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Any Questions #326 - "Mustaches"

On this Black Friday, WAMC's Ian Pickus and resident quizzer Mike Nothnagel bid farewell to "Movember."

Last week's challenge
Start with the phrase PRIDE OF LIONS. Change one letter to a T and you can spell the seven-letter name of a television show and a five-letter word for something most television shows have. What are the words?
Answer: If you change one of the Os to a T, you can spell FRIENDS and PILOT.

THIS WEEK'S CATEGORY: MUSTACHES
On-air questions: This is our last show of November, which means that it is almost the end of Movember, an annual tradition where people grow facial hair and raise funds to promote awareness of men's health issues. Before everyone returns to their clean-shaven selves, we'll have a quiz about mustaches.

1. In the early 1970s, Oakland Athletics owner Charlie Finley held a mustache-growing competition with his players. What 1972 competition, in which Finley's Athletics faced the clean-shaven Cincinnati Reds, was called "the hairs vs. the squares"?
2. Launched in June of 2012, what service first used as one of its major branding concepts fuzzy pink mustaches that attached to the front grill of a car, and replaced them a few years later with small, glowing magenta mustaches that sat on the car's dashboard?
3. The World Beard and Moustache Championships is a biennial competition, held in 2017 in Austin, Texas, and scheduled for Antwerp, Belgium in 2019. There are six categories in the Moustache competition, including one whose description is "slender with long tips, straight up or arching up" and is named for what artist?
4. A 1919 work by the artist Marcel Duchamp titled L.H.O.O.Q. – the first of many variations on a similar concept – is a postcard-sized reproduction of a famous portrait onto which Duchamp penciled in a mustache and a small beard. By what name do we most commonly know the painting Duchamp altered, which is also known in French as La Joconde?
5. What actor, born with the first and middle names Julius Henry but much more well-known by a stage name, adopted early on in his career a look that became so synonymous with him it inspired a novelty disguise named after him that consisted of horn-rimmed glasses, a fake nose, and a bushy mustache?

Extra credit
1. Leopold Bloom drinks his tea from a moustache cup given as a gift for his 27th birthday by his daughter Milly in what classic novel?
2. About whom was a woman named Oona speaking when she said, in reference to hearing his name, "I still think now of the guy in the moustache and bowler hat and funny walk. I don't think of an old man who was my grandfather."

This week's challenge
Start with the phrase FACIAL HAIR. Change one letter to an M and you can rearrange the result to spell the name of a continent and the name of a country on that continent. What are they?

ANSWERS
On-air questions

1. World Series
2. Lyft
3. Salvador Dali
4. The Mona Lisa
5. Groucho Marx

Extra credit
1. Ulysses
2. Charlie Chaplin

 

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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