Trivia Dominoes: Play Off the Last Bit of Trivia

Archduke Franz Ferdinand had already survived an assassination attempt earlier on the day that he was killed. When his motorcade passed by the initial group of assassins, one of them, Nedeljko Cabrinovic, lobbed a grenade at the motorcade. The grenade took 10 seconds to detonate, and bounced off the lead car and exploded under the car behind instead, wounding two army officers as the assassins dispersed in the chaos.

Cabrinovic took a cyanide pill that failed to kill him and jumped into a three foot river to “drown” himself. Franz Ferdinand and his party, it seemed, were safe.

Against advice, Franz Ferdinand insisted on going to the hospital to visit the people who were injured by the grenade. The driver got lost and they ended up on side streets of Sarajevo, until they passed a cafe where Gavrilo Princip, another of the party of assassins was standing. The motorcade attempted to reverse, but Princip leaned into the car and shot both
Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie.

The cyanide radical CN· has been identified in interstellar space. The cyanide radical (called cyanogen) is used to measure the temperature of interstellar gas clouds.

In December 1984 in Bhopal, India an isocyanate leak from a pesticide plant killed at least 3,700 people, and some estimates list over 10,000 people. Others estimate that 8,000 died within two weeks, and another 8,000 or more have since died from gas-related diseases. It is considered among the worst of all industrial accidents. Cause of the leak is not certain, and theories include corporate negligence and/or worker sabotage. Chemicals abandoned at the plant continue to leak and pollute the groundwater.

For two years after the partition of India, Bhopal held out and refused to join India, instead declaring its independent sovereignty. But there was little support for the move, the leader was arrested, and in 1949 Bhopal took its place among the Indian states.

Ironically (and tragically) because of the isocyanate disaster, Bhopal is known as the City of Lakes for its various natural as well as artificial lakes and is also one of the greenest cities in India. Bhopal is the 17th largest city in the country and 131st in the world.

In his 2012 book The Inconvenient Indian, novelist, broadcaster, and aboriginal rights activist Thomas King criticized the Land O’Lakes butter packaging, noting that it

“features an Indian Maiden in a buckskin dress on her knees holding a box of butter at bosom level. The wag who designed the box arranged it so that if you fold the box in a certain way, the Indian woman winds up au naturel, sporting naked breasts. Such a clever fellow”

Wendy Lou Lansbach, , is a former swimmer, Olympic champion, and former world record-holder. After retiring from competition swimming, she became a coach, and later, a motivational speaker. She grew up in Land O’ Lakes, Wisconsin, population 800.

On March 26, 2015, NBC ordered 13 episodes of a sequel series to Coach, set to focus on Hayden Fox’s son, who had recently taken a coaching job at a small college. Most of the original series’ stars were set to reprise their roles, except for Shelley Fabares who is battling autoimmune hepatitis. Her role as Christine, Hayden’s wife, was to be written off as having died. On August 31, 2015, TVLine reported the series had been cancelled due to the pilot having “mixed results”.

Christine is a 1983 American horror film directed by John Carpenter and starring Keith Gordon, John Stockwell, Alexandra Paul, and Harry Dean Stanton. The story, set in 1978, follows a sentient and violent vintage Plymouth Fury named “Christine”, and its effects on the car’s teenaged owner.

When Chrysler introduced Plymouth cars in 1928 as a low cost competitor for Ford and Chevrolet, the inspiration for the Plymouth brand name came not from the historical association, but Plymouth binder twine, produced by the Plymouth Cordage Company. The name was chosen due to the popularity of the twine among farmers However, the company still used a likeness of the ship *Mayflower *as is logo.

Forty-five of the 102 immigrants at Plymouth Colony died the first winter.

One of the immigrants to Plymouth Colony who didn’t die was John Howland. (He almost died when he fell overboard on the voyage there, but managed to grab a line and was pulled back on board.) He and Elizabeth Tilley married and had ten children, all of whom lived to grow up and have children. They had more than eighty grandchildren.

Kamakaiwi Airfield on Howland Island is named after James Kamakaiwi, a young Hawaiian who arrived with the first group of four colonist onto the island.

Regarded by Guinness as the world’s smallest island with a building on it, Bishop Rock stands at the end of Britain’s Isles of Scilly, where coastal waters give way to the fury of the Atlantic.
In 1847, engineers started building an iron lighthouse there – and it washed away in a storm. Its extraordinary successor, first lit in 1858, stands to this day.

These are the first few lines from Cole Porter’s Anything Goes, written in 1934:

Times have changed,
And we’ve often rewound the clock,
Since the Puritans got a shock,
When they landed on Plymouth Rock.
If today,
Any shock they should try to stem,
‘Stead of landing on Plymouth Rock,
Plymouth Rock would land on them.

And Malcolm X’s famous line about Plymouth Rock, from his “Ballot or the Bullet" speech (Washington Heights, NY, March 29, 1964)

"We’re not Americans, we’re Africans who happen to be in America. We were kidnapped and brought here against our will from Africa. We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock–that rock landed on us”

It is very possible that Malcolm X knew Cole Porter’s song, since he was a ballroom dancing fan and the song was regularly played at dances in the 1940s.

The Plymouth Superbird was one of the fastest ever Plymouth street legal production cars. It was manufactured only in one year, 1970. The Superbird was the follow-on version of the 1969 Dodge Charger Daytona. Superbirds came with a 7.0 liter (426 cu. in.) engine producing 425 HP, with a 0-60 time of 5.5 seconds. No more than 2,800 Superbirds were ever produced,

The Dodge Super Bee was a sister to the Plymouth Superbird, and was also available with the 426 Hemi engine (along with the 383 and the 440 Sixpack).

Well, crap, I had a response that encompassed three previous posts and got ninja’ed.

There have been four warships named USS Plymouth to serve in the U.S. Navy, the most recent of which was a patrol gunboat sunk by a German U-boat in August 1943.

According to LiveScience.com, August is the month with the highest birth rate in the United States.