Vacation Trivia 7/14 - 7/22/2012

How many children did Marie Antoinette and King Louis XVI have?

• Four—two daughters and two sons. Only the firstborn, Marie Therese Charlotte, survived the French Revolution.

 

What does the acronym MSRP represent to a car buyer?

• Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price—it’s the list price set by the automobile manufacturer that dealers are legally required to post on window stickers on all new cars.

 

What is the only hard part of an octopus’s body?

• Its beak, which is shaped like a parrot’s beak and is used to kill prey and break it into pieces.

 

How tall is actress Meryl Streep, who portrayed 6-foot-2 Julia Child in the 2009 film Julie & Julia?

• 5-foot-6.

 

What bird’s flight inspired the Wright Brothers to develop a wing warping system for maneuvering and banking aircraft?

• The buzzard, which twists one wingtip upward and the other downward to make banked turns.

 

What three-letter word has the greatest number of definitions in the Oxford English Dictionary?

• Set, with 464 definitions.

 

What golfing great helped design the first golf clubs to be given numbers instead of Scottish names like mashie, baffie, and niblick?

• Bobby Jones, in 1932. The numbered clubs, made by A. G. Spaulding & Bros., bore Jones’s name. Manufactured until 1973, they were the world’s first mass-produced sets of matching clubs.

 

What product was advertised in the very first infomercial aired on American television?

• Herbalife, a weight-loss supplement. Its first infomercial appeared on the USA Network in 1984, soon after the Federal Communications Commission lifted restrictions limiting TV advertising to 16 minutes per hour and individual ads to two minutes.

 

What African river has two countries named after it?

• The Niger. The countries are Niger and Nigeria.