Things I Learned From Reading 4 Quiz

Answer: Blood

The way the story goes, Jack was trying to get into his safe, but couldn't remember the combination. He kicked the safe in anger and injured his toe. Blood poisoning set in and Jack Daniels died in October of 1911.

This was the rumor that swirled around, but the biographer that wrote Jack Daniel's story said Jack's death by blood poisoning happened in an unrelated way.

Answer: Arizona

Dennis Dickey and his wife went out into the Arizona grasslands to film a gender reveal in 2017. The explosive device started a fire which burnt 46,991 acres of land and cost 8.2 million dollars in damages. Eight hundred fire fighters worked to put out the blaze. It was known as the sawmill fire.

Dennis Dickey was a U.S. Border Patrol agent at the time. The U.S. Forest Service gave him five years probation and made him pay restitution in the amount of $220,000. It was the first known gender reveal to cause a wildfire.

Answer: Phone company

In 1950, two women working in the counting room at the Southern Bell Telephone Company smuggled wrapped coins retrieved from pay phones out of the building in their bras. The crime was accidentally discovered by the Miami Police Department when a family member of one of the smugglers reported money missing from her home. By the time the women had been caught, they had smuggled thousands of dollars worth of wrapped coins out of the building.

The phone company couldn't say the exact amount of money stolen from them and the attorney threatened the police and the phone company with a lawsuit. The women returned to work at the phone company but were fired the same day. An auditor for the phone company was flown to Miami and with his findings the phone company was able to press charges against the woman for grand larceny. The women were sentenced to a year in jail and to pay restitution.

Answer: Brazil

Brazil began the "Redemption through Reading" program by offering prisoners the chance to read twelve books a year, write a report on each book, and then turn it in to a commission to critique it. The commission would then reduce the prisoners stay by four days for each book if the book report was accepted.

Brazil began the program in 2011.

Answer: Pacific Northwest

The Hansa Carrier lost twenty-one shipping containers when they fell overboard in May 1990. Six of those shipping containers held sixty-one thousand eight hundred and twenty Nike shoes. The shoes washed up on the shores of the Pacific Northwest, mainly Alaska, Oregon, and Washington. "The great shoe spill of 1990" helped oceanographers track ocean currents and tides.

An art exhibit by Andy Yoder features replicas of two hundred of the Nike shoes that washed up on shores. The exhibit, known as "Overboard", was on display from 2023 to 2024.

Answer: Five

Bees have five eyes. They have three eyes called ocelli on top of their head. These three eyes see light and not images. They have two eyes on the front of their head with thousands of small lenses called facets. These facets hold small pictures that make up a full scene when all the facets are put together.

Answer: Tuesday

Tuesdays were a problem for Alexander I of Yugoslavia because he had lost three family members on a respective Tuesdays. Because of his dislike for Tuesdays, Alexander refused to talk to anyone or be seen in public on that day.

On October 9, 1934 (which was a Tuesday), Alexander had no choice but to leave his home and attend a meeting in Marseilles, France. It was in France that Alexander was assassinated by Vlado Chernozemski.

Answer: The first shot hit a soup kettle

The Kettle War took place between the Holy Roman Empire and the Republic of the Seven Netherlands on October 9, 1784. The only shot fired that day hit a soup kettle which is how the war got its name. The war began over the Scheldt River. When the Scheldt River closed to shipping, the ports in Amsterdam took over trading and shipping which meant the southern regions were out of luck.

The Holy Roman Emperor at the time, Joseph II sent three ships to the Scheldt River to see if the shipping route could be opened.

At the same time, Amsterdam sent a ship to stop the Roman ship. In order to stop the Roman ships, the Amsterdam ship fired once on the Roman ship. The shot hit a soup kettle on the Roman ship and the captain of the ship quickly surrendered.

Answer: True

The fear of palindromes is aibohphobia. The prefix of aibohphobia is phobia spelled backward. Aibohphobia is a made-up word which came about from a 1977 "Orlando Sentinel" newspaper contest to invent a new phobia.

Answer: Lobsters

Due to their body armor and their scavenging ways, the lobster is known as the "cockroach of the sea". A lobster is a crustacean and crustaceans are also in the same phylum as the cockroach, Arthropoda. Lobsters were once known as the poor man's food and fed to prisoners and slaves in the United States. In Massachusetts, lobsters were once used as fish bait and fertilizers.