Quick quote quiz

Who said, “A man has to be Joe McCarthy to be called ruthless. All a woman has to do is put you on hold.”

Quick quote quiz

Who said, "Dumb blonde jokes don't bother me, because I know I'm not dumb. And I know I'm not blonde"?

Just wanted to let everyone know that I haven't abandoned this blog, I just can't decide what to do with it now that my March trivia game is over.

Physicist

I split the atom, and my partner got a Nobel Prize for it.
I was born in Austria in 1878 to a family of non-practicing Jews. As a young adult, I was baptized Lutheran.
I entered the University of Vienna in 1901 and obtained my PhD in 1906. Then I was drawn to the study of radioactivity.
In 1917, while I was still in my thirties, I was given my own physics section in the prestigious Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry. In 1934, my partner, Otto Hahn, a chemist, and I investigated the very heart of the atom, its nucleus.
Unfortunately, my rise in the scientific world coincided with Adolf Hitler’s political rise.
Although I was of Jewish descent, I had been baptized a Protestant and loved my country. Nevertheless, I was dismissed from teaching and my name was suppressed. I hung on without protest, hoping the unpleasantness would be temporary. But as restrictions on "non-Aryan" academics tightened, I finally slipped across the border with only a small valise carrying a few summer clothes. I was 59. I continued to advise Hahn through letters from Sweden.
At my direction from afar, Hahn and his assistant Fritz Strassmann more closely analyzed the byproducts of the neutron-bombardment experiments. To their amazement, the elements weren't heavier than uranium, but lighter. "Perhaps you can come up with some sort of fantastic explanation," Hahn wrote me. Within days, collaborating with my nephew Otto Robert Frisch, also a noted physicist, I worked out a theoretical model of nuclear fission.
Hahn published the chemical evidence for fission without listing me as a co-author, possibly because of the political situation in Nazi Germany, or possibly because he convinced himself that he had not been inspired or guided by me.
Historically, I came to be known as Hahn's junior assistant, when in reality I had been his equal partner at the Institute for 30 years.
With my name missing from the key experimental paper on nuclear fission (previously Hahn and I always shared the credit for our joint efforts), Hahn alone received the 1944 Nobel Prize for chemistry.
With the passing of time, my reputation was resurrected, and in 1966 Hahn, Fritz Strassmann, and Itogether were awarded the Enrico Fermi Award. I also received the Max Planck Medal of the German Physics Society in 1949.
My legacy is instead a permanent abode on the periodic table. In 1994 an international commission agreed that element 109, artificially created in Germany by slamming bismuth with iron ions, will be named after me.

Runner

I won the Badwater ultra marathon in 2002 and 2003. The Badwater ultra marathon, considered the world’s toughest running event, is a 135 mile (215 km) course starting at 282 feet (85 m) below sea level in the Badwater Basin, in California's Death Valley, and ending at an elevation of 8360 feet (2548 m) at Whitney Portal, the trailhead to Mount Whitney. There is a cumulative elevation gain of 13,000 feet (4,000 m). It usually takes place in July, when the weather conditions are most extreme and temperatures over 120 F (49 C) in the shade are not uncommon.
The first time I won, in 2002, I finished over four and half hours before the second place winner, Darren Worts, who was ten years younger than me. I was 41.

Primatologists

1- I am the world's leading authority on orangutans, and have spent over thirty years in Borneo observing them in the wild. I am a professor at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, and 'Professor Extraordinaire' at Indonesia's Universitas Nasional in Jakarta. I am also president of the Orangutan Foundation International in Los Angeles, California.
As for my personal life, after many years in the field, I divorced my spouse and married a scantily-clad native.

2- I spent many years studying mountain gorillas in Rwanda. When I went to Africa for the first time, I had my appendix removed preemptively so that I wouldn't suffer appendicitis while in the jungle. I was murdered in 1985, probably by poachers, but my murder remains unsolved. My story was told in the dramatic 1988 Movie Gorillas in the Mist.

