Trivia Dominoes II — Play Off the Last Bit of Trivia — continued! (Part 1)

Georg Luger designed the Luger pistol in 1898. It was chambered in 9x19, and also in 7.65x21. The Swiss military adopted it in 1900, and then the German Army adopted it in 1908.

The US examined the Luger for its own services. West Point bought 1,000 Lugers beginning in 1901, but it proved to be unpopular among the troops.

The Luger remained in Swiss service until 1949. Because the Luger was expensive to produce, in 1938 Germany chose to replace it with the Walther P38 which took half the time as the Luger to produce.

James Bond’s signature weapon throughout most of the films is the Walther PPK pistol.

Following the publication of “You Only Live Twice”, Ian Fleming wrote “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” for his son, Caspar. It would be his first posthumous publication.

Ian Fleming was initially skeptical of the casting of Scots actor Sean Connery, as he saw James Bond as thoroughly English. He was impressed by Connery’s performance in the early movies, however, and subsequently gave 007 a Scottish father in his writings.

It was not until the penultimate novel, You Only Live Twice, that Ian Fleming gave Bond a sense of family background. The novel reveals Bond is the son of a Scottish father, Andrew Bond, of Glencoe, and a Swiss mother, Monique Delacroix, of the Canton de Vaud. When his parents are killed in a tragic mountain climbing accident in the Aiguilles Rouges near Chamonix, eleven-year-old James is orphaned.

The haiku James Bond writes in You Only Live Twice is
You only live twice
Once when you are born
And once when you look death in the face

Despite what most people think, it was an original from Ian Fleming and not written by Basho.

“I Lost on Jeopardy” is a 1984 parody song by “Weird Al” Yankovic, which spoofs the Greg Kihn Band’s 1983 hit “Jeopardy.” Yankovic’s parody depicts a hapless contestant on the television game show “Jeopardy!” The music video of the song features Art Fleming and Don Pardo, the host and announcer (respectively) of the original television version of “Jeopardy!”; the video also features cameos from disc jockey (and Yankovic’s mentor) Dr. Demento, and Greg Kihn himself.

“Weird Al” Yankovic has stated that he always asks for permission to parody songs from the songwriter. He wanted to parody Beck’s song “Loser”, but Beck turned him down. Beck has since said he regretted that decision and wonders how Yankovic would have spoofed it.

Terry Farrell left Star Trek: Deep Space Nine after six seasons to take a role on the comedy show Becker.

In 1993, Becker lead actor Ted Danson appeared in blackface at the New York Friars Club Roast of Whoopi Goldberg, with whom he was dating. Whoopi has said the incident, including the racist jokes, were scripted by the two of them.

The Age of Enlightenment, or Age of Reason, was a period in the 1600s and 1700s in Europe where people focused on ideas including human happiness, the separation of church and state, the pursuit of knowledge through reasoning and sensory evidence, and constitutional government. Historian Carl L. Becker wrote and lectured on this era, and one of the colleges of Cornell University is named for him.

Cornell is one of the eight schools of the Ivy League. The others (Brown University, Columbia University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, Princeton University, University of Pennsylvania, and Yale University) were all founded in the colonial era. Two other colonial-era colleges not included in the Ivy League are Rutgers University and the College of William & Mary.

Rutgers and Princeton took part in the first intercollegiate football game ever played, on November 6, 1869. Its rules more closely resembled soccer than what we now think of as gridiron football. Carrying and throwing the ball was disallowed, and it took place between two teams of 25 players each.

Two weeks before the Transcontinental Railroad was completed at Promontory, Utah on 10 May 1869, on 28 Apr 1869 the Central Pacific Railroad crew set a record by laying ten miles of track in one day. They beat the previous record of 7.5 miles set by the Union Pacific Railroad.

The Union Pacific’s previous record was set in a day starting at 3AM and ending just before midnight. When Charles Crocker claimed that his Central Pacific crew could lay ten miles in a day, the Union Pacific and other people scoffed at such a ridiculous boast. To beat the record, back in 1869, the Central Pacific had to pre-position materials totaling more than 4.4 million pounds, according to a 1928 article in the Southern Pacific Bulletin.

CPRR.org article — A Railroad Record That Defies Defeat: How the Central Pacific laid ten miles of track in one day back in 1869

The Central Pacific Railroad crew laid 10 miles and 56 feet of railroad in a little less than 12 hours that day.

This record still stands to this day, more than 150 years later.

Of the two railroad companies that were part of the Transcontinental Railroad meeting at Promontory Summit, Utah, in 1869, the Union Pacific Railroad continues to operate today (and is one of the U.S.'s largest railroads). The other, the Central Pacific Railroad, was acquired by the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1885, though it continued to exist as a separate legal entity until 1959, when it was finally merged into the Southern Pacific.

The Southern Pacific Transportation Company was acquired in 1996 by the Union Pacific Corporation and merged with their Union Pacific Railroad.

In the 1970s, it founded a telecommunications network with a state-of-the-art microwave and fiber optic backbone. This telecommunications network became part of Sprint, a company whose name came from the acronym for Southern Pacific Railroad Internal Networking Telephony.

Bond, er, Fleming should have known to stick to the 5-7-5 syllable count of a proper haiku.

In play:

Portraits of both William McKinley, President of the United States, and John Hay, Secretary of State, hang in the Union Club of Cleveland, Ohio.

Maybe it does if transcribed into kanji characters.

in play:

Cleveland’s name was originally spelled ‘Cleaveland’. It was established in 1796 by surveyors working for the Connecticut Land Company and was named after their leader, General Moses Cleaveland, who was a veteran of the American Revolutionary War.

-“BB”-

No. Tiger Tanaka tried that in the book and it doesn’t work.

In the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode “Little Green Men”, Nog tells the U.S. military that the Ferengi intend to invade Cleveland with Klingon shock troops.