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Greg's Useless Trivia #8 (1 Viewer)

GregR

Footballguy
A collection of mostly useless but sometimes interesting things I've come across. There are bugs with opening a lot of spoiler boxes at once. Easiest to avoid if you close each box again once you read the answer. If that doesn't work, just reload the thread and they should work again.

Links to previous useless trivia:
#1
#2
#3
#4
#5
#6
#7

1. Since commercial aviation took off in the US, there have been 4 times the skies have been kept clear of commercial and private planes by the government. The most recent was due to the attacks on 9/11/2001. What were the other three times?

All three occurred in the early 1960s as part of Cold War military exercises.

Airliners had to make way for waves of B-52 and B-47 bombers that were to cross from Canada into the United States and enter the continent from the coasts in a simulated Soviet nuclear attack. The three simulations, known as Sky Shield, were training exercises for the personnel, communications, and radar detection systems of North America. The plan was to make sure that the bombers were detected by radar and other early-warning systems, that interceptor and missile squadrons would be alerted and scrambled, and that the United States would remain able to strike back.
2. When Arnold Schwarzenegger was originally contacted about the movie The Terminator, it was about playing the role of Reese rather than the role of the cyborg. The studio had another actor in mind to play the Terminator, but director James Cameron did not want to go with the studio's choice in part because Cameron said the actor was "this likable, goofy, kind of innocent guy". Which actor had the studio wanted?

OJ Simpson.
3. How long were vehicles stuck in the longest lasting traffic jam in history?

a) 1 day

b) 3 days

c) 7 days

d) 12 days

e) 15 days

d)12 days.

The traffic jam took place in China on the Beijing-Tibet Expressway. Trucks delivering supplies to construction meant to ease traffic congestion became blocked at the exits. The traffic jam was 62 miles long, and cars moved an average of 2 miles per day. A 109 mile long traffic jam took place in France in 1980 but did not last as long.
4. What book resulted from a famous author being challenged by a publisher to write a book using only 50 words?

Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss
5. What gold and jewels possessing movie character did Forbes estimate the wealth of at $8.6 billion?

Smaug the dragon from The Hobbit. The estimate is based on the dimensions of Smaug's treasure pile. Scrooge McDuck was estimated to have $44.1 billion.
6. What product name came from the words "General Purpose"?

Jeep. The vehicles in World War II were marked "GP" for General Purpose.
7. A group of geese are known as a gaggle, and a group of lions are known as a pride. What group of animals make up a "grumble"?

Pugs. According to some places on the internet, the term can also be used for fishermen.
8. What award has only been bestowed 8 times, to Henry Kissinger, Bob Hope, Karrem Abdul-Jabbar, Whoopi Goldberg, Nelson Mandela, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Pope John Paul II, and Jesse Jackson?

They are the only honorary members of the Harlem Globetrotters.
9. The United States, Liberia and Myanmar (Burma) are believed to be the last three countries in the world to share what trait?

Have something other than the metric system as their official system of measurement.
10. The names of all the planets in the solar system have something in common, except for the Earth. What is it?

Earth is the only planet not named for a god.
11. When it comes to Presidential history, something unusual happened in 1841 and again in 1881. What was it?

Three different men served as president in those years.

In 1841, the year started with Martin Van Buren as president. The job was then assumed by the winner of the 1840 election, William Henry Harrison. Harrison died of pneumonia 31 days after he was inaugurated, making Harrison's vice president--John Tyler--president.

In 1881, Rutherford B. Hayes started the year as president. Just as Van Buren did before him, he relinquished the office to James Garfield, who had been elected in 1880. Garfield was assassinated in 1881, making his vice president--Chester A. Arthur--president.
12. As an actual unit of time, how long is a "jiffy"?

A jiffy is a millisecond, but you get full credit for alternate answers of one tick of a computer's system clock (1/100th of a second or 1/60 of a second), or the time it takes light to travel one foot in a vacuum.
13. In 1895, Bayer marketed a new drug as a "non-addictive morphine substitute". What was its trademarked name?

Heroin
14. About how many mosquitos would it take to suck all the blood out of a human body?

A mosquito on average will suck five millionths of a liter of blood, and there are about 5 liters of blood in the average human body. So it would take around a million mosquitos to drain all five liters from the human body.
15. Observers of whales have sometimes noted clouds of bubbles rising from whales that don't seem to come from their blowholes, causing some people to believe they are whale farts. What are they according to researchers?

They really are whale farts. Great big giant whale farts.
 
I don't imagine anyone will get more than a couple on this set. More interesting facts than trivia this time.

 
There is NO WAY Scrooge McDuck is worth more than Smaug. His gold vault is way smaller than Smaug's.

http://th08.deviantart.net/fs24/300W/f/2008/007/d/e/The_Money_Bin_by_vikung_fu.jpg

Smaug himself wouldnt even fit in that gold vault.

Sorry, but this puts into question the accuracy of all your trivia answers.
Scrooge is worth about ~5 trillion according to this guy:

Here's how we did the math:

Carl Banks, the creator of Scrooge McDuck and his gold trove, described Scrooge's vault (which he called a "money bin") as a 12-story skyscraper. Additionally, blueprints created for a Scrooge McDuck story by Don Rosa, a writer who picked up the Scrooge franchise where Banks left off, detail that the money bin is approximately 127 feet (39 meters) tall, and 120 feet (37 meters) long on each side. Of course, the money bin isn't filled to the top — Scrooge dives into it daily from a diving board raised a few stories above the gold's surface — so, for simplicity, we assume the vault is half full. [Would You Really Sink If You Fell into a Volcano? ]

That means it contains approximately 228,600 cubic feet of heaped gold. Using a common estimate that the empty space between coins accounts for roughly a quarter of the total volume, Scrooge owns 171,450 cubic feet of actual gold. That volume translates to 3,302,088,419 ounces, and at the current market price of $1,641 per ounce, its total worth is $5.4 trillion. Dream on, Carlos Slim Helu.

Since the dawn of humanity's fixation on shiny things, we have mined a total of 158,000 tonnes of gold, according to the World Gold Council. Coin Week says this translates into a volume of 289,121 cubic feet (8,187 cubic meters) of the precious metal — a quantity roughly the size of a small office building, and one that is approximately half as tall as Scrooge's money bin. All this is to say, there must be a lot of gold in Duck universe: Scrooge alone owns about as much of it as all the poor Earthlings put together.
 
I knew Dr. Suess, the metric system, and a jiffy. The rest I wouldn't have even had a guess.

Cool stuff.

ETA> Oh and the planets.

 
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