3- I have spent 45 years studying chimpanzees. One of my major contributions to the field of primatology was the discovery of tool-making in chimpanzees. Though many animals had been observed using "tools", previously, only humans were thought to make tools, and tool-making was considered the defining difference between humans and other animals. This discovery convinced several scientists to reconsider their definition of being human.

Bogeyman

I am famous for being an atheist, likely the most famous and most-despised atheist in America. My name is constantly circling on spurious Internet petitions although I have been dead since 1995.
I was born in 1919 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I graduated from Rossford High School in Rossford, Ohio. I enlisted and served in the military in Europe during WWII. I got a BA from Ashland College (now University) and a law degree from South Texas College of Law.
During the 1950s I attended Socialist Workers Party meetings while living in Baltimore townhouse with my sons, parents and brother. In 1959 I applied for Soviet citizenship. The following year, after receiving no response, my two sons and I traveled by ship to Europe with the intention of defecting to the Soviet embassy in Paris and living in the Soviet Union. The Soviets refused us entry, and we returned to Baltimore in 1960.
One day my thirteen-year-old son William told me that he could no longer, in good conscience, participate in reciting coerced prayers in school. We talked it over, and William decided that he would ask the school to excuse him from the daily ritual. The school refused.
In 1960 I filed a lawsuit against the Baltimore school district in which I claimed it was unconstitutional for my son William to participate in Bible readings in public schools. In 1963 this suit reached the United States Supreme Court which voted 8-1 in my favor, effectively banning "coercive" public prayer and Bible-reading at public schools in the United States.
Following the Supreme Court decision, I founded American Atheists, a nationwide movement which defends the civil rights of non-believers, works for the separation of church and state, and addresses issues of First Amendment public policy.
In 1995 I disappeared mysteriously from my house and there was speculation that I had run off with hundreds of thousands of dollars of my organization’s money. However, several months later police were able to prove definitely that I had been murdered by an ex-convict who worked in our offices.
I achieved posthumous notoriety among users of the Internet through an urban legend. An e-mail claimed I was attempting to get TV programs such as Touched by an Angel and all TV programs that mention God taken off the air. It cited a petition RM-2493 to the FCC which had nothing to do with me, and which was denied in 1975, concerning the prevention of educational radio channels being used for religious broadcasting. A variant acknowledging my death was circulating in 2003, still warning about a threat to Touched by An Angel months after the program's last episode had been aired. In 2006 similar e-mails were still being reported, eleven years after my disappearance and long after my confirmed death.

Surfer

I learned to surf before I could walk, and was participating in surfing competitions at age four. When I was thirteen years old, I suffered a shark attack and lost my left arm at the shoulder.
The shark took a chunk out of my surfboard that was about 16 inches across and 8 inches deep, suggesting that the shark was 12-15 feet long. In less than a month I was back in the water, and I returned to competition in just ten weeks, placing fifth in my age group in a National Scholastic Surfing Association meet in Kaiua-Kona, Hawaii.
I won the 2004 ESPY Award from ESPN for Best Comeback Athlete as well as a special Courage Award at the 2007 Teen Choice Awards.

Journalist

I was born in 1864 in a small town in Pennsylvania. I aspired to be a journalist, and I landed my first newspaper job with the Pittsburgh Dispatch. Dissatisfied with my assignments, I took the initiative and traveled to Mexico to serve as a foreign correspondent.
I spent nearly half a year reporting the lives and customs of the Mexican people; my dispatches were later published in book form as Six Months in Mexico.
Mexican authorities threatened me with arrest for a report I wrote critical of president Porfirio Diaz, and I left Mexico.
In 1887 I moved on to bigger things in New York City.
My first assignment for the New York City newspaper The World was an article on an insane asylum, for which I posed as a mentally ill patient and got myself committed. I spent ten days inside an asylum before my employers came to let me out. The story embarrassed New York City officials into taking action. A grand jury launched an investigation into conditions at the asylum, inviting me to assist. The jury's report recommended the changes I proposed, and its call for increased funds for care of the insane prompted an $850,000 increase in the budget of the Department of Public Charities and Corrections. My report was later published in book form as Ten Days in a Madhouse.
In 1873, French author Jules Verne had published a novel called Around the World in 80 Days. In it, a fictional hero named Phileas Fogg circles the globe on a bet. But no real person had attempted the feat. In 1889, I proposed to attempt it as a publicity stunt for The World. The paper’s business manager suggested that another reporter could do it better. My reply: "Very well. Start the man and I'll start the same day for some other newspaper and beat him." I got the assignment.
Newspaper sales skyrocketed as New Yorkers, then the rest of the country, bought copies of The World to keep track of my whereabouts. After a couple of near-disasters in catching departing steamships, I arrived back in New York in 72 days, 6 hours, and 11 minutes — beating Phileas Fogg's time by more than a week, and setting a world record for circling the earth. Naturally, my resulting book was titled Around the World in 72 Days.
100 years ago you would have been hard pressed to find an American who hadn’t heard of me. Now few Americans know my name.
A character very much like me appeared in the 1965 Blake Edward’s movie the Great Race.

