A Panoply of Trivia 8 Trivia Quiz

Answer: Golf

Juli "Linkster" Inkster didn't just win all four modern majors (the US Women's Open, LPGA Championship, du Maurier Classic, and Nabisco Dinah Shore), she did it while balancing motherhood. Famously dubbed the "Mayor of LPGA", she won two of those majors in 1999 at the age of 39, long after having her two daughters.

Her career was defined by insane longevity. She remains the only golfer in history to win two majors in the same decade that she was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame.

Answer: Benjamin Harrison

This wasn't just a quirky game of musical chairs; it was one of the most intense ideological wars in American political history. Grover Cleveland (who was a Democrat) and Benjamin Harrison (representing the other party, the Republicans) faced off in back-to-back elections in 1888 and 1892, each side representing entirely different visions for America. Harrison stood firmly for high protective tariffs to insulate young American factories from foreign competition, while Cleveland campaigned fiercely against them, arguing they were an unfair tax on everyday consumers.

In 1888, Cleveland actually won the popular vote, but, perhaps controversially, Harrison won the Electoral College to take the White House. Four years later, voter anger over Harrison's high-tax "Billion-Dollar Congress" allowed Cleveland to storm back and reclaim the presidency. Interestingly, upon leaving the White House the first time, First Lady Frances Cleveland famously told the staff to take good care of the furniture because they would be back in exactly four years, a bold (and presumptuous) prediction that came true.

Answer: Soft Cell

Soft Cell was a British band consisting of vocalist Marc Almond and instrumentalist David Ball. They originally chose to record the cover out of pure desperation. In fact, they were totally broke, their first two singles had completely bombed, and their record label was threatening to drop them if their next release wasn't a hit. Back up to the wall? Make an amazing cover!

David Ball had heard the obscure Gloria Jones version played in underground British soul clubs and suggested they arrange an electronic cover version. To save money and add a unique punch, they used a newly invented, primitive digital sampler to create the song's signature, metallic "tink-tink" whipping sound. The gamble paid off spectacularly. The track didn't just save their careers, it went on to conquer the charts. It hit number one in seventeen different nations and spending a then-record-breaking 43 weeks on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart.

As for Soft Cell, well, they only had the one hit. Sometimes, that is enough.

Answer: Søren Kierkegaard

Søren Kierkegaard was an interesting man. He was an absolute eccentric who waged a fierce, one-man war against both the Danish state church and the fashionable academic philosophers of his era. He firmly believed that objective truth was an illusion and that life could only be understood by looking backward, but must be lived forward.

His personal life was just as dramatic as his philosophy. He famously broke off his engagement to the love of his life, Regine Olsen, believing that his profound melancholy and divine calling would completely ruin her happiness... which was a heartbreaking decision that fueled almost all of his agonizing writings on anxiety and sacrifice. He was a man of deep religious faith, yet said that God cannot be proven objectively.

In the end, Kierkegaard made people ask the difficult questions: How should I live? What do I believe? What am I willing to commit myself to? He knew that these questions are nearly impossible to answer satisfactorily, yet essential to understand the answers in order to live an authentic life.

What do you think?

Answer: Mathematics

Edward Witten is widely regarded as the practical father of modern M-theory, an advanced framework that seeks to unify all competing versions of superstring theory. His mathematical insights into the universe were so profoundly advanced that the International Mathematical Union decided his geometric proofs couldn't be ignored, making him the first non-mathematician to ever secure the medal.

The award was founded by and named after John Charles Fields, a brilliant Canadian mathematician from the University of Toronto. He conceived the medal in the 1920s to foster international collaboration after the bitter divisions of the First World War, funding it entirely out of his own estate upon his death.

Interestingly, unlike other achievements, one must be under the age of 40 in order to be eligible to receive the Fields Medal. Is the medal too heavy to be carried by anyone who's older? Actually, the reason is twofold. First of all, it's intended as being an incentive to continue to further one's research and to continue making advancements in mathematics, unlike the Nobel Prize, which is awarded for a lifetime's achievement. Secondly, politics. Many mathematicians were skipped over when the committee was choosing who to give the medal to. So, in order to not play historical catch-up, it was decided in 1966 to not award the medal to anyone 40 years of age and older.

Answer: Julianne Moore

Going into the 2003 ceremony, Julianne Moore was the absolute toast of Hollywood. Sadly, her history-making double night did not turn out as well as she had hoped. In the Best Actress category, her performance as a fractured 1950s suburban housewife in "Far From Heaven" was beaten out by her own castmate in her other nomination, Nicole Kidman (who won for "The Hours"). Later in the evening, her Best Supporting Actress nod for playing a pregnant, suicidal mother in "The Hours" was snapped up by Catherine Zeta-Jones for the musical blockbuster "Chicago".

