Ken Jennings's Trivia Almanac by Ken Jennings Read Free Book Online Page A

also sometimes used to refer to a vicuña or guanaco?
    3. What 1997 megahit asks, “When you get old and start losing your hair, can you tell me who will still care?”
    4. What cloud of comets, out beyond Pluto, was named for a twentieth-century Dutch astronomer?
    5. What composer’s tune “Hoe Down” is the background music for the “Beef—it’s what’s for dinner” TV ads?

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JANUARY 26
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    1848 I N A LECTURE AT the Concord Lyceum, Henry David Thoreau first delivers his landmark essay “Civil Disobedience,” which will go on to inspire both Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.
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    PUTTING DOWN THE MAN
    Question authority with
trivia
questions, for a change.
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    1. What was “Che” Guevara’s real first name?
    2. According to Bob Dylan in “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” “Don’t follow leaders. Watch your—” what instead?
    3. What did Tommie Smith and John Carlos do to make headlines in 1968?
    4. What organization’s 1999 conference in Seattle led to massive street protests?
    5. The famous “peace symbol” was designed to combine the semaphor positions for N and D. What do the N and D stand for?
    6. What celebrated antiapartheid activist died in South African police custody in September 1977?
    7. Greenwich Village’s 1969 Stonewall riots took place just hours after what gay icon’s funeral?
    8. What country overthrew its authoritarian regime via the bloodless “Velvet Revolution”?
    9. Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” first appeared on what movie’s soundtrack?
    10. What unknown revolutionary was, alongside “The American G.I.,” one of only two nameless entries on
Time
’s list of the twentieth century’s most influential people?

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    1972 F LIGHT ATTENDANT VESNA VULOVIC free-falls a record 33,000 feet when JAT Yugoslav Flight 364 explodes over Czechoslovakia…and she survives.
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    GOING DOWN
    Trivia you’ll fall for.
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    1. How many different types of falling pieces are there in the game Tetris?
    2. Who is pop band Fall Out Boy enjoying an
Evening Out with,
according to the title of their first album?
    3. Albert Fall became the first U.S. cabinet officer to serve jail time for his part in what scandal?
    4. The “crawlers” are the predators in what 2005 horror film?
    5. What book begins “Of Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit / Of that forbidden tree”?
    6. Alicia Keys’s hit “Fallin’” is written in E minor, but the album title suggests it
should
be sung in what other key?
    7. What World Heritage Site is found along the Zambezi River, in Zambia’s Mosi-oa-Tunya National Park?
    8. What TV catchphrase was first uttered, in 1990, by retired nurse Edith Fore, portraying “Mrs. Fletcher”?
    9. What two-word term is the top speed reached by a free-falling object?
    10. What famous structure was transplanted to Lake Havasu City, Arizona, in 1971?
    11. Name either of the two L.A.-area streets mentioned in the lyrics of Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’.”
    12. What controversial novel begins with Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha falling from an exploding jetliner?
    13. Who missed out on an Olympic gold medal in 1984 after her famous collision with Zola Budd during the 3,000-meter final?
    14. “Defenestration” is the act of being thrown out of what?
    15. What are Butch and Etta riding during the “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” scene from
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
?

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JANUARY 27
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    1606 THE TRIAL OF G UY F AWKES and his Gunpowder Plot coconspirators begins. Four days later, they’ll be executed! Ah, London—the Texas of the seventeenth century.
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    SO GOOD YOU COULD PLOTS

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    1. In 1944, who was the intended assassination victim of the July 20 Plot?
    2. What director’s last film was 1976’s
Family Plot
?
    3. What novel begins “Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted…persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot”?
    4. What famous figure becomes an anti-Semitic U.S.