While I’m off work, I’m keeping a hand in the game with five trivia questions and answers each weekday.

Thursday, 13 February Questions Answers
Wednesday, 12 February Questions Answers
Tuesday, 11 February Questions Answers
Monday, 10 February Questions Answers

Answers for Thursday, 13 February

1. The Shakespeare play whose action takes place farthest in the past is which problem play set late in the Trojan War?
   Troilus and Cressida
2. The Eisner Awards, presented every summer in San Diego, recognize achievement in what art form?
   Comics
3. Fill in the blank. The de facto head of the Eastern Orthodox Church leads under the title “Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople.”
4. What keyboardist served as the musical director for the Blues Brothers Band, the World’s Most Dangerous Band, and the CBS Orchestra?
   Paul Shaffer
5. The movie Boxing Helena and the novel The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer are the major 1990s works of what American filmmaker?
   Jennifer Lynch

Answers for Wednesday, 12 February

1. What presidential scion/future U.S. president served as Secretary of State under President James Monroe?
   John Quincy Adams
2. The Ohio River originates in Pennsylvania and flows into the Mississippi in Illinois. Along the way, it forms the entire southern borders of which two states?
   Ohio, Indiana
   
3. What word fills in both power-innovation blanks?
   

   The first electric battery was dubbed the “Voltaic Pile” and the first manmade self-sustaining nuclear reactor was dubbed “Chicago Pile–1.”

4. Some countries’ national animals are mythological beasts, such as China’s dragon and Scotland’s unicorn. Which country’s national animal is the winged horse called the “chollima”?
   North Korea
5. The baiji, a Chinese river dolphin, was declared extinct in 2006, the first mammal driven to extinction by man in 50 years. What river constituted the entire habitat of the baiji?
   Yangtze / Yangzi / Chiangjiang

Answers for Tuesday, 11 February

1. What genericized trademark is often used by speakers of British English to mean “vacuum cleaner” and “vacuum-clean”?
   Hoover
   
2. It’s the number of Pillars of Islam, of Sacred Wounds of Christ, of the Faces of Shiva, of Books of Moses. What is it?
   5
3. Mongolians traditionally ferment airag (or “koumiss”), their national beverage, from the milk of what versatile animal?
   Horse
   
4. The first modern Olympic Games were held, appropriately, in Athens. What city—a 2,900-km torch relay from Athens—hosted the second games? The city in question predominately speaks one of the two official languages of the Olympics.
   Paris
5. The first cultivated variety of coffee bean is named for what Yemeni port city?
   Mocha

Answers for Monday, 10 February

1. What chemical element lies between uranium and plutonium on the periodic table?
   Neptunium
   
2. The band Fragile Rock takes its name from its emotionally vulnerable music, as well as the conceit that its members are not ordinary humans, but rather, what?
   Puppets
3. What country saw its army defeated at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, and consequently withdrew all its military forces from Vietnam?
   France
4. The word “impeach” derives from the Latin for which body part?
   Foot
5. Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth, Willa Cather’s Shadows on the Rock, Mazo de la Roche’s Finch’s Fortune, Warwick Deeping’s The Ten Commandments, and Rafael Sabatini’s Scaramouche the King-maker were announced on October 12, 1931, as the first five novels to achieve what distinction?
   Placement on the New York Times Best Seller List