short and intense American Geography Trivia quiz might be just the thing. Some of you will know every answer, some will know most, and some will be totally stumped. Where do you think you’ll score? Let’s see.
* * *
1. Two states bill themselves as the “Sunshine State. Can you name?
2. What US city is almost the same latitude as Mexico City?
3. What U.S. canyon is the deepest gorge on the North American continent?
4. What are the numbers of the three interstate highways that run coast-to-coast?
5. How many official time zones are there in the United States – including Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and American Samoa?
6. What for state capitals are named after cities in England to Mark
7. What city is more than 2 1/2 times the size of Rhode Island and is America’s largest in area?
8. What is the only place below sea level in the United States that is not located in the California desert? Hint: it’s a major city.
9. How many states were created in part or in their entirety from the Louisiana Territory, purchased from France in 1803?
10. What was the name of the first permanent settlement in Kentucky, established in 1775 by frontiersman Daniel Boone?
* * *
I get to brag a little today after taking this quiz. I scored seven correct answers out of ten and amazed myself. As always, the correct answers will be posted tomorrow along with a limerick or two and a dirty joke if I can find a good one.
I’m a big fan of movies and I find nothing more enjoyable than throwing in a DVD, popping some popcorn, and relaxing with a good film. My preferences are varied but what I really enjoy most are the movies normally shown on TCM. I’ve spent hundreds of hours watching those films and without hesitation would do it again.
One thing above all that interests me are the anomalies made during filming that are missed by the editors and end up in the final version. I’m sure some of them are done purposely but many are just screw-ups that were missed. I stumbled on this information concerning a few movie foul-ups that aren’t all that well known (at least not to me). The next time you happen to be watching any of these films with a friend of family member you can dazzle them with your superior knowledge of movie trivia. Enjoy.
-
In 1982 during the filming of Raiders of the Lost Ark a great blooper can be found in the scene where German soldiers and Gestapo agents were lifting the Ark. If you look closely as the camera pans along the hieroglyphics on the wall you’ll see paintings of C3PO and R2D2, the robots from the Star Wars classic (another George Lucas film).
-
This tidbit is from the movie Fortune Cookie made in 1966. The blooper scene shows Walter Matthau leaving one room and entering another and he appears to have lost a great deal of weight in the process. Matthau suffered a heart attack while this scene was being filmed; only half of the scene was completed before he entered the hospital. He returned five months later to finish the job almost 40 pounds lighter than he was in the first part of the filming.
-
In 1971 during the filming of Diamonds are Forever, James Bond tips his Ford Mustang up on two wheels and drives through a narrow alley to escape from the bad guys. Unfortunately in the final version the Mustang enters the alley on its two right wheels and leaves the alley on its two left wheels.
-
Close Encounters of the Third Kind filmed in 1977 also had a blooper worth mentioning. Towards the end of the movie Richard Dreyfus and Terry Garner smashed through several roadblocks as they neared the Devil’s Tower. The license plate on their station wagon kept changing.
-
Now let’s go back to 1954 to the filming of Rear Window. The star Jimmy Stewart, in a cast and sitting in a wheelchair, is arguing with Grace Kelly. His cast magically switches from his left leg to his right during the scene.
-
1967 during the filming of Camelot, King Richard (Richard Harris) praises his medieval kingdom while speaking to some of his subjects. Someone dropped the ball because in that scene Harris is wearing a Band-Aid on his neck.
-
And last but not least one small blooper from one of my all-time favorite movies, Abbott and Costello Go to Mars (1953). In the movie they actually go to Venus.
I hope to discover more of these little miscues in other films and if I do I’ll be sure to pass them along.
I think it’s a good day for another trivia quiz with questions about something of which I’m not all that familiar. As I’ve said many times before I’m not a huge sports fan but I do know that many of the readers of this blog are. With that in mind here are 10 fairly difficult sports trivia questions which should challenge even the best sports trivia fanatics.
As always I’ll list the correct answers tomorrow and you can see just how good you really are. I scored a big fat zero on this one. I hope you sports people can at least do better than that. Have fun.
* * *
1. What souvenir did New York Giant linebacker Lawrence Taylor request from a referee after he played his last game in January 1994?
2. What was the first sport in which women were invited to compete at the Olympics?
3. What Baseball Hall of Fame pitcher hit a home run in his first major league at-bat and never hit another?
4. Who was the first athlete to hit a major league home run and make a professional football touchdown in the same week?
5. What basketball player racked up the greatest number of personal fouls during his professional career?
6. Who was the first professional football player to run for more than 2000 yards in a season?
7. How many baseball gloves can be made from one cow?
8. Why did the Cincinnati Reds baseball team send an autographed second-base bag to cowboy movie star Roy Rogers?
9. Who was scheduled to be the next batter when Bobby Thomson hit his famous home run in the 1951 National League playoffs, winning the pennant for the New York Giants?
