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Trivia Bits Saturday, July 4
Little Letters: Kathryn Dawn Lang likes to spell her name with lower-case letters. Lang is also notable for appearing on the cover of the debut issue of two magazines. One of them was Entertainment Weekly, which was dated Feb. 16, 1990. The other …
Trivia Bits Friday, July 3
Keep Quiet: To hide his Jewish origins, Marcel Mangel changed his name to that of a French Revolution general, François Séverin Marceau-Desgraviers. He became Marcel Marceau, the French mime who came to define the art form. His father, a kosher …
Trivia Bits Thursday, July 2
The Ebola virus is named for the Ebola River, in the D.R. Congo, where the virus spread to more than 55 villages in 1976. This probably ruined any tourism industry along the Ebola River. In fact, the Ebola virus is a lot like the Marburg virus, …
Trivia Bits Wednesday, July 1
Happy Canada Day: Our Canadian readers are celebrating Canada Day and probably not reading this column in their papers. Originally, it was called Dominion Day, because Britain promoted some of its colonies to a semi-independent status called …
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Trivia Bits, November 20Eponym of the week: Ohio-born Charles F. Richter. Receiving his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Caltech in 1928, he immediately went to work at Pasadena's new Seismology Laboratory, where, with co-worker Beno Gutenberg, he developed the Richter scale for measuring earthquake intensity in 1935. Richter was a lifelong skeptic about scientists' ability to predict earthquakes.
The venerable whodunit board game Clue underwent a major redesign earlier this year. The six suspects now have first names and occupations (such as actress Kasandra Scarlet) and three of the weapons (lead pipe, revolver and wrench) have been replaced with new ones (dumbbell, trophy and poison). Who played the title role in the 1950 biopic "The Jackie Robinson Story"? A) Ossie Davis B) Bill Cosby Sr. C) Sidney Poitier D) Jackie Robinson Previous answer: The radioactive decay of uranium-238 ultimately results in its transformation to the atomically stable lead-206. TRIVIA FANS: Send the trivia questions you've always wanted answered, or original TriviaBits ideas of your own, with your full name and hometown, to Stan Newman at StanTrivia@aol.com or on a postcard to P.O. Box 69, Massapequa Park, NY 11762. COPYRIGHT 2008 STANLEY NEWMAN DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS SYNDICATE
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