This Title Intentionally Left "Blank" Quiz

Answer: William Shakespeare

"But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?
It is the East, and Juliet is the sun.
Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,
Who is already sick and pale with grief
That thou, her maid, art far more fair than she.
Be not her maid since she is envious;
Her vestal livery is but sick and green,
And none but fools do wear it. Cast it off."

--William Shakespeare, "Romeo and Juliet" (example of blank verse)

Blank verse became all the rage in English drama during the late 16th century, and nobody used it more memorably than William Shakespeare. From "Hamlet" to "Macbeth", his plays are chock with lines of unrhymed iambic pentameter, giving the dialogue its characteristic rhythm. It's formal enough to sound posh, but loose enough to feel conversational. That's right. I said it: iambic pentameter is the linguistic equivalent of the Goldilocks zone.

Shakespeare wasn't the first to use blank verse, though. Christopher Marlowe deserves a nod for popularizing it in "Doctor Faustus" and other plays. However, Shakespeare did take the form to its height (and he certainly got all the glory). Later poets like John Milton also used blank verse (famously in "Paradise Lost"), but it's Shakespeare's plays that arguably remain the most celebrated today.

Answer: Blank Space

"It's a song about how the media has taken this game that I'm actually winning, which is that I have a long list of ex-lovers, and so they'll say, 'She writes songs about all her ex-boyfriends.' So I said, 'Okay, I know this is a thing, so why don't I just write a song about having a long list of ex-lovers who'll tell you I'm insane?'"

--Taylor Swift

"Blank Space" was released in November 2014 as the second single from Taylor Swift's album "1989". It quickly became a worldwide hit, topping the Billboard Hot 100 for seven weeks, shaking off Swift's own "Shake It Off" from the number one spot. The song brought a bit of a satirical edge, poking fun at her tabloid image as a serial dater with a "long list of ex-lovers" who only dates men to get songwriting material.

Answer: Des Moines

The Blank Park Zoo is located in Des Moines, Iowa's capital and largest city. The zoo opened in 1966 and has grown into a 49-acre facility featuring animals from around the globe, with all the usual suspects: lions, giraffes, rhinos, sea lions, et cetera. It also participates in numerous conservation programs, such as efforts to save endangered amphibians and native Iowa butterflies.

The name comes from A.H. Blank, a Des Moines businessman and philanthropist whose donations helped establish the park. It's the only accredited zoo in Iowa, making it the go-to place for Iowans who want to see more than cornfields and cows.

Answer: Sylvia Plath

The line comes from 1963's "The Bell Jar", the semi-autobiographical novel by Sylvia Plath. In the book, Plath's protagonist, Esther Greenwood, describes her suffocating depression through the metaphor of a bell jar, a glass dome that cuts her off from the world, leaving her trapped with her own distorted thoughts. The "blank and stopped as a dead baby" imagery is stark, quite unsettling, and unforgettable, which fits in well with Plath's raw confessional style.

Plath is remembered not only for her novel but also for her poetry, much of it written in the last years of her shortened life. Collections like "Ariel" have made her one of the most influential American poets of the 20th century. The bell jar itself has since become shorthand for oppressive isolation or depression.

Answer: Austria-Hungary

Germany's "blank check" of July 5, 1914, was given to Austria-Hungary. After the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Austria-Hungary was itching for a decisive fight with Serbia, even more so than usual. The German leadership, instead of counseling restraint, told Vienna it could count on Berlin's full military backing "whatever the consequences", although in fairness they saw this as a strictly local conflict. If Gavrilo Princip's bullets lit the match over the powder-keg that was Europe at the time, the notorious blank check inadvertently fueled the flame with sweet, sweet oxygen.

Austria-Hungary promptly issued its famously harsh ultimatum to Serbia, triggering the chain reaction of strange events, diplomatic miscues, unadulterated lies, and finally mobilizations that spiraled into World War I.

Answer: Point Blank

"Point Blank", released in 1967 and directed by John Boorman, is considered by many to be a landmark in neo-noir cinema. Lee Marvin plays Walker, a criminal double-crossed by his wife and partner during a heist, who survives a murder attempt on Alcatraz and sets out for revenge.

Although it was based on the novel "The Hunter" by Richard Stark (pseudonym of Donald E. Westlake), Boorman's adaptation took some liberties as you'd expect, stripping away much of the pulpy grit and adding a more existential edge. The movie, the first to be filmed on Alcatraz Island, influenced later crime dramas like "Get Carter" and "Reservoir Dogs", and Marvin's performance is still considered one of his best.

Answer: Home Depot

Arthur Blank, along with Bernie Marcus and a few other partners, co-founded The Home Depot in Atlanta in 1978. The idea was big for its time: instead of a small, specialized hardware shop, they built a vast cavernous warehouse-style store where you could find everything from nails to power tools to entire kitchen remodels. By the 1980s, their model had caught on, and orange aprons became as much a symbol of home repair as duct tape.

The chain's mascot, Homer D. Poe, debuted in the 1980s as a friendly cartoon handyman, one part pun and one part marketing device. Today, Home Depot is the largest home improvement retailer in the United States, with thousands of locations and billions in annual revenue. Arthur Blank eventually moved on to bigger and better things, like buying the Atlanta Falcons. However, if you need a bidet, a packet of oregano seeds, a ceiling fan, an electric weed whacker, and a pipe nipple extractor set (no, I have no idea what that is), look no further than your local Home Depot... or well, any other big-box hardware store that happens to be in the area (probably across the street).

Answer: Planet

Porcupine Tree released "Fear of a Blank Planet" in 2007, and it quickly became one of their most acclaimed works. The album explores themes of alienation, overmedication, and the numbing effects of technology on modern youth. The title nods directly to Public Enemy's 1990 release "Fear of a Black Planet", though Porcupine Tree reimagined it for a generation of kids lost in an LCD glow rather than a political struggle.

The record balances progressive metal riffs with moments of haunting atmospheric music, and includes a 17-minute centerpiece track, "Anesthetize," that demonstrates the band's musical talent. It was a commercial and critical success and earned a Grammy nomination. It's certainly as relevant today as it was in 2007, if not more so.

Answer: The Blank Slate

"Tabula rasa" is Latin for "scraped tablet," but it's usually translated into English as "blank slate." The metaphor suggests the human mind starts life as a clean writing surface, ready to be inscribed with knowledge by experience. The concept goes back to Aristotle, but it was John Locke in the 17th century who made it a part of his philosophy, arguing that all ideas come from sensation and reflection.

This stood in contrast to theories of "innate ideas," which claimed humans are born with built-in concepts like morality or logic. Whether Locke was entirely right is still debated, especially with modern psychology and neuroscience showing a blend of genetics and environment at work.

Answer: A key with a profile but no bitting

A "blank key" is exactly what it sounds like: a key that hasn't yet been cut. It has the general profile (the grooves and shape that fit into a certain type of lock) but no "bitting". Those are the ridges and notches that match a lock's pins. Hardware stores keep racks of these blanks so they can be cut to duplicate an existing key. Without the bitting, the blank won't open anything at all, though it looks as much like a real key as one without bitting can look.

This is why you'll often see rows of identical-looking blank keys hanging in a store, each ready to be cut into a working duplicate in just a minute or two. It's a little like having a perfectly good pen with no ink in it: all the potential and none of the function.