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Any Questions #432: "Christmas Shopping"

The Rockefeller Center Christmas tree
The Rockefeller Center Christmas tree

WAMC's Ian Pickus and resident quizzer Mike Nothnagel still need to buy some holiday gifts.

Last week's challenge
Start with the phrase ONE MORE THING. Change one letter to a P and you can rearrange the result to spell a six-letter word for a type of insect and a six-letter word for a type of bird. What are the words?
Answer: If you change M to a P, you can spell HORNET and PIGEON.

THIS WEEK'S CATEGORY: "CHRISTMAS SHOPPING"
On-air questions: The big day is just 12 days away. I hope you have gotten your shopping done, checked your list twice, and secured enough wrapping paper to keep everything under your tree a secret. But just in case you’ve procrastinated, like me, there’s still time to do some Christmas shopping. For this week, each answer will be made up of letters in the word “Christmas,” except one letter. You’ll have to go shopping for the letter required to make the correct answer.

1. Grain that is ground to make flour, malt that is crushed in the brewing process, or useful material for the mill, proverbially.
2. Turk Wendell, Rico Brogna, Mookie Wilson, Doc Gooden, Bubba Trammell, Pete Alonso and Jacob deGrom, for example.
3. On TV: Rogers, Ed, Mackey, Robot, to name a few.
4. Only 13 hockey players — including Gordie Howe, Steve Yzerman, Jaromir Jagr, Mark Messier and all-time leader Wayne Gretzky — have racked up 1,000 of what stat?
5. Half of a cartoon-within-a-cartoon duo, what mouse appears in episodes such as “Bang The Cat Slowly,” “Bleeder of the Pack” “Cat Splat Fever” and “Remembrance of Things Splashed?”

Extra credit
1. In English, who is the only one of the 12 apostles who fits this category?
2. What word describes the era of Russian history running from Ivan the Terrible in 1547 through Nicholas II in 1917?

This week's challenge
Start with two five-letter words associated with the game of football. Combine them and you can spell a word associated with digital currency. What are the words?

ANSWERS
On-air questions

1. Grist (go shopping for the G)
2. Mets (go shopping for the E; Pete Alonso hit a record 53 homers in 2019 and won Rookie of the Year)
3. Mister (go shopping for the E; Mister Mackey is an elementary school counselor on the animated series “South Park,” which has aired 306 episodes since debuting back in 1997)
4. Assist (go shopping for the third S; how good was Gretzky? He has 1,963 assists, 714 ahead of Ron Francis at No. 2 on the list)
5. Itchy (go shopping for the Y; “Simpsons” fans will remember that “Itchy and Scratchy” briefly got a third co-star, Poochie, voiced by Homer Simpson, in a famous Season 8 episode that gave rise to the Comic Book Guy catchphrase “Worst episode ever.”)

Extra credit
1. Thomas (go shopping for the O; he is also known as Doubting Thomas)
2. Tsarist (go shopping for the second T)

 

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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