Friday's factoid

Here's a nice one I made up. It might be a $16K-er on Millionaire:

Which three-digit number is designated for use in the United States as a telecommunications relay number for assisted calls to deaf and hard-of-hearing people?

1) 211

2) 511

3) 711

4) 811

I caught a whiff of a commercial today for this service and realized I hadn't remembered the number. We all know 411 and 911, but there's a set of government-designated rapid-dialing numbers, known as the N11's. Here's what I got from the FCC's Web site information sheet on N11's:

211: Assigned for community information & referral services

311: Assigned nationwide for non-emergency police and other government services

411: Unassigned, but used virtually nationwide by carriers for directory assistance

511: Assigned for traffic and transportation information

611: Unassigned, but used broadly by carriers for repair service

711: Assigned nationwide for access to Telecom Relay Services

811: Unassigned, but used by local exchange carriers for business office use

911: Unassigned, but used nationwide for emergency services

011 and 111 are unavailable because "0" and "1" are used for switching and routing purposes.

 

A factoid for Thursday

"Which President Killed a Man?" is the title of a handy little book by former presidential speechwriter James Humes.

Presidents and their families yield an overflow of trivia. Those of us who do it a lot know most of the basics, including the answer to the title of Humes' book. (Pssst, it's Andrew Jackson--he killed a man in a duel. Presumably those who fought in wars also killed people...) Humes also has this gem: Whose immortal last words were "My nourishment is palatable"? Our thirteenth president, Millard Fillmore. (Now we know why he wasn't reelected...the man needed a speechwriter...)

All the news that's fit to broadcast...

You've got to be alert at all times for stuff you can use when you're on a quiz show. Once you get into that habit of mind, you start doing it automatically. I can have the news on and be only minimally engaged with it, multitasking right along and reading, writing, practicing a dance move, playing with my son, then all of a sudden--pow!--I get hit with a factoid. I've learned to filter out all the commentary and grab onto those cold, hard facts that make for good trivia fodder. And here's one from last night:

Chris Matthews (of whom I've become very fond, despite his weird pronunciation of "Amurrica"...) on MSNBC was talking about President Obama's trip to Europe for the G-20 conference. Chris mentioned that Britain's Queen Elizabeth II has met 11 U.S. presidents, all of them except Lyndon Johnson. Now, I give professional courtesy to MSNBC's fact-checking department, so I won't bother to verify it further--that's good enough for me.

And in it, you've got several ways to cook up a question. You might get asked, oh, for about $100K on Millionaire, or in the $1,000 slot on Jeopardy!, which U.S. president was the only one not to meet Queen Elizabeth II (of course, Jeop! being Jeop! would have some other descriptor in the question as a clue...). Or for a really wild and woolly high-level Millionaire question, you might get asked who was the first U.S. president to meet her. I calculate that as Harry Truman, though Chris didn't mention it. Thus: If she's met 11 of them, all of the most recent but Johnson, it stands to reason that there have been 12 of them she could have met. She just met Obama, so working backwards that gives us: GW Bush, Clinton, GHW Bush, Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon, (skip Johnson), Kennedy, Eisenhower, Truman. Truman turned over the office to Eisenhower in 1953, so you have to calculate carefully and not assume he met her. (I just verified that I'm right by checking the USA Today story about her meeting with Obama, which mentioned that she'd met Truman when she was still a princess.) 

Btw, the queen was in my $100K Millionaire question, so I'll always be fond of her...not to mention that Helen Mirren did a bang-up job portraying her... :)

Every time you watch the news, be listening for just this kind of thing and file it away. Newspapers like USA Today are fantastic for inserting little factoids in to liven up their stories--read it regularly and you'll pick up a lot. Be reading popular newspapers and magazines written for the adult general reader. Pay special attention to what we in media call sidebars (those little boxes that contain more information); often they're filled with interesting trivia. And pay attention to the captions on the illustrations, which are often written with an interesting fact in them.

Every time a big news event happens, such as Obama's trip to Europe, news outlets are pouring forth copy describing it. While your aim as a human being is to be well-informed, your aim as a potential trivia maven is to think like a quiz show writer and be hyper-vigilant for those wonderful little bits of flotsam and jetsam that could turn themselves into questions...and remember, one little bit of flotsam can twist itself into multiple lengths of jetsam in the hands of a Millionaire or Jeop! writer...

