Simon Says (Part 1) Trivia Quiz

Answer: bait

Jose Simon founded Comedy Day in San Francisco which helped stand-up comedy emerge as a popular entertainment in that city's culture. The annual Comedy Day festival takes place in Golden Gate Park. 50,000 people typically attend
and get to hear various comedians for free. Jose Simon was a pioneer in Latin rock music. He died on Saturday, April 19, 2008 of lung cancer at his San Francisco home at the age of 63.

Answer: Simon Cameron

Simon Conway Morris is a British paleontologist, born in 1951. Simon Carmiggelt was a Dutch poet who lived from 1913 to 1987. And Simon Callow is a British actor, born in 1949.
Simon Cameron (1799 1889) served as U.S. Democrat Senator for Pennsylvania from 1845 to 1849. He was a constant voice of anti-slavery. He served as Pennsylvania Senator again from 1857 to 1861 but this time as a Republican. He was re-elected in 1867, serving until 1877.

Answer: Dickens

Mr. Callow has appeared onstage in Peter Ackroyd's one-man play, "The Mystery of Charles Dickens" and also performed solo version of "A Christmas Carol" written of course by Charles Dickens. Simon Callow is also author of the book "Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World" which examines the importance that theatre had on Dickens throughout his lifetime. "We all know he was an actor and a performer," says Mr. Callow "but what no one really takes into account is he was a great director... He seized the role, saw the potential of theatre."

Answer: care like a mother

She said, "There are four things a woman needs to know. She needs to know how to look like a girl, act like a lady, think like a man and work like a dog." That speech came on the heels of being vetoed by Federal officials for the job of Postmaster of New York "based on the ground that the job was unsuited to a woman." Caroline K. Simon was the first woman nominated by a major party in NYC for citywide office and helped to draft the country's first state law barring job discrimination.

Answer: anti-culture

John Simon was notoriously acerbic (some would say cruel) in many of his reviews, and certainly a hugely entertaining quiz can be written about all the various stinging barbs he wrote over the years such as "Don't assume you have seen the worst before experiencing the latest revival of Jesus Christ Superstar, a production so stillborn I defy God himself to resurrect it" and calling Barbra Streisand "the sort of thing that starts pogroms." John Simon was incredibly well-read and fluent in half a dozen languages.

He received B.A., M.A., Ph.D. degrees from Harvard. Despite that opinion of his regarding dinner theatre, perhaps the last laugh was on him since he was at a local dinner theatre when he suffered the stroke that killed him. On the other hand that is sort of the ultimate negative review isn't it?

Answer: 2 years

History is full of erroneous predictions of the future of technology. This was one of the many regarding humankind devising a way to take flight. Similarly, astronomer William H. Pickering wrote that "it is clear that with our present devices there is no hope of competing for racing speed with either our locomotives or our automobiles." And exactly one week before the Wright Brothers made their historic first flight on December 17, 1903 (2 years after Simon Newcomb's claim), the "New York Times" published this comment: "...We hope that Professor Langley will not put his substantial greatness as a scientist in further peril by continuing to waste his time and the money involved, in further airship experiments. Life is short, and he is capable of services to humanity incomparably greater than can be expected to result from trying to fly....For students and investigators of the Langley type there are more useful employments."

Answer: California Suite

"California Suite" is the L.A. flip side of the coin to Neil Simon's "Plaza Suite" set in New York City. "California Suite" is structured as four smaller plays, all of them taking place in the Beverly Hills Hotel.

Neil Simon began as a sketch writer in New York for Sid Caesar's "Your Show of Shows." But then when most of the talented comedy writers in television headed out to Hollywood to ply their trade, Neil stayed in New York and focused on Broadway. It turned out to be a fortuitous decision. He became the most successful playwright of the 60's and 70's.
This gets me to wondering...We looked at some biting quotes two questions ago by critic John Simon. I wonder what he thought of fellow Simon, playwright Neil Simon? Well here's a sampling: Puzzled by an audience's positive reception of Neil Simon's "They're Playing Our Song," John Simon wrote, "They cannot all be backers, relatives or friends -- or can they?" John Simon did however approve of Neil Simon's "Lost in Yonkers" writing that "Simon's humor was no longer in a vacuum, but situated in a historical context. It was like going from abstraction to reality. Somehow they weren't just jokes for jokes' sake, but were in the service of something bigger." Here's the biggest kick of all though regarding a linkage of these two theatre titans named Simon: John Simon once appeared in a 1974 episode called "Two On The Aisle" on TV's "The Odd Couple" based on Neil Simon's wonderful play. John Simon played himself in the episode appearing on a talk show panel with Felix and Oscar (Tony Randall and Jack Klugman) after those two roommates begin writing theater criticism. John winds up excoriating them and their inept column.

Answer: plastic detergent bottles and milk jugs

Those bottles and jugs are among the many plastics littering our planet's oceans.
The whale is called Ethyl and was built by Joel Stockhill and Yustina Salnokova, both from the American city San Francisco. It has been built with an internal lighting rig to illuminate it at night. It was built for the occasion of Earth Day in April of 2019.

Answer: Simon Sinek

Simon Sinek is the author of books such as "Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action" and "Leaders Eat Last." He has pushed for a philosophy suggesting that organizations and individuals stop aiming to dominate their competition but to try learning from them instead.

He would also like to see people ease off complaining, and instead try changing their workplace from within. Those other Simons are all animated characters. Simon Seville is from "Alvin and the Chipmunks", Simon Petrikov is from the animated series "Adventure Time" and of course who can forget Simon Bar Sinister from "Underdog"!

Answer: The Boxer

Simon revealed that the song was written as his own personal response to criticism that he was receiving at the time from music critics. He imagined himself as the title character of the song staving off the critical blows.
Paul Simon borrowed a few of the song's lyrical phrases from the Bible. For instance, the song's line "Asking only workman's wages / I come looking for a job" comes from the Book of James, Chapter 5, verse 4: "Failing to pay workman's wages."