nerdsholmferret

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He’s Ours Because We Killed Him nerdsholmferret 10/3 '25

What NHL star scored "5 goals 5 ways" for the Penguins in 1988? (even-strength, power-play, short-handed, penalty-shot, open-net)

What scientific constant is celebrated at 6:02 on October 23rd?

What German philosopher and economist was a correspondent for the New-York Daily Tribune from 1852 to 1862?

What author is credited with the first modern detective story, in which C. Auguste Dupin solves a double homicide?

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5d 3 Comments
it was driving me nuts that i could only remember the NHL star's first name, i gave up and looked it up
rone
It's a particularly fun name if you know French.
nerdsholmferret
indeed!
rone
 

Shake It nerdsholmferret 9/26 '25

They didn't show us Lake Assal on the map, unfortunately, but we did win.  I got the first one below from the lyrics to "Tears of a Clown" by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles.

What opera about a clown is featured in a double-bill with Cavalleria rusticana ?

Hal Newhouser quit his scouting job in protest when the Houston Astros did not select what shortstop from Kalamazoo with their first overall pick?

In what Horn of Africa country is Lake Assal, from which 4 million tons of salt is extracted annually?

What car rental company has the slogan "We try harder" ?

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9/26 3 Comments
Pagliacci, Jeter, Eritrea, Avis
rone
Ah, but you cannot shake Eritrea.
nerdsholmferret
It shakes itself!
rone
 

Semi-successful nerdsholmferret 9/21 '25

We finished eighth out of about 18 teams in the semis.  Oh well...

What U.S. president was known for saying "speak softly and carry a big stick"?

What city, which held the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition in 1898, had its name used at the line by a player inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2021?

What meal was ordered by Margot from Chef Julian Slowik in The Menu?

What 9-letter word describes the body's hormone system of glands and tissues?

What is the most common type of star in our galaxy, comprising 60%-70% of the stars in the Milky Way?

What NHL team has the nickname "Habs" ?

According to BBC Earth, what is the shortest-lived land vertebrate?  A) Flores giant rat, B) Labord's chameleon, C) dwarf pygmy goby, D) Fresno kangaroo rat?

Before And After (two answers that smoosh together):  Boxer Mancini and an aboriginal Australian invention.

In 1976, what band was sent a telegram by Groucho Marx congratulating them on their "sage choice" in album titles?  [This was a Final Jeopardy question that eliminated a Baltimorean contestant]

What 3 countries and one autonomous region were labeled the Four Asian Tigers for their industrial growth and export economies after World War II?

What type of foods are spelt, teff, and triticale?

What video game is featured in the plot of the 2009 film "Couples Retreat"?

Dunlop manufactures balls with different-colored dots for various skill levels in what sport, developed in 19th century England?

The phrase "fior di latte" (Italian for "flower of milk") refers to what type of cheese?

Valletta, the smallest capital city in the European Union, is in what country of historically strategic importance?

What three U.S. states have the lowest average elevation?

What Game of Thrones character said "confession feels good under the right circumstances" ?

From what is the Native American crafted product wampum made?

What actor appears in the three movies "The Replacements", "Four Christmases", and "Iron Man"?

What Maryland county is named for the longest-surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence?

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9/21 9 Comments
I would have performed poorly, having just three: Teddy, endocrine, and grain. I was way off on my guess for Groucho Marx's telegram. Meal ordered by Margot? That question is entirely nonsense to me!
Chris Herdt
We actually got the Menu question right, thanks to my bad habit of researching movies I haven't seen. Some OPWers have spent time in the state with the lowest average elevation!
nerdsholmferret
Florida has to be one of the three. RI and DE?
rone
I suggested RI, but our team settled on a state so low-lying that parts of it are below sea-level, which was the correct choice.
nerdsholmferret
what city: Omaha

star: red dwarf

Habs: Montreal Canadiens

Before and after: boom boom boomerang

tigers: South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan

Valletta: Malta
rone
Ok. Ones that others haven’t already answered:

Marx - Led Zeppelin?

Pygmy goby?

Gwyneth Paltrow?

Ann Arundel?



CM Adams
So... Anne Arundel, the wife of Cecil Calvert, Baron Baltimore, signed the Declaration of Independence?
nerdsholmferret
I didn’t know who she was! It crossed my mind that it might be one of those historical names that sounds like a lady but was actually a man. Like Evelyn Waugh.
CM Adams
Our biweekly trivia night is tomorrow. I’ll save the ones we miss (and any especially fun ones) to post here.
CM Adams
 

Lies! East-Lies! nerdsholmferret 9/19 '25

What U.S. state is the only one without any Division I sports?