A Wednesday factoid...

I haven't been paying much attention to commercials lately, which I would have if I were studying for a show right now. You need to know your consumer products, and especially the ads, symbols, slogans and songs associated with them, past and present. Like this one I just made up:

John Mellencamp took some flak from fans for licensing his song "Our Country" to be used in commercials for which pick-up truck?

A) Nissan Titan

B) Chevrolet Silverado

C) Toyota Tundra

D) Dodge Ram

Nice, tight little question? 

I'm putting the answer at the end of the post so you can figure it out first. I was reminded of this when I heard Mellencamp interviewed today on NPR's "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross. If you're studying, you can pick up lots of useful things from radio and TV talk shows. There's a certain way of listening to/watching them: Just as you would skim a magazine for interesting little factoids, and pay less attention to speculation, suggestion, nuance, etc., that's how you have to listen to a talk show or news story. As much as I enjoyed Gross's convo with Mellencamp, my quiz show antennae never quite go down, so they started quivering madly when I heard that the song had been used in the commercial. That's how quiz show writers think: nouns, nouns, nouns, hard and indisputable and at least mildly interesting or unusual facts. That's what you need to be ready to pounce on and file away every time you listen to the radio or watch TV...don't worry, once you train yourself to do it, it NEVER quite goes away, even years afterwards... :(

Oh, the answer? The Chevy Silverado.

One Bobby Jindal (are there others?), or what bothered me about today's Millionaire

And another thing...

Getting back to today's broadcast of Millionaire...the first contestant had as a $50,000 question the following:

Bobby Jindal is the first Indian-American governor of which state?

The choices, as I remember them, were Michigan, Mississippi, Kentucky and Louisiana. Now, who among us doesn't know this now? I was astonished that it was pegged at $50K. I might have written it as a $2,000 or $4,000 question, since he's been all over the news. The poor contestant Double Dipped, for first Michigan and then, I think, Kentucky. Which makes me think this episode was taped well before Jindal gave the response to President Obama's address to Congress, which means at least several months. Had he been as prominent when it was written as he is now, I doubt it would have been worth $50K to the show's writers.  

So, the lesson to be learned from this is: Get our your World Almanac (the best one-volume quiz show resource around) and run down the list of state governors. And keep paying attention to the news. Jindal had been mentioned during the course of the campaign, with attention paid to the fact that he is of Indian (East Indian, I believe, not Native American) heritage. Quiz shows prefer the unusual: An Indian-American governor of Louisiana is unusual. A woman governor, an African-American governor, a governor with an unusual position on something, are all more likely to be used in a question than a middle-aged-white-male governor in the Midwest...(sorry, middle-aged-white-guys, that's just the way it is...) :)

Factoid du Jour...

When you study for a quiz show, you have to be on top of the news all the time: Here's something you should have noticed, just in case a 2010 game of Millionaire goes like this for about $4,000:

In March 2009, Fox News host Bill O'Reilly announced that he was boycotting films featuring which actor?

A) Tim Robbins

B) Richard Gere

C) Sean Penn

D) Mel Gibson

(See, Meredith, I'm really good at writing these...hint hint...)

In case you missed it, here's the answer:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090330/tv_nm/us_oreilly

Another useful study thingee: Every time you sign onto AOL or Yahoo, look at the news they put up. It's filled with the kind of things Millionaire (and Jeopardy!) love to ask. 

Millionaire Analysis

Today's Millionaire had some good object lessons for would-be contestants:

1) My heart broke for a lovely young man who was obviously very bright, but he left with $1,000 because he didn't talk himself through the question: How long does an Olympics typically last? He jumped on C) One month and seemed thoroughly sure. I knew it was B) Two weeks, but started doubting myself because he seemed so sure...and he said "Final answer" much too soon. 

Read the question word for word. Consider each choice, even if some of them look improbable at first. Always pause and take a breath or two to make sure that answer resonates within you as the right one before popping out "Final answer." Even if it's a $2,000 "easy" question--you just might be reading it wrong or jumping to conclusions. Talk yourself through each answer choice aloud (I never cared if my vamping looked stupid--the point was to be absolutely certain...and they edit out most of it anyway...)

