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Any Questions #416: Do Your "Best"

WAMC's Ian Pickus and resident quizzer Mike Nothnagel strive to be the best, at least for one week.Last week's challenge
Start with the name of a certain NFL team. Change one letter, rearrange the letters, and you can spell the name of a second NFL team in the same conference. What are the teams?
Answer: GIANTS and SAINTS. (G to S)

THIS WEEK'S CATEGORY: THE "BEST" TRIVIA
On-air questions: On August 16, 1962, Pete Best, the first drummer of The Beatles, was asked to leave the group. Brian Epstein, who had been managing the Beatles for less than a year, delivered the news to Best, who had been with the group for just over two years before his firing. The Beatles (then known as the Quarrymen) played some of their early shows at a venue called the Casbah Coffee Club, founded by Pete Best's mother Mona. Best was first seen playing with another band at the club and was recruited to be the drummer for the Beatles – who had no permanent drummer at the time – for a series of shows in Hamburg. While Best's participation in the group worked well for the band in live settings, it was ultimately determined that it wasn't the sound they wanted on their recordings, which led to Best's replacement. To mark Pete Best's exit from the Beatles, our questions this week are about people and things with the word "best" in their name.

1. First performed by Carol Channing in the Broadway production of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, the song "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" is perhaps most closely associated with what actress, who sang the song in the 1953 film adaptation of the Broadway show?
2. Canadian-American medical scientist Charles Best was a student at the University of Ontario working as an assistant to a surgeon named Dr. Frederick Banting when they, along with the help of Banting's supervisor J.J.R. Macleod and two other people, co-discovered what hormone, produced by the pancreas in humans and most other verterbrates?
3. What chain traces its origins to just after World War II, when a network of independent hotels in California began referring travelers to each other via calls to front desk operators, and has a name that references the fact that most of the chain's original properties were on one side of the Mississippi River?
4. The sitcom Father Knows Best starring Robert Young and Jane Wyatt aired on CBS and NBC from 1954 to 1960. The house seen in the opening credits of the series was later used as Mr. Wilson's house on Dennis the Menace and again as the home of Larry Hagman's character Major Anthony Nelson on what series that also starred Barbara Eden as the title character?
5. A German Shepherd named Rumor Has It, an English Springer Spaniel named Wakefield's Black Knight, and an Airedale Terrier named Boxwood Barkentine are among the winners of what title, first awarded by the Westminster Kennel Club in 1907?

Extra credit
1. The title of what 1937 novel comes from a line in a Robert Frost poem that begins with the words "The best laid schemes"?
2. On a list of the movies with the largest all-time worldwide box office gross earnings, the highest-ranking film with the word "best" in the title is what 1997 Julia Roberts/Dermot Mulroney romantic comedy?

This week's challenge
Start with the phrase BEST PICTURE. Rearrange the letters to spell a seven-letter word for something you might get when you purchase a ticket and a four-letter word for something you might get when you use a ticket. What are the words?

ANSWERS
On-air questions

1. Marilyn Monroe
2. Insulin
3. Best Western
4. I Dream of Jeannie
5. Best in Show

Extra credit
1. Of Mice and Men
2. My Best Friend's Wedding

 

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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