Ken Jennings - Ken Jenningss Trivia Almanac: 8,888 Questions in 365 Days

CONTENTS
TO MINDY AND WIKIPEDIA,
who are both nearly always right Introduction
IT SEEMED LIKE IT WAS GOING TO BE SO EASY. I spent most of 2005 submerged in the world of trivia nuts, writing my book Brainiac. I was (and still am) writing a weekly Tuesday Trivia e-mail quiz for visitors to my website. As a result, I was seeing trivia everywhere I looked. While driving by the Olive Garden restaurant by the mall: hmm, the Olive Garden logo is a fruit thats not an olive. While looking at a fistful of change at the grocery store: hmm, two different state quarters have George Washington on their tails side as well as on the heads. While my wife was in labor: hmm, childbirth contractions are measured in units named for the capital of Uruguay.

Um, sorry, honey, my mind was elsewhere. Go ahead and push now. I needed to get all this trivia out of my system, cleanse myself of all the clutter. The book you now hold in your hands would, I thought, be my trivia enema. (In fact, Ken Jenningss Trivia Enema was its original working title, before wiser heads prevailed.) I pictured a 365-day trivia almanac, stuffed to the gills with odd historical facts from every day of the year, each tied to a related trivia quiz. What could be easier, in a world packed with exotic little factoids? It would be like gaily skipping through an alpine meadow, picking whatever wildflowers of trivia happened to catch my eye.

A fact here, a question there, and pretty soon Id have a book, right? As it turned out, a better title for the book might have been Ken Jenningss Trivia Aversion Therapy. Math was never my strong suit in school, but it turns out that twenty or thirty trivia questions for each day of the calendar year runs to about nine thousand questions in total. Nine thousand. Thats two whole boxes of Trivial Pursuit. Thats most of a season of Jeopardy! As far as I can tell, this is the biggest single assembly of trivia questions ever published in this country, in any form. And writing nine thousand trivia questions comes with challenges beyond mere volume, it turns out. In case you have professional curiosity, or just want to feel my pain (Ken Jenningss Trivia Pity Party!) here are a few of the difficulties inherent in writing an ber-trivia book of this scale. OVER EASY OR HARD-BOILED? My favorite trivia questions arent simple fact retrieval.

They involve a little bit of workforehead furrowing, lip chewing, tossing the question around with friends and familybefore the sudden flash of insight that produces the answer. Whos the only U.S. president with a four-syllable surname? is probably not the kind of question you can answer off the top of your head, but its not annoyingly esoteric either. But a book of nine thousand brain-straining questions like that might be, well, a little exhausting. So Ive sprinkled in some of the easy, quick-response kind of questions (What countrys national carrier is Qantas Airways?) as well asIll admita few maddeningly abstruse ones that just happen to have interesting answers (Dolbears Law relates air temperature to the speed of what?). THE GENERATION GAP. A 15-year-old trivia buff and a 65-year-old trivia buff are going to have different ideas of what pop culture and what once-current events constitute fair game for quizzing. THE GENERATION GAP. A 15-year-old trivia buff and a 65-year-old trivia buff are going to have different ideas of what pop culture and what once-current events constitute fair game for quizzing.

To someone of exactly the right age, the sentence Bill Laimbeer played one of the Sleestaks on Land of the Lost will elicit a smile of happy recognition. To anyone else, it will only elicit a puzzled Bill Laim-who played one of the what-staks on Land of the what now? Ive tried to avoid the hopeless minutiae of any generation, evenas tempting as it seemedmy own Gen-X childhood. But rest assured that, no matter what your age, youll probably feel too old for some of the questions herein and too young for others. EQUAL TIME. Quiz show and board game questions are produced by staffs of dozens of diverse writers, but this book all poured out of one head: mine. So Im terrified that the questions will reflect my own personal preferences and prejudices. Are there too few NASCAR questions? Too much breakfast cereal? What if theres twice as much Beatles as Elvis or more CSI: NY than CSI: Miami? What if there are two questions on the Sino-Japanese War and only one on the Russo-Japanese War? Aaaargh! HAKUNA ERRATA. Finally, theres accuracy.

Ive been over this book with a fine-toothed comb, and so have many other trivia gurus of my acquaintance, but I know from experience that we couldnt have caught every possible error in a book this size. Trivia is an odd field: the very best finds are the odd and nearly unbelievable facts, and those are also the ones most likely to
have been misreported or exaggerated or, sometimes, simply made up. Also, times changethis book may have been current when I finished it in the summer of 2007, but I cant vouch for all its facts if youre reading it in some remainder bin of the far-flung future of 2009 or beyond. If you spot goofs or have other comments or questions, drop me a line via Ken-Jennings.com so we can fix em in any future editions.
I hope you enjoy this endlessly overstuffed clown car of trivia (Ken Jenningss Trivia Clown Car?). Trivia, Ive always thought, has the wonderful side effect of making knowledge seem fun, or even sexy.

It can bring back fond memories, or spark new interests, or inspire marvel at the wonderful strangeness of the world around us. Maybe some of the facts in the nine-thousand-odd questions that follow will do something like that for you. But even if these quizzes just provide a momentary rainy day diversionwell, theres nothing trivial about that, either. You know, I just searched the manuscript one final time for the letters TK (a publishing-speak placeholder abbreviation for To Come) and immediately got back a great list of legitimate trivia answers with the letters tk in them: Dick Butkus, OutKast, Kamchatka, the Atkins Diet, Latka Gravas. And my first thought, even after eight grueling months of question writing, was, Wow, what a great idea for a quiz! I wonder if I can squeeze it in somewhere. So much for getting the trivia jones out of my system.

Maybe theres still more TK. JANUARY 1