For this one, I just "knew" it was two weeks: I could taste the layout of the TV Guide schedule from a few years ago when I saw it in print...and I got a brick red sort of impression, which told me that the Beijing Olympics last year took up about two weeks of my time--that's synesthesia for you...

2) The next guy used a lifeline on a $4,000 question when he probably shouldn't have, although I always tell people to use them when they need them--but only when they're *sure* they need them...Which country uses the phrase "Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite" on its euro currency? Two of the choices were not French-speaking nations, so for a question that low, they are out of the running...we were left with France and Belgium. The phrase should resonate because of French history, but if it doesn't at all, a better choice might have been the Ask the Audience or Double Dip lifeline instead of wasting Ask the Expert (if you saw me do Ask the Expert, you know I can only dream of being called in for such a simple question... ;) Lesson: Choose when to use a lifeline very carefully, and choose WHICH lifeline to use very carefully, based on the level of the question and how likely you might be to need it later: Look at the categories coming up...

This same lovely guy--a comedian by trade--has medicine as a hobby, so he knew that the anterior cruciate ligament was in the knee. However, it was a lower level question, so there were references within it that could come in handy: In 2008, Tiger Woods had surgery on his anterior cruciate ligament, which is located where? 

If you study for your quiz show as I recommend, you'll be regularly skimming things like USA Today, People Magazine, Time, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, Entertainment Weekly...these are prime sources. And time them. I've noticed that Millionaire often uses events in politics or pop culture that happened in one year for shows that will broadcast in the following year. If you know your tape date, figure on a scheduled broadcast date a few weeks or months later, assume that the questions are being written at least a little bit in advance (breaking news the week before your tape date is VERY unlikely to be used--I've certainly never seen it) and gather up issues of these magazines from your friendly public library (including their year-end compilations) for one to two years prior. Skim over the stories looking for unequivocal, solid factoids using persons, places and things: A celebrity like Tiger Woods is injured and has surgery; a major sports tournament is held and you see winners and notable things that happened with losers; a famous couple splits; an unusual thing happens, such as pandas visiting the U.S. from China; someone famous blurts out something particularly humorous or obnoxious; you see a list of best or worst dressed celebs; a new kind of car enters the market. Jot down quick reminders in a notebook--I've found that the act of writing them down helps. Just don't spend too much time on them--the chances of any of these particular factoids being among the questions you get is slim. The idea is to pack in as many quick bits of info you can, as systematically as you can, so that if you do get one you'll recognize it, and also to help you get familiar enough with stuff so that you can actually eliminate wrong answer choices...

My favorite imaginary question...

Being a lover of all things medieval, I'm in love with those famous lovers Abelard & Heloise (about whom numerous books have been written, and there's at least one film...) and with obscure scientific and pseudo-scientific instruments. So if I were a quiz show writer, I'd have to throw in this wicked one that I made up years ago, maybe for $1 million:

What was the name of the son of the famous medieval philosopher Pierre Abelard and his lover Heloise? 

1) Astrolabe

2) Alembic

3) Sextant

4) Orrery

I've never seen this one anywhere, anyhow in any trivia contest universe. Let me know if you see it. 

Oh--you actually want the answer???

http://classiclit.about.com/cs/articles/a/aa_abelard.htm

Buy this book...

I haven't even read the book yet, but I know there's something to be learned in it...My friend Arthur Phillips (who was in the Jeopardy! Tourney of Champs with me in 1998) has a new novel coming out: The Song is You www.amazon.com/Song-You-Novel-Arthur-Phillips/dp/1400066468/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1238427592&sr=8-1

Sight unseen, I know I'll learn a lot about music from it, but I also know there'll be depth, wisdom and fascinating turns of fate. He's written Prague, Angelica, and the Egyptologist, all of which were wonderful. Everything is connected, and I'm so fortunate to have reconnected with some of my old Jeop! TOC friends lately...

Factoid for the Day...

When I studied for my quiz shows, I paid reallly close attention to the news. A casual light news story could be a trivia gold mine. Like this one from the other day:

Here's maybe a $4,000 question on Millionaire:

In 2009, which fast food chain signed a contract to repair potholes in city roads in exchange for having its name placed over the repaired potholes as an ad?

