KEN JENNING'S TRIVIA ALMANAC: 8,888 QUESTIONS IN 365 DAYS, by Ken Jennings, Villard, 532 pages, $20
Ken Jennings was a Salt Lake City computer programmer before becoming an unlikely celebrity in 2004 when he achieved an unprecedented record-breaking streak on the television quiz show, "Jeopardy!" His first book was "Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs."
Just from the phenomenal success of the board game "Trivial Pursuit" in its various editions, we know how fascinated many people are with trivia — and that some of us have more trivial minds than others. Answers to questions such as "What professional sports team has retired more jersey numbers than any other?" or "Who was the last U.S. president to sport facial hair?" just stick in some people's minds.
Using the proved formula of Farmer's Almanac, Ken Jennings has built a thick but extremely trivial book that devotes a page to every day of the year. Instead of predicting the weather, the page offers trivia quizzes tied to strange historic events that happened on that date.
On Feb. 22, for instance, we read about the birth of Pebbles Flintstone, the 1495 A.D. beginning of Europe's syphilis epidemic and the 2006 download of the billionth song from iTunes.
On April 7, we read that in 1859 the English chemist John Walker sold the first "friction lights," which he accidentally invented, known today as "matches." In 1926, on the same date, Violet Gibson, the mentally deranged sister of Baron Ashbourne, shot Italian dictator Benito Mussolini in the streets of Rome. The bullet allegedly went through both Mussolini's nostrils, he was bandaged — and the parade continued.
In 1969, the Major League logo made a debut when players wore it for the first time on their uniforms. Legend says it was modeled on Harmon Killebrew.
On Aug. 27, 1820, the first mountaineers reached the top of the Zugspitze, Germany's highest peak — but in 2006, a newly discovered map indicated that local hunters and shepherds had been climbing the peak 50 years earlier.
On the same date in 1997, the International Federation of Anatomists decreed that the feminine body part popularly known as "cleavage" would officially be called the "intermammary sulcus." So much for decrees.
On Oct. 31, 1945, Jimmy Durante left an imprint of his "schnozzola" in the cement outside Grauman's Chinese Theatre. In 1961, Josef Stalin's embalmed body was removed from Lenin's Tomb in Moscow and buried outside the Kremlin.
On the same date in 1981, the fictional Voldemort from "Harry Potter" killed Harry's parents and left Harry with a "fetching scar."
The questions in this book are easy, moderately difficult and "stumpers" — labeled "Easy," "Harder" and "Yeah, Good Luck."
If this is your kind of fun, go for it.
E-mail: dennis@desnews.com