Does Abe Vigoda do his own stunts? You know Betty White does, because she is some kind of ageless robot. Come on, do you know any 105-year-olds who are pretty good Password players? When I play board games with people a generation older than me, it becomes clear that the “game neurons” in your brain all die off at the same time the day you turn fifty.

Wow, the controversial Tom Tebow ad is the softest sell of all time. I guess Focus on the Family figures they got their money worth with all the meta-hype around the ad, so they didn’t even have to mention abortion in the ad itself. (In that sense, it’s sort of like those content-free “We wasted millions!” Super Bowl ads that popped up during the first dotcom bubble. The point is the price of the ad, not anything in it.) I wonder if Focus on the Family remembers that most Americans watching the game have never read a paper or news website in their lives and will have no idea that the meta-controversy even happened. I wonder what those viewers thought the ad was for. Some kind of MLM product that the Tebows are hawking?

I don’t care what Phil Simms says: Payton’s going for it on fourth and goal was a terrible call. You’re only down 10-3! And wow, are Nantz and Simms the most boring team in broadcasting or what? They are Wonder Bread in sportscaster form.

Have to admire Simms for sticking with his approval of the gutsy call, though, even after it didn’t work. Typically football commentary is all about 20-20 hindsight. This is a good call, because it worked! That identical call was bad, because it didn’t work! All these guys should have to take some undergrad econ and statistics courses.

If the Leno-Letterman shocker was the ad highlight of the night for you like it was for me, check out this astonishingly detailed New York Times piece on its top-secret making. Uh, couldn’t this have been put together digitally for a fraction of the time/cost that all these corporate jet trips cost? The Times doesn’t go into Leno’s possible motivations for recording a high-profile ad for his competition, but it isn’t hard to guess: he wants to be perceived as “Nice Guy Jay” again despite his recent antics. Uh, that ship might have sailed, Jay.

Dylan, during the anemic-sounding halftime set by The Who: “When does the Super Bowl start again? Because this…is terrible.”

Okay, love the onside kick call. But only because it worked! Otherwise it would have been a terrible idea.

These GoDaddy ads are sapping my will to live. So they don’t hire an advertising agency? They just let the boss’s son (or some other untalented person with a Danica Patrick fetish) write and shoot the spots? Super Bowl ads are all about the high-concept twist, you idiots. Like if you set up that Danica Patrick’s going to come out in a tight T-shirt…and then Dan Patrick comes out instead. Now that’s an ad!

Holy cow, Tracy Porter is fast. On my screen he shows up like a blurry drybrush tornado, a la the Tasmanian Devil. That is ball game, ladies and gentlemen.

A tricky social situation I’d never thought of: what do you do when your identical twin dies?

Well, you bury and mourn him or her, of course, and then go through their stuff. (You know it will fit you!) But here’s what I’m getting at: when you show up at the funeral, many of the deceased’s friends, co-workers, etc. will never have met you. I’d guess that somewhere around a third of them might not even know he or she was a twin.

In other words: there will be whispers, pointing, dropped drinks, maybe screams. You will be widely assumed to be the dead, come back to life.

I’d never considered this problem before (believe it or not!) until last night, when I was talking to an eightysomething widow who lives in my neighborhood. Her husband was an identical twin, and this very thing happened at this funeral. His twin lived across the country, most of the mourners had no idea who he was, and the funeral was disrupted by mass confusion.

I don’t know if there’s an etiquette book to cover this scenario, but–to tide you over until Miss Manners weighs in–here are some Ken Jennings-approved suggestions on how to handle it.

1. If you are the twin, wear a disguise. Not a costume, like a zombie version of your dead sibling. That would be in poor taste. Just something simple to reduce the resemblance: changing the color or style of your hair, for example, or adding a big port-wine birthmark to one side of your face.
2. Conversely, you could perform a similar operation on the twin in the open casket: a tasteful little fake mustache, for example. This is a tempting option, since a dead body will obviously be less inconvenienced by cumbersome cosmetics than you will. What will he or she care? Be warned, however: many attendees might remember what he or she looked like before the change.
3. Embrace the problem. Attend the funeral as a walking piece of performance art: the deceased, as their loved ones would like to remember them. Perhaps you could install yourself at the entrance to the church, performing one of the deceased’s favorite hobbies (juggling, yoga, playing a favorite song on the tuba, reciting all the words to Rex Harrison’s patter songs in My Fair Lady) in tribute to your late twin. A small signboard (or addendum in the invitation) could warn attendees of this touching tribute, so they know not to be surprised.
4. Arrange to die together. Twins are always doing nutty, parallel stuff like that, buying the same neckties and whatnot, so no one will think anything of it.

