Trivia Bits for October 7 by Paul Paquet on Creators.com

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RELEASE: FEBRUARY 18, 2012 Tim Harper was a campus reporter for the Drake University Times-Delphic in Iowa, when he broke the biggest story of his career on Sept. 17, 1969. Except that none of it was true. That year, Paul McCartney was out of the public eye, as he mulled the …Read more. RELEASE: FEBRUARY 17, 2012 Henry James proofread the galleys for the 1903 edition of "The Ambassadors," which had been serialized in North American Review. Unfortunately, NAR had edited it down, and James wanted to restore the original version for the book. In the …Read more. RELEASE: FEBRUARY 16, 2012 British post-punk group Joy Division's music wasn't especially joyful. And the origin of the name is even less so. As the story goes, the Nazis plucked the prettiest women from concentration camps and employed them in brothels for preferred soldiers.…Read more. RELEASE: FEBRUARY 15, 2012 Before Mickey Mouse — and before he knew much about intellectual property laws — Walt Disney created Oswald the Lucky Rabbit in 1928 for Universal. When he and Universal parted company, Disney lost Oswald, which always rankled the …Read more.

Trivia Bits for October 7

Today would have marked the 60th anniversary of the division of Germany into East Germany and West Germany, or as they were officially called, the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany. Actually, the Federal Republic of Germany is still around. When communism collapsed in East Germany, it was absorbed by West Germany. East Germany had been East Berlin plus the Soviet Zone of Occupied Germany. West Germany was made up of the zones occupied by the Americans, British and French.

The Prime Meridian runs through London, but the stubborn French kept using a line that ran through Paris until the 1910s. This was the so-called Rose Line that Dan Brown got all excited over in "The Da Vinci Code." The actual line runs through the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, near London.

It is marked with a laser beam. The line was picked at the 1884 International Meridian Conference, called by President Chester Arthur, who therefore did at least one thing in office that you now know about.

What country is crossed by the most lines of latitude?

A) Canada

B) Chile

C) Indonesia

D) Russia

Previous answer: A "Bajan" is somebody or something from Barbados.

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. For more, visit triviahalloffame.com or e-mail him at paul@triviahalloffame.com.

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