Five Minute Trivia

Everyone has heard the poem that starts off with, "'Twas the night before Christmas," but hardly anyone knows the name of the poem or the man who wrote it. It's responsible for some of the most iconic images of Christmas--stockings, Santa Claus, reindeer, gifts delivered via chimney--but it was first published anonymously in a local newspaper. On this week's' show, we...

Gerardus Mercator had a dream. He wanted to make a map of the world that people could actually use to get from one place to another. He was so successful that we're still using it 500 years later. It's even on our smartphones. But his projection was not without controversy. While it may have made the world easier to navigate, it came at the cost of making the world look ridiculous. Have...

Edsel Ford was the only son of Henry Ford, founder of Ford Motor Company. He became president of Ford but sadly died of cancer in 1943. To honor his memory, Ford Motor Company launched a new car division 17 years after his death and unveiled it in a live Sunday night event featuring Bing Crosby, Louis Armstrong, and others. Did the Ford Edsel do justice to Edsel Ford's memory? Listener, it di...

It's Thanksgiving week! That means food, family, and...FOOTBALL!! If you're a fan of the Dallas Cowboys and the Detroit Lions, you'll always get to watch your team on Thanksgiving, because they always play on Thanksgiving Day. How and why did that come to be a tradition? Tune in this week to find out. WWW.5MINUTETRIVIA.COM

The modernist poet TS Eliot won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948. But before he got famous for The Waste Land and The Hollow Men, he wrote a bunch of silly poems for his godchildren and compiled them in a book called Old Possum's Guide to Practical Cats. An aspiring composer named Andrew Lloyd Webber got a hold of them and decided to turn TS Eliot's musings about Growltiger, Skimbl...

This week, we're taking on the human body with a show about what blood is, what it's made of, and why it's so important. We also have a special cohost who calls himself Hemo the Magnificent. Hemo premiered in a 1957 educational film produced by  Frank Capra (It's a Wonderful Life, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington) but never found work again. We're pleased to welcome him back t...

Ernest Hemingway was a soldier, romantic, adventurer, and...oh yeah, something of a writer. His prose was spare and direct and spoke volumes without saying much at all. The Old Man and the Sea is perhaps the best example of that. In this novella, Hemingway talks about courage, perseverance, and struggle through the story of a fisherman's struggle with the catch of a lifetime. This week, we&ap...

Countries inside countries, cities inside cities, dogs and cats working together...what is this madness? This week, we're tackling a world shaped in odd ways by war, medieval treaties, and drunk cartographers.  Special thanks to Aceinet for the musical contribution. WWW.5MINUTETRIVIA.COM

President Abraham Lincoln commissioned the United States Secret Service to safeguard the country's financial infrastructure from the scourge of counterfeit currency. They've been protecting presidents since Theodore Roosevelt and, since Truman's time, assigning them weird nicknames like Rawhide and Searchlight. Their code name for Jimmy Carter's budget director was Dumbo. They...

In the concluding episode of our mini-series on WW1, we're talking about one of those rare times in history when goodwill and humanity triumphed in a place where you'd least expect to find it. In this case, the brutal trenches of the western front. On that first Christmas, men on both sides spontaneously gave up the fighting for one day. Thanks to Gregor Quendel for the string arrangemen...

The writer Jean Dutourd called it "the greatest event of the twentieth century." Was he talking about the moon landing? The moonwalk? Nope. In 1914, the French army urgently needed to get troops to the Marne river valley, just 30 miles away from Paris, to stop the rapidly advancing Germans from besieging the city. In desperation, they turned to the city's taxis. What followed is now...

It was called the war to end all wars, which is perhaps the dumbest thing said by anyone about anything. But then, pretty much everything about the first World War is kind of dumb. The dumb network of alliances that made it inevitable. The dumb royal who took a vacation in the one city on Earth that hated his guts. His dumb driver who took a wrong turn. The dumb anarchist who shot the dumb royal....

Da-da-da-dum...it's probably the most famous musical opening in history. But...why? How did Beethoven's Fifth Symphony become so much more well known than the Fourth or the Sixth? On this week's show, learn about the piece of music that helped end World War 2, was covered by Chuck Berry, and is currently floating through interstellar space. Thanks to Gregor Quendel for the piano arr...

Aristotle classified living things by how much air, water, earth, or fire they possessed. The Gilbert and Sullivan operetta The Pirates of Penzance brought us animals, vegetables, and minerals. It took a former cobbler's apprentice named Carl Linnaeus to give us the current system that organizes every living thing on earth. This week's show talks about how that's done--and gives us...

Leo Tolstoy didn't consider War and Peace a novel. Sure, there's a story in there about a bunch of families told through the backdrop of a (spoiler!) war, but there's so much more in those 587,000 words that we might have to spend a little more than five minutes talking about all of it.  WWW.5MINUTETRIVIA.COM

Happy Labor Day! As you (hopefully) get to enjoy some time off, take in a football game, and put away your white clothes, stop in and learn how two unrelated guys with the same name, a couple of riots, and President Grover Cleveland gave us a day to celebrate our hard work. WWW.5MINUTETRIVIA.COM

Broadway began as a Native American trail carved into the swampland of Manhattan island and today runs almost thirty miles from lower Manhattan to Westchester County. But Broadway is so much more than a street. In this episode, we cover the 400 years it took for Broadway to become America's theater capital...in about 5 minutes. WWW.5MINUTETRIVIA.COM

There are four countries, one body of water, and a pet rodent named after Guinea. Three of the countries are in Africa, one is near Australia, and guinea pigs are from South America. How did this name take over the world? Tune in and find out! WWW.5MINUTETRIVIA.COM

In the late 19th century, a Russian eye doctor had a vision for bringing peace and understanding to the world. He created a new language that would unite everyone under a common tongue. He called it Esperanto, and it would eventually become the official language of the post-WW1 League of Nations. Learn all about it in this week's show. Thank you to Kevin Luce and Freesound for the recording o...

A colony of ants. A parliament of owls. A bed of oysters. Where did all this come from? In this episode, we explore how a boss nun and a lot of wealthy people with too much time on their hands came up with all these names for animal groups.  WWW.5MINUTETRIVIA.COM

Who writes a book and then puts someone else's name on it? Well, the writers of 1984, Jane Eyre, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, A Series of Unfortunate Events, Confessions of a Shopaholic. And that's just a small handful. Join us on the show to learn about where some of these pen names came from and why anyone would  even use one.  WWW.5MINUTETRIVIA.COM

In Part 1, we learned how Pluto became a planet. In Part 2, we take it all away. This episode explains why Pluto, ninth planet from the sun and inspiration for Mickey Mouse's pet dog, is no longer welcome at planetary parties. WWW.5MINUTETRIVIA.COM

Pluto was discovered in 1930 and was considered the ninth planet in our solar system until 2006, when it was demoted. So how did it come to be and then...not to be? Join us for this two-part odyssey on the little planet that wasn't. WWW.5MINUTETRIVIA.COM

What are those weird job titles you see in movie credits? If you don't know your grips from your gaffers from your wranglers, check out this week's episode of Five Minute Trivia. Hosted by RM Zubairi. WWW.5MINUTETRIVIA.COM

Welcome to 5 Minute Trivia! A new show about all there is to know in about five minutes.  WWW.5MINUTETRIVIA.COM