Three of a Kind, Part 47 Trivia Quiz

Answer: Simon

Simon Wiesenthal (1908-2005) was an Austrian Jew imprisoned by the Nazis during World War II. As a survivor, he devoted the remainder of his life to finding and prosecuting Nazi war criminals.

Vincent Price played Simon Templar, the Saint, on radio. Louis Hayward, George Sanders, Hugh Sinclair, and Val Kilmer played the Saint in motion pictures and Simon Dutton, Roger Moore and Ian Ogilvy portrayed him in television series.

In the TV cartoon series "Underdog," the principal antagonist is Simon Bar Sinister. Simon is a mad scientist whose motivation is "I want money and power and money and power and money and power and money and power!!!". Underdog thwarts him by the end of each episode.

Answer: eye

In the center of most tropical cyclones, there is an area of relatively calm weather, low pressure and low winds. This is called the eye. The clouds surrounding it are called the eyewall and are the worst of the storm.

Vladimir Nabokov wrote "The Eye" in 1930 but it wasn't until 1965 that his son Dmitri Nabokov translated it into English. The title in Russian ("Sogliadatai") means spy or peeper or voyeur. "The Eye" is Nabokov's fourth and shortest novel.

CBS is a major American radio-and-television broadcasting company. Its logo is called "the eye" because it looks like one. Because of it, people in the broadcasting business sometimes refer to CBS as "the Eye Network."

Answer: world

It is difficult to categorize John Irving's fourth novel "The World According to Garp" (1978). It touches issues of feminism, the profession of writing, war, sex and abstinence from sex, wrestling, and parenting. As is the case in most of Irving's novels, there are parts about hotels, Vienna and bears. George Roy Hill directed an adaptation to film in 1982.

While the Tulsa World is published in Tulsa, Oklahoma, it is more a regional than local newspaper. It was founded in 1905 and family owned until 2013. The paper has had a Republican tilt during most of its life and opposed the Ku Klux Klan. It was subsequently purchased by Warren Buffett.

People who estimate such things have said that World of Warcraft (WoW) is the largest multiplayer on-line role-playing game in cyber history. In 2012, it had 12 million subscribed players, more than any other game to that time. This version of the game was started in 2004 and continues to grow through the issuance of "expansion packs" every few years.

Answer: willow

Willow Rosenberg is one of the three original members of the Scooby Gang: Buffy (the vampire slayer), Xander (a friend) and Willow. She was introduced as a shy, uncertain person who grew into her role as a witch. Her lesbian relationship with another witch, Tara Maclay, was a major story arc. She appeared throughout the series 1997-2003.

The Whomping Willow figures significantly in "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets." It is a sentient, magical, and malign tree capable of inflicting harm on people by pummeling them. When Harry and Ron Weasley crash a car into the Whomping Willow, they are fortunate to survive.

The Willow Tearooms were designed by architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh in 1903. The original location was at 217 Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow, Scotland. A business called Mackintosh at The Willow operates in this space; another business using the name The Willow Tearooms does business on Buchanan Street. The explanation is found in complicated legalities of trademark, bankruptcy and succession of ownership.

Answer: snow

Walter "Jack" Rollins and Steve Nelson wrote "Frosty The Snow Man" in 1950 and Gene Autry recorded it to follow upon his success with "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" the year before. Both songs were made into seasonal television specials. Frosty is not technically a Christmas song; the 1969 TV cartoon changed the lyric from "I'll be back again someday" to "I'll be back on Christmas Day."

Charles Percy Snow, perhaps best known as C.P. Snow, was a physical chemist who also wrote novels. His series of novels called "Strangers and Brothers" is particularly well known. On 7 May 1959 he delivered the Rede Lecture titled "The Two Cultures" which caused a stir and was published as "The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution." In it, Snow argues that the lack of communication between the sciences and the humanities redounds to the detriment of the world.

When ice is shaved or ground up and heaped into a cup, such that sweet fruity syrup may be poured over it to make a treat, the result is a snow cone or sno-cone, even if the container is not a paper cone. The Hawaiian version, called "shave ice," is unique in that it may be flavoured with guava, lychee, passionfruit, and even "li hing mui" powder (dried and salted Chinese plums) and mixed with azuki beans or condensed milk.

Answer: turkey

Bourbon has been distilled and bottled in Lawrenceburg, Kentucky (with a brief interruption for Prohibition) since 1891. The Old Hickory Distillery is the birthplace of the brand Wild Turkey in 1942. In 2011, the company initiated an unfortunate advertising campaign based on the slogan "Give 'em the Bird." An industry board reviewed the ads and held that they violated their code of ethical practices. Actor Matthew McConaughey was hired in 2016 as a spokesman to restore the brand's image.

In Europe, the story about the little bird who reported that "The sky is falling" is known mostly as "Henny Penny." In the US, it is more likely called "Chicken Little" or "Chicken Licken." The story includes a variety of animal characters with rhyming names: Turkey Lurkey, Cocky Locky, Ducky Lucky, Drakey Lakey, Goosey Loosey, Gander Lander, and Foxy Loxy.

