The 2,263rd Mixed General Trivia Quiz

Answer: Chrysler Building

The Chrysler Building entered the Manhattan skyline during the late 1920s, and it remains a reminder of the Art Deco craze of the time. It's also a reminder of the skyscraper craze, back when everybody wanted to have the tallest building in the world. And for just a brief, shining moment in 1930, it WAS the tallest building in the world, beating out its competitors in a race that involved secret spires and other architectural tricks.

The following decades would be... well, very Freudian if you were a New Yorker.

Answer: German

"Silent Night" was originally 'Stille Nacht', so if you said Klingon, you were close. The song was born in 1818 in a small Austrian village, written in German by Joseph Mohr with music by Franz Xaver Gruber.

The story goes that Mohr showed up with the lyrics just before Christmas Eve, and Gruber had to scramble to compose a melody in time for midnight Mass. No pressure, or anything. The result was very simple, almost humble, and that's probably part of the reason why it traveled so well past the Austrian Alps. It's been translated into hundreds of languages, sung everywhere from candlelit churches to crowded shopping malls to outside our front door by my overly neighborly neighbors.

Answer: Soap

Don't blame me for this one. Blame your DNA. A variation in the OR6A2 gene tweaks how your nose picks up certain compounds called, unceremoniously, aldehydes. These are the same compounds that show up in soap and some cleaning products.

So while one person is happily piling cilantro onto tacos, another is wondering why their dinner suddenly tastes like a recently scrubbed sink. It's not a culinary problem so much as biology picking on you. Interestingly, people have been known to change their minds over time as they get used to the sudsy flavor, so today's soap might be tomorrow's garnish if you practice.

Answer: The Stand

The super-flu, or "Captain Trips", is a main character in the first episode of 2020's "The Stand". The series, based on Stephen King's epic novel, opens with a lab accident that unleashes a weaponized flu strain into the world. From there, a global collapse montage of humanity's fall. Highways jammed, cities eerily quiet, and... well, just be glad King isn't describing the stench in the miniseries.

Fun timing for the release, as well. If you want to maximize the psychological damage of a miniseries about a deadly global pandemic, release it during a deadly global pandemic.

Answer: New Sweden

It started as a small foothold with big dreams. New Sweden, or 'Nya Sverige' in Swedish, stretched along the Delaware River beginning in 1638, founded by settlers backed by the Swedish South Company. The population never got much above 400 people.

They built forts, traded with local Lenape communities, and tried to carve out a bit of the New World before the Dutch showed up and decided they rather liked the land in that area. By 1655, the whole thing had been absorbed into New Netherland, but bits and pieces remained, including log cabins, which the Swedes helped popularize in North America. I guess as legacies go, that's not much... but it's more than I've managed.

Answer: Blinking

While technically you can blink and poop at the same time, pooping involves a whole messy group of muscles that you probably don't want to learn about here.

Meanwhile, the orbicularis oculi closes the eyelid, while the levator palpebrae superioris opens it back up. Back and forth. All day long. And they'll do this whether you notice or not... and I'm guessing you're noticing now.

Blinking keeps your eyes moist, clears away any dust and cobwebs, and gives your brain quick micro-breaks from watching "Andy Griffith" or whatever you kids are tuning into these days. It's one of those background processes that only gets attention when something goes wrong... or someone starts talking about it.

Answer: Whoopi Goldberg

Before Whoopi Goldberg became famous, she made dead people look pretty. Somebody's got to do it. I know I won't be leaving a good-looking corpse.

She didn't do this for fun or anything weird like that. She worked in a funeral home applying makeup to the dearly departed. When she was doing standup in the 80s, if she had a certain seen-it-all attitude... well, now you know.

Answer: Ottoman Empire

By 1870, much of the Balkans was still under the control of the Ottoman Empire, which had pushed deep into southeastern Europe centuries earlier and just... well, kind of stayed there. It's lovely, I hear.

Their time there was not without resistance, of course, especially by 1870. Nationalist movements were bubbling up all over the place, and the empire was starting to show its age. It was slow at first, but when things went bad, they went bad fast. Over the next few decades, uprisings, wars, and a whole lot of political maneuvering would end Ottoman control in the Balkans... and eventually the empire itself.

Answer: Mick Taylor

When Brian Jones exited The Rolling Stones in 1969, it marked the end of the band's original lineup and the start of a "golden era" with a bit of a sharper edge. Enter Mick Taylor, a young blues fiend who entered the fray just in time for the band's legendary Hyde Park concert. His guitar work helped shape albums like "Exile on Main Street" and "Sticky Fingers".

Answer: The Death of Ivan Ilych

If you mix up the heavy hitters of Russian literature, I understand. They all seem determined to outdo each other in existential dread, misery, and abject despair. But "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" actually came from the pen of Leo Tolstoy, not Fyodor Dostoevsky. Tolstoy's depressing story is all about the quiet horror of an ordinary man dying an ordinary death.

In fact, that's one of the main lessons. There are no "ordinary deaths" when it happens to you. It's kind of a big deal. You only die once.

Dostoevsky's depressing stories are much more into traumatizing the characters with psychological tortures and moral crises. So, different flavors of gloom, really. And to follow up on the cilantro question, they both taste like soap.