Three of a Kind, Part 39 Trivia Quiz

Answer: rook

One of the more potent pieces on a chessboard, the rook begins the game one in each back-row corner. It moves horizontally or vertically through any number of unoccupied squares. In some older chess sets, the rook may be represented by a chariot rather than a tower. The rook and the king sometimes engage in a bizarre pas de deux called "castling" in which they trade places.

The comic-book character The Rook first appeared in 1977 and gained his own magazine in the 1980s. The franchise has been bought and sold, and recreated several times over the years, most recently in 2015. Restin Dane plays a scientist-businessman who practices time travel using a dark-energy powered device called the Time Castle. It looks like a big chess piece and that is how Dane came to be called The Rook.

Australian novelist Daniel O'Malley's first book was "The Rook." Published in 2012, it tells the story of Myfanwy Thomas, the head of a secret organization which fights supernatural threats to the United Kingdom. A second volume, "Stiletto" (2016), continues her story. "The Rook" won the 2012 Aurealis Award for Best Science Fiction Novel.

Answer: wobble

In 1971, the Hasbro Corporation introduced a children's toy called Weebles. They were egg-shaped and resembled humans, other animals and other things. The advertising for this product impelled the tagline into popular culture: "Weebles wobble, but they don't fall down." This was in reference to the propensity of the toys, weighted at the base, to rock madly but always to return to an upright position.

An oscillation (4-10 Hz) which occurs in the steerable wheel(s) of a vehicle at a particular speed is called a speed wobble, shimmy, or tank slapper. Because the phenomenon can result in loss of control, it is also referred to as a "death wobble." It may occur in a bicycle or motorcycle, the tricycle gear of an airplane, or a skateboard.

In genetics, a wobble base pair is a pair of nucleotides in an RNA molecule which do not follow the base-pair rules discovered by James D. Watson and Francis H.C. Crick. There are four main wobble based pairs: guanine-uracil (G-U), hypoxanthine-uracil (I-U), hypoxanthine-adenine (I-A), and hypoxanthine-cytosine (I-C). Crick himself named them in 1966.

Answer: tin

The tin-roof sundae was invented by Harold Dean "Pinky" Thayer at the soda fountain in the Potter Drug Store in Potter, Nebraska, in 1916. Pinky was the son of the pharmacist-owner, James Earl Thayer. Also called a black-and-white sundae, the tin roof is a scoop of vanilla ice cream topped with Spanish peanuts and Hershey's chocolate syrup. Those wishing to gild the lily add marshmallows or marshmallow cream.

Rin Tin Tin (1918-1932) was a male German Shepherd dog who appeared in 27 movies. He was found wandering a battlefield in WWI by an American soldier, Lee Duncan. After the dog's death, several other shepherds took his name. It was Rin Tin Tin IV who starred in the original "Adventures of Rin Tin Tin" on 1950s American television. Successors to the blood line still perform.

Henry Ford's Model T was the subject of numerous nicknames: Tin Lizzie, Leapin' Lena, flivver. The name "Tin Lizzie" came from a Model T race car so-named which won the race up Pike's Peak, Colorado, in 1922. It was the first truly affordable automobile, the first produced on a moving assembly line, and had greater influence than any other. Ford sold 16.5 million of them. A joke of its time was "What is the difference between a rattlesnake and a Ford Model T? With the snake, you can count the rattles."

Answer: Saturn

Saturn was the Roman god of wealth, agriculture, plenty, generation and dissolution after whom the planet and the day of the week were named. The Temple of Saturn in Ancient Rome housed the government treasury. His December festival (Saturnalia) was an occasion of much feasting, gift giving and a generally good time.

The Saturn Corporation manufactured automobiles from 1985 until 2009. It was a subsidiary of General Motors. Its base of operations was Spring Hill, Tennessee, which figured in its advertising. The brand might have been kept alive by a purchase by Penske Automotive but, when that deal fell through, the company went out of business.

A founding member of the Legion of Super-Heroes, Saturn Girl was born on the moon of Titan in the 30th century. She first appeared in DC Comics in 1958. Here alter ego is Irma Ardeen. Not only has she appeared in comic books but on the television programmes "Smallville" and "Super Girl" as well.

Answer: mischief

Martin Filmore Clark Jr. (b. 1959) is a Virginia circuit court judge who writes novels about the criminal justice system. "Plain Heathen Mischief" (2004) is about a minister who makes a misstep with a teen-age girl in his congregation and pays for it repeatedly. It is both humourous and pathetic.

"Mischief" is a motion picture, set in the 1950s, in which a shy fellow tries to win the heart of a sexy popular girl, while his outrageous friend tries to hold his own love relationship together and guide his wingman. The critics rated it middling: neither as good as "American Graffiti" nor as bad as "Porky's."

Seen through the eyes of a street urchin, apprenticed to a great chef in the palace of the doge in 15th century Venice, this novel includes religious intrigue, political conspiracy, murder, haute cuisine, love, torture, and betrayal. Elle Newmark came to writing fiction later in life. She had lived in Italy. Her father was an Italian chef. She liked mysteries. "The Book of Unholy Mischief" grew out of this background. Sadly she died in 2011 after a long illness.

Answer: copper

From the no-longer-used English verb "copper" meaning to capture, police officers in Britain and Australia were called coppers beginning in the early 1700s. The American slang for police officer, "cop," is a shortening thereof.