If anyone tries out any of my tips in real life, I would love to hear. One in 285 U.S. births results in identical twins, which means that 1 in 143 American funerals will be for a twin. And in (almost) every case, one twin will be the first to go, thoughtlessly leaving the other in an awkward social situation! This is a real problem that happens thousands of times in this country every day. Time we stopped talking about the problem and did something about it!

Edited to add: Ed Toutant, leveraging the kind of free time only available to game show zillionaires, actually did the math and discovered that this only happens 18 times a day in America, not “thousands.” How dare he get in the way of my alarmism with mere statistics?

Question. (Dwight Shrute voice off.)

You often see claims that smell is the sense most closely related to memory. This is received wisdom, never challenged. Is it actually true? Is there experimental data to show that smell relates to memory in a way that taste, sight, etc. do not? I guess the olfactory nerve is part of the limbic system, which would tie it to memory, but…I don’t know. It sounds like such a facile observation about such a thorny area of vast human ignorance that it seems little suspect. And ever since I found out the “taste map” of the tongue was BS, I’m skeptical about stuff like this in general.

Anybody know of research on the topic, or is this some bogus “everybody knows” thing? Personally, I do get wafted back to the past very easily by smell: diesel fumes = Seoul, Korea. The sickly, lukewarm smell of institutional food anywhere = my first grade school cafeteria. But I can get the same nostalgia wave from sights, tastes…especially songs. “Sister Havana” just came on KEXP–a song that I doubt I’ve heard in fifteen years–and suddenly it was the summer of 1993.

I am a huge fan of Beatles Rock Band, which we got for our Wii at Christmas. I was at best a mild fan of the other Rock Band games: those games, it turns out, are for people who grew up miming hair-band guitar solos on their tennis rackets. But if you grew up cheekily bobbing your air-guitar neck and grinning to the girls in the crowd like you saw Paul and George do in old Ed Sullivan video, Beatles Rock Band is for you.

The only dispiriting thing about the game for me (besides not being able to master the bass part to “Within You Without You”) is learning how many Beatles lyrics I’ve been singing wrong for thirty years. Did you know that the second verse of “Get Back” is about “sweet Loretta Martin,” not “sweet Loretta Modern”? Yeah, you probably did. You probably also knew that the “Paperback Writer” lyric is not “it’s a thousand pages, will you take a few?” but “it’s a thousand pages, give or take a few,” which makes more sense. I don’t think I ever understood the line “why on earth should I moan” in “A Hard Day’s Night.” I usually just sang something like “so I anershadime own,” with the vague idea that “anershadime” probably isn’t a word.

At least I knew there wasn’t a song about “Ella Marigby.”

I learned two things while re-watching All the President’s Men on DVD the other night:

1. Director Alan Pakula pronounces his last name “puh-KOO-luh.” Embarrassingly, I’d been pronouncing it to rhyme with “Dracula” my whole life. If “Blacula” is a black vampire, I thought “Pakula” might be, I don’t know, a vampire who’s really good at packing. Or a Pakistani vampire. Is that racist?
2. Jack Warden’s character apparently christens the two lead characters “Woodstein.” So here’s my question: was this the first case of the modern trend of combining partnerships into a single name, a la Bennifer and Brangelina? I can’t think of an earlier case. Did Lewis and Clark go by “Clawis”? Did Victorians know the work of “Gillivan” and “Mangels”?

This just happened like 45 seconds ago.

Me: Hey, did you see J. D. Salinger died?
Mindy (not looking up): Oh, he did?
Me: So did that midget lady from Poltergeist.
Mindy (suddenly interested): Wait, really?

In February 1996, McLean Stevenson (Colonel Henry Blake on M*A*S*H) died. The very next day, Roger Bowen died. Bowen was the actor who had played Colonel Blake in the Robert Altman film MASH. It was a remarkable coincidence, not (as far as I know) any kind of suicide pact or bizarre senior citizen serial killing spree.

So when I saw that actor Pernell Roberts, of Bonanza and Trapper John, M.D. fame, had died earlier this week at age 81, I was concerned. Concerned for Wayne Rogers!

Watch your back, Wayne.

Discovery of the day: the British call bicycle training wheels “stabilisers.” How awesome is that? It sounds like something the starship Enterprise should have, not some dodgy British Eagle kids’ bike.

