This Week's Trivia

I've been collecting interesting trivia (is that an oxymoron?). Once I reach ten items, I'll post them. Here's the first installment. Read on and learn...if you dare.

1. Ho Chi Minh, the father of modern Viet Nam, left what was then French Indochina on a steamship in 1911, at the age of 21. He did not set foot in his native country for another 30 years.


2. Most people recognize the name of the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima—the Enola Gay—but not that of the B-52 that dropped the bomb called “Fat Man” on Nagasaki a few days later: Bocks Car.


3. Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play Our Town is staged, on average, somewhere in the world every night.


4. The longest English word that you can type on a QWERTY keyboard using only the left hand is “stewardesses.”


5. Massachusetts voters have not elected a Republican to the U.S. House of Representatives for 17 years.


6. Some of the names that the Beatles considered (and rejected) for their seventh studio album were: Beatles on Safari, Pendulum, Four Sides of the Eternal Triangle, Magical Circles, Abracadabra, and After Geography. The band eventually agreed on Revolver.


7. In Elizabethan England, about a quarter of the male population was named John. The pool of common first names numbered fewer than 40 for each gender. 70% of men were named John, Thomas, William, Richard, or Robert.


8. In German, the equivalent of the phrase “It’s all Greek to me” (meaning “I don’t understand the subject”) is “It’s all Bohemian villages to me.”


9. No. 10 Downing Street, the residence of British Prime Ministers since the 1700s, contains about 100 rooms.


10. Rock n’ roll pioneer Chuck Berry now holds the copyright to the Beach Boys’ first #1 single, “Surfin’ USA,” because the band stole the entire song from the Berry composition “Sweet Little Sixteen.”

This Week's Trivia: U.S. Presidents!

According to his college classmates, Ronald Reagan had a nearly photographic memory.

While serving in the U.S. Navy in World War II, Richard Nixon won thousands of dollars in shipboard poker games. He used the winnings to pay for his law school education at Duke University after the war.

Nixon lost the 1960 presidential election by about 100,000 votes, roughly the equivalent of one vote for every polling place in the country.

John Kennedy is the only President to have won a Pulitzer prize. The evidence shows that the actual drafts of the book, Profiles in Courage, published while he was a U.S. Senator, were written by his speechwriter.

George H.W. Bush was a star first baseman for Yale in the 1940s and played in the first College World Series. He threw left-handed and batted right.

The first U.S. President to be born in a hospital was Jimmy Carter.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of The Scarlet Letter, wrote a campaign biography of Franklin Pierce. The two had been classmates at Bowdoin College.

No U.S. Senator has been elected President since 1960.