In the animated motion picture "The Fox and the Hound" (and the novel on which it was based), Copper is a young coonhound who befriends an orphaned red fox. Because they are "natural" enemies, their relationship crumbles. Kurt Russell voiced Copper.

In addition to looking really good hanging from a rack in the kitchen, copper-clad cookware is remarkably efficient in conducting heat from a burner to the inside of a pan. The inside of copper-clad cookware is normally covered in stainless steel or, less often, tin. Bare copper reacts badly to the acid in foods. Copper bottoms tarnish easily and must be polished often to prove that one deserves to have them.

Answer: heart

James Horner composed the music and Will Jennings wrote the lyric for "My Heart Will Go On and On" -- alternatively known as the "Love Theme from Titanic." Celine Dion's recording was released in 1997 and became one of her greatest hits. "Near, far, wherever you are, I believe that the heart does go on. Once more you open the door and you're here in my heart and my heart will go on and on."

Dr. Wilfred G. Bigelow of the University of Toronto was a pioneer in a revolutionary method of conducting heart surgery. He stopped the heart, put the patient on a heart-lung machine during the procedure, operated on a heart which neither beat nor bled, and then restarted the organ.

Edgar Allen Poe's short story "The Tell-Tale Heart" was published in 1843 in James Russell Lowell's "The Pioneer" (a literary magazine). It involves an unidentified man who insists that he is sane while admitting to killing an old man with an odd eye, chopping the body into bits and hiding the parts under the floor. The motive for the homicide (other than distaste for the old man's "vulture eye") is never disclosed.

Answer: Betty

A Brown Betty is made with fruit (apples, pears, berries) cooked between layers of sweetened bread crumbs and topped with lemon sauce, whipped cream or both. It was a favourite dessert of President Ronald and Nancy Reagan in the White House. It compares to both a fruit cobbler and to apple crisp. Apple Betty can be made with white sugar but brown sugar is more flavourful. It dates from some time in the middle 1800s.

Betty Grable (1916-1973) was the highest salaried woman in the US in 1946 and 1947, the biggest box office attraction in the world in 1943, the highest paid entertainer in the US in 1947. Her photograph was pinned up by more American servicemen during WWII than any other star's. She sang, she danced, she romanced John Payne and Don Ameche and Victor Mature and Tyrone Power. She was married to comedian Jackie Coogan (1937-1939) and to trumpeter-bandleader Harry James (1943-1965). She died young (56) of lung cancer; her song "I Had the Craziest Dream Last Night" from her motion picture "Springtime in the Rockies" (1942) was played at her funeral.

Betty Williams was born in 1943 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Distressed by "the troubles" in Northern Ireland, she and Mairead Corrigan Maguire co-founded the Community of Peace People. Her mother was Roman Catholic and her father was Protestant. She worked with the Global Children's Foundation, the World Centre of Compassion for Children International, and the Institute for Asian Democracy. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1976. In her acceptance speech, she decried "the mindless stupidity of the continuing violence."

Answer: smoke

The first people to smoke meat, fowl and fish left neither records nor recipes because the invention occurred in preliterate times. Many cultures are well known for smoking meats: Jamaica, Scotland, Ashkenazi Jewish communities, Africa, the Southern United States. Pacific Northwest Indians were smoking salmon when Lewis and Clark arrived. Jamaicans were smoking "barbacoa" when Christopher Columbus came ashore. Montreal is probably the smoked-meat capital of Canada. The varieties of wood-smoked meat in the US seem infinite.

The origin of the nickname "The Smoke" for London, England, is much debated. It earned the name from the smoke generated by so many individual coal-burning fireplaces in such a small area. Air quality was already degrading during the Victorian Era. Finally the Great Smog of 1952 killed enough people (several thousand) to prompt the Clean Air Act of 1956 which created vast smokeless areas in the city.

In addition to the serious negative health effects of smoking on the smoker, it has been discovered and documented that second-hand smoke is highly dangerous to those around smokers. Cigarettes, cigars and pipes produce hazardous chemicals which non-smokers, especially children, take into their lungs. This places them at higher risk to contact lung cancer, asthma, COPD, elevated LDL cholesterol, heart disease, low-birth-weight babies, and sudden infant death syndrome.

Answer: horses

Alexander the Great rode his horse Bucephalus into battle. The horse was killed in the Battle of Hydraspes in June of 326 BC and was buried at Jalapur Sharif outside of Jhelum in the Punjab region of modern Pakistan. The name "bucephalus" is a compound of two Greek words meaning head and ox, thus Bucephalus was an ox-headed horse.

The horse chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum)is a large deciduous tree which produces large hard nut-like seeds called conkers or horse chestnuts. The tree is not a member of the chestnut family. The "nuts" are not edible by humans. In Britain, a children's game called "conkers" involved single horse chestnuts threaded onto a string which were then used to strike each other until one broke.

In "Discworld", Death is a personified character, a black-robed skeleton carrying a scythe. His horse is named Binky which name he gave to it because "it is a nice name." Binky is a real horse; Death tried to use a skeleton horse but its pieces kept falling off and he would have to stop and wire them back in place. Binky can fly, can move through time and into other dimensions. Although Binky will not live forever, he ceases to age while serving Death.