WAMC's Ian Pickus and resident quizzer Mike Nothnagel are marking a milestone birthday.
Last week's challenge
Start with the word LABYRINTHS. Change one letter to a Y (not the one that's already there, of course) and you can rearrange the result to spell two five-letter synonyms. What are they?
Answer: If you change the H to a Y, you can spell BRINY and SALTY.
THIS WEEK'S CATEGORY: IMPORTANT BIRTHDAYS
On-air questions: Between this week’s show and next week’s show, our resident quizzer Mike Nothnagel will celebrate a milestone birthday. I won’t say which one, but close listeners over our nearly 200 shows can probably venture a good guess. That’s not this week’s challenge, by the way. We’ll get to that later. So in honor of Mike, this week’s show is all about important birthdays.
1. Which actress whose credits include Gravity, Speed and The Blind Side, for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress, became the oldest person ever named Most Beautiful Woman by People magazine earlier this month, three months before turning 51?
2. Comedy Central recently honored which pop star’s 21st birthday at its annual roast, during which host Kevin Hart said “Tonight we are gonna do what parents and the legal system should have done a long time ago – give the boy a butt-whupping he deserves?”
3. Which longtime entertainer was honored on his 100th birthday in 2003 with a public ceremony in Hollywood that included flyovers from various 1940’s-era U.S. warplanes?
4. Recognized for celebrating “this is what 40” and later “this is what 50 looks like,” which writer and public intellectual said of turning 80 in 2014, that a dwindling libido is an advantage because “The brain cells that used to be obsessed are now free for all kinds of great things?”
5. Turning to literature now, which narrator after a pivotal scene in The Great Gatsby remarks on turning 30, “Before me stretched the portentous menacing road of a new decade…Thirty-the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair.”
Extra credit
1. Name the 1970 single by Alice Cooper that includes the line “I'm a boy and I'm a man” and peaked at 21 on the U.S. charts?
2. Twenty-eight-year-old rapper Waka Flocka Flame, known for his pro-marijuana policy views, announced this spring that he is running for president. What landmark birthday must he hit to be Constitutionally allowed to serve as president?
This week's challenge
Start with the word milestone. Rearrange the letters and you can spell a four-letter vehicle and a five-letter word describing people it often transports during this time of year. What are the words?
ANSWERS
On-air questions
1. Sandra Bullock (Bonus fact: Michelle Pfeiffer was on the cover of People’s first Most Beautiful People issue in 1990 and was the first to repeat the feat in 1999.)
2. Justin Bieber (who closed the roast by saying the roast was “brutal” and was “supposed to be a birthday present.”)
3. Bob Hope (who would die less than two months after the day 35 states celebrated as Bob Hope Day)
4. Gloria Steinem
5. Nick Carraway
Extra credit
1. “I’m 18”
2. 35
