Ken Jennings's Trivia Almanac Read Free

taken on any planet but this one.
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    THAT’S THE SPIRIT!
    In what movie do these actors play ghosts?
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    Easy
    1. Bruce Willis
    2. Alec Baldwin
    3. Nicole Kidman
    4. Cary Grant
    5. Ray Liotta

    Harder
    1. Rex Harrison
    2. Alan Rickman
    3. Carol Kane
    4. Daveigh Chase
    5. Michelle Pfeiffer

    Yeah, Good Luck
    1. Jake Busey
    2. Charles Laughton
    3. Paul Scofield
    4. Vincent Schiavelli
    5. Ian McShane

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JANUARY 5
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    1945 P EPÉ L E P EW makes his screen debut in the short “Odor-able Kitty,” in which Pepé is actually a married American skunk
pretending
to be French so he can seduce a cross-dressing male cat. (“Odor-able Kitty” is obviously ripe for rediscovery by Queer Studies majors.)
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    COMMON SCENTS
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    1. What molecule is named for the Greek word for “smell,” because of the odor associated with lightning storms?
    2. What band’s album
Smell the Glove
was released with an all-black cover because Polymer Records and retailers balked at the misogynistic original cover?
    3. What port’s name comes from the Cantonese for “fragrant harbor”?
    4. What TV character’s trademark song was “Smelly Cat”?
    5. Peanut butter, coffee, or roses—according to a Yale study, what’s the number one most recognized smell among American adults?
    6. Joseph Pujol, the French entertainer known as “Le Pétomane,” built a whole stage act out of his virtuosity doing what?
    7. What foursome—two people, an insect, and a Freudian construct—ask to be entertained in Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit”?
    8. Who is Martha talking about when she tells Jesus, “Lord, by this time he stinketh,” in John 11?
    9. What animal’s intestine secretes ambergris, a strong-smelling, waxy gunk used in making perfume?
    10. Young wines are said to have “aroma.” What do older wines have instead?
    11. J. J. Hunsecker, Burt Lancaster’s unscrupulous character in
Sweet Smell of Success,
is a thinly veiled caricature of whom?
    12. As mystery fans know, cyanide is often said to have the bitter aroma of what?
    13. The title tale in the bestselling children’s book
The Stinky Cheese Man
is an updating of what classic story?
    14. What product did Herbert Lapidus invent in 1974 by impregnating latex rubber with coconut charcoal?
    15. In
Apocalypse Now,
Robert Duvall says he loves “the smell of napalm in the morning” because it smells like what?

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    1995 A MERICA FINALLY LEARNS Kramer’s first name, when the
Seinfeld
character’s estranged mother calls him “Cosmo” for the first time.
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    FIRST-NAME BASIS
    If its title used last names instead of first names, what movie/TV show/literary work would be called…
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    Easy
    1.
Montague and Capulet
    2.
Truman & Adler
    3.
DeFazio & Feeney
    4.
Parker and Barrow
    Harder
    1.
Jones ’n’ Brown
    2.
Sanders & Sanders & Henderson & Henderson
    3.
Dickinson and Sawyer
    4.
Finklestein & Montgomery
    Yeah, Good Luck
    1.
Shanowski & Fairfield
    2.
Hopkins and Leplastrier
    3.
Chasen and Chardin
    4.
McCardle & Lowell
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JANUARY 6
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    1831 T HE NAME OF C LEAVELAND, Ohio, permanently loses the first
a
when the first issue of the
Cleveland Advertiser
shortens the city’s name so it’ll fit on the paper’s masthead.
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    MISPELLINGS
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    1. What Margate City, New Jersey, housing area has been misspelled on the Monopoly board for almost eighty years?
    2. What proper name is spelled, unusually, with a single
n
both on the Liberty Bell and in the U.S. Constitution?
    3. In what 1986 film does Brian Cox portray “Hannibal Lecktor” (
sic
)?
    4. Whose first album was meant to be titled for the Mexican expression
Órale,
before a misspelling intervened?
    5. In the Bible, whose daughter-in-law Orpah is the source for Oprah Winfrey’s misspelled name?
    6. What extra letter did Dan Quayle add to the word “potato” when he misspelled it in 1992?
    7. Where is Jacques Plante’s name misspelled five of the six times it appears?
    8. What nation’s dyslexic king Carl