The 2,265th Mixed General Trivia Quiz

Answer: John Glenn

John Glenn took a seat atop a rocket in 1962 and did something no American had done before... he went all the way around the Earth. Not once, but three times. His spacecraft was called the Friendship 7, a part of NASA's Mercury program. It was a tense mission, with concerns about heat shield integrity popping up mid-flight. Nothing like potentially dying during re-entry to keep the blood pumping. Glenn kept his cool, circled the planet, and splashed down safely. He was an instant celebrity, and more... a national hero.

This flight came at the height of the Space Race, when the United States and the Soviet Union were locked in a cosmic showdown, and the U.S. was lagging behind. The Soviets had already sent Yuri Gagarin into orbit the year before, so Glenn's mission was a crucial moment for American pride and progress in space exploration.

Answer: True

The surface of your tongue is covered in tiny structures called papillae. Don't make the mistake of doing a Google image search. The results are kind of creepy. Anyway, these guys create a pattern of ridges, textures, and shapes that vary from person to person.

Researchers have found that these patterns are highly individual, much like fingerprints. Even identical twins, who share the same DNA, have subtle differences in their tongue prints, because papillae don't care about your expectations. This has led some scientists to look into the idea of tongue recognition as a possible biometric identifier though thankfully, it is not nearly as widespread as fingerprint or facial recognition. "Sorry, sir. You'll have to lick this before you enter."

Answer: 1408

Easily overlooked, the movie '1408' takes the idea of a haunted hotel room and runs with it in ways that are genuinely-and delightfully-frightful. It features John Cusack playing a professional eye-roller, who makes his living debunking hauntings and mocking those who believe in something after death.

It is only natural then that he checks into room 1408 at the Dolphin Hotel, despite repeated warnings. What comes next isn't a standard ghost story, because there are no ghosts here. Only a room that finds new and creative ways of tormenting him, bending reality, bending time, and stretching his very sanity to the breaking point.

Answer: 3 Body Problem

'3 Body Problem' arrived on Netflix in 2024. The show was based mostly on the first book of Liu Cixin's science fiction trilogy, lovingly called 'Remembrance of Earth's Past', by those who take the time to call it anything.

The story kicks off during China's Cultural Revolution before launching into a sprawling, mind-bending story about first contact with an alien civilization. It is not a typical aliens-in-the-sky tale. Instead, it dives into physics, philosophy, unsettling observations about self-preservation, and the idea that humanity might be better off keeping to itself.

The show turns down the volume on the science, turns up the volume on effects, but it remains a fascinating watch.

Answer: Rubber vulcanization

Rubber vulcanization was not one of Benjamin Franklin's inventions. That particular breakthrough belongs to Charles Goodyear, who discovered in 1839, a fine year, that heating natural rubber with sulfur made it much stronger and even weather-resistant. Before that, natural rubber was kind of messy. It turned sticky in heat and brittle in the cold, making it pretty unreliable for practical use.

Goodyear's process changed everything, "paving" the way for products like tires (get it?), waterproof clothing, and industrial applications a-plenty... although it would take another 50 years for rubber tires to roll by. You can thank Scotland's own John Dunlop for that.

Answer: Angine de Poitrine

Angine de Poitrine is a Canadian rock duo that popped up in Chicoutimi (Saguenay, Quebec) around 2019. They are talented, anonymous, and very very weird.

The two members go by Khn de Poitrine (guitar) and Klek de Poitrine (drums). However, you won't see their faces. Live shows feature oversized papier-mâché masks, polka-dot outfits, and a vibe that kinda feels like an art project... or maybe an inside joke.

It actually started as a gag so they could play two shows in the same week without being recognized. Neat gimmick. Fast-forward a bit. Their debut album 'Vol. 1' landed them spots on Quebec's festival circuit, and earned them Artist of the Year at the 2025 GAMIQ awards. Then a KEXP live session in early 2026 suddenly went viral. Millions of views later, and they're touring internationally following the April 2026 release of 'Vol. II'.

Pretty decent gimmick.

Answer: True

It may look like a big ball of cotton candy, but the average fluffy cumulus cloud weighs as much as 175 female African bush elephants (or over 3.3 million bananas). It feels wrong on every level, but that big white fluffball is made of water, and water is heavy.

The trick is that all that weight is spread across a huge volume, made up of countless tiny water droplets suspended in the air. Each droplet is small enough to float along with rising warm air currents, so the whole cloud just hangs there looking harmless. Make no mistake, though. Mr. Fluffy there could crush you like a bug if it were so inclined.

Answer: Miguel de Cervantes

Miguel Cervantes invented a whole new way of telling stories with 'Don Quixote' in the early 1600s. The book poked fun at everything people thought heroic literature was supposed to be. Instead of a flawless knight, you get a guy who's read way too many chivalric tales, and now thinks windmills are the enemy.

It's messy, it's funny, and even a little endearing.

Answer: China

'Zhōngguó' literally means 'Middle Kingdom', a name that demonstrates that the ancient Chinese saw themselves as the center of the world. The term goes back thousands of years, showing up in texts from the Zhou dynasty. It did not always refer to the entire modern nation, though. At first, it described a group of central states surrounded by peripheral regions. Over time, as dynasties came and went, the name stuck, and its meaning expanded with the territory.

Meanwhile, the name 'China' used in English likely comes from the Qin dynasty, pronounced something like 'Chin'. Not nearly as compelling a story as the one above, but it's a lot easier to remember.

Answer: Marc Garneau

Marc Garneau made history in 1984 aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger. At the time, Canada was still a relative newbie to human spaceflight, and Garneau's trek marked a milestone for the country's scientific and technological communities. He served as a payload specialist. Among his duties was helping conduct experiments that highlighted Canada's increasing role in space research, including a study into "space sickness" and testing a new vision system for the much-ballyhooed robotic "Canadarm".

I looked. There's no record of him eating Hawkins Cheezies OR poutine during his three lifetime trips to space.