Musings of a Dead Parrot

THIS WEEK'S QUESTIONS
1. Which Muppet has a wife named Astoria? the logical choice is Waldorf
2. A community at Sabbathday Lake, Maine, is today home to the last remaining members of what group? sounds like a simple living religious group like the Amish.
3. What did TV Guide magazine do on October 17, 2005 that Rolling Stone later did on October 30, 2008? changed its size to match the standard of other magazines. I think TV Guide grew while Rolling Stone shrank.
4. What number followed the name of all of the spacecraft capsules flown by the Mercury astronauts? there were 7 Mercury astronauts. Was it Mercury 7?
5. What famous woman is the sister of Oregon State basketball coach Craig Robinson? Michelle Robinson Obama
6. Pashmina wool comes from a breed of what animal? isn't it from an angora goat?
7. What unusual distinction is shared by all these celebrities? Sarah Ferguson, Morgan Freeman, Harrison Ford, Arnold Palmer, Ron Paul, John Travolta, Chuck Woolery, Steve Wozniak. The key here for me is Arnold Palmer. I tested various things I knew about him until one stuck - airplane pilot. They are all licensed pilots. See this link.

LAST WEEK'S ANSWERS
1. The Saffir-Simpson scale assigns the traditional five categories to what? Thanks to Mr. Saffir, an engineer, and Mr. Simpson, a meteorologist, hurricanes are now "Category 1" to "Category 5." correct
2. British king George I, as well as most of the Plantagenets, including Richard the Lionheart, were notable for not being able to do what? Speak English! George I was a German import, like Beck's. The Plantagenets (with exceptions, like Henry I) were only fluent in French and occasionally Latin. Mon dieu!
3. The title of the Mark David Chapman film Chapter 27 refers to an imaginary final chapter of what novel? The Catcher in the Rye, the novel that Chapman was famously carrying when he shot John Lennon. I did not know this footnote to rock and roll history.
4. Who is on pace to become the world's first billionaire athlete by 2010? Tiger Woods--and that's a billion in earnings *only*, so you don't have to worry about what the crappy market is doing to Tiger's 401(k) and, therefore, Forbes's projection. correct
5. Artists traditionally orient their studios so that windows and skylights face which direction? Artists need plentiful indirect light that doesn't change during the day, so they use a northern light source when they can. A few people pointed out that this is true in the Northern Hemisphere only; I figured the word "traditionally" takes care of that, since the fine-arts tradition in the Northern Hemisphere is centuries older than it is Down Under. Quick, name one world-famous Southern Hemisphere painter! Half credit if you said "That guy that was always painting Elle MacPherson naked in the movie Sirens." traditionally not a great question
6. What singer claims that she took her stage name as a salute to Steve Buscemi's performance in Reservoir Dogs? Pink sometimes tells interviewers she's named for "Mr. Pink" in the Tarantino film. Sometimes she also tells a more, uh, graphic story.
7. What unusual distinction is shared by these U.S. states, and no others? Hawaii, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North and South Dakota, North and South Carolina, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and sort of Oregon? As I write this, I'm actually a little doubtful that anyone's going to get this one right, even with the hints I added ("sort of" Oregon, all the two-word states but Rhode Island represented). These are the states that have different names (differently spelled, anyway) in Spanish. I noticed this while looking at a bilingual map on a recent plane flight, thought it might make a good question. Well, maybe not. What about Texas and Tejas?