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24.01.2022 We now have two team trivia sessions on Sundays. We're continuing our popular 3 pm session and adding an evening session at 8 pm (after the children are in bed). Same questions at both. Same fee - $5.50 per person. Same rules - teams of up to eight people in different locations. Book at - https://www.trybooking.com/BLHNN

24.01.2022 Smelly Trivia... Smelling hot popcorn? If theres nothing in the microwave, check the tree in the garden for binturongs. A binturong has a face like a cats and a body like a bears which is why some people call them bearcats. The bit about them that got me interested is that their urine smells like hot popcorn! The way they urinate means their feet and tail get wet, so they smell like hot popcorn long after they finished weeing. Looks like the smell is a marker for other bi...nturongs and comes from a chemical compound in their urine called 2-AP*. Apparently, when you heat popcorn, amino acids and sugars in the corn kernels react and form 2-AP. The binturong is a native of South and South-east Asia and is listed as threatened in some countries. p.s. You are very unlikely to find a binturong in your garden, so re-check your microwave. (Info from San Diego Zoo, National Geographic and Duke University. Picture from Adelaide Zoo website) * 2-Acetyl-1-pyrroline

23.01.2022 The classic 1960 Uncle Scrooge comic The Hound of the Whiskervilles by Carl Barks showed Scrooge McDuck travelling back to his ancestral home in Scotland in search of his clan tartan. The Walt Disney company actually registered several Clan MacDuck tartans over the years: MacDuck Final Version (STA 1121) was registered with the Scottish Tartans Authority in 1942 (five years before Scrooge McDuck was created!) and MacDuck (STWR 1080) was registered with the Scottish Tartans Society in 1984. Other fictional characters who have their own registered tartans include Peter Rabbit, Robin Hood, Hello Kitty, K9 from Dr Who, The Wombles, Brad from The Rocky Horror Picture Show and the Colonial Marines from the movie Aliens. Picture credits: Don Rosa/Walt Disney, The Scottish Register of Tartans.

23.01.2022 Cockney Trivia Its harder to be an authentic cockney now than it was 250 years ago. The tradition says that to be a true cockney, you have to be born within the sound of Bow Bells - the bells of St Mary-le-Bow in Cheapside in London but, noise pollution means the distance the sound of the bells can be heard is much reduced. The map from 24Acoustics Ltd shows the difference.

23.01.2022 Happy 2016 everyone. A big thanks to the people who have worked with Melbourne Trivia in 2015... Regular hosts Janet McLeod, Rob Lloyd, Richard McKenzie and (now moved on) Adam McKenzie. Guest hosts Laura Davis, Chris Gregory, Danny Alder, Doug Bair and Paul Verhoeven. Tech assistants Scott Pollard and Tank Monsternova. Financial wizard Justin Seto. What a talented mob you are!! Thanks.

21.01.2022 In ancient Greek mythology a centaur was a creature with the torso of a male human attached to the lower body of a horse. A female centaur was called a centauride or centauress. Disneys Fantasia featured both, although the studio called the females centaurettes. Onocentaurs had human torsos on the body of an ass and ichthyocentaurs had human torsos, the front two legs of a horse and the tail of a fish. Photo: Ichthyocentaur statue, Hotel Sacher, Vienna

21.01.2022 Back in the 10th century CE, Harald Gormsson was king of Denmark (and briefly, Norway). He brought Christianity to Denmark. At some time he acquired a nickname - Bluetooth - Harald Bluetooth. Many scholars believe he had a prominent dead tooth that appeared to be blue. Forward to 1997 when computing engineer Jim Kardach, after a few drinks one night, came up with the name for the new technology. "Harald had united Denmark and Christianized the Danes! It occurred to me that this would make a good codename for the program." The logo is a combination of the nordic H & B.

21.01.2022 Corn flakes were invented to discourage what?? Erm... well, masturbation actually. Among other things, John Kellogg was an anti-masturbation advocate who claimed his corn flakes would promote health and decrease interest in sex. He said masturbation was the worst sin imaginable to him. He believed it led to leprosy, tuberculosis, heart disease, epilepsy, dimness of vision, insanity, idiocy, and death. He also preached that masturbation led to bashfulness in some people, unnatural boldness in others, a fondness for spicy foods, round shoulders, and acne. I found a lot of sources for this, the most interesting was Kelloggs book Plain Facts for Old and Young (1877)