10. What is the meaning of basketball great Shaquille Rashaun O’Neal’s given Islamic name?
* * *
As you can see I wasn’t kidding, they are tough questions. Check back tomorrow.
I guess it’s time for another trivia challenge for all of you trivia maniacs out there. Today’s 10 questions should be categorized as miscellaneous. They are a mixed bag of facts that might just interest you a little. I took this quiz myself as I put it together but I’m not admitting how badly I did. Let’s just say I scored higher than one and less than four. I’m so ashamed.
As always the correct answers will be posted tomorrow. If you score anything higher than a four your doing really well and should be proud. Good luck!
* * *
1. What was the original name of the Girl Scouts?
2. In 1937, sewing machine heiress Daisy singer Alexander put her will in a model and tossed it into the Thames River near London. Where and when did it wash up?
3. What day is the middle day of the year in a non-leap year?
4. For what magazine did Hugh Hefner serve as circulation manager while he was raising money to launch Playboy?
5. What did Lizzie Borden, Napoleon, and Titian have in common?
6. By what name was Nobel Peace Prize winner Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu better known?
7. What do the letters stand for in the acronym CARE, the name of the relief organization established in 1945?
8. What is the telephone area code for a cruise ship in the Atlantic Ocean?
9. What unusual twosome spoke at ventriloquist Edgar Bergen’s funeral in 1979?
10. Why is the phrase "the quick brown fox jumps over lazy dog" used to check typewriters?
* * *
There you have it. Now before I finish this posting I’ll throw in another filthy yet funny limerick. You can never ever have enough limericks, dirty or otherwise. If you’re offended by this off-color humor, too bad.
There once was a woman named Jill
Who swallowed an exploding pill
They found her vagina
In North Carolina
And her tits in a tree in Brazil.
I’ve always been intrigued by strange and unusual facts, synchronicity, and coincidences. Common sense tells me that they’re just random happenstances that mean nothing and have not been caused by anything paranormal or magical. If you research as many of them as I have it can easily seem that something unearthly is causing the occurrences.
I’ve collected reference material from wherever I could find it and I’m still occasionally stunned and amazed by what I’ve found. Let me pass on to you a few facts that are true and bizarre. Feel free to make your own decision as to what causes things like this to happen. I certainly have no answers. Maybe it’s just luck, if you believe in that.
* * *
Angel Santana, of New York City, escaped unharmed when a robber’s bullet bounced off his pants zipper.
In 1942, Lieut. I. M. Chisov, a Russian pilot, fell 21,980 feet from his fighter plane and survived (his chute failed to open).
Sgt. Joseph Charles was in a fox hole in New Guinea during World War II when the mail boys called him to come out for a letter from home. He crawled out approximately 10 feet when a Japanese plane flew over and dropped a bomb that completely destroyed the foxhole he’d just left.
Lieut. Cmdr. Robert W. Goehring was swept off the Coast Guard cutter U.S.S. Duane by a gigantic wave during a storm. The ship then turned around to rescue him, when suddenly another huge wave tossed him back on board to safety.
An ambulance in Nykroppa, Sweden, sent to pick up Lars Elam, a patient with a high fever, returned to the hospital with the patient driving it and the regular driver lying dead in the back from a heart attack.
Actor Sean Connery, who played the film character James Bond was once stopped for a traffic offense by a policeman named Sgt. James Bond.
Two automobiles that collided in Ajax, Ontario, on a slippery winter day were owned by motorists named Snow and Blizzard.
A bottle of prescription pills was swept out of the bedroom of Mrs. Lena McCovey when a flood destroyed her home on the Klamath River. It was found 200 miles away at Coos Bay, Oregon, by Mrs. McCovey’s sister.
Abraham Lincoln was the second member of his family to die by an assassin’s bullet. The other was his grandfather. Both victims were named Abraham, both had wives named Mary, and both had a son named Thomas. The name Abraham has never again been given to any member of the family.
In Bermuda, brothers Erskin L. Ebbin and Neville Ebbin both died one year apart after being struck by the same taxi, driven by the same driver, and carrying the same passenger.
* * *
What do you think now? As I read through these kinds of facts there are just times when I can’t wrap my head around what I’m reading. Does it mean I believe there’s more at work here than meets the eye? There are times when I do think that but then the cynic and pragmatic part of me began screaming, “Are you effing crazy?”. Maybe I am.
I’m a huge fan of both the Cooking and Food channels. Being a huge fan of food makes it almost a requirement. Without a large assortment of food the human race would cease to exist in short order (no pun intended).
I’ve been a cook for most of my life and to this day maintain a large handwritten recipe book with family recipes and many of my own that I use on a regular basis. Nothing fascinates me more than finding a new dish that I’ve never experienced and attempting to remake it “my way” and then share it with friends.