A) Kentucky Fried Chicken

B) Taco Bell

C) Domino's Pizza

D) Quizno's

You probably know the answer, but will you remember it when you're in the hot seat in 2011? They often pick these little events a year or two afterwards:

http://www.suntimes.com/news/transportation/1497720,kfc-potholes-road-repair-032609.article

A priceless little nugget of info...

To Internet or not to Internet...

People love to get "trivia" info. online, and I do it myself, but I'm a professional skeptic and am very selective about my online sources. I rely on sites put out by universities or recognized scholarly or professional organizations, libraries, recognized experts, individual companies, etc. You just can't afford to get burned wading through "trivia" sites put up by enthusiasts. You have to know that the info. is verified and fact-checked. And you also have to know that it's relevant to the quiz show you're hoping to be on--a lot of the "trivia" sites are soooooo specific and arcane that their stuff would just never be used on Jeopardy or Millionaire...like, in 1969, how many guitar picks did Eric Clapton use in a single concert? Well, I love him and might like to know that, but the chances of your needing it on a general knowledge show are so slim you're better off studying things like where he's from, his famous songs and lines from them, his awards, news-making events involving him, etc. The All-Music Guide (www.allmusicguide.com) is great for that.

A good general knowledge gateway is www.lii.org, the Librarians' Index to the Internet, made available by the wonderful librarians in California (hi to my friend Ida in San Mateo...don't know if she works on it, but she's a wonderful librarian in California...). You can find authoritative Web sites on a vast array of subjects, and they've all been vetted by those same wonderful librarians...

The more things change...or, how to study literature quick

If I were a quiz show writer, here's a question I'd love to use:

Which novel written in the Victorian era described the Circumlocution Office to satirize the way petty government document-jockeying ties things up and delays reasonable requests?

A) Middlemarch by George Eliot

B) Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray

C) Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens

D) Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope

It's at least a half-million dollar question for sure. And the answer is: Appearing on your local PBS station for the next few Sunday nights is a fabulous production of Dickens' "Little Dorrit," my favorite of all his books. We haven't seen the red tape that ties everything together yet, but last night we saw a terrific, twisting evocation of the Circumlocution Office that houses it when hero Arthur Clenham went to look for the documents that would show why William Dorrit ended up in the Marshalsea debtors' prison. If you're a passionate reader, that's the kind of detail you've picked up over the years that just might win you some money. (Btw, all four of these books make for great reading...) 

I'd originally thought Dickens originated the phrase "red tape" in this novel, but the Facts on File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins doesn't confirm that, and says Thomas Carlyle used "red tapism" as a metaphor for bureaucracy.

If you're studying for a quiz show, you can get info. like this in two ways: A lifetime of wide and greedy reading, or a good one-volume literary encyclopedia. Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia is a nice one (it mentions the Circumlocution Office in the entry on Little Dorrit). There's also a specific Benet's for American literature.

Most quiz show literature questions can be answered simply by knowing authors, titles, major characters and basic plot lines, which Benet's will give you if you're in a hurry. It's also good to know first lines and famous lines from major works, like these:

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..." and "It is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done..." ... The first are the opening lines of Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities," and the second are from the final monologue by his character Sidney Carton as he goes to his death by guillotine in the same novel. 

"All happy families are alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way..." are the opening lines of Leo Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina."

There is (Voila! There's a book for everything!) a handy little book called "The Algonquin Literary Quiz Book" by Louis Decimus Rubin that will give you lots of this sort of thing. It looks like a special order on Amazon.com, but your public library may have it.

The $1,000,000 question...

What are the most popular questions quiz show winners get asked? It seems pretty universal:

1) What did you do with the money? 

and

2) What's _________ really like?

If I had $1 for every time I'd ever been asked these two, I'd be collecting royalties every time I ventured out to Publix...

So, in case you're wondering: 

What's Meredith really like?

