Trivia Dominoes: Play Off the Last Bit of Trivia

Robert Baden-Powell, founder and first Chief Scout of the world-wide Boy Scout Movement, acquired scouting skills as a young teenager at Charterhouse School in England, through stalking and cooking game while avoiding teachers in the nearby woods, which were strictly out-of-bounds.

Read about Kathy Rowe stalker extraordinaire.

Mike Rowe, who is probably best known as the host for the Discovery Channel’s Dirty Jobs, got his start in television on the QVC Shopping Channel. He got the job after an audition when he talked about a pencil for 8 minutes. He worked the graveyard shift for three years, until he was ultimately fired for making fun of products and belittling viewers.

(This is directly from the bio on his website: Bio – Mike Rowe )

In addition to being cousin to Carl, Dennis and Brian Wilson, Beach Boy Mike Love is the brother of former NBA basketball player Stan Love and of Pink Martini harpist Maureen Love and is the uncle of Cleveland Cavaliers basketball player Kevin Love.

(The story that I’ve heard Rowe relate is that, at the time, he was an extra in the Baltimore Opera. In a particular opera, he and another extra had to appear in the first act, and then not again until the final act. After the first act, the two of them left the opera house, still in costume, and walked to a nearby bar, to get a beer while they waited to go back on stage. As they were drinking beers, in costume, QVC was on one of the TVs in the bar. Rowe said something along the lines of, “That can’t be that hard of a job, I could do that.” The other extra said, “Oh, yeah? I dare you to audition.”)

In play:

Singer Darlene Love (no apparent relation to Mike Love) was primarily a backup singer in the 1950s and 1960s, performing on recordings by many artists, including Johnny Rivers, Sam Cooke, Dionne Warwick, and (ironically) the Beach Boys. She occasonally sang lead, such as on the Crystals’ recording of “He’s a Rebel,” and on “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home),” on the famous album “A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector.”

Love retired from music in the early 1970s to raise a family, though she appeared on Cheech & Chong’s hit 1973 song “Basketball Jones,” and later became an actress, appearing in the “Lethal Weapon” films as Trish Murtaugh, the wife of Danny Glover’s character, Roger Murtaugh. In addition, she performed “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” on David Letterman’s late night programs every year from 1986 until 2015.

Scientists estimate that tens of millions of goldfish now live in the Great Lakes. A 14-inch goldfish was caught in the Niagara River, just downstream of the wastewater treatment plant. River managers say it was either released into the river, or more likely, flushed down a toilet, and entered the river when overflow from the sewage system was discharged.

Sea lampreys are considered a pest in the Great Lakes region. The species is native to the inland Finger Lakes and Lake Champlain in New York and Vermont. Whether it is native to Lake Ontario, where it was first noticed in the 1830s, or whether it was introduced through the Erie Canal which opened in 1825 is not clear. Improvements to the Welland Canal in 1919 are thought to have allowed its spread from Lake Ontario to Lake Erie, and while it was never abundant in either lake, it soon spread to Lake Michigan, Lake Huron, and Lake Superior, where it decimated indigenous fish populations in the 1930s and 1940s. In its original habitats, the sea lamprey coevolved with its hosts, and those hosts evolved a measure of resistance to the sea lampreys. However, in the Great Lakes, the sea lamprey attacks native fish such as lake trout, lake whitefish, chub, and lake herring, which historically did not face sea lampreys. Elimination of these predators allowed the alewife, another invasive species, to explode in population, with adverse effects on many native fish species.

About 14,000 years ago, water began filling the glacially scoured basins in what is now east-central North America when the ice receded during a period of global warming. It is generally accepted that Lake Erie reached its present level about 10,000 years ago, Lake Ontario about 7,000 years ago, and Lakes Huron, Michigan, and Superior some 3,000 years ago. Although Lake Baikal in Russia has a larger volume of water, the combined area of the Great Lakes — some 94,250 square miles —represents the largest surface of fresh water in the world, covering an area exceeding that of the United Kingdom.