What U.S. territory claims to be "Where America's Day Begins"  because of its proximity to the International Date Line?  Other territories have a better claim, including the Northern Mariana Islands, whose capital is Saipan.

What 11-letter word starting with "c" describes fruits such as apples, pears, and bananas, which continue to ripen after being harvested?

Debbie Reynolds is to Carrie Fisher as Peggy Lipton is to what Parks and Recreation actress?

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9/19
 

Have Some nerdsholmferret 9/12 '25

What animal is referred to by the word cervine?

What U.S. Civil War general has a style of facial hair named after him?

What does the unit pascal measure?

What Portuguese archipelago has a type of fortified wine named after it?

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9/12 11 Comments
Deer

Burnside

Pressure?

Madeira
CM Adams
Winner, winner, brownie sundae!
nerdsholmferret
Ran them all by my best teammate and she didn’t get any!
CM Adams
here i thought Madeira only referred to the island
rone
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Have_Some_Madeira_M%27Dear
nerdsholmferret
Today I learned what zeugma is!
Lindsay Harris Friel
And learning is half the battle! The other half is remembering!
nerdsholmferret
I was very excited to note that, on her most recent album, Taylor Swift finally discovered zeugma and worked in two instances of it:

“You crashed my party and your rental car.”

And “was it hazing for an obscure fraternity I pledged and I still mean it that old habits die screaming”.

I especially appreciate the second one, not least because it took about 30 listens for me to catch it. But neither of course can hold a candle to the most famous musical example - that being the Humpty Dance’s “both how I’m living and my nose is large”.

Anyway…I hope on the new album, she starts using chiasmus.

CM Adams
I just googled “chiasmus,” and the Wikipedia definition says it’s “is a "reversal of grammatical structures in successive phrases or clauses – but no repetition of words".

A similar device, antimetabole, also involves a reversal of grammatical structures in successive phrases or clauses in an A-B-B-A configuration, but unlike chiasmus, presents a repetition of words.”

But, Google’s first search result was from the Oxford Learner’s Dictionary, saying, “a rhetorical or literary figure in which words, grammatical constructions, or concepts are repeated in reverse order, in the same or a modified form; e.g. ‘Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.’.”



Well, which is it, Internet? Chiasmus or timetable? Or is that for a doctor to decide?
Lindsay Harris Friel
I SAID ANTIMETABOLE NOT TIMETABLE wtf.
Lindsay Harris Friel
In Latin lit, it’s repeated words but with reversed order and sometimes different uses. (Or if the author is especially flamboyant, repeated PHRASES with reversed order.)

Example from modern lyrics would be some rap song I heard years ago with the lines:

“So I wait for [cant remember] to attack

Every time a car backfires I fire back.”

I think Polonius uses it in more than one place in Hamlet, but the example I’m trying to remember isn’t quite coming to me at the moment.
CM Adams
 

Smells Like Victory nerdsholmferret 9/5 '25

Between "seasons", we compete for fun!  (And more brownie sundaes!)

What does the N stand for in FAANG, a group of five large American companies?

What molecule named after the Greek word for "smell" is noticeable during lightning storms?

What Disney character was scheduled for a "Mammal of the Year" cover before the attack on Pearl Harbor bumped that story in Time?

What singer died four years before Keith Moon, in the exact same bedroom?

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9/5 2 Comments
Donald Duck must have had a fowl temper tantrum. After the Magical Mammal got bumped, though, I bet he was quacking up.
Lindsay Harris Friel
FAANG was: Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google. I think they've tried to revive such a thing with MAMAA and MATANA but they just aren't as catchy. Meta and Alphabet didn't think about that, did they?



And ozone, the same smell I get when I let the magic smoke out of my failed electronics projects!
Chris Herdt
 

Pride Be Not Proud nerdsholmferret 8/29 '25

We finished third again thanks to another final-question botch, but did qualify for the semifinals.  I was most proud of an answer from my Geography wheelhouse, but also proud of an answer in the Taylor Swift category that strangely enough no one else on my team knew.

What upcoming Taylor Swift album was promoted on the New Heights podcast hosted by the Kelce brothers?

Who was the first TV screenwriter with a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame, most well-known for his series that aired for three seasons starting in 1966?

Mexico and what two other countries have agreed to form a multinational nature preserve to protect their rainforests?

Forest Hill Cemetery was "a sea of flowers" after the death of what celebrity, setting a record for the most memorial flower donations?


