A Medley of Motley Miscellany Trivia Quiz

Answer: Strawberry

Botanists can be unhelpful when it comes to the topic of everyday fruit names. A strawberry isn't a true berry at all. In a grocery store run by botanists, you'll find strawberries in the Aggregate Accessory Fruit section of the produce aisle. What that means is that the fleshy part people eat develops mostly from the flower's receptacle rather than the ovary. The actual fruits are those tiny specks on the outside that everyone calls seeds. They're really little dry fruits called achenes. Very proper. Botanists are buzzkills.

A true berry is one that develops from a single flower with one ovary, has a fleshy fruit wall, and contains seeds within (often two or more). Strawberries just don't make the cut.

Answer: Alfred E. Neuman

Freckled, red-haired, and proudly gap-toothed, Alfred E. Neuman became the face of "MAD Magazine" despite rarely doing much inside the magazine itself. His blankly cheerful expression fit with the publication's style perfectly. He was smugly clueless and weirdly relatable. And honestly, what better slogan than "What, me worry?" for a magazine that made fun of everything?

Oddly enough, versions of Alfred's face had been floating around in advertisements, postcards, and novelty images for decades before "MAD" adopted him in the 1950s. The magazine cleaned him up, named him, and turned a stray bit of visual nonsense into a celebrity.

Answer: Wikipedia

Wikipedia is the oddball here, and very proudly so. Most of the modern internet runs on ads, tracking pixels (also called "web beacons"), and nearly instantaneous, behind-the-scenes silent auctions for your attention. Meanwhile, Wikipedia operates on donations. No banner ads. No sponsored content. No personal profiles built from your browsing history. The site is run by the Wikimedia Foundation, a nonprofit whose business model can be summed up briefly as "please give us money".

And then there's Google and Facebook, which are case studies for the saying itself. Their services are free because advertisers are the customers, and you can bet that you're the inventory.

Answer: Skein

English has a marvelous collection of collective nouns for animals taken collectively, and geese ended up with more than one. A group of geese on the ground is traditionally called a gaggle, but once they take to the sky they become a skein. The word probably comes from an old term for a length of wound-up yarn. You can kind of understand it when you see migrating geese stretched into long, wavering V-shaped lines across the horizon.

It's poetic, one supposes, if a bit of a stretch.

Answer: Insidious

If you like horror movies over the last couple decades, you'll recognize Patrick Wilson's face. In "The Conjuring" series, he stars as real-life paranormal investigator Ed Warren along with Vera Farmiga as Lorraine Warren. A few years earlier, he starred as Josh Lambert in "Insidious", directed by James Wan. Along with its sequel, in which Wilson also appears, the "Insidious" movies became one of the most successful supernatural horror franchises of the 2010s and introduced us to creepy concepts like "The Further", a spirit realm where everything is like the real world but so much worse.

Answer: South America

Archaeologists with time on their hands have traced the origins of the lowly peanut to South America. In particular, the area making up modern-day Bolivia and northwestern Argentina, where the peanut's wild relatives still grow. Indigenous peoples domesticated the plant thousands of years ago, and they became a key crop long before Europeans arrived. From there, they spread throughout the Americas. Spanish and Portuguese explorers eventually carried peanuts across the Atlantic, whence they spread far and wide through Europe, Africa, and Asia.

Answer: The Treaty of Waitangi

The Treaty of Waitangi was signed on 6 February 1840 at Waitangi in the Bay of Islands by representatives of the British Crown and more than 40 Māori chiefs. Copies of the treaty were then carried around New Zealand, gathering hundreds of additional signatures over the course of seven to eight months. Today it is considered New Zealand's founding document, although its English and Māori texts differ in key areas, causing plenty of legal and political discussions over generations.

In particular, issues like the meaning of sovereignty and the protection of Māori rights tend to come up quite a bit.

Answer: Beyoncé

Beyoncé made Billboard history in April 2024 with "Cowboy Carter" debuting at Number One on the Top Country Albums chart. That achievement made her the first Black woman ever to top the chart, which dates back to 1964. The album was far more than a plain old country record, though.

It moseyed through country, folk, gospel, Americana, soul, and rock, ignoring all the usual boundaries of the genre. It was a very successful move on her part. It also debuted at Number One on the all-genre Billboard 200, giving Beyoncé her eighth Number One there.

Answer: Chicken

Chickens aren't known for their graceful acts of long-distance flight, but they do taste good battered and deep-fried. No, chickens are built for quick bursts into the air to escape danger or at best hop onto a perch. That's what makes Sheena one of the more famous fowls you might have picked out of your teeth.

A bantam chicken owned by Bill and Bob Knox, Sheena flew an impressive 630 feet 2 inches (192.07 meters) in Pennsylvania on May 31, 1985. The feat set the Guinness World Record for the longest flight by a chicken, which is something you know now. The flight lasted only about 13 seconds, but it's longer than you've ever flown on your own. Tiny wings. Big heart. Finger-licking good.

Answer: Hans Island

Tiny, rocky, and an almost impossible place to live on. Welcome to Hans Island. Somehow, it became the focus of one of the friendliest territorial disputes in history. The island sits in the Kennedy Channel between Canada's Ellesmere Island and Greenland, a territory within the Kingdom of Denmark.

Starting in the 1980s, officials and military personnel from each country would visit the island from time to time, raise their national flag, and leave behind a bottle of their favorite spirit. Canadians usually left Canadian whisky. The Danish usually responded with schnapps. People called the exchange the "Whisky War".

This rivalry ended in 2022, when Canada and Denmark agreed to divide Hans Island roughly in half along a natural cleft. Other countries could learn a lot from this dispute.