19.01.2022 So, weve been a little... erm... very... slack at posting new trivia. Sorry. Were back.

18.01.2022 Today marks the 107th anniversary of the famous escapologist Harry Houdinis death defying escape from the murky Yarra river in Melbourne when he dived off the Queens St bridge bound in 25 pounds of chains and padlocks. Houdini had been performing at Melbournes opera house for about a week before he gained permission to perform the stunt and at 1:30pm on February 17, 1910 a crowd of about 20,000 onlookers watched as he was chained head to waist and dove head first into the muddy brown river. He emerged a little over a minute later holding the chains above his head, much to the relief of the local police who were waiting by with corpse retrieval hooks in case he didnt make it. Photo source: State Library of Victoria

17.01.2022 Hollywood Sign Trivia The first official document to use of the name of Hollywood was on a grid map of the new town in the Los Angeles County recorders office. That was in 1887. By the 1910s, films were happening and Hollywood was burgeoning. In 1923, a large sign was erected, advertising a new subdivision on the hills overlooking Hollywood Hollywoodland. Over the next few years the sign, fell into disrepair but, in 1943, The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce removed the last four letters and restored the remaining portions of the sign. The sign is now a registered trademark owned by the Chamber of Commerce, and may only be used in filming with their permission.

17.01.2022 HOW THE AMPERSAND GOT ITS NAME Firstly, its shape evolved from the Latin word 'Et', meaning 'and' (see the picture). For many years it was added to the alphabet in schools in Britain and the US, following the 'Z'. When spelling out words in class, children were often taught to say the letters that are words - 'a' and 'i' - using a Latin phrase meaning 'by itself'. The phrase is 'per se'. When they recited the alphabet that had our symbol at the end, they would say, 'X, Y, Z, and per se and' which translates as 'and, by itself, and'. It's easy to see how children slurred the expression and, over a period it turned into 'ampersand'.

17.01.2022 Queen Elizabeth the truckie mechanic. As British men went off to World War Two, the then Princess Elizabeth joined a branch of the army using women to perform many jobs previously done by men. She apparently nagged her father, George VI, for months before being allowed to. She was trained as a driver and mechanic and, as well as driving trucks, could strip down an engine.Second Subaltern Elizabeth Windsor was 18 at the time.

17.01.2022 One of Melbourne Trivias friends sent us this pic. Who are we to argue? It was taken on the Bruce Highway in Queensland.

15.01.2022 HOW THE AMPERSAND GOT ITS NAME Firstly, its shape evolved from the Latin word Et, meaning and (see the picture). For many years it was added to the alphabet in schools in Britain and the US, following the Z. When spelling out words in class, children were often taught to say the letters that are words - a and i - using a Latin phrase meaning by itself. The phrase is per se. When they recited the alphabet that had our symbol at the end, they would say, X, Y, Z, and per se and which translates as and, by itself, and. Its easy to see how children slurred the expression and, over a period it turned into ampersand.

15.01.2022 We now have two team trivia sessions on Sundays. Were continuing our popular 3 pm session and adding an evening session at 8 pm (after the children are in bed). Same questions at both. Same fee - $5.50 per person. Same rules - teams of up to eight people in different locations. Book at - https://www.trybooking.com/BLHNN

14.01.2022 Hot air trivia The first living things to fly in a hot air balloon were a sheep, a duck and a rooster. The test flight was to see how the sheep, a land animal, would cope with the flying and with the altitude (about 460 m/1,500 feet). The duck and the rooster were there as controls.

13.01.2022 Can you beat Team Cat Btch at trivia? Get a team together and find out at Thursday team trivia - 6.30 pm, online. Itll cost you $5.50 (including GST) per person to play. Book now!

13.01.2022 There are fingerprints detective constable - better check the local wildlife. Its not surprising that gorillas and chimpanzees have fingerprints, given their genetic closeness to humans. I guess we were all surprised to learn that koalas also have fingerprints, very like humans. So like humans that its hard to tell. Current thinking is that the dermal ridges (fingerprints) are there to help when climbing trees and stuff, although there are other theories including one that says they are to prevent blisters.

13.01.2022 HOW DOES WEEKLY TRIVIA WORK ONLINE? Pretty much like weekly trivia in real life. Its a team activity rather than a solo one. You get a team of 3 to 8 people together online. The questions are asked to the whole group, then each team is sent to its own online room where they can discuss the answers and socialise, then go back to the general screen. Theres a small charge per person to play. Contact Melbourne Trivia at [email protected] to join up or to ask for more info.

12.01.2022 MAKE A TEAM WITH YOUR OVERSEAS RELATIVES Join us - there's room for more teams in our weekly online trivia wherever their members are scattered. We already have teams with people in England and Australia.

12.01.2022 R2-D2 from Star Wars appeared in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He did - very briefly. The special effects team working on constructing the mothership that lands at the climax of the film wanted the exterior of the ship to look busy. As well as bits of machinery etc, they fixed R2-D2 upside down to part of the exterior. He is only visible in the film for a couple of seconds - if you know where to look. You dont get to see the tie fighter, model aeroplanes and, Im told, Jaws.

