Not For Women Only
By Mark Howell
One of the delights of our recent family get-together at a coastal cottage on the shores of Connecticut was coming upon a vintage box of trivia questions published by Axlon called “The Women’s Game: Not for Women Only.”
Here’s a sampling of some of the questions and their fascinating answers:
Q: King Kong comes from Skull Island, but where did Wonder Woman come from?
A: Paradise Island.
Q: What did Adam Smith say was “the game women play in life?”
A: Men.
Q. What American feminist said, “Men are what they do, women are what they are”?
A: Susan B. Anthony.
Q. In 1969, what country followed the U. S. in divorce statistics?
A. The USSR.
Q. What part of Rasputin’s body did his daughter Maria search for throughout her life?
A. His penis.
Q. Who was the first woman on record to receive a diamond on her engagement?
A. Mary, Duchess of Burgundy, in 1477.
Q. Who was the first woman on record to reach the summit of Mount Everest?
A. Junko Tabei.
Q. Was Benjamin Franklin ever married?
A. Deborah Reed was his common-law wife.
Q. With whom did Gen. Douglas MacArthur lunch with every day while Army Chief of Staff?
A. His mother.
Q. What car did Grace Slick drive in the 1960s?
A. A white Rabbit.
Q. What name did poet Blanche Oelrichs take prior o her marriage to John Barrymore?
A. Michael Strange.
Q. What is the word for when a woman has many husbands?
A. Polyandry.
Q. In 1972, Jeanne Pierce and Susan Roley were the first women sworn in as what?
A. FBI agents.
Q. What 1920s writer lived in the same building as a young Lucille Ball?
A. F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Q. Norman Mailer said of marriage, “it all comes down to” what?
A. “Who does the dishes.”
Q. What aromatic, expensive spice comes from the stigma of crocus blossoms?
A. Saffron.
Q. By what age did the 1930 edition of “Bringing Up Your Child” say toilet training should be completed?
A. Six months.
Q. If you have type “O” blood and your husband is type “B,” what can be proved about your type “AB” baby?
A. It is not his.
Other interesting facts we uncovered in our holiday reading include the following:
The Canadian middle class has surpassed the U.S. middle class as the richest in the world.
A New York Times analysis reveals that after-tax middle-class incomes in our neighbor to the north have now pulled ahead after decades of being way behind.
The U.S. is still the richest nation overall but most of the income goes to the wealthiest citizens, while in Canada it is spread more evenly.
Emergency Physicians Monthly reports that researchers at UC Davis have found that the “most satisfied patients” in a poll of visitors to America’s emergency rooms did in fact have a 26-percent higher mortality rate, a 9-percent higher expense, spent more on medications and were more likely to be admitted as inpatients than the “less satisfied patients.”
Michael Silverman, MD questions whether today’s governmental focus on “patient satisfaction” through such studies does in fact actually end up undermining care and is thereby “not in line with the Hippocratic oath.”
It was in the 1940s that the notion of the “hipster” first began to take shape in America. There are various theories about where the term “hip,” meaning “with it,” and which ultimately morphed into the term “hippie,” originally came from, but it seems most likely to have originated in West Africa in the language of the Wolof tribe. The Wolof have a word “hipi” that means “to open one’s eyes,” and it is from West Africa that most American slaves came from. A “hip-cat” from the Wolof “hipi-kat” was someone who had wised up and opened his or her eyes to the ways of the world.
Quotes for the Week:
“The Beat Generation, that was a vision that we had, John Clellon Holmes and I, and Allen Ginsberg in an even wilder way, in the late forties, of a generation of crazy, illuminated hipsters suddenly rising and roaming America, serious, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere, ragged, beatific, beautiful in an ugly graceful new way.”
Jack Kerouac on hipsters, 1960
“It feels like a perfect night to dress up like hipsters. And make fun of our exes. Ah. Ahh. Ahhh.”
— Taylor Swift on hipsters, 2014
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