Also, this thread on the message boards alerted me to one of the great injustices of the Western World: how is durable ex-ABA star Artis Gilmore not in the Basketball Hall of Fame? I only remember Artis from his declining NBA days in the late 80s, coming off the bench for the Bulls and Celtics, long shorn of the triumphant afro that added four inches to his dominating 7′6″-presence in the lane. But that was at the end of a 17-year career that included eleven All-Star appearances and a 1975 ABA title with the Kentucky Colonels. (Best team name EVER!) Websites like this one compellingly illustrate the unfairness of the omission: stats equivalent to a Willis Reed or a Bob Lanier, ABA Rookie of the Year and MVP honors, still the #5 rebounder and the #1 percentage shooter of all time…this is a no-brainer.

He’s next eligible for enshrinement in 2012. Basketball Hall of Fame voters: take the A-Train!

Life as a minor, mostly forgotten TV celebrity brings with it lots of little life dilemmas that the rest of you will never, ever have to face. Case in point:

Sports card collectors being what they are, every month I get a few requests by mail to sign the Allen & Ginter card I appeared on a couple years back.

Today, I was going through a batch of these, and the very first one I opened was addressed, “Dear Takudzwa,” which confused me a little bit. Is this a Japanese or Swahili honorific for “game show champion”? Is it an About Schmidt reference?

Then I pulled out the card. Instead of my own pasty face and slumped shoulders, I see the well-toned physique of Zimbabwean rugby star Takudzwa Ngwenya! The faux-personalized letter about Takduzwa’s “passion, dedication, and determination” is very similar to the enclosed letter I usually get about my Jeopardy! streak. Card collectors must know that they’re more likely to get the autograph if they pretend to be actual fans and not just collectors (or, worse, dealers) blanketing the globe with requests, but I think this guy’s cover is now blown. (Okay, maybe this game show/African rugby fan just had two cards, mine and Takudzwa’s, because we are his two idols.)

What do I do with my new collectible Takudzwa Ngwenya card? YOU MAKE THE CALL.

• Sign it “Takudzwa Ngwenya”?
• Sign it “Ken Jennings”?
• Forge an angry reply from Mr. Ngwenya?
• Toss the SASE and keep the card myself? Because, hey, free Takudzwa.
• Replace it with a “Ken Jennings” card from my own stash? I think I have two or three in a drawer somewhere.

Keep in mind that Takudzwa Ngwenya has always been, far and away, my favorite Zimbabwean rugby player. And somewhere, POSSIBLY RIGHT NOW, he’s opening a letter with my card in it and becoming very, very confused…

In honor of health care reform potentially getting derailed by the recent Massachusetts election, here are two backward-thinking bits of wordplay that occurred to me this week:

1. Take the five-letter word for a very specific type of person. Spell the word backward and you’ll get another word, describing what this person–by definition, especially when used metaphorically–might do to those around him, and vice versa.

2. There’s a six-letter word for a very specifically woven pattern. Reverse the first syllable only (i.e. turn “afro” into “faro”) and you’ll get the name of a material often used for weaving.

What are the words?

Edited to add: It took a few hours, but Michael Farabaugh eventually cracked these here.

We were watching Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Flight of the Red Balloon last night (mostly because I felt ashamed that I’d only seen 43 of the 100 movies on this list) and the subtitles showed me a word I’d never seen before. A piano mover talks about an on-the-job accident that nearly left him tetraplegic.

Wait, “tetraplegic”? So three limbs paralyzed, I thought? But no, of course, that would be triplegia. Which is also a real thing, apparently. Not due to spinal injury, of course. Triplegics usually suffer from cerebral palsy.

“Tetra-” means four, so apparently “tetraplegia” is just a (slightly cooler sounding) synonym for “quadriplegia.” One is of Greek origin and the other Latin, so maybe it’s all context. You would say “That jerk Mussolini sure deserved to be a quadriplegic” but “I hope that annoying family from the Nia Vardalos movie all becomes tetraplegic.”

A while back, some friends had us try some roasted sunflower seeds they had discovered on a trip to China. I immediately got addicted to them–what was that elusive flavor?–and they generously let me have a big bag of the seeds from their rapidly diminishing stockpile. The packaging was entirely in Chinese, so I still had no idea what that vaguely licorice-y taste was. It sure didn’t remind me of anything else I’d ever eaten.