12.01.2022 MAKE A TEAM WITH YOUR OVERSEAS RELATIVES Join us - theres room for more teams in our weekly online trivia wherever their members are scattered. We already have teams with people in England and Australia.

11.01.2022 One of our hosts, the talented Rob Lloyd, is sacrificing his hair in the Worlds Greatest Shave to help raise money for the Leukemia Foundation. Hell be doing the deed publicly after his regular trivia at the Spread Eagle Hotel, Richmond at 6 pm on Sunday 6th March. If you cant make it, you can still make a donation at: http://my.leukaemiafoundation.org.au/robertlloyd

11.01.2022 More cooking inventions trivia The Microwave Oven. Like so many inventions, the microwave oven started with an accident. Percy Spencer was a self-taught physicist, engineer and inventor who became an expert on radar in the 1940s. Radar used magnetrons to produce the microwaves. In 1945 he was working on an active radar set when he noticed that a candy bar in his pocket was melting. Could it be microwaves from the magnetron that caused this? It certainly was. He and his col...leagues tried it on some popcorn it worked. Then they tried it on an egg it exploded in the face of one of the team! Spencer decided that maybe attaching the field generator to a metal box to contain the field was the way to go. It was. The rest is history. His company called the very first commercial microwave oven the Radarange. Thats the short version of the story, you can easily find details on the web.

10.01.2022 Were going online. Pub regulars, look for your weekly email. Others, watch this space.Were going online. Pub regulars, look for your weekly email. Others, watch this space.

10.01.2022 THE ASHES URN (well, the first one anyway) Its the cricket season and the most famous stuff about cricket (apart from the cheating) is the Ashes. Most of us know that the ashes are most probably of a burnt bail and that they and the little wooden urn theyre stored in were most probably presented as a joke by some women, to the English Cricket team, who were guests at the home of wealthy Australian, Sir William Clarke at Sunbury, outside Melbourne back in 1882. The bit t...hat interests me, however, is where the urn came from. SMELL IT I said it came from some women - one was Janet Clarke and the other we know about was the music teacher of Janet Clarke, Florence Morphy, who subsequently married the English team captain. It was this couple that took the Ashes urn back to England. So where did the urn come from? Or, more importantly, what was it. Simple! It was an empty perfume jar belonging to one of the women. I dont know if any traces of the smell still exist - probably not.

10.01.2022 This guys name was no joke. By law! Methodist minister, Canaan Banana became the first president of Zimbabwe in 1980. In 1982 a law was passed forbidding jokes about his name.

09.01.2022 Whats a Wiki? Wiki here, wiki there, wiki wiki everywhere Wiki Answers, WikiArt, Wikibooks, Wikidata, Wikimedia, Wikipedia Wiki So, what does the word mean?... 1. Its a Hawaiian word for fast or quick. Fly to Hawaii and take the airport shuttle bus and youll see Wiki Wiki on the front it means very fast. 2. Its an internet word meaning a collaborative website that allows any user to add to and edit. In 1995, a computer programmer, Ward Cunningham, wanted a quick system for computer programmers to exchange ideas and quickly edit each others contributions. His first idea for naming the site was QuickWeb but he remembered the Honolulu airport shuttle bus, and renamed the site WikiWikiWeb. Over the next few years, websites that were designed for the users to write the material and edit info on the site became more and more common until now there are hmmm I wonder if I can find out how many from Wikipedia.

08.01.2022 Central Park, NY - Big as a country. I knew Central Park in Manhattan was a big park - 3.4 square kilometres. I noticed this week that it is actually bigger than one of the worlds small countries. Monaco is a mere 2 square kilometres! Central Park does have a smaller population, however - there are nightly police patrols after the gates close.

07.01.2022 Up ya bum Moomba! As we mentioned in a post back in March 2013 during Melbournes Moomba Festival, it looks like the indigenous word Moomba translates as, Up your bum! Not as Melbourne City Council thought when they asked local indigenous leaders for something that meant, Lets get together and have fun Experts realised that it was unlikely that a two syllable word could mean all that and had a closer look. Heres a quote from one indigenous language expert... "In fact moom (mum) means buttocks or anus in various Victorian languages and ba is a suffix that can mean at, in, on etc. Presumably someone has tried to render up your bum in the vernacular." Australian Aboriginal Languages, Barry J.Blake.

