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Any Questions #255

WAMC's Ian Pickus and resident quizzer Mike Nothnagel focus on cable news this week.

Last week's challenge
Start with the phrase COPY EDITORS. Rearrange the letters and you can spell a five-letter genre of music and a six-letter type of literature. What are the words?
Answer: DISCO, POETRY

THIS WEEK'S CATEGORY: M, S, N, B, C
On-air questions: On July 15, 1996: a new network called MSNBC debuted. At its inception, it provided news coverage, interviews, and opinion. Over time, it shifted its focus to politics, but kept many of the opinion-cased shows. In 2015, it revitalized its focus on news, replacing many daytime talk shows with news programming. To commemorate MSNBC's founding, this week we'll have a quiz about the letters M, S, N, B, and C.

1. Beginning with 1995's GoldenEye, the character known as M, who is the head of the Secret Intelligence Service – also known as MI6 – was played by Judi Dench. In the two most recent Bond films (2012’s Skyfall and 2015’s Spectre) the role was taken over by what actor?
2. In 2013, author Doug Dorst published S., a novel-within-a-novel about a work by a mysterious author and two college students who attempt to figure out his identity as they trade a copy of the author’s work back and forth. The novel was co-conceived by who, also the director of two Star Trek films and the most recent Star Wars film?
3. The most commonly-used chess notation (and the only one that is recognized by the World Chess Federation) identifies the squares on the board by a lowercase letter and a number. It also assigns a capital letter to each piece. Which piece, the only one that can jump over other pieces, is identified by the capital letter N?
4. Focusing on entertainment and sports news, b was a newspaper published from 2008 to 2015, and targeted at more casual readers between 18 and 35 years old. The paper was published as a companion to the Sun, the daily newspaper of what East Coast city, whose name also starts with B?
5. The letter C is used as the unit for degrees Celsius, named after Swedish astronomer Anders Celsius. What other word beginning with C is also used to refer to this scale, referencing the fact that there are 100 degrees on the scale between the freezing and boiling points of water?

Extra credit
1. Of the letters M, S, N, B, and C, which is the only one that is not used as a one-letter symbol for a chemical element?
2. Of the letters M, S, N, B, and C, which is the only one that does not appear as the only letter on the cap of a current Major League Baseball team?

This week's challenge
Start with the letters MSNBC. Add four vowels and you can rearrange the result spell a two-word phrase (five letters, four letters) for something that makes a loud noise. What is it?

ANSWERS
On-air questions

1. Ralph Fiennes
2. J.J. Abrams
3. Knight
4. Baltimore
5. Centigrade

Extra credit
1. M
2. N
 

A lifelong resident of the Capital Region, Ian joined WAMC in late 2008 and became news director in 2013. He began working on Morning Edition and has produced The Capitol Connection, Congressional Corner, and several other WAMC programs. Ian can also be heard as the host of the WAMC News Podcast and on The Roundtable and various newscasts. Ian holds a BA in English and journalism and an MA in English, both from the University at Albany, where he has taught journalism since 2013.
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