Actor, Inventor

I was born in Vienna, Austria in 1913. I went into the film business as a teenager, first as a production assistant and then as an actor, and became famous in the 1932 Czech movie Exstase (Ecstasy), which was banned in Germany by chancellor Adolf Hitler because I was a Jew.
My later movie successes include Tortilla Flat and White Cargo in 1942. I acted in approximately 35 movies, and produced the 1946 movie the Strange Woman. Possibly my biggest movie was 1949’s Samson and Delilah, though I turned down roles in Gaslight and Casablanca.
I was married six times. My star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame is at 6247 Hollywood Boulevard.
During World War II, I got together with the composer George Antheil and, driven by our shared desire to help defeat the Nazis, we put our heads together to invent the earliest known form of the telecommunications method known as “frequency hopping,” which used a piano roll to change between 88 frequencies and was intended to make radio-guided torpedoes harder for enemies to detect or to jam. America’s generals were not interested in this invention from Hollywood people, but our method received U.S. patent number 2,292,387 on August 11, 1942, under the name “Secret Communications System.” Frequency hopping is now widely used in cellular phones and other modern technology.
Frequency hopping, also known as spread spectrum, is used in “wireless” LANS, integrated bar code scanners, palmtop computers, radio modem devices for warehousing, digital dispatch, digital cellular telephone communications, etc., and its use is on the verge of potentially explosive commercial development.
However, neither Antheil nor I profited from it, because our patent was allowed to expire decades before the modern wireless boom.

Scientist

I was born in December of 1815, the only legitimate child of the Romantic poet Lord Byron. Five weeks after my birth, my parents divorced and my father left England forever, to die eight years later without my ever having met him.
My mother, who wished me to be unlike my father, reared me to be a mathematician and scientist. I excelled at mathematics and was an accomplished linguist and musician. However, my poetic nature and imagination shone through even in my scientific endeavors.
At a dinner party I attended as a teenager, I heard of Charles Babbage’s ideas for a new calculating engine which he called the Analystical Engine, what we nowadays call a computer.
Charles Babbage worked on plans for this new engine and reported on the developments at a seminar in Turin, Italy in the autumn of 1841. An Italian, Menabrea, wrote a summary of what Babbage described and published an article in French about the development. I translated Menabrea's article. When I showed Babbage my translation he suggested that I add my own notes, which turned out to be three times the length of the original article. In my article, published in 1843, my prescient comments included my predictions that such a machine might be used to compose complex music, to produce graphics, and would be used for both practical and scientific use. I was correct.
I suggested to Babbage writing a plan for how the engine might calculate Bernoulli numbers. This plan, is now regarded as the first "computer program." A software language developed by the U.S. Department of Defense was named in my honor in 1979.
I appear as a character in William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's science fiction novel, "The Difference Engine.”

