FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, JANUARY 31, 2012 by Paul Paquet on Creators.com

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Monday, June 17 Chinese checkers is neither Chinese nor checkers. It is an American version of Halma, a British game with a Greek name that means "a leap." Interestingly, the game was introduced to China by the Japanese. There is a game called Chinese …Read more. Saturday, June 15 What Oriental Republic gets its name from the Guarani language word meaning "river where the painted birds live"? That's nowhere in Asia. It's Uruguay. The "Oriental" part refers to its location to the east of the Uruguay River. …Read more. Friday, June 14 The first major world leader to call for government action against climate change was ... Margaret Thatcher. A chemist by training, she understood the science when it was presented to her by an advisor named Crispin Tickell. She gave passionate …Read more. Thursday, June 13 The Aztec people were said to have come from the Kingdom of Aztlan, found somewhere to the north. In the 1960s, Chicano civil rights activists started referring to the land the U.S. took from Mexico as "Aztlan." (Mexico lost about half its …Read more.

FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, JANUARY 31, 2012

Richard Pryor's first film was going to be "Uncle Tom's Fairy Tales," about a white man on trial for raping a black woman. Yikes. Not surprisingly, the film, directed by Penelope Spheeris, never saw release, and it may be gone forever. Pryor's first wife apparently shredded most of the only negative, although a small bit of it appeared in a 2005 retrospective when the Directors Guild of America honored Pryor. This led to Pryor suing Spheeris and his own daughter, Rain. The suit was still pending when Pryor died in 2005.

Steven Schirripa wrote "A Goomba's Guide to Life." You may remember him as the goomba Bobby Bacala on what TV show?

A) "All in the Family"

B) "Everybody Loves Raymond"

C) "Jersey Shore"

D) "The Sopranos"

Previous answer: Look back in anger.

TRIVIA FANS: Send the trivia questions you've always wanted answered, or original TriviaBits ideas of your own, with your full name and hometown, to Paul Paquet at paul@triviahalloffame.com or visit him online at www.triviahalloffame.com.

Paul Paquet has been writing trivia since the early 1990s and has written roughly 100,000 questions.