Not all that amazing given that Queen deliberately chose those names as homage to the Marx Brothers.
TBH, a lot of the more recent trivia questions in this thread don’t seem that amazing to me. To qualify for this thread, I would prefer to see definitely startling things, questions that if I didn’t already know both answers, would make me think “no way can there be two different correct answers to that!”
YMMV, of course.
I am a Phillies fan since 1980 and a New York Jets fan since 1985.
I guess that makes me the biggest loser fan in organized sports
In which country did a Jewish politician named Lieberman have an ongoing feud with a liberal leader whose name is pronounced “ba-ROCK”?
The Eurasian beaver is currently being reintroduced into England. Right now numbers are in the couple of hundreds, but there now are three or four rivers which have viable colonies of wild beavers on them. So: which English river, beginning with the letter “S”, supports a colony of wild beavers?
Answer - or rather answers:
The Stour and… the Stour. Two identically named rivers several hundred miles apart, one in the far south east of England, one in the west.
and
j
In which British TV sitcom did a leading character played by David Jason regularly drive a three-wheeled vehicle?
Which snack food shares its name with a 1994 comedy co-starring Adam Sandler?
Studio sessions by the band Rockpile in 1978-79 were used to record material for which band member’s solo album?
Answer: Nick Lowe’s Labour Of Lust and Dave Edmunds’ Repeat When Necessary. The two albums were recorded simultaneously. Wiki. You can find the documentary Born Fighters, covering the recording sessions, on YouTube, but it’s a tough old watch.)
j
So I just discovered that (with sufficiently sneaky ambiguous rewording) this question has three answers. Phrased as “A defensive wall was built by the Roman empire on the Northern border of Roman Britain. By the 17th century it was commonly known in English by the name of the emperor who, it was believed, ordered it built. What was that name?”
Phrased like that the answer is the Severan Wall, as until the 1800s it was thought it was built by the emperor Septimius Serverus.
Checks date of the post. Ok, that was legit for 2017.
“A Rockpile question. Since before your sun burned hot in space and before your race was born, I have awaited a Rockpile question.”
Pair of national capital cities separated only by a river, and NOT connected by a bridge.
I’m guessing Brazzaville and Kinshasa
You mean there is a second pair?
Which twentieth century writer published a novel which received widespread popularity, and then spent many years writing their next novel, which shared some characters with the first book, but was much longer and more ambitious, initially received quite mixed reviews, and is now regarded as their magnum opus and one of the greatest works of English literature?
Saint_Cadnwrote:
I’m guessing Brazzaville and Kinshasa
You mean there is a second pair?
There is. They are both ocean ports, separated by the mouth of a fairly major river. Not exactly walking distance, but if you drew a line from one to the other, it’s just river between them. Also, it’s not Talinn and Helsinki. They are separated by a gulf.
A much earlier question asked which two (four?) African countries were named after rivers, and I think the answer is Congo, Rep.of Congo, Gambia and Upper Volta (now called Burkina Faso).
Another tricky one is “Which three countries are named after Jews?”
Israel, Solomon Islands, and El Salvador.
So not Buda & Pest since they were unified in the 1870s. That’s what I thought you had as your 2nd capital pair since I’ve heard many people refer to it as 2 different cities.
The way you describe it, is it Buenos Aries and Montevideo? I would say a bay separates them, not the mouth of a river.
There’s also a ton of bridges connecting the two sides.
markn_1 wrote:
Which twentieth century writer published a novel which received widespread popularity, and then spent many years writing their next novel, which shared some characters with the first book, but was much longer and more ambitious, initially received quite mixed reviews, and is now regarded as their magnum opus and one of the greatest works of English literature?
I guess Mark Twain counts as a “twentieth century writer” even though Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn were both 19th century novels. The second answer is less clear-cut. Philip Roth? Joseph Heller? F. Scott Fitzgerald? Kurt Vonnegut?
Huh – I would have said the easy., obvious answer was James Joyce. I like the Twain idea, but I’m not sure I’d class him as a twentieth-century writer.
Saint_Cad wrote:
The way you describe it, is it Buenos Aries and Montevideo? I would say a bay separates them, not the mouth of a river.
Fair enough. WIKI describes it as both.