Surgeon

I was born in 1832 in Oswego, New York.
I taught school to earn enough money to pay my way through Syracuse Medical College where I graduated as a doctor in 1855.
At the outbreak of the American Civil War, I volunteered for the Union Army as a civilian. At first, I was only allowed to practice as a nurse. As a nurse, I served at the First Battle of Bull Run (Manassas), July 21, 1861 and at the Patent Office Hospital in Washington, D.C. I also worked as an unpaid field surgeon near the Union front lines, including the Battle of Fredericksburg and in Chattanooga after the Battle of Chickamauga. Finally, I was awarded a commission as a "Contract Acting Assistant Surgeon (civilian)" by the Army of the Cumberland in September, 1863, becoming a U.S. Army Surgeon.
I was later appointed assistant surgeon of the 52nd Ohio Infantry. During this service, I frequently crossed battle lines, treating civilians. On April 10, 1864, I was captured by Confederate troops and arrested as a spy (I may have allowed myself to be captured in order to spy for the Union Army). I was sent to Richmond and remained there until August 12, 1864 when I was released as part of a prisoner exchange. I went on to serve during the Battle of Atlanta and later as supervisor of a prison in Louisville, Kentucky, and head of an orphanage in Tennessee. After the war, I was recommended for the Congressional Medal of Honor by Generals William Tecumseh Sherman and George Henry Thomas. On November 11, 1865, President Andrew Johnson signed a bill to present me the medal, specifically for my services at the First Battle of Bull Run (Manassas).
After the war, I became a writer and lecturer,
In 1917, the U.S. Congress, after revising the standards for award of the medal so that it could only be given to those who had been involved in "actual combat with an enemy", revoked more than 900 previously-awarded medals, including mine and William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody’s. Although ordered to return the medal, I refused to do so and continued to wear it until my death.
President Jimmy Carter restored my medal posthumously in 1977.
In World War II, a Liberty ship was named for me.

Monarch, Saint

I was born in 1374 and reigned as monarch from 1384 to 1399.
I spoke Latin, Bosnian, Hungarian, Croatian, Polish, German, and was interested in the arts, music, science, and court life.
My father, Louis I of Hungary, had made an arrangement in 1364 with his former father-in-law the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV to inter-marry their future children, and thus I was destined to marry before I was born.
At age ten I was crowned King of Poland. After my coronation, my pre-natal wedding plans were assailed by various factions, and I ended up married at the age of twelve to a pagan Lithuanian royal who adopted Latin Christianity in order to unite Lithuania with Poland.
Although young, I was actively engaged in my kingdom's political, diplomatic and cultural life and acted as the guarantor of Władysław’s promises to reclaim Poland’s lost territories. In 1387 I led two successful military expeditions to reclaim the province of Halych in Red Ruthenia, which had been retained by Hungary in a dynastic dispute.
I sponsored writers and artists and donated much of my personal wealth, including my royal insignia, to charity, for purposes including the founding of hospitals. I financed a scholarship for twenty Lithuanians to study at Charles’s University in Prague to help strengthen Christianity in their country, to which purpose I also founded a bishopric in Vilnius. Among my most notable cultural legacies was the restoration of the Academy of Kraków, which in 1817 was renamed Jagiellonian University. I had many Latin books translated into Polish for my people.
No sooner did I die than I was considered a saint. Numerous legends about miracles were recounted to justify my sainthood.
I often prayed before a large black crucifix hanging in the north aisle of Wawel Cathedral. During one of these prayers, the Christ on the cross is said to have spoken to me. The crucifix is still there, with my relics beneath it.
According to another legend, I took a piece of jewelry from my foot and gave it to a poor stonemason who had begged for my help. When I left, he noticed my footprint in the plaster floor of his workplace, even though the plaster had already hardened before my visit. The supposed footprint can still be seen in one of Kraków's churches.
Despite widespread veneration for my memory in Poland, it was only in 1997 that I was canonized.