A few months later, Mindy discovered the same seeds at a local Asian grocery. This time, the ingredients list was bilingual. I bought a gigantic bag of them and eagerly looked to see what gave the snack its distinctive taste. Turns out there are only two flavoring ingredients: fennel seed, and a sugar substitute called acesulfame potassium. Wikipedia says it’s not used much in the U.S. because of its bitter aftertaste and possible health concerns in lab rats.

So that was the “secret ingredient” I couldn’t quite put my finger on: a dicey artificial sweetener. I feel betrayed by my Chinese sunflower seeds (yet I’m still stuffing myself with them right now as I type this). So that’s the moral of the story: if you want to keep any cred at all, find out the name of what you’re enjoying first, so you know that it’s okay to enjoy it. You don’t want to be telling everyone about the great new song in the Target ad that you can’t help dancing to…only to find out after the fact that it’s really Ashlee Simpson.

Via Ray Hamel: women have taken the lead for the first time in an on-line Trivial Pursuit “battle of the sexes,” the U.K.’s Guardian reports.

Of course running a major story like this is destined to–boo!–make itself paradoxically untrue within minutes, in some “All Cretans are liars” way. An influx of newly-motivated men stormed the Hasbro site, and men have now widened to a 7,000-point lead again.

I wrote about gender differences in trivia back in Brainiac, and I still feel like my conclusion holds: women might know just as much trivia as men, but they’re much less likely to want to flaunt their knowledge in high-pressure public competitions, so you see a big “gender gap” in fora like quiz shows and academic quiz bowl. A Tuesday Trivia winner once told me that going on Jeopardy! has been a “lifelong dream” of hers, but the idea makes her so nervous that she literally feels faint when considering it. (Her current plan: get Mariah Carey @#$%ed up on her taping day.) Stage fright afflicts both genders, of course, but I get the sense that women are more prone to this special case, “trivia anxiety.” That could explain the more level playing field in an anonymous game like this one.

But the Hasbro website is a bit of a sham: it only counts the total number of correct answers, not any kind of “batting average.” It’s possible that women are answering 60% of their questions correctly, while men are showing up more often but only nailing 40%. Or vice versa. Actually, if we assume that the stereotypes hold and that men are slightly more interested than women in answer trivia questions on-line, then it’s very likely that women are out-answering the men…per capita, anyway.

In Friday’s post, the fine breakfast cereals of the General Mills Corporation helped us “mix” a DJ name–based on a super-villain or street name, just like all your hip-hop favorites!

But I know what you’re thinking. Dear Reese’s Puffs, my DJ name is dope now, but I’m worried that my “flow” may not be as “sick” as I’d like. Can you help?

Of course breakfast cereal can help!

Damn, that is some some tight $#%& right there. Did you see how Reese’s referenced that time Pac referred to himself as “l-l-lyrical” but dissed Biggie as “oh-so-spherical”? Genius.

A local public radio station, KUOW, runs a recurring feature in which unusual people are asked to assemble three songs on a certain theme, and expound upon them in long-winded NPR style. I was the guest this weekend, discussing (apparently) “Mad Skills and the American Dream.” In other words: songs with some link to the world of game shows.

I don’t feel like I said anything that insightful about game shows or pop music, but I did get the local NPR station to play 30 seconds of Eric B and Rakim. Mission accomplished! (If that was, indeed, my admittedly odd mission.)

Didn’t cereal boxes use to suck less?

My memory, when I was a kid, is that the backs of non-healthy cereal boxes were pretty great. They had mazes, they had word searches, they had stories and diagrams for cut-out models. They had descriptions of the little toy inside the box that made is sound much less lame than it really was.

But this morning I looked in the cereal shelf and the boxes didn’t exactly bring out my inner child. Cocoa Krispies wanted me to read “Keep ‘n’ Clip Recipes.” Yeah, that’s what kids want: “Entertaining Made Easy.” Just like Moms want to put Cocoa Krispies in their party appetizers. Cinnamon Life (not a healthy cereal in the Special K mold!) had a big picture of…a bowl of Cinnamon Life. Wow, that’s awesome. Prop that up behind your actual bowl of Cinnamon Life and you have a witty, Magritte-style commentary on modern life. (“Ceci n’est pas la Vie aux Cannelle.”) Kids’ll love that. Oh, it also had some long boring spiel about B-vitamins that made me want to swallow my tongue. Give my tongue to Mikey. He’ll eat anything.

