Missed Trivia

What famous British writer kept a tame bear as a pet while he was a student at Trinity College at Cambridge?

• George Gordon, Lord Byron. He apparently did it in defiance—because college rules barred dogs as pets but didn’t mention bears. On one occasion Byron and his bear reportedly bathed in the fountain in the center of the Great Court at Trinity.

What weapon served as the code name for one of the five main Normandy beaches where Allied forces landed on D-Day during World War II?

• Sword. The five beaches, from west to east, were code-named Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, and Sword.

How did Kraft Foods come up with the idea of packaging macaroni and cheese?

• From one of its traveling salesmen, Harry Weishaar, who was using rubber bands to attach two-ounce packets of grated cheese to boxes of macaroni to promote the cheese. The company saw the potential and packaged the two ingredients together in 1937, selling them as “a meal for 4 in 10 minutes” for 19 cents.

How many whiskers does the average cat have?

• 24, with 12 on each side of its face.

Which country’s rebels were the first to call crude homemade explosives Molotov cocktails?

• Finland’s. The Finnish resistance used the improvised gasoline-filled bottle-bombs against Russians tanks during the winter of 1939–40, naming them for Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister.

At what weight does a scrod become a cod?

• At 2 ½ pounds.

Who was the first comic strip artist to win a Pulitzer Prize?

• Garry Trudeau, creator of Doonesbury, in 1975. He won the coveted prize for Editorial Cartooning.