Athlete

I earned more medals, broke more records, and swept more tournaments in more sports than any other athlete in the twentieth century.
I was born in Texas to Norwegian immigrant parents in 1913. My brothers nicknamed me “Babe” because I hit so many home runs in baseball games. I competed in track and field, basketball, baseball, billiards, tennis, diving, and swimming.
While playing basketball for Beaumont High School in 1930, I was offered $75 a month to work for Employers Casualty Company of Dallas so that I could play for its team. I earned AAU All-American honors from 1930-’32. After taking up track in 1930, I won four events is an AAU competition.
I single-handedly won the 1932 AAU championships, which served as Olympics qualifying, on July 16th in Evanston, Ill. The sole representative of Employers Casualty, I scored 30 points, eight more than the runner-up team, which had 22 athletes. In a span of three hours I competed in eight of ten events, winning five outright and tying for first in the high jump. I set world records in javelin, 800-meter hurdles, high jump and baseball throw.
In the 1932 Olympics Games, I set two world records and won two gold medals in the javelin and 80-meter hurdles, plus a silver medal in the high jump.
After taking up golf in the early ‘30s, I went on to win 55 amateur and professional events. In 1947 I won 17 tournaments in a row. From 1940 to 1950 I won every available golf title. After turning pro, I won 10 majors. I lost only once in seven years of competition.

Scientist, Environmentalist

I was born on May 27th 1907, near Springdale, Pennsylvania.
I graduated in 1929 with magna cum laude honors. I continued my studies in zoology and genetics at the Johns Hopkins University, earning a master's degree in zoology in 1932.
I taught zoology at Johns Hopkins and at the University of Maryland for several years, continuing to study towards my doctoral degree, particularly at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.
In 1936 I outscored all other applicants on the civil service exam and was hired by the Bureau of Fisheries for a full-time, professional position, as a junior aquatic biologist.
My second book was The Sea Around Us. It remained on the New York Times bestseller list for 86 weeks, was abridged by Reader's Digest, won the 1952 National Book Award, and resulted in my being awarded two honorary doctorates. It was also made into a documentary film that was 61 minutes long and won an Oscar.
My most famous book, Silent Spring, was published in 1962. It was widely read (especially after its selection by the Book-of-the-Month Club and an endorsement by Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas), spent several weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, and inspired widespread public concerns with pesticides and pollution of the environment. Silent Spring facilitated the ban of the pesticide DDT in 1972 in the United States.
The book claimed detrimental effects of pesticides on the environment, particularly on birds. I accused the chemical industry of spreading disinformation, and public officials of accepting industry claims uncritically. I proposed a biotic approach to pest control as an alternative to DDT, claiming that DDT had been found to cause thinner egg shells and result in reproductive problems and death.
Silent Spring has made many lists of the best nonfiction books of the twentieth century. In the Modern Library List of Best 20th-Century Nonfiction it was at #5, and it was at #78 in the conservative National Review's list of the 100 best non-fiction books of the century. However, it was a "honorable mention" on conservative Human Events' "Ten Most Harmful Books of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries". Most recently, Silent Spring was named one of the 25 Greatest Science Books of All-Time by the editors of Discover Magazine.
In Silent Spring's re-release five years ago, former Vice President Al Gore wrote in the book's introduction that it marked "the beginning of the environmental movement" and showed the power of one person.
And in 1999, Time magazine named me one of its 100 most influential people of the 20th century.

Pirate

I may have been the most successful pirate in history. At my height, I commanded 2,000 ships.
I assumed command of my pirate fleet in the early 1800’s. We plundered the South China Sea, and had a massive banking system of our own.
I developed a code of laws that were strictly enforced. For example, it was a capital offense to steal from a village that help my pirates. It was a capital offense to steal from the treasury. Raping female captives was a capital offense. Even if there was fornication with a female captive at her supposed consent, the sailor was beheaded and the female cast overboard with a weight tied to her legs. If a sailor was absent without leave, or deserted and was caught, one of his ears was cut off and he was shown off through the squadron as an example.
My fleet committed many varying kinds of piracy, from the traditional weak merchant ships, to sacking and pillaging villages inland along rivers. The Chinese government* tried to destroy the pirates in a series of battles in January 1808, however all they managed to do was to give the pirates even more ships for the fleet. The damage was great enough that the Government had to use private fishing vessels.
The government eventually became threatening enough that I asked for a pardon and received it. I died at the age of 60 in 1844, running a brothel and gambling house in Guangzhou.
*my history is weak, not sure exactly what government was in place at the time.