Only Reese’s Puffs didn’t let me down! Reese’s apparently has a strong corporate interest in molding America’s children into…hip-hop DJs. Today’s installment: the Official Reese’s Puffs DJ Name Mixer. If you ever wondered how all your hip-hop favorites got their names…well, you should have been LOOKING FOR THAT INFORMATION ON A @#%&ING CEREAL BOX, DUMB-ASS! Because now you know!

This is absolutely correct information about the world of hip-hop, straight out of Compton. For example, Tupac Shakur grew up on Tupac Street, and had a gerbil called Shakur. TRUE FACT.

So I guess I just have to decide if I’m going to be Thyrty-Eyghth Northeast Watson the Parakeet, or Anton Chigurh W. Peace.

There’s a word in English that means something like “get-up-and-go.” But I was sitting in my car a minute ago, and happened to see that very same word. (Sort of…that’s where the little trick comes in.) But in the case of my car, it meant that I wasn’t going anywhere at all!

What’s the word?

Edited to add: There were a few wrong guesses before econgator and malonetd figured it out.

If you look at the left sidebar, you’ll see that I’ve made a slight change to the website. For a long time, I’ve wanted the weekly Tuesday Trivia email quiz to have a more rigorous sign-up process, to make sure that people aren’t signing recipients up for the quiz without their permission. (The new process is called “double opt-in” among skeevy junk-mail marketers, and you’ve probably seen it in action. Subscribers have to reply via email to activate their account, ensuring that the email address’s owner actually approved the subscription.)

An outfit called G-Lock makes a very nice (and free!) WordPress plug-in that manages email newsletter sign-up. Works like a charm, and it’s very configurable.

The only issue I’m having has more to do with my sucky web skills than G-Lock’s features. The “Subscribe” button at left is styled correctly (dark green background) in Firefox and other browsers, but not in Explorer. I made the change to the G-Lock style sheet here, but no dice in IE. If you know what you’re doing/have seen something like this before, feel free to take a look and let me know what I screwed up. One look at the crappy four-year-old HTML for this site (the layout is done with tables, for crying out loud) and you’ll know the problem is probably on my end, not theirs.

If you read this blog sometimes but haven’t signed up for the free weekly trivia quiz, take five seconds and do it. Eleven thousand Tuesday Trivia fans can’t be wrong!

I only noticed this when I saw it on a Sporcle quiz a couple weeks ago. Rolling Stone recently named its 100 best albums of the decade (2000-2009). There are three eponymous albums on the list. One is the first Vampire Weekend record. The other two are by bands with, improbably, the very same initials as each other. Who are the bands?

(This is, admittedly, a tough, tough question, even if you follow music. If you’re a music nerd and this is starting to bother you, I’ll post the initials over in this message board thread. Should make things much easier.)

One of our New Year’s resolutions around Casa Jennings is to start pronouncing 2010 “twenty-ten” instead of “two-thousand-and-ten.” Did we worry about Y2K back in “one-thousand-nine-hundred-ninety-nine”? More to the point, did the Norman Conquest take place in “one-thousand-sixty-six”? It did not! The “two-thousand-and” formulation is all Stanley Kubrick’s fault and it’s an abomination. I can see why “twenty-oh-one” sounds a little odd, but enough’s enough already. We putzed around for a decade instead of taking strong, decisive action. It ends here.

Getting used to “twenty-” before the year is going to be hard, but Mindy pointed out that the real test of our modern-ness will come when we start to leave it off. In the last century, we could say that we graduated from high school in “ninety-two” or re-elected Clinton in “ninety-six” or quit Sterling Cooper in “sixty-three.” So far, that’s been hard in the new millennium. Was the World Trade Center attacked back in “one”? Or “aught-one”? Somehow the lingo of barbershop quartets and handlebar mustaches doesn’t seem to go very well with the Bush years. (Insert political punchline here.) Even “oh-one” doesn’t trip off the tongue quite as neatly as “eighty-one” or “ninety-one” did.

But look at the calendar: it’s 2010! We’ve gotten past the awkward oh/aught problem! Are we now comfortable saying “The economy will rebound in ‘ten’” or “I can’t wait for the London Olympics in ‘twelve’”?

My guess is no. We still have a long way to go.

Unbelievably, when this blog started up, the running “Bewildering Conversations with a Three-Year-Old” gag centered on my son Dylan. Dylan is still bewildering, but his sister is three now and tends to produce more of the confusing dream-logic-meets-weak-A.I transcripts that are pretty much my favorite thing about parenting. I just always forget to write them down.

