If you took our trivia test, here are the answers
Happy New Year!
I hope that you saved my column from last week’s paper (or have it handy online), because otherwise this week’s column might be a little hard to understand.
What follows are the official (and, I hope, correct) answers to the questions posed in the Sixth Annual Fisher-Paulson After-Christmas Trivia contest. Hope you got them all.
1. Indiana Jones’ first name was Henry. To quote his father: “We named the dog Indiana.”
2. Abhors, biopsy and chimps are words in which the letters occur in alphabetical order. The longest such word in the English language, by the way, is aegilops, a species of grass.
3. Fred Flintstone had four fingers on each hand and three toes on each foot. In fact, every character in Bedrock did. (When Brian had a toe amputated this past summer, I told him that he still had more toes than Fred Flintstone. He did not find this to be the least bit consoling.)
4. Four is the number with the same number of letters as its actual value. The fact that this was the fourth question should have been a giveaway.
5. Captain James T. Kirk’s middle name was Tiberius, which is just a little more pompous than Kevin Thaddeus Fisher-Paulson, Aidan Timothy Fisher-Paulson and Zane Thaddeus Thaddeus Fisher-Paulson.
6. Of the contiguous United States, Maine borders the least number of other states — just one, New Hampshire.
7. The equator passes through Ecuador, Colombia, Brazil, Sao Tome & Principe, Gabon, Republic of the Congo, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, Kenya, Somalia, Maldives, Indonesia and Kiribati.
8. The Pillsbury Doughboy’s official name is Poppin’ Fresh.
9. Spike, Belle, Marbles, Olaf and Andy are the siblings of none other than Snoopy, Charlie Brown’s dog. If you got this one wrong you have the right to yell, “Curse you, Red Baron!”
10. You would think that Z would be the last letter added to the Roman alphabet. But it was already there in 1524, when Renaissance grammarian Gian Giorgio Trissino made the final addition: letter J. It had been a fancy stand-in for letter I, but Trissino insisted that it was a consonant that no longer wanted to live its life as a vowel.
11. The letters J and K do not appear in the spelling of any cardinal numbers.
12. In 1859, Joshua Abraham Norton proclaimed himself Norton I, Emperor of the United States. This began a 21-year reign as a San Francisco character. Interestingly, although Congress did not recognize his position, King Kamehameha V of Hawaii, who refused to recognize the U.S. government, acknowledged Norton I as America’s sole leader.
13. The Halfway to Hell Club was composed of construction workers who fell while building the Golden Gate Bridge but were saved by a giant net strung beneath it.
14. A coin has a head and a tail, but no body.
15. Ceres, Makemake, Haumea and Eris are all dwarf planets in our solar system. Some will tell you that Pluto is a dwarf planet as well, but really, he’s just Mickey Mouse’s dog.
16. The bishop is the chess piece that can move only diagonally on the board. The queen, let it be known, can move any way she wants.
17. Santa’s reindeer Cupid shares the name of a Roman god.
18. K and M are both symbols for 1,000. K is the symbol in the metric system, whereas M is the symbol in Roman numerals.
19. The four “Golden Girls” were Blanche, Dorothy, Sophia and Rose. And with the recent passing of Betty White, who played Rose, the four have been reunited in the next life.
20. Samuel Tilden, Grover Cleveland, Al Gore and Hillary Rodham Clinton all won the popular vote for president, but lost the Electoral College vote, which explains the second Bush and Trump presidencies (not to mention the Hayes and Harrison presidencies).
21. Doc and Bashful are the only two of the Seven Dwarfs whose names do not end in y (Dopey, Grumpy, Sleepy, Sneezy and Happy do).
22. Batman’s butler’s name is Alfred T. Pennyworth. The T stands for Thaddeus.
23. The smallest country in the world is Vatican City, which raises the question: Why didn’t they name it Vatican Country? True fact: It is actually smaller in area (109 acres) than the Outer, Outer, Outer, Outer Excelsior (364 acres). Which makes me think we should be our own country. We could call it OOOO City. Ever upward.
24. In “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” Lucy wanted real estate. I know a great 109-acre place in Rome. Bit of a fixerupper.
25. Eleanor Roosevelt’s maiden name was Roosevelt, as she was actually a distant cousin of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. If she’d hyphenated as we did, she’d have been Eleanor Roosevelt-Roosevelt.
26. Kiribati was not only one of the answers to question No. 7, but is also the first place in the world to celebrate the new year. Not only is it in two different hemispheres, but in 1994, they jumped a day forward so that, instead of being the last to start the new year, they became the first. Yes, just like Michael J. Fox, they went back to the future.
27. The orphan boys, a.k.a. Lost Boys in James M. Barrie’s “Peter Pan” writings, lived in Never Never Land. On a map, that’s just west of the Outer, Outer, Outer, Outer Excelsior.
28. The name of the guardian angel in “It’s a Wonderful Life” is Clarence.
29. You knew there had to be one comic-book geek question, and here’s the answer: Superman gets superpowers under a yellow sun. He has no powers under a red, orange or green sun. Blue suns and white dwarf stars give him super superpowers, and purple suns give him mind over matter. If you don’t mind. It won’t matter.
Any answers that readers deem controversial shall be debated in next week’s column.
But for the record, I win.