Entertainer and Diplomat

I was born in 1928 and began my career three years later. I starred in over 40 films during the 1930s. For four solid years, I was the top-grossing box office star in America. I was the first recipient of the special Juvenile Performer Academy Award in 1935. Seventy years later, I was still the youngest performer ever to receive this honor. I was also the youngest actor to add foot and hand prints to the forecourt at Grauman’s Chinese Theater.
In my career in entertainment, I starred in 14 Short films, 43 Feature Films and over 25 storybook movies in a career that spanned from 1931 until 1961.
President Richard Nixon appointed me as a US Delegate to the United Nations in 1969, which began my long career in U.S. International Relations.
I was appointed American ambassador to Ghana in 1974 and served through 1976. In 1976, I became the Chief of Protocol of the United States, which put in me charge of all State Department ceremonies, visits, gifts to foreign leaders and co-ordination of protocol issues with all US embassies and consulates. I was ambassador to Czechoslovakia from 1989 to 1992 and witnessed the Velvet Revolution. In 1987 I was designated the first Honorary Foreign Service Officer in US history by then US Secretary of State, George Schultz.
I received honorary doctorates from Santa Clara University and Lehigh University, a Fellowship from the College of Notre Dame, and a Chubb Fellowship from Yale University.
In the late 60's I was a member of the U.S. Citizens' Space Task Force, chaired by the U.S. Vice President. We discussed the future of the space program for the next decade. We were very much in favor of an unmanned space "Grand Tour," and development and building of a space station.

WWII Spy

I attended the best schools and colleges on the east coast but wanted to continue my studies in Europe. I studied in France, Germany and Austria, finally landing a job as a consular official at the American embassy in Warsaw. I accidentally shot myself in the left leg in a hunting accident in Turkey, and it was eventually amputated from the knee down and replaced with a prosthetic wooden leg I nicknamed Cuthbert. I resigned from the Department of State in 1939.
The same year I was in Paris as war arrived there. I joined the Ambulance Service before the fall of France and ended up in Vichy-controlled territory when the fighting stopped in the summer of 1940. I made my way to London and volunteered for Britain’s newly formed Special Operations Executive, which sent me back to Vichy in August 1941. I spent the next 15 months there, helping to coordinate the activities of the French underground in Vichy and the occupied zone of France. When the Germans suddenly seized all of France in November 1942, I escaped to Spain by crossing the Pyrenees mountains on foot.
Back in London in July 1943 I was quietly made a Member of the Order of the British Empire. The British had wanted to recognize my contribution with a higher honor but were afraid it might compromise my identity as I was then still active as an operative.
In 1944 I joined the Office of Strategic Services. In March 1944, after mastering Morse code and wireless radio operation, I returned to France as an operative. The OSS landed me from a British motor torpedo boat in Brittany (my artificial leg kept me from parachuting in). I eluded the Gestapo and contacted the French Resistance in central France. I mapped drop zones for supplies and commandos from England, found safe houses, and linked up with a Jedburgh team after the allied forces landed at Normandy. I helped train three battalions of Resistance forces to wage guerrilla warfare against the Germans and kept up a stream of valuable reporting until Allied troops overtook my small band in September.
The Gestapo once declared me "the most dangerous of all Allied spies" who had to be destroyed.
In 1945 Wild Bill Donovan personally awarded me the Distinguished Service Cross.

Pilot

I was the first pilot to make a successful, non-stop, solo flight from England to North America "the hard way," i.e. from east to west, against the headwinds.
I was born in England and when I was three years old the family moved to Kenya. My childhood was spent on a horse farm, and I learned to ride horses, speak some African languages, and hunt game with a spear. In my youth I had a successful career as a horse trainer.
Later I developed an interest in aviation, got a commercial pilot's license, and because a bush pilot.
In 1936 I flew a borrowed, single-engine Vega Gull with a 200-horsepower engine and no radio equipment from London to Nova Scotia, where I crash landed. A frozen fuel line prevented me from landing in New York city, as intended.
In 1942 I published a book about the deed, West with the Night, which became a best-seller. Ernest Hemingway said about it that I "can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves writers."
The International Astronomical Union honored me by naming a Venusian crater after me.
For the answer, click on "comments." The answer will appear in a new window.