Luckily, she was just singing to herself in my office while I was trying to think of something to post today. And this conversation ensued:

Katie: I’m singing a song about Baby Jesus born in a lake.
Me: Born in a lake? Won’t He get wet?
Katie: No, Dad! Babies can’t swim in a lake! He’s in the lake on a bed.
Me: Oh, He has a bed.
Katie: He has buckles on His bed, so He doesn’t roll out of bed and splash into the lake, and splash away into the kids splashing.

The theology is uncertain, but I guess I’m glad He has the buckles.

It’s been ages since I posted any photos of the kids. Here’s one from Christmas morning that I stole from Mindy. Matching jammies!

Have a very Heimlich Christmas and a happy new year!

Here’s an easy Wordplay Wednesday. I’m thinking of two musical instruments, one of whose names is hidden inside the other, in this fashion:

_ _ ? _ ? ? _ ?

The eight spaces are one instrument, the four question marks the other. What two instruments are playing this unusual duet?

Edited to add: Quickly solved here by DrS.

Someone over on the message boards pointed out that Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas is an ingenious bit of holiday marketing, because it sells merchandise on both Halloween and Christmas, and presumably all points in between.

I remember my dad noticing this once, and saying that the right way to treat Nightmare is to average out its dates and watch it on Thanksgiving. This seems wrong to me, like the old joke about rabbit-hunting with a statistician. Also, it would ruin our annual Thanksgiving tradition of watching Squanto: A Warrior’s Tale.

Seriously, there is a lack of great Thanksgiving movies. This is a weekend when the whole family’s together, and either cranky or sleepy or both. There are only two NFL games for the bulk of the weekend. A good Thanksgiving movie could clean up in this time slot, once it became a tradition. The Wizard of Oz doesn’t count: no holiday content, and only old people (boomers and up) associate it with Thanksgiving anyway. Pieces of April? My family used to watch Miracle on 34th Street on Thanksgiving. Okay, it’s a Christmas movie, but at least it opens on Thanksgiving Day.

If a movie bridging Halloween and Christmas is a great merchandising coup, it seems like you do better. Maybe a movie that starts on New Year’s and ends on the Fourth of July. Or Columbus Day to Easter. The Littlest Flag Who Saved New Year’s! The Easter Bunny that Discovered America!

“I have a stomachache in my head!” Caitlin just told me. That is the problem with making kids’ Tylenol a delicious cherry flavor: they get a taste for it. They start making up symptoms, just to keep riding that delicious cherry-red horse.

Beatles: Rock Band showed up under our Christmas tree on Friday, which reminded me of a conversation I had with my brother when he was up here to see the Pixies with me a few months back. We were looking at used CDs and arguing over who was The Most English Band at every point in music history. (I don’t think either of us has ever actually been to the U.K. for longer than a week or so, so please assume here that we’re talking about the “England” of cockeyed American anglophilia: Chaucer and Victorian Christmases and foggy Baker Street and Michael Powell and Benny Hill and weird tomahto-centric breakfasts.) We finally agreed on the following list:

The Kinks (1964-1972). No contest here. The Beatles were the best British band in the world for most of this time, but let’s face it: they were also one of the most American bands in the world. Hence the pandemonium at JFK and the shrieking on Sullivan: we knew these expatriate bastard children of Buddy Holly and Carl Perkins were finally coming home. Not so the Kinks! Do you realize how many dopey music-hall numbers Paul McCartney would have had to toss off to approach the English-ness of Ray Davies’ band? A whole album of “Honey Pie” knock-offs wouldn’t be as English as, say, the first verse alone of “Waterloo Sunset.” The Village Green Preservation Society (“God save little shops, china cups, and virginity”) is the concept-album equivalent of a Powell-Pressburger movie about the quirky Kent countryside. Arthur is a bittersweet farewell letter to Empire, to a world map spanned by “pink bits” on which the sun never set.

???? (1972-1979). We couldn’t really come up with something great for this spot. Pink Floyd is tempting. Or do you divide the time between Floyd (or another bunch of prog-rock wankers) and some sallow punk band? What is quintessentially English about, say, the Sex Pistols, besides their bad skin? I could be talked into Elvis Costello and the Attractions here, maybe. Seems like this list should have actual songwriters on it, you know? Sceptred isle of Milton and Shakespeare and all that.

