Trivia People

April 11 marks the 50th anniversary of the second Palm Sunday tornado outbreak in the Midwestern United States.

Here are three things you may not have known about the outbreak:

One: There were 47 tornadoes reported across the states of Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin and Iowa.

Two: 271 people were killed and 1,500 injured. It was the deadliest tornado outbreak in Indiana, where 137 were killed.

Three: The storms caused 6.23 billion dollars in damage in 2015 dollars.

Our question: What scale is used to rate the strength of tornadoes?

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April 10 marks the 90th anniversary of the publication of “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Here are three things you might not know about “The Great Gatsby”:

First: Among the other titles Fitzgerald considered were: “Among the Ash-Heaps and Millionaires,” “Gatsby,” “Gold-Hatted Gatsby,” “The High-Bouncing Lover,” “On the Road to West Egg,” “Trimalchio,” “Trimalchio in West Egg” and “Under the Red, White and Blue.”

Second: Between 1925 and 1942, Scribner and Sons printed 25,000 copies of “The Great Gatsby” Starting in 1943, 155,000 copies of Gatsby were given to members of the United States Armed Forces during World War II, which coincided with a revival of interest in the book and the rest of Fitzgerald’s works

Third: It was selected by the Modern Library as the best American book  and second greatest English-language novel of the 20th century.

Our question: Which book ranked above “The Great Gatsby” on the list of best English Language novels?

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On April 9, 1959 NASA announced the first seven American astronauts.

Here are three things you might not know about Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom, John Glenn, Scott Carpenter, Wally Schirra, Gordon Cooper and Deke Slayton: ” The Mercury Seven”

One: All candidates for the Mercury program were test pilots. All were five-foot-11 or shorter and weighed 180 or fewer pounds.

Two: The astronauts signed a $500,000 deal with Life magazine for exclusive access to their private lives.

Three: Two of the Mercury Seven, Scott Carpenter and Deke Slayton made only one trip into space.  Carpenter was the second man to orbit the earth in Aurora 7, while Slayton’s flight was the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz Test project.

Our question: How many of the Mercury Seven astronauts also flew on the Space Shuttle?

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On April 8, 1904, New York’s Longacre Square at the intercection of Seventh Avenue and Broadway was renamed Times Square.

Here are three things you might not know about Times Square:

1. It was the center of New York’s horse and carriage industry.

It got its former name after London’s Long Acre which was a similar district in the British capital.

2. The New York Times slowly moved away from Times Square after nine years.

The newspaper built an annex on West 43rd Street in 1913, and after several expansions moved the entire operation there in 1960.

3. Times Square was selected as the eastern terminus for the Lincoln Highway, the first coast-to-coast highway in the United States.

Our question: Where was the western terminus of the Lincoln Highway?

April 7 is World Health Day marking the anniversary of the founding of the World Health Organization in 1948.

Here are some things you might not know about World Health Day and the WHO:

First: It has a theme each year. This year’s theme is food safety. According to the WHO, 2 million people die as a result of unsafe food.

Second: World Health Day is one of eight annual WHO campaigns, the others are World Tuberculosis Day, World Immunization Week, World Malaria Day, World No Tobacco Day, World Blood Donor Day, World Hepatitis Day and World AIDS Day.

Third: Among the recent themes for World Health Day are: Insect-borne illness, high blood pressure, anti-microbial resistance, traffic safety, healthy cities and mental health.

Our question: What city is the World Health Organization headquartered in?

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April 6 marks the anniversary of the first modern Olympic games in Athens, Greece, in 1896.

Here are three things you might not know about the first modern Olympics:

First: Greece had the largest contingent of athletes with 169 participants. The next largest delegation was from Germany with 19 athletes, followed by the United States with 14.

Second: The first person to win an Olympic event was Greek fencer Leonidas Pyrgos.

Third: The US won the most events with 11. All the victories came in track and field along with shooting. 12 of the 14 American participants earned medals. Because only the top two finishers were awarded medals at the time, two of the Americans were retroactively awarded bronze medals.

Our question: First and second place finishers were not awarded gold and silver medals respectively at the first Olympics. What types of medals did they earn?

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April 5 marks the 21st anniversary of the death of Nirvana front man Kurt Cobain.

Here are three things you might not know about Cobain and Nirvana:

First: According to friends, the first concert he went to was a 1983 show at the Seattle Center Coliseum featuring Sammy Hagar and Quarterflash.

Second: Cobain, along with Krist Novaselic and Aaron Burckhard, formed Nirvana in 1987. Drummer Burckhard left the band in 1988 and was replaced by Chad Channing, who played on the band’s first album “Bleach.”

Third: Dave Grohl replaced Channing on drums in 1990, one year before the band recorded its seminal album “Nevermind.”

Our question: “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was Nirvana’s highest charting single. What position did it reach on the Billboard Hot 100 chart?

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April 4 marks the 40th anniversary of the founding of Microsoft.

Here are some things you may not know about the software giant.

One: The company was not founded in the Seattle area.

Bill Gates and Paul Allen started Microsoft in Albuquerque, New Mexico, after they secured a contract to produce a programming language translator for the Altair 8800 microcomputer.

Two: Its co-founders both dropped out of college.

Allen dropped out of Washington State University in 1974 and Gates dropped out of Harvard a year later when they started Microsoft.

Three: Gates is the richest man in the world with an estimated net worth of $78.2 billion. If he decided to split his fortune evenly among the population of the United States, each person would receive about $245.22 using 2014 census estimates.

Our question

In 1995, Microsoft introduced Bob, a program that was designed to make it easier to use its Windows operating system. What font was created for, but not used in, Bob?

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On April 3, 1973, the first handheld mobile phone call was made.

Here are some things you might not know about early cellular phones:

First, Martin Cooper of Motorola made that first call to his counterpart at AT&T and said, “Joel, this is Marty. I’m calling you from a cell phone; a real handheld cell phone.”

Second: The prototype phone used to make that call looked virtually identical to the classic “Brick Phone” of the 1980s.

Third: The first commercially available cell phone, the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X cost $3,995, which would be about $9,500 today.

Our question: Starting with a full battery, how long could you talk on a DynaTAC 8000X in 1984?

Listen to the show for the answer.

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Today is the 33rd anniversary of the Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands, a British Overseas Territory also claimed by Argentina. The invasion sparked the Falklands War.

Here are three things you may not have known about the Falklands War:

One: 904 troops were killed and 2,432 were wounded during the 74-day conflict.

Two: The British lost two destroyers, two frigates and three other ships, while Argentina lost a cruiser, a submarine, four cargo ships and three other boats.

Three: The Argentine cruiser that was sunk was named the General Belgrano. It was built by the United States as the USS Phoenix. It was stationed at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on Dec. 7, 1941 but was not damaged.

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