Lake Michigan and Lake Huron are considered, from a hydrologic standpoint, to be a single lake. Their joining, at the five-mile-wide Straits of Mackinac, is large enough that the flow of water through the straits is sufficient to keep the water levels of the two lakes in near-equilibrium.

I thought this sounded familiar…

In play:

Lake Michigan is bordered by four US States: Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan. Lake Huron is bordered only by one state, which is Michigan. However, Lake Huron is also bordered by the Canadian province of Ontario.

Eight American states border on the Great Lakes: Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

One Canadian province, Ontario, borders on four of the five Great Lakes.

(I have no doubt that I’ve repeated other people’s trivia in this thread more than once…and that undoubtedly includes repeating my own. :slight_smile: )

In play:

The first European to visit what is now Wisconsin was likely French explorer Jean Nicolet. In 1634, Nicolet took a canoe west from Georgian Bay (a bay on the Ontario portion of Lake Huron), and traveled west into Lake Michigan. Tradition holds that Nicolet made landfall in Wisconsin at Red Banks, on the shore of Green Bay, just northeast of what is now the city of Green Bay.

In his book Brainiac, Ken Jennings writes of a college trivia contest in which one contestant won by ringing in upon hearing just the single word “Hydrologically…” and then answering correctly, “Lake Michigan and Lake Huron.”

Actress Veronica Lake was known for her trademark “peek-a-boo” hairstyle, with her fine blond hair falling over her right eye; it was widely imitated. During World War Two, the rage for her hairstyle became a hazard when women in the defense industry would get their hair caught in machinery. Lake had to take a publicity picture in which she reacted painfully to her hair getting “caught” in a drill press and changed her trademark style at the urging of the government to encourage women working in war industry factories to adopt more practical, safer hairstyles.

The Veil of Veronica is a Christian relic of a piece of cloth which, according to tradition, bears the likeness of the face of Jesus not made by human hand — it is an acheiropoieton. The Western tradition recounts that Saint Veronica from Jerusalem encountered Jesus along the Via Dolorosa on the way to Calvary. When she paused to wipe the blood and sweat off his face with her veil, his image was imprinted on the cloth. The event is commemorated by the Sixth Station of the Cross celebrated in many Anglican, Catholic, Lutheran, Methodist and Western Orthodox churches.

The United States Postal Service included the Archie comic strip in a set of five 44-cent commemorative postage stamps on the theme “Sunday Funnies”, issued July 16, 2010. The Archie stamp featured Veronica, Archie, and Betty sharing a chocolate milkshake. The other stamps depicted characters from the comic strips Beetle Bailey, Calvin and Hobbes, Garfield, and Dennis the Menace.

And here they are: Stamp Announcement 10-19: Sunday Funnies

In play:

Dennis Kucinich, former Mayor of Cleveland, state senator and U.S. Congressman, ran for the Democratic nomination for Governor of Ohio in 2018 but was defeated by former Attorney General of Ohio Richard Cordray. Cordray, in turn, lost to then-Attorney General Michael DeWine, the Republican nominee, in November 2018.

Richard I of England is one of the few kings of England known by his epithet, Richard Cœur de Lion or Richard the Lionheart, rather than his regnal number. He has been portrayed many times in literature (as in the books of Sir Walter Scott) and film, by Wallace Beery, Anthony Hopkins, Richard Harris, Peter Ustinov, Sean Connery and Patrick Stewart, and many others.

To produce a malaria vaccine, technicians have to decapitate and dissect individual mosquitoes. One by one, they grasp each mosquito by its abdomen and then sever its head from the body and squeeze out the salivary glands, which hold the malaria-causing parasite. To speed up this painstaking process, medical roboticists from Johns Hopkins University have engineered a mosquito guillotine that technicians can use to decapitate 30 insects at a time.

The first execution by guillotine took place on April 25, 1792, in front of the city hall in Paris. The last execution in France by guillotine happened on September 10, 1977. France abolished capital punishment in 1981.