XTC (1979-1992). The first two albums of good-natured but uneasy punk don’t count. It’s not until the ’80s that Andy Partridge’s tastes for cheeky middle-class comedy and Blakean mysticism turn every XTC album into a little English settlement, no matter what country you listened to it in. Also, these words in song titles: “Nigel,” “Roundabout,” “Umbrellas,” “Bonfire,” “Chalkhills,” “Omnibus,” “Maypole.” XTC’s overpowering English-ness keeps The Smiths off this list altogether, which I wouldn’t have believed before I looked at the dates.

???? (1992-1999). This is probably Blur or Oasis, but that possibility makes me too depressed to actually choose one Britpop contender over the other. I’d be perversely tempted to go with Madonna here, except that her British-ness didn’t really peak until the turn of the millennium. Wait, what about The Beautiful South, Monty Python as rock band?

XTC (1999-2000). The last balloon is leaving. After a seven-year hiatus occasioned by stage fright or label squabbles or something, XTC released one final English hurrah: a double album (the discs released a year apart) of over-the-top orchestral paganism. But Dave Gregory quit the band and Colin Moulding lost interest and that was about it.

The Clientele (2000- ). Who is more English nowadays than these dreamy street poets of the London suburbs? In fact, I can’t think of another band more interested in geography, period: back gardens and sodium-lit, rain-soaked streets and council estates and bicycling on the heath. Plus, Alasdair MacLean has the rock and roll toff accent of all time. Take away the reverb and he sounds like Ralph Fiennes or something, no joke. I guess this shows what a backward-looking view of Britain I have, or I would have chosen, say, M.I.A. for the current slot. Oh well. “Preserving the old ways from being abused, protecting the new ways for me and for you. What more can you do?”

Edited to add: Some funny discussion of Englishiest-ness (and good suggestions like The Jam and Jethro Tull) in this thread.

Some words have the same pair of letter in them twice, like ONiON or SEahorSE or alUMinUM.

I’m thinking of a word like this where, if you reverse the order of both letter pairs, you get a new word (“noino” or “esahores” or “almuinmu” or something like that). One is a kind of animal, the other is a body part.

What are the two words?

Edited to add: It took a day or two, because no one likes wordplay at Christmas, but one Alex Boisvert solved this one here.

Game show author and GSN historian David Schwartz just sent me a link to the CBC news of October 25, 1965. Does that voice sound familiar to you? If not for the newsreader’s insistence that his name is “Alec Trebek,” I would almost think this is a certain game show host.

I have a new installment of my “6° of Ken Jennings” column in the new issue of mental_floss, heading to newsstands and subscriber mailboxes now. Hey, I just realized that I have the same initials as “Knowledge Junkies,” the mental_floss target demographic as per their official ad slogan. I guess according to that initials puzzle where “Franklin Pierce” is “Fourteenth President” and “E. E. Cummings” is “Eccentrically Eschewed Capitalization,” then I would be “Knowledge Junkie.” (Or “Killed Jeopardy!” or something like that.)

Anyway, here’s a sneak preview of my column, via the original (slightly longer) draft. Director’s cut!

Martin Luther and Lex Luthor

Why is it that Protestant clergy can marry, while Catholic priests can’t? The practice dates all the way back to Martin Luther, founder of the Protestant Reformation. In 1523, Luther helped twelve unhappy nuns escape from their convent by smuggling them out in herring barrels. The smell of pickled fish was heavy in the air that night, but so was romance: one of the defrocked cuties, Katharina von Bora, caught Luther’s eye. He was reluctant to marry, telling friends he feared death daily: just two years earlier, he’d been branded a heretic by the imperial assembly called the Diet of Worms. But two years later Luther finally wed his “lord Katie,” as he called her, setting a pattern for married pastors that continues to this day.

The diet of worms–earthworms, that is–is made up of whatever chunks of fallen organic material they can scavenge, mostly animal manure and fallen leaves. Luckily for us, when worms digest their dinners, they convert them into humus, the rich black material that makes soil fertile. Recognizing their contribution to the fertility of the Nile River Valley, Cleopatra declared earthworms to be sacred animals in 50 B.C., making it a capital crime to remove a single one from Egypt.

In 45 BC, the Roman calendar was all screwed up, with calendar months lagging three months behind the actual seasons. Luckily, Julius Caesar was shagging Cleopatra at the time, and Egypt had the whole calendar thing figured out. Cleo introduced Caesar to her court astronomer, Sosigenes, who suggested a 12-month year of 365 days with a “leap day” added every four Februarys, a solution which has stuck with us for over two thousand years. For this and other contributions to Rome, the month of Quintilus was renamed in Julius Caesar’s honor, and we still call it “July” today.