07.01.2022 Did an American escape artist make the first powered flight in Australia? A lot of people think that Harry Houdini, the famous escapologist entertainer was first and quite a lot of websites think so too. I dont think so Heres what Ive found out. The first person to fly a powered aeroplane in Australia was an Englishman who arrived in Australia in 1909 intending to demonstrate flying. He took off in his Wright model A on 9th December at Victoria Racecourse in Sydney in fro...nt of several hundred onlookers. That first flight got about 5 metres off the ground and was forced to land due to engine difficulties after only travelling about 90 metres. However, he had achieved a controlled level flight, which makes him the first in my book. On 18th December he achieved about 275 metres but crashed trying to retrieve his hat which had blown off! Theres no doubt that the flights that Harry Houdini (real name Eric Weiss) made three months later at Diggers Rest in Victoria were more spectacular (see the Sydney Morning Herald item pictured). Just for the record, the first flight by an Australian in an Australian aircraft was by John Duigan later in 1910.

06.01.2022 Where is Santa at any given time on Christmas Eve? A joint Canadian and American defence organisation will tell you at http://www.noradsanta.org/ The site shows his progress across the world, starting as darkness falls at the International Date Line on 24th December. In recent times the site has become a little cluttered with cuteness, but you can ignore that once Santa starts out. Heres NORADs explanation of how it started. Its a good story... For 60 years, NORAD and its... predecessor, the Continental Air Defense Command (CONAD) have tracked Santas flight. The tradition began in 1955 after a Colorado Springs-based Sears Roebuck & Co. advertisement misprinted the telephone number for children to call Santa. Instead of reaching Santa, the phone number put kids through to the CONAD Commander-in-Chiefs operations "hotline." The Director of Operations at the time, Colonel Harry Shoup, had his staff check the radar for indications of Santa making his way south from the North Pole. Children who called were given updates on his location, and a tradition was born. In 1958, the governments of Canada and the United States created a bi-national air defense command for North America called the North American Aerospace Defense Command, also known as NORAD, which then took on the tradition of tracking Santa.

06.01.2022 Deodorant and writing on the wall were the basis of the grunge rock classic Smells like Teen Spirit. There are a lot of variations of the details, but what is certain is that punk singer Kathleen Hanna, a friend of Kurt Cobain, wrote Kurt smells like teen spirit on the wall one night. Kurt thought she was referring to his rebellious nature and, shortly after, built a song around it. What he didnt know was that Hanna was referring to a brand of deodorant aimed at teenage g...irls. Most sources say that she was having a dig at another member of her band, who Cobain was seeing, who used Teen Spirit deodorant. It seems that Kurt didnt discover that it was a deodorant until after the song was released. My sources all have slight variations was it a motel room wall or Cobains bedroom wall (most likely), spray paint (likely) or sharpie, was Hanna a girlfriend or just a friend. However, all agree on the basics. I looked at: Rolling Stone Magazine, theguardian.com; songfacts.com; upvenue.com; Wikipedia.

05.01.2022 ONLINE TEAM TRIVIA Play with your team without leaving home! Tuesday & Thursday evenings + Sunday arvo Message us for more infoONLINE TEAM TRIVIA Play with your team without leaving home! Tuesday & Thursday evenings + Sunday arvo Message us for more info

04.01.2022 A good start to our new weekly trivia night at the Metropolitan Hotel in the Melbourne CBD. A good mood in the room and some good laughs. Im caretaking as host until Comedy Festival ends and the excellent Nick Caddaye takes over. Were on every Thursday at 6.30 pm. Its worth booking if youre coming - ring 9670 1385. The Metropolitan is on the corner of William and Little Lonsdale Streets.

02.01.2022 Blue whales bigger than the dinosaurs? So, I read somewhere that the blue whale is bigger than any of the dinosaurs were. But, as I read it on Facebook, I instantly doubted it and went looking for the truth and found that, yes, its mainly true The blue whale is undoubtedly heavier than any of the known dinosaurs. At around 180 tonnes, it is over double the estimated weight of even the biggest sauropods. ... However, some sauropods were longer than the blue whale argentinosaurus is estimated to have a skeletal length of around 39 metres while the blue whale is about 30 metres long. If it raised its long neck, it would have been taller (but shorter?). So, by its sheer bulk, it seems to me that the blue whale is in fact the largest animal ever to exist on Earth.

01.01.2022 People have been cooking and eating bread since the Upper Paleolithic era (about 30,000 years ago) and toasting bread since at least the time of the Romans. The first electric toaster was invented by Alan MacMasters in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1893 and the first pop up toaster was invented by Charles Strite in Minnesota, USA in 1919 reportedly because Strite got sick of eating burnt toast. Pre-sliced bread came even later with Otto Rohwedder in Iowa, USA created the first mechanical bread slicer in 1928 and the plastic clips commonly used to close bags of sliced bread werent invented until 1952 when American inventor Floyd G. Paxton had a flash of inspiration when he opened a bag of airline peanuts and realised there wasnt any way of reclosing it.