There Has To Be An Easier Way #4 Quiz

Answer: Andy Warhol

The often misquoted phrase from Andy Warhol actually reads: "In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes." Once when doing an interview for Art News in November 1963 Andy was asked, "What is Pop Art?" Warhol responded: "It's the place where my prediction from the sixties finally came true: "In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes." Then he went on to say he was "bored" with that line and that his new line is, "In fifteen minutes everybody will be famous." Sorry Andy, that prediction never came true.

Answer: built a life-sized statue of Jesus Christ with toothpicks and glue

Equipped with tweezers, super glue, and hundreds of boxes of flat, sandwich, square, pickle, and round toothpicks, Bob Haifley, 40, from Covina, California, set out, in the summer of 1991, constructing a likeness of Jesus Christ. It took over 2,500 hours and 65,000+ toothpicks.(Hence, the clue stating "I prefer Lego myself") When interviewed Bob to the effect that he was just cruising down the street in his pick-up truck and received a powerful spiritual inspiration to do it.

He named his inspiration "The Gift".

Answer: He's credited as the first man to report seeing a UFO

(look for the capitalized letters in my clue and what do they spell?)
On June 24, 1947, while flying near Mount Rainier, Ken Arnold claimed he saw nine odd-shaped objects flying in the sky. He also claimed it was not the first time he had seen UFO's. Arnold was considered to be a skilled pilot who undertook a project to find answers for what he saw, and did acquire minor celebrity status, yet he quit his personal search for answers in 1960 having found nothing worth spending the rest of his life pursuing.

Answer: sneezed non-stop for 978 days straight

It's true. "Sneezy" from the story of "Snow White" had nothing on Donna Griffiths of the U.K. At the age of twelve on January 13, 1981, she began to sneeze at one minute intervals. This pattern continued for over a year which added up to over a million sneezes.

The intervals began to lengthen after this but they never lasted for than five minutes. She finally stopped on September 16, 1983, after 978 days of continuous 'achoos'. I wonder if the tissue industry noticed a huge jump in sales?

Answer: Engelbert Humperdinck

You can't argue with the success of Engelbert Humperdinck, but it was certainly an interesting choice for Arnold. The name is actually taken from the famous German composer who turned the famous fable "Hansel and Gretel" into a highly popular stage place of the 19th century. Dorsey was born on May 2, 1936, in Madras, India, one of ten children of British Army office Merv Dorsey and his wife Olive.

After several mediocre years in music, Arnold's agent decided although Dorsey's music was good, it needed something that would "catch the audience's attention".

There's no argument that his choice of stage names had that very result.

Answer: grafted monkey testicular tissue on human male gonads for therapeutic purposes

*(sorry, couldn't help the humourous clue) Voronoff, a Russian medical specialist who emigrated to France, grafted not just monkey teste tissue onto male gonads, but also transplanted entire testicles from other animal sources as part of his study on the organs effects on virility and age.

He began by injecting ground-up dog and guinea pigs gonads into himself and volunteers, then moved onto grafting thin slices of the tissue. The scariest part of this research is that men actually lined up for the procedure.

He even transplanted the testicles of executed criminals into millionaires and notable people, but when that supply ran short, he turned to chimpanzees for a source of the organs. Some of his notable customers were Harold McCormick, CEO of the "International Harvester Company", the president of Turkey, Mustafa Ataturk, and U.S. soprano singer, Lily Pons.

He died rich but was the subject of much ridicule for decades. Forty years later, the medical community re-opened his research papers and have derived many good things from Voronoff's techniques including treatment for certain cancers, pancreatic grafting tests, techniques that have shown promise in the cure of diabetes, and many other surprising findings.

He received a pardon and full apology posthumously from many worldwide medical associations so I guess they had decided Voronoff wasn't "nuts" after all.

Answer: ran backwards from New York to L.A. in 107 days

Running a marathon of 26.2 miles forwards is tough enough but running backwards from New York all the way to L.A. has got to be likened to physical torture. The distance Arvind ran between the two cities was nearly 4,500 kms or approximately 2,800 miles.

This means that he ran a distance, equivalent to an Olympic marathon, of over twenty-six miles a day for 107 straight days. No wonder he earned the title of the World's Greatest Retrorunner for his feat and in my opinion, has earned his place on the list of those who have enjoyed their fifteen minutes of fame.

Answer: he crushed thirty walnuts in fifty-seven seconds between his butt cheeks

Jose had cracked alright, that is, cracked thirty walnuts in fifty-seven seconds between the cheeks of his buttocks. His brother took second place with a time of eighty seconds. As part of the 1990 1st Annual "Nutcracking With The Bottom Festival", the people of the small Basque village laid out two rows of fifteen walnuts along the ground for each brother and watched as they squatted over each walnut and crushed it.

The brothers credit their 'success' to "a peculiar physical characteristic" that runs in the Astoreka family.

Answer: toilet paper

I've seen people literally go into fits of rage when any of those items run out, but there's no panic like the utter terror of being caught with your pants down and not a single square of toilet paper in sight! (Isn't that SO true my fellow FT quizplayers? LOLOL) Joseph Gayetty introduced "Gayetty's Medicated Paper" in 1857, which was sold in packages of flat sheets right up until 1920.

Although there are many earlier reports of different types of hygenic paper showing up in different forms and made with various materials, Gayetty is widely credited with being the first to patent his product and sell it for commercial use. Original advertisements for the product used the tagline "The greatest necessity of the age! Gayetty's medicated paper for the water-closet." All I can say is "Thanks Mr. Gayetty!"

Answer: he could write five different words at the same time using hands, feet, and his mouth

I have enough problems writing one word at a time, but to be able to write five words at a time using my hands, feet, and mouth is beyond my ability. Yet Harry Kahne could do this and demonstrate many other amazing abilities to the degree that he developed an educational program called "The Multiple Mentality Course", which is still available for purchase eight decades later! Harry was known to be able to engage in six different mental processes at the same time while using no fewer than fourteen mental processes.

The most interesting thing is that Mr. Kahne wasn't even a university graduate and all of his abilities were self-taught.