An ancient tradition associates the quadrennial leap day, February 29, with “the Ladies’ Privilege.” Supposedly, this was the only time when women were allowed to turn the tables and propose marriage to men–and if the lucky fella said no, he owed his admirer a kiss and either a silk dress or a pair of gloves. The custom supposedly dates back to Ireland’s St. Bridget, who complained incessantly to St. Patrick about the rough lot of single ladies. (Even in 5th-century Ireland, men apparently had issues with commitment.) When Patrick finally agreed to the leap day solution, Bridget immediately proposed to him! St. Pat turned her down, but at least she got a nice gown out of it.

German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche proposed marriage to two women during his life, with spectacularly bad results. The first victim was Mathilde Trampedach, a young piano student he had met only briefly, and the second was Russian-born writer Lou Salome. In each case, he had the woman’s boyfriend deliver the proposal for him! Both, shockingly, said no. Considering that poor Friedrich was such a washout with the ladies, it’s ironic that today he’s most famous for his concept of the Ubermensch: the powerful, confident “superman” of the future.

Superman’s arch-enemy is the criminal genius Lex Luthor, who first appeared in Action Comics #23 way back in 1940. In his early appearances, Luthor had a full head of lustrous red hair. His trademark bald look debuted in the daily Superman newspaper comic, and was a simple goof by artist Leo Novak, who evidently thought one of Luthor’s bald henchmen was the man himself. Later stories resolved the hair contradiction by revealing that Luthor had lost all his hair in a lab accident, for which he blamed Superman. Jeez, is that all it takes to turn someone into a super-villain? Did he even consider the Hair Club for Men? 

Christmas pet peeve of the day: “My Favorite Things” from The Sound of Music is not a Christmas song, no matter how many Kenny G/Kenny Rogers/Kenny Loggins/anyone-named-Kenny Christmas albums it appears on. Yes, I’ll grant you the mittens and the snowflakes and the brown paper packages tied up with string. (Brown paper would make for a pretty austere Christmas, yes, but the economy is in the crapper after all.)

But you’re cherry-picking! What about the geese? What about the raindrops? What, for the love of Christopher Plummer, about silver-white winters melting into spring?

And don’t even bring up the sleigh bells, unless you are willing to throw in the (not-very-Christmassy) doorbells. And schnitzel with noodles. Ho ho ho!

Right now I can hear Dylan and his grandpa playing some party game in the other room. Grandpa says, “Okay, this is a singer.” Dylan guesses, “William Shatner!” to the bewilderment of all. This is all my fault, since we were watching this on YouTube last night. Dylan disapproves. “Captain Kirk shouldn’t be smoking even if he’s not on board a starship.”

At the end of each year, Entertainment Weekly runs a series of tributes to entertainers who have passed away during the past year. (Just like the one during the Oscars, but without the applause-meter to find out who’s really missed and who isn’t.) They usually solicit these tributes from fellow celebs, people with some connection to the late great.

With so many high profile celebrity deaths this year, I thought this might be a basis for a fun little trivia game. (Why should I stop having fun just because, say, Dom DeLuise has?) Can you guess with celebrity who passed away in 2009 was eulogized in the pages of Entertainment Weekly by…

1. Katie Couric
2. Jaclyn Smith
3. Matthew Broderick
4. Betty White
5. Alan Dershowitz
6. Richie Sambora
7. C. Thomas Howell
8. Keith Carradine

In other news, Soupy Sales is remembered by Alice Cooper, who was apparently a huge Soupy fan as a little kid. That’s the greatest thing ever.

Edited to add: Answers here.

Either nerds for old movies, or old nerds who like movies. Either will do. Anyone else will probably be a little out of their depth.

The other day I was looking at Quigley Publications’ quixotic annual lists of the “top box-office draws” in movies. Today it’s Johnny Depp or whoever instead of Marie Dressler, but the list has been compiled all the way back to 1932.

The list inspired these trivia questions I thought you might like:

1. The first man to top the list, in 1934, has the same first name as the most recent man to top the list, in 2008. Who are the two stars?
2. Speaking of common names, the seventh biggest star of 1935 has the same last name as his opposite number, the fifth biggest star of 1937! Who are the actors?
3. There are three two-person pairs on the list: one from the 1930s, one from the 1940s, and one from the 1950s. Can you guess who they might be?

Probably more fun to play around with these a little before you cheat, but the Quigley lists can be Googled.

Edited to add: It took most of a day of guesswork, but correct answers were finally scrounged up here.