Five Minute Trivia

Gerardus Mercator had a dream. He wanted to make a map of the world that people could actually use to get from one place to another. He was so successful that we're still using it 500 years later. It's even on our smartphones. But his projection was not without controversy. While it may have made the world easier to navigate, it came at the cost of making the world look ridiculous. Have a listen. And also visit the show n...

Edsel Ford was the only son of Henry Ford, founder of Ford Motor Company. He became president of Ford but sadly died of cancer in 1943. To honor his memory, Ford Motor Company launched a new car division 17 years after his death and unveiled it in a live Sunday night event featuring Bing Crosby, Louis Armstrong, and others. Did the Ford Edsel do justice to Edsel Ford's memory? Listener, it did not. Hear all about it on this we...

The modernist poet TS Eliot won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948. But before he got famous for The Waste Land and The Hollow Men, he wrote a bunch of silly poems for his godchildren and compiled them in a book called Old Possum's Guide to Practical Cats. An aspiring composer named Andrew Lloyd Webber got a hold of them and decided to turn TS Eliot's musings about Growltiger, Skimbleshanks, and Mr. Mistoffelees into ...

This week, we're taking on the human body with a show about what blood is, what it's made of, and why it's so important. We also have a special cohost who calls himself Hemo the Magnificent. Hemo premiered in a 1957 educational film produced by  Frank Capra (It's a Wonderful Life, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington) but never found work again. We're pleased to welcome him back to the world of showbiz and we assur...

Ernest Hemingway was a soldier, romantic, adventurer, and...oh yeah, something of a writer. His prose was spare and direct and spoke volumes without saying much at all. The Old Man and the Sea is perhaps the best example of that. In this novella, Hemingway talks about courage, perseverance, and struggle through the story of a fisherman's struggle with the catch of a lifetime. This week, we're talking all about it.

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President Abraham Lincoln commissioned the United States Secret Service to safeguard the country's financial infrastructure from the scourge of counterfeit currency. They've been protecting presidents since Theodore Roosevelt and, since Truman's time, assigning them weird nicknames like Rawhide and Searchlight. Their code name for Jimmy Carter's budget director was Dumbo. They also have aliases for buildings, ai...

In the concluding episode of our mini-series on WW1, we're talking about one of those rare times in history when goodwill and humanity triumphed in a place where you'd least expect to find it. In this case, the brutal trenches of the western front. On that first Christmas, men on both sides spontaneously gave up the fighting for one day.

Thanks to Gregor Quendel for the string arrangement of "We Wish You a Merry Chris...

The writer Jean Dutourd called it "the greatest event of the twentieth century." Was he talking about the moon landing? The moonwalk? Nope. In 1914, the French army urgently needed to get troops to the Marne river valley, just 30 miles away from Paris, to stop the rapidly advancing Germans from besieging the city. In desperation, they turned to the city's taxis. What followed is now known as the Miracle of the Marne....

It was called the war to end all wars, which is perhaps the dumbest thing said by anyone about anything. But then, pretty much everything about the first World War is kind of dumb. The dumb network of alliances that made it inevitable. The dumb royal who took a vacation in the one city on Earth that hated his guts. His dumb driver who took a wrong turn. The dumb anarchist who shot the dumb royal. Really, the only smart thing about ...

Da-da-da-dum...it's probably the most famous musical opening in history. But...why? How did Beethoven's Fifth Symphony become so much more well known than the Fourth or the Sixth? On this week's show, learn about the piece of music that helped end World War 2, was covered by Chuck Berry, and is currently floating through interstellar space.

Thanks to Gregor Quendel for the piano arrangement of Beethoven's Fifth S...

Aristotle classified living things by how much air, water, earth, or fire they possessed. The Gilbert and Sullivan operetta The Pirates of Penzance brought us animals, vegetables, and minerals. It took a former cobbler's apprentice named Carl Linnaeus to give us the current system that organizes every living thing on earth. This week's show talks about how that's done--and gives us a pretty cool mnemonic to remember ...

In the late 19th century, a Russian eye doctor had a vision for bringing peace and understanding to the world. He created a new language that would unite everyone under a common tongue. He called it Esperanto, and it would eventually become the official language of the post-WW1 League of Nations. Learn all about it in this week's show.

Thank you to Kevin Luce and Freesound for the recording of Le Marsellaise featured in this ep...