The popular song "Turkey in the Straw" dates from the early 19th century. It was a common piece in minstrel shows. There is considerable variation in the lyrics over time. A typical first verse ran, "Turkey in the hay, in the hay, in the hay / Turkey in the straw, in the straw, in the straw / Pick up your fiddle and rosin your bow / And put on a tune called Turkey in the Straw." An excerpt of the tune appears in Charles Ives "Symphony No. 2" (1909). The tune was used in the 1928 Walt Disney cartoon "Steamboat Willie." The melody is a common one played over loudspeakers by ice cream trucks.

Answer: yellow

At one time, two alphabetic directories of telephone numbers were published by telephone companies: the white pages for personal, residential, non-business listings and the yellow pages for businesses. In smaller markets, these were sometimes two parts of the same book. The yellow pages are often associated with a walking-fingers logo connected to the statement "Let your fingers do the walking in the yellow pages." Usage has declined as more of the service provided is available on the Internet.

The original Yellow Cab Company was a huge business based in Chicago, Illinois. The use of the term "yellow cab" is not legally protected and thus there are yellow cab companies throughout the US and abroad. A musical comedy called "Cabriolet Jaune" (Yellow Cab) was produced in Paris in 1789, long before "cabs" were drawn by anything but horses.

The Norris-LaGuardia Act of 1932 prohibited the use of yellow-dog contracts of employment in the private sector in the United States. Until that time, such contracts, forced upon workers as a condition of employment, forbade employees from joining labour unions. The phrase "yellow dog" was widely used to describe such agreements, for example, in an editorial in the United Mine Workers Journal in 1921: "It reduces to the level of a yellow dog any man that signs it, for he signs away every right he possesses under the Constitution and laws of the land and makes himself the truckling, helpless slave of the employer."

Answer: mixer

A common kitchen task is the combining of ingredients: stirring, beating, folding, incorporating, kneading, whipping. A hand-mixer (e.g. a crank-type egg beater) makes these tasks a bit easier; an electric motor makes them a breeze. These motors drive a variety of beaters for a variety of mixing actions. Some use a dough hook to knead bread dough. Whisks can be turned at high speed to make meringue. Since 1919, Kitchen Aid has claimed and held a large part of the home mixer market.

A "mixer" added to an alcoholic beverage reduces the percentage of alcohol in the total volume, and adds/changes flavour, colour, sweetness, and/or consistency. Mixers include carbonated soft drinks, fruit juices, beer and wine, dairy products, coffee and tea, and (yuck!) energy drinks. The most common mixer is water.

In situations where sound is produced which needs to be amplified, broadcast, and/or recorded, the various audio inputs terminate in a device called a mixer. These include voices and other sounds from microphones, pick-ups from electronic instruments, and previously recorded sounds. The mixer collects, balances and produces an output signal or signals which can then be pumped into event speakers, broadcast and/or recorded. The simplest mixer is a disc jockey's with one channel for a turntable or tape player and another for the DJ's voice. High-end recording studios have mixers capable of managing 96 tracks.

Answer: ship

There is no end to debate about the distinction between a ship and a boat. One argument holds that a boat can be carried aboard a ship but not vice versa. This does not resolve why riverboats and ferry boats are called boats rather than ships. The US Navy uses a rule that, when turned sharply, ships heel toward the outside and boats toward the inside of the turn. This is because of differences in the center of mass relative to the center of buoyancy. This does not help with submarines which can carry boats and yet are themselves called boats.

Jefferson Airplane formed in 1965 in San Francisco and split up in 1972. Some former members formed a band called Hot Tuna; others formed a band called Jefferson Starship. The latter was exceptionally successful releasing eight albums which charted either gold or platinum. The band retired in 1984 but was revived in 1992.

Plutarch (AD 46- ca AD 119) wrote of the "Ship of Theseus." This vessel carried Theseus and thirty of the youth of Athens home from Crete. The boat was preserved but rotted over time, various parts being replaced as they disintegrated. The paradoxical question raised by this was "Once every part of the original ship has been replaced, is it still the original ship?" Heraclitus and Plato chewed on this question, as did Thomas Hobbes and John Locke.

Answer: tank

The definition of a tank top is imprecise but, in North America, it can refer to any casual shirt without a collar, buttons or sleeves. Other names for this garment include muscle shirts, shooter shirts, or A shirts. The British name for the same article of clothing is vest; in Australia and New Zealand, singlet.

The British comic "Tank Girl" first appeared in 1988. It was made into a not-particularly-successful motion picture in 1995. The episodes are confusing, not especially sequential, and perhaps psychedelic. Rebecca Buck is the tank girl, so called because she lives in her tank and carries out daring missions using it. The setting is a vaguely future Australia. Her sidekick is a mutated kangaroo named Booga.

Frank Kaminksy was born in 1993, played college basketball with distinction for Wisconsin Badgers, and was named National College Player of the Year in 2015. As a professional player in the National Basketball Association, he is known as Frank the Tank Kaminsky. He has played for both the Charlotte Hornets (2015-2019) and the Phoenix Suns.