Needless to say everyone who enjoys cooking thinks their family recipes are the best and that their mothers and grandmothers are the final word on anything food related. I fall into that category myself not so much with my mother’s cooking which was only so-so but with my grandmothers which was sooooo good.
I thought today I’d present you with a short trivia challenge on food and cooking related items. As with any other subject there’s thousands of trivia items available to stump and puzzles us all when it comes to food. Here are 10 that I found somewhat interesting and I hope you do as well. The answers will be posted tomorrow so you can check and see how you’ve done. Have fun with it and then go eat a sandwich.
* * *
1. In which American city is the greatest amount of ketchup consumed?
2. Who said: “Never eat more than you can lift”?
3. What was the first commercially manufactured breakfast cereal?
4. How many pounds of dry saffron does an acre of crocus plants yield?
5. Under federal food labeling regulations, how much caffeine must be removed from coffee for it to be called decaffeinated?
6. What are the five most frequently consumed fruits in the United States?
7. What snack food commercial was pulled off the air in 1970 because of complaints from an outraged ethnic group?
8. What popular lunch and snack food did an unidentified St. Louis doctor develop in 1890 for patients requiring an easily digested form of protein?
9. What do Eskimos use to prevent their food from freezing?
10. What eating utensil was first brought to America in 1630 by Massachusetts Bay Colony governor John Winthrop, who carried it around with him in a specially made, velvet-lined leather case?
* * *
I selected these questions because I felt they could be answered easily if you just think about them for a moment. I could be wrong so check back tomorrow.
I spend a lot of time on the Net these days and have done so for many years. It’s become an integral part of my life and indispensible in a number of other ways. It’s hard to believe than just over thirty years ago I was a subscriber to the Genie Electric Network and received text-only Internet on a 300 baud modem. The changes have been huge and relatively fast and I’m glad to have experienced the Net in all of it’s changing incarnations.
I decided to do a little surfing today and to collect a few facts about the all-seeing Internet in it’s current form. I was more than a little shocked at what I found because some of the numbers were almost impossible to wrap my head around. Here is a short list of some amazing stats. Unbelievable is probably more accurate.
-
Google estimates the Internet at about 5 million terabytes of data, or 5 trillion megabytes.
-
The human brain can hold between 1 and 10 terabytes.
-
Using an average of 5 terabytes per human brain, it would take a million human brains to hold the entire Internet.
-
212 DVD’s will hold one terabyte or 1,000,000,000 to hold the Internet.
-
40 Blue-ray discs will hold a terabyte and it would take 200,000,000 to store the Internet.
-
American makes up 76.2% of the Internet population but only 5% of the worlds population.
-
There are 247 billion emails sent every day and 81% (200,000,000) are spam.
-
There are 90 trillion emails sent each year.
-
Teenagers spend an average of 31 hours per week on the Internet and only four hours doing homework.
-
There are 234,000,000 web sites and 126,000,000 blogs.
-
Every second 28,258 Internet users are watching pornography.
-
There are 600 tweets a second.
-
924 videos are watched on Hulu each month in the US.
-
Twenty hours of videos are loaded onto YouTube every minute.
-
Facebook has 6,000,000 page viewers a minute.
-
2,500,000 images are loaded onto Facebook each month.
Some of these facts are mind-blowing but a number of others are more than a little scary. I’m not sure I could survive my raging paranoia if I had teenage children to raise now. I can’t imagine the difficulties there must be when in most cases the kids are more knowledgeable about the Net than most of their parents. What will this all become in another thirty years?
I think I’ll start your week with a few items of truly useless information. You can never have enough of this wonderful stuff and I intend to keep shoveling it your way until I run out. So sit back in your seat and enjoy.
-
Mr. Potato Head was the first toy advertised on TV.
-
Malaria mosquitoes are attracted to ripe Limburger cheese and smelly feet.
-
A fetus acquires fingerprints by the end of the first trimester.
-
Every 20 minutes the world population increases by 3500.
-
Toilet paper was invented by the Chinese in 1391 for the exclusive use by the emperor.
-
The two robbers crucified next to Jesus were Dismas and Gestas.
-
Disney World in Orlando, Florida, covers 30,500 acres (46 square miles).
-
Butterflies are cannibals.
-
Tigers have striped skin under their hair but zebra’s don’t.
-
Monkeys have no feet, they are classified as four-handed.
-
Under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, leeches and maggots are categorized as medical devices.
-
You can in fact get cooties. Cooties are lice.
-
Poison Ivy is a member of the Cashew family.
-
In late 1600’s Puritan society, a child over 16 years old convicted of cursing at a parent was sentenced to death.
-
E T A O I N S H R D L U C M F G Y P W B V K X J Q Z: The alphabet in order of its frequency of use in written English
Well, there you have it. See just how many useless facts you were unaware of. As a reminder, I get a ten percent of all bar bet winnings. Just so you know.