While going home empty-handed may have stung, Moore secured her place in the record books. The Academy has strict rules that state that an actor can never be nominated twice in the same category in the same year. This means that a double nomination requires cross-category awesomeness. Only a handful of talented actors have done it. This list includes Sigourney Weaver, Al Pacino, Emma Thompson, Scarlett Johansson, and Jamie Foxx.

Moore eventually got her redemption twelve years later. She won the Best Actress Oscar in 2015 for her heartbreaking role in "Still Alice".

Answer: Notre Dame

The Notre Dame Fighting Irish are one of the most decorated teams in NCAA Division I. After their title in 1988, they entered a multi-decade championship drought. However, they came agonizingly close to capturing the crown in 1993 under head coach Lou Holtz.

In a legendary matchup billed as the "Game of the Century" (or one of them, anyway), the number two ranked Notre Dame played perfectly to put away the number one ranked Florida State Seminoles 31-24. The victory shot the Irish to the top of the rankings. However, in a shocking twist just one week later, Notre Dame suffered a devastating, final-second 41-39 loss to lower-ranked Boston College on a game-winning field goal.

Despite the fact that Notre Dame had a matching 11-1 record and had literally beaten Florida State head-to-head on the gridiron, voters in the final poll penalized the Irish for the timing of their loss. They controversially awarded the 1993 National Championship to Florida State anyway... an administrative snub that still infuriates South Bend faithful to this day.

Notre Dame has come close to a championship in 2012, 2018, 2020 and again in 2024. Is there a curse or a hex?

Answer: Demi Moore

When a 19-year-old Demi Moore landed the role of Jackie Templeton, she had virtually no professional acting experience and was sharing an apartment. "General Hospital" was at the absolute peak of its cultural power, drawing over 14 million viewers a day thanks to their Luke and Laura mania.

Moore's character was an inquisitive, fast-talking journalist who arrived in Port Charles to find her missing sister. She quickly became a fan favourite through her romantic pairing with spy Robert Scorpio (played by Tristan Rogers). Her transition to film started in 1984 when she landed a spot in "Blame It on Rio", and then, with "St. Elmo's Fire" a year later, she joined the so-called 'Brat Pack' and left television behind entirely.

Of the incorrect answers, they all were television stars before they turned to the silver screen. Meg Ryan was also a major 80s darling who got her start on a daytime soap, "As the World Turns", around the exact same time as Demi Moore. Robin Wright spent the mid-80s starring on the soap opera "Santa Barbara" before landing "The Princess Bride". Finally, Julianne Moore won a Daytime Emmy for her dual roles on "As the World Turns" before transitioning to film.

Answer: Toronto, ON, Canada

Completed in 1976 by Canadian National Railways, the CN Tower was built out of pure necessity in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The city was experiencing a massive skyscraper boom in the 1970s, and the new, reflective corporate high-rises were completely blocking TV and radio signals across the city. The solution was to build an antenna so absurdly tall that nothing could interfere with it.

Engineers poured over 40,000 cubic meters of concrete to anchor the structure, creating a marvel that accidentally became a global tourism phenomenon. The observation deck is fitted with a glass floor that hangs over the ground. Up top, you can reserve a spot at the 360 Restaurant which rotates once every 72 minutes giving the diners a view of the entire city and Lake Ontario. The owners also tout it as having the "world's highest wine cellar".

For thirty two majestic years, the CN Tower stood completely unchallenged as the tallest free-standing structure on land, a historic streak that was finally broken in 2007 by the Burj Khalifa in Dubai.

Answer: Franz Boas

When Franz Boas entered the field in the late 19th century, mainstream anthropology was dominated by "scientific racism" which was the belief that physical traits, like skull shape or brain size, dictated a race's intelligence and social evolutionary position. This erroneous thinking later mirrored the pseudoscientific justifications used by the Nazis' racist regime to dehumanize the Jews.

Boas, a German-Jewish immigrant who had personally experienced intense anti-Semitism, set out to test these theories using strict statistical data. He conducted a massive, landmark study measuring the head shapes of over 17,000 immigrants in New York City. He discovered that within a single generation, the skull shapes of immigrants' children completely changed based on their new environment and nutrition. By proving that human behavior and physiology were shaped by environment and culture, Boas single-handedly broke the backbone of scientific racism.

Margaret Mead became the most famous anthropologist in the world by doing something academics rarely did: she wrote an international bestseller. She travelled to Samoa, alone, and studied teenaged girls that were living there. When she wrote "Coming of Age in Samoa", she overturned the theory that angst and stress were an important part of the transition from childhood to adulthood, based on her observations.

Ruth Benedict became an anthropologist only after her career as a teacher and a poet. She was able to observe different societies as a whole and to see how they exhibited different traits that were a group "personality". She, in her book "Patterns of Culture", contrasted the Zuni people of southwestern America to the Kwakiutl of the Pacific northwest. Due to her work examining societies, Benedict was tasked by the American government to study Japanese culture during WWII and to try and get an insight into their mindset.