INTERNET & LINGO
What does GIF stand for?
A) Graphic Image File
B) General Image Format
C) Graphics Interchange Format
D) Graphical Internet Frame
C) Graphics Interchange Format
Fun fact: Steve Wilhite, who created the GIF, always said it’s pronounced “jif,” like the peanut butter. He said so again when he accepted a Webby lifetime achievement award in 2013, and the internet has argued about it ever since.
Secretariat
Horse
Fun fact: Secretariat won the 1973 Triple Crown and took the Belmont Stakes by 31 lengths. His time in that race is still the record.
In “Groundhog Day,” what is the groundhog’s name?
A) Woodstock Willie
B) Staten Island Chuck
C) Punxsutawney Phil
D) General Beauregard Lee
C) Punxsutawney Phil
Fun fact: The groundhog bit Murray twice during filming. The movie wasn’t shot in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. It was filmed in Woodstock, Illinois, which now holds its own Groundhog Day celebration with a groundhog named Woodstock Willie.
A house pet that meows and has eaten too much.
Fat Cat
What is the hardest substance in the human body?
A) Bone
B) Tooth enamel
C) Fingernails
D) Cartilage
B) Tooth enamel
Fun fact: Enamel can’t grow back. The cells that make it disappear once a tooth comes through the gums, so any enamel you lose is gone for good.
Calling junk email “spam” goes back to a sketch by which comedy group?
A) The Kids in the Hall
B) Monty Python
C) SCTV
D) Saturday Night Live
B) Monty Python
Fun fact: In the 1970 sketch, a group of Vikings in a café keep singing “Spam, Spam, Spam,” drowning out everyone else. Early internet users borrowed the word for messages that flood out everything else.
Laika
Dog
Fun fact: In 1957, Laika rode the Soviet Union’s Sputnik 2 and became the first animal to orbit Earth. She was a stray from the streets of Moscow.
Murray’s only Oscar nomination came for which film?
A) Rushmore
B) Broken Flowers
C) St. Vincent
D) Lost in Translation
D) Lost in Translation (2003)
Fun fact: Murray doesn’t have an agent. Filmmakers contact him by leaving a message on a phone number he checks only now and then, and Sofia Coppola spent months trying to reach him before he agreed to do the film.
Sleepwear for a South American pack animal.
Llama Pajama
Which animal has fingerprints so close to a human’s that they can be hard to tell apart, even under a microscope?
A) Chimpanzee
B) Gorilla
C) Raccoon
D) Koala
D) Koala
Fun fact: Koalas evolved fingerprints completely separately from primates. They probably help koalas grip eucalyptus branches.
The first widely used set of emoji was made in 1999 for a mobile phone company in which country?
A) South Korea
B) Finland
C) Japan
D) United States
C) Japan
Fun fact: “Emoji” has nothing to do with the English word “emotion.” It’s Japanese: e means “picture” and moji means “character.” Shigetaka Kurita’s original 176 emoji are now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Bounty
Ship
Fun fact: HMS Bounty’s crew mutinied against Captain William Bligh in 1789. The mutineers settled on Pitcairn Island in the South Pacific, and some of their descendants still live there today.
In 1977, Murray joined “Saturday Night Live” to replace which original cast member?
A) Dan Aykroyd
B) Chevy Chase
C) John Belushi
D) Garrett Morris
B) Chevy Chase
Fun fact: His first season was rough, and early on he even went on air to admit he didn’t think he was being funny. That same year he won an Emmy as one of the show’s writers.
A thick soup made for a slow-moving rainforest mammal.
Sloth Broth
Protein analysis of a 68-million-year-old T. rex fossil showed it was most closely related to which of these living animals?
A) Crocodile
B) Komodo dragon
C) Chicken
D) Iguana
C) Chicken
Fun fact: A 2008 study found that T. rex was closer to chickens and ostriches than to alligators. Birds are the only living dinosaurs. The trick is the crocodile, which is related to dinosaurs but sits on a different branch.
Which scientist coined the word “meme” in 1976?
A) Carl Sagan
B) Marshall McLuhan
C) Stephen Jay Gould
D) Richard Dawkins
D) Richard Dawkins
Fun fact: Dawkins introduced it in his book The Selfish Gene to describe ideas that spread from person to person. He took the Greek word mimeme, meaning “something imitated,” and shortened it so it would sound like “gene.”
Flying Cloud
Ship
Fun fact: Flying Cloud was an American clipper ship that set a speed record in 1854, sailing from New York to San Francisco around South America in about 89 days. The ship’s navigator was Eleanor Creesy, the captain’s wife, which was almost unheard of for a woman at the time.
In “Caddyshack,” groundskeeper Carl Spackler says he once caddied for whom?
A) The Pope
B) Arnold Palmer
C) The Dalai Lama
D) Mahatma Gandhi
C) The Dalai Lama
Fun fact: Murray improvised a lot of his part. That includes the “Cinderella story” scene, where he knocks the heads off flowers with a golf club, which he made up from a single line of direction from Harold Ramis.
A monk’s hooded garment worn by a nocturnal bird of prey.
Owl Cowl
Which animal can turn from its adult form back into its juvenile stage, possibly repeating its life cycle over and over?
A) Tardigrade
B) Axolotl
C) Greenland shark
D) Turritopsis dohrnii jellyfish
D) Turritopsis dohrnii jellyfish
Fun fact: It’s nicknamed the “immortal jellyfish” and is only about 4.5 mm across. It isn’t truly immortal, though. Most of them still die from predators or disease before they get a chance to start over.
In 1969, what was the first message ever sent over ARPANET, the network that became the internet?
A) “HELLO”
B) “TEST”
C) “LO”
D) “QWERTY”
C) “LO”
Fun fact: On October 29, 1969, a student at UCLA tried to type “LOGIN” to a computer at Stanford Research Institute. The system crashed after the first two letters, so the first message on the internet was “LO,” as in “lo and behold.”
Fortuné
Dog
Fun fact: Fortuné was Empress Joséphine’s pug. On her wedding night with Napoleon, the dog wouldn’t leave the bed and bit Napoleon on the leg. The trick: the name sounds like a ship’s.
Columbia Pictures agreed to make which 1984 drama, based on a W. Somerset Maugham novel, only if Murray also signed on for “Ghostbusters”?
A) Of Human Bondage
B) The Razor’s Edge
C) The Painted Veil
D) Cakes and Ale
B) The Razor’s Edge
Fun fact: Ghostbusters was a huge hit, but The Razor’s Edge flopped. Murray then took about four years away from movies and spent part of that time in Paris studying history and philosophy at the Sorbonne.
Playful, teasing back-and-forth from the official who leads the singing at a synagogue.
Cantor’s Banter
Fun fact: “Cantor” comes from the Latin word for “singer,” which is also the root of “chant” and “incantation.” The trick is the psalmist: a psalmist writes sacred songs, so it sounds like the right answer, but a palmist reads palms and doesn’t trade jokes.
What is the most abundant protein on Earth?
A) Collagen
B) Keratin
C) Hemoglobin
D) RuBisCO
D) RuBisCO
Fun fact: RuBisCO is the enzyme plants use in photosynthesis to pull carbon dioxide out of the air. It’s famously slow and processes only a few CO₂ molecules per second, so plants make a lot of it to keep up. In some leaves it’s up to half of all the soluble protein. The trick is collagen: it’s the most abundant protein in the human body, but not on the planet.