TRIVIA TEST Aug. 20, 2009

1. TELEVISION: What was the name of the frequently visited coffee shop on the sitcom “Frasier”?

2. U.S. STATES: What is the United States’ northernmost state capital?

3. ASTRONOMY: What object in our solar system is about 110 times bigger than Earth?

4. ENTERTAINERS: What was entertainer Mel Brooks’ last name at birth?

5. LANGUAGE: What is logorrhea?

6. LITERATURE: How many sonnets are attributed to William Shakespeare?

7. GENERAL KNOWLEDGE: About what percentage of people are left-handed?

8. GEOGRAPHY: Which European country is only 2 square kilometers?

9. ANATOMY: About how long does it take to blink your eye?

10. FAMOUS QUOTES: Who once said, “A verbal contract isn’t worth the paper it’s written on”?

Answers

1. Cafe Nervosa

2. Juneau, Alaska

3. The Sun

4. Kaminsky

5. Excessive talkativeness

6. 154

7. 10 percent

8. Monaco

9. 0.3 seconds

10. Samuel Goldwyn

(c) 2009 King Features Synd., Inc.

STRANGE BUT TRUE

By Samantha Weaver

• It was the inestimable Miss Piggy who made the following sage observation: “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye.”

• If you ever travel to the Far East, you might run across an aspidistra, an ornamental plant with an unusual claim to fame. Although most plants are pollinated by bees, birds and other flying creatures, the aspidistra is pollinated by the humble snail.

• Do you suffer from hallux valgus? Don’t worry, the malady is not as bad as it sounds. It just means that you have bunions.

• When a pope dies, the cardinals convene to elect a new one, but there’s no guideline requiring that a certain amount of time be spent in the process. In 1503, Pope Julius II was elected in only a few hours. In contrast, Pope Gregory X’s election in 1271 occurred nearly three years after the previous pope died.

• Before he founded the auto company Mazda, Jujiro Matsuda worked in Japan as a blacksmith.

• What do the words “uncopyrightable” and “dermatoglyphics” have in common? Dermatoglyphics is the study of skin patterns such as fingerprints, so the meanings have nothing to do with each other. These two are the longest words in the English language that have no repeating letters.