Star Wars Prequel
Though widely mocked, Jar Jar Binks holds an official Senate title in the prequels — it was his motion in the Senate that granted this emergency power to Palpatine, effectively ending the Republic.
What is emergency powers (or the Military Creation Act)?
This 1803 Supreme Court case, never taught as the political power grab it actually was, established the principle of judicial review — giving the Supreme Court authority to strike down laws, a power nowhere explicitly mentioned in the Constitution.
What is Marbury v. Madison?
This Romanian dictator, executed on Christmas Day 1989, was so paranoid about assassination that he employed four body doubles and had his food tested by multiple layers of tasters — yet was ultimately killed by his own military after a trial lasting less than two hours.
Who is Nicolae Ceaușescu?
This is the name of the boundary where Earth's atmosphere officially ends and outer space begins, sitting at 100 kilometers above sea level — though the U.S. military defines space as starting 20 kilometers lower.
What is the Kármán Line?
This 1871 disaster, which destroyed roughly a third of Chicago and left 100,000 residents homeless, was famously blamed on a cow kicking over a lantern — a story invented by a reporter who later admitted he fabricated it to make the story more colorful
What is the Great Chicago Fire?
Obi-Wan tracks Jango Fett to the ocean planet Kamino by tracing a toxic dart — but the dart's origin is only identified by this character, a specialist in droids and food at a diner, who recognizes it immediately.
Who is Dexter Jettster
his senator from Wisconsin delivered a six-hour speech in 1957 against the Civil Rights Act — the longest individual filibuster in Senate history — reading from the phone book and cooking recipes to stall the vote.
Who is Strom Thurmond?
his Soviet dictator, responsible for the deaths of millions, was so beloved by Western media during WWII that Time Magazine named him Man of the Year twice — and his death in 1953 sent the Soviet Union into such collective psychological shock that thousands were crushed to death in the funeral crowd.
Who is Joseph Stalin?
This Soviet cosmonaut, the first human to walk in space in 1965, nearly died during his 12-minute spacewalk when his suit inflated so severely in the vacuum that he couldn't re-enter the airlock — and had to secretly release pressure by partially opening his oxygen valve.
Who is Alexei Leonov?
This Chicago architect, who designed the world's first skyscraper in 1885 and coined the phrase "form follows function," is so central to modern architecture that historians split the entire field into before and after his influence.
Who is Louis Sullivan?
This Sith Rule, established by Darth Bane roughly a thousand years before the prequels, limits the Sith to exactly two members at all times — a master and an apprentice.
What is the Rule of Two?
The only U.S. president never to have won a national election — neither for president nor vice president — he ascended to the presidency after Nixon's resignation and is the answer to this trivia staple.
Who is Gerald Ford?
This Ugandan dictator, who gave himself the title "Conqueror of the British Empire," was trained by the British military, hosted the 1976 Palestinian hijacking at Entebbe airport, and claimed to hold the last true King of Scotland title — inspiring a 2006 film of that name.
Who is Idi Amin?
This phenomenon, predicted by Einstein but only directly confirmed in 2016, occurs when two massive objects spiral into each other and send ripples through the fabric of spacetime itself — detected by the LIGO observatory after a collision 1.3 billion light years away.
What are gravitational waves?
This 1886 labor riot in Chicago's Haymarket Square, in which a bomb killed several police officers during a workers' rally, led to the wrongful execution of four anarchists and directly inspired the international celebration of May Day as a labor holiday — observed everywhere in the world except the United States.
What is the Haymarket Affair?
Palpatine's Sith name, Darth Sidious, follows the tradition of Sith names — but this was the birth name of the man who became Darth Tyranus, Dooku's Sith identity being the lesser-known of his two names.
Who is Dooku (Count Dooku of Serenno)?
This 1919 constitutional amendment, which prohibited alcohol, was itself ratified through a process many legal scholars consider irregular — since it was the first amendment to impose a ratification deadline on states, a precedent with no constitutional basis.
What is the 18th Amendment (Prohibition)?
This Turkmenistan dictator renamed the months of the year after himself and his mother, banned opera and ballet as "unnecessary," ordered the word for bread to be changed to his mother's name, and built a gold rotating statue of himself that perpetually faced the sun.
Who is Saparmurat Niyazov (Turkmenbashi)?
This is the term for the theoretical maximum temperature in the universe — approximately 1.416 times 10 to the 32nd power degrees Kelvin — beyond which our current laws of physics completely break down and spacetime itself loses meaning.
What is the Planck Temperature?
his Chicago alderman, who served from 1923 to 1955 representing the predominantly Black South Side, built one of the most powerful independent political machines in American history and was known as the "Mayor of Bronzeville" — wielding more real political influence over Black Chicago than any actual mayor.
Who is William Dawson?
In Revenge of the Sith, Yoda tells Obi-Wan he has been in contact with this deceased Jedi master, who has learned to retain his consciousness after death and will teach Obi-Wan to do the same during his exile on Tatooine.
Who is Qui-Gon Jinn?
This failed 1741 conspiracy, in which enslaved people and poor white laborers in New York City allegedly plotted to burn the city and kill its white residents, resulted in 34 executions — but historians now debate whether the plot ever existed or was fabricated through tortured confessions.
What is the New York Conspiracy of 1741?
This Paraguayan dictator ruled for 35 years and instituted a policy of forced miscegenation — ordering racial mixing throughout the country — partly to repopulate Paraguay after the War of the Triple Alliance had killed an estimated 60% of its entire population, leaving the country with a ratio of roughly one man for every four women.
Who is Francisco Solano López?
This Soviet spacecraft, launched in 1977 and now billions of miles from Earth, confounded NASA engineers in 2012 when it began drifting slightly off its predicted trajectory — a mystery eventually solved by calculating the asymmetric pressure of its own heat radiation pushing against the vacuum of space.
What is Voyager 1?
This 1992 disaster, largely unknown outside Chicago, occurred when a construction crew accidentally breached a forgotten tunnel beneath the Chicago River — flooding the entire downtown underground freight tunnel system, knocking out power to hundreds of buildings, and causing an estimated $2 billion in damage.
What is the Chicago Loop Flood (or the Great Chicago Tunnel Flood)?