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8/29 6 Comments
Tom mentioned your recent pub trivia commentary and as a regular myself I thought I’d come check it out. Props on the Swift - we have not one but two (one of which is me) fairly heavy Swifties on my team so that’s one of our strong categories.

Best one we ever got: a tie breaker question of the “here’s a numerical question no one will ever get exactly right - let’s see who gets closest” type.

Question was “how many days were there between the start of the Chicago Fire and the date of Taylor Swift’s birth?”

We knew the exact dates of both - the first because it had come up in a previous question, the second because T is famously a Sagittarius, and somewhat less famously (except to her fans) a triskaidekaphile, and because her “1989” album was titled thus because it was the year of her birth.

Ok. So we have December 13 1989 minus October 8, 1871. Count the years between. Multiply by 365. Account for leap years. Account for 1900 NOT being a leap year. Count the days between 10/8 and 12/13. Total the day counts all up. Argue amongst ourselves over whether the start and end dates are included in the count or not. Take a vote. Turn it in.

Got it exactly.

I don’t think that venue has asked a Swift question since.
CM Adams
Bravo! I famously hate the “toss up” questions of that type, which often encourage us to do math on completely unknown quantities. You certainly aced that one! I *almost* remembered the “largest recorded lightning bolt”, but wrote down 151 miles instead of 515 miles. D’oh!
nerdsholmferret
Ha ha. Well now I’m prepared for that one!
CM Adams
Another one that *might* have been amenable to an exact answer was “how many states have a state capital as their largest city”, but manually pondering 50 states in 90 seconds was a bridge too far.
nerdsholmferret
The other one we nailed almost exactly was “by square miles, how many Rhode Islands would fit in the state of Texas?”



Becca happened to know the exact square mileage of Delaware and a very close guess at how much smaller RI is. Bill had driven east to west, north to south across central Texas and across the panhandle, and diagonally - and he remembered the total drive time of each along with a close approximation of average mph. I had a good mental picture of the outline of Texas and broke it down into a geometry problem. Elizabeth talked us into rounding down from a likely overestimate. The calculations took up the entire back and front of a napkin. We ended up off by 1 and almost got beaten up on our way to the parking lot.



(These two stories suggest a greater degree of genius than we usually exhibit. We got a round one time of “name the emo band shown in each of these 10 photos” and put System of a Down for all of them figuring we’d get at least one right, except System of a Down isn’t actually an emo band at all so we got exactly zero. The usual level is somewhere in between.)



What’s your usual venue?
CM Adams
The American Legion!
nerdsholmferret
 

Rage Quit nerdsholmferret 8/22 '25

Our final answer got submitted before a team member mentioned the obviously correct answer, so I had to performatively stomp up and down in lieu of changing our answer.

The sound effect for what movie prop was created by combining a projector's hum with staticky interference from a television?

What Hawaiian word meaning "mountain" appears before "Loa" and "Kea" in the names of Hawaiian volcanoes?

Michael Crichton's book Jurassic Park shares theme-park-gone-wrong DNA with what 1973 film written and directed by Crichton?

What FPS video game sequel was the first to be rated "M for mature" and also spawned comic books, novels, board games, and two films?

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8/22 3 Comments
rain?; Mauna; The Lost World; no idea
rone
But rain doesn’t hum, nor is “The Lost World” from 1973.
nerdsholmferret
Westworld
Thomas Boutell
 
 

In which I mentally list all of the countries on Earth to make sure they don't start with a certain letter nerdsholmferret 8/15 '25

We're back!

What MLB team that plays in Oracle Park has a mascot named Lou Seal ?

A person who does what is called a librocubicularist ?

What kind of time measures the Earth's rotation relative to the stars ?

What country, whose common English name begins with a letter shared by no other, is bordered on the north by a gulf named after it and, in addition to its main export of oil, also produces high-quality frankincense?


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8/15 3 Comments
SF Giants, bookbinder?, sidereal?, Oman
rone
Lou Seal was the mascot of the Baby Seals, a short-lived women's football team from the 1980s.

A librocubicularist curates displays of tempting books in study carrels.

The earth's rotation relative to the stars is measured in parasocials.

Profit! is the only nation with a punctuation mark in its name. It is bordered to the north, and indeed on all sides, by the Gulf of Execution.
Thomas Boutell
I want to be a librocubicularist. How does one get that job? I’m guessing like any other art form, you have to start as a hobbyist and then volunteer.
Lindsay Harris Friel
 
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