Trivia Dominoes: Play Off the Last Bit of Trivia

Though the Italian language does have subject pronouns, and they are rarely used since the subject of the sentence is obvious from the verb ending.

Jack Albertson, star of TV sitcom Chico and the Man, won an Oscar as Best Supporting Actor for ***The Subject Was Roses.


Chico Marx was called that way because he was an insatiable womaniser.

The Marx Best of the West action figures (some of my favorite toys from childhood) included the West family (Johnny, Jane, Josie, Janice, and Jay West), various horses and dogs and teepees and other accessories, many good guys and bad guys, several Indians and a couple of African-American figures, and figures based on at least three historical figures: General Custer, Geronimo, and Sheriff Pat Garrett.

The Spanish name Geronimo, like the Latin name Hieronymus, translates as “Jerome” in English.

Jerome K. Jerome is the author of the comic novel Three Men on a Boat. Its popularity caused boat rentals on the Thames (which it describes) to increase by an estimated 50%.

MS Voyager of the Seas, completed in 1999, is the first of five Voyager-class cruise ships from Royal Caribbean International. It can handle up to 3114 guests, and, along with its sisters in the Voyager class, is one of the largest passenger ships in the world.

[del]Jerome Horwitz was the birth name of Curly Howard of the Three Stooges. His brothers Moses and Samuel went by Moe and Shemp.[/del]

The fastest passenger ship ever built was the SS United States, which won the Blue Riband for fastest transatlantic crossing in 1952 and retains it to this day.

There has long been speculation that the RMS Titanic was going faster than it should during its fateful 1912 transatlantic maiden voyage because White Star Line chief Bruce Ismay urged Captain Edward Smith to reach New York City sooner.

Other ships beside the Titanic sunk on their maiden voyages, notably the Swedish warship Vasa in 1628, in front of a large crowd, no less.

The Great Northern War ended in a decisive defeat of the Swedish Army, and established Russia as the leading regional military power.

The most famous train of the Great Northern Railway, whose main line ran between St. Paul and Seattle, was the Empire Builder. Amtrak’s current train on that route continues the name. The route served Montana’s Glacier National Park, which the GN promoted heavily as a tourist destination.

The Great Eastern, by far the largest ship of its time, was a financial disaster for most of its career. The original owners went bankrupt and it made only a handful of trips (including one where it hit a rock and sustained more damage than the Titanic, though it still floated). It finally was used to lay the first successful transatlantic cable.

Rumors were that its problems were caused because of the skeleton of a worker accidentally sealed in the hull. It’s unclear as to whether this actually happened or not.

The Great Eastern was designed by the great engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who also built the Great Western Railway, the Thames Tunnel, and the Clifton Suspension Bridge, among many other civil works. He also designed the first portable hospital, for Army use in Crimea. In a 2002 BBC poll, he was named the second greatest Briton, behind only Churchill.

The last MASH (Mobile Army Surgical Hospital) unit was deactivated on February 16, 2006.

Admiral David Farragut made his immortal utterance, “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead” at the Battle of Mobile Bay.

The film “Battle Circus”, starring Humphrey Bogart and June Allyson, is focused on a MASH doctor attempting to hold his unit together during the Korean War. The name refers to the frequency with which a MASH had to move its tents to another location.

President Harry S. Truman did not seek a declaration of war from Congress after North Korea invaded South Korea in 1950, but, under United Nations auspices, committed U.S. forces to the defense of South Korea in what he termed a “police action.”

Harry and Bess Truman never bought a house- they lived with her mother, then rented homes in D.C., then the White House and Blair House (when the White House was being rebuilt) then returned to her mother’s house where they spent the rest of their lives- but they spent so much time during and after his presidency at the former commandant’s quarters of the Key West Naval Station in Florida that it is today known as the Truman Little White House& Museum. (Taft, Teddy Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and Carter also used the residence, but Truman considered it his home away from… well, wherever, even attempting to purchase it [which didn’t happen since he was pretty much broke when he left office plus the government wasn’t interested in selling it].)

Truman at first used the C-54, the “Sacred Cow”, that FDR had used as his personal transport, then switched to a larger VC-118 he named “Independence”. He had it painted in a color scheme that made it look like an eagle, a pattern that was designed for but rejected by American Airlines.