I wrote a first-person piece about the whole experience in December 2007 right after it happened and mentioned her. (Read it on my journalism blog, here: http://lynpaynejournalist.blogspot.com/2008/06/personals-column.html)

She's a mensch: genuine, grounded, supportive of the contestants, incredibly giving and kind. We had real conversations about real things between takes, and when I won my half million, she cried tears of joy for the little slumdog journalist. And a consummate professional at what she does--on time, prepared, hitting her marks, paying attention, remembering your name, polite to everyone on set, focused, relaxed and having fun. She sat patiently joking and kidding around while about half a dozen assistants came pouring onto the set to fix one of her earrings that they thought was looking a little uneven. When we had a technical problem and stopped the take, she and I vamped along exchanging what passed for witty repartee to keep the audience from getting restless. I also have to say she's a terrific journalist. Every time I see one of her interviews, I learn something. How she manages to do all this well in the course of a single day without going insane I have no idea. I thought I was a good juggler, but she keeps several balls up in the air, spins plates and leaps off trapezes and over flaming tigers and makes it all look effortless. I want to be Meredith Vieira when I grow up...

Slumming for trivia...

Most of my friends know that I AM Slumdog Millionaire and that I love the movie. Here's some trivia about it, courtesy of my friend Bob Harris (who beat me by $1 in the semi-finals of the Jeopardy! Tournament of Champs in 1998...but who's keeping track?...) on his blog: www.bobharris.com/content/view/1671/1/

Bob's blog has lots more fascinating things, including the natural history of my new favorite animal, the oh-so-adorable pudu...

All about music...or, how to avoid becoming a traitor...

If you're studying for a quiz show (which I suppose many of my readers may be contemplating) or if you just love music as much as I do, check out 

www.allmusicguide.com

It really does have info. on "all" kinds of music, classical to world to rap, and tells you about composers, artists, new releases and lots more. You can even study up on the history of musical genres, and there're lots of cross-references. 

"The man that hath no music in himself,

Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,

Is fit for treason, stratagems and spoils."

--Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

Word Origins for $100, Alex

Etymology is my all-time favorite Jeopardy! category, and a subject I could play with all day. (We're playing it for $100 because that's all Jeop! paid out for the first row of questions when I played in olden times...)

Btw, "etymology" (the study of words) comes from the Greek "etumon," the true meaning of a word; "entomology" (the study of bugs) comes from Greek "entomon," "insect." People seem to confuse the two and not to want to be disabused of their ignorance. I once had a boss who got mad at me for knowing the difference. Be prepared to wreck havoc.

Btw again, in Hebrew, the word for "word" is "davar," which is the same as the word for "thing." Words for me have corporeal existence, with tastes, colors, feels...If you can relate to that, you'll like Arthur Rimbaud's poem "Voyelles" ("Vowels"). It's probably kicking around on the Internet somewhere, so you can easily see what I mean.

Here's some etymology you might be able to use on a quiz show:

1) Influenza: There was once an outbreak of "a contagious distemper" in Rome in 1743. They called it "influenza" because they thought it was "influenced" by evil stars, and other occult "influences" were said to cause plague and pestilence. The Italian "influenza" became the English name for the disease. 

2) Mustard: I love Latin taxonomic names: Brassica nigra (the black mustard plant) and Brassica hirta (the white mustard plant) are the most commonly used in making mustard the condiment. When people used to make mustard, the paste for it was first mixed using "new wine," or "must." Frederick the Great drank a mixture of powdered mustard, champagne and coffee, believing it to be an early form of Viagra...

3) Caterpillar: This "wyrm among fruite," as the English once called it, is a "chatepelos" ("hairy cat") in French, from which our word derives. However, I love that the case isn't that simple: The word was modified in English because a "cater" was a glutton, and "to pill" (as in "pillage") meant "to strip or plunder," which is what caterpillars do to tree bark...

4) Planet: From Greek "planasthai," to wander, which is what they do. For some nostalgic reason, I'm sad to think that most of us will no longer be around about 200 years hence when Pluto once again wanders back inside Neptune's orbit to be the eighth planet from the Sun, as it did from 1979 to 1999...and no, I'm still mad at the International Astronomical Union for saying Pluto isn't a planet...and fortunately for him, composer Gustav Holst wrote "The Planets" long before Pluto was discovered in 1930, so he's off the hook not including it...

) Azalea: The ancient Greeks named it thus because they thought it only thrived in dry, sandy soil. They were wrong (as witness the azalea bushes all over muggy and buggy Central Florida), but their word for "dry," "azalea," stuck anyway.

My source is the fabulous "Facts On File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins." (I always cite my source...well, almost always...)

More helpings of Trivialicious coming your way.