Musings of a Dead Parrot

THIS WEEK'S QUESTIONS
1. What career does Hermey the Misfit Elf think he'd prefer to toymaking? dentist
2. What movie was adapted from the book In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash? This must be a Xmas movie. Die Hard? Home Alone? Miracle on 34th Street? My first instinct says It's A Wonderful Life.
3. What botanist sent a namesake Christmas symbol back to the U.S. in 1828 while serving as the first U.S. minister to Mexico? Poinsette or some similar spelling
4. What two animals "kept time" for "The Little Drummer Boy"? the ox and lamb
5. What's the name of the Wookiee holiday analogous to Christmas in the infamous 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special? no idea
6. What was George Washington famously doing on Christmas Day, 1776? isn't this when he crossed the Delaware?
7. What unusual distinction (at least in their respective fields) did these famous people share with the historical St. Nicholas? Ansel Adams, Marlon Brando, Copernicus, Albus Dumbledore, Stephen Fry, Charlton Heston, Michelangelo, Robert Mitchum, Thackeray, Owen Wilson. I read about the historical St. Nicholas. Nothing is clicking.

LAST WEEK'S ANSWERS
1. Which moon of Uranus shares its name with one of the Sex and the City women? Miranda--though it's named for a character in Shakespeare's The Tempest, not for Cynthia Nixon. correct
2. What kind of animal is examining the title character in Henri Rousseau's famous painting The Sleeping Gypsy? She's being inspected by a lion. I guessed the wrong feline
3. Which African country name contains within it (not at the beginning or the end, but embedded in consecutive letters in the middle of the word) the name of another African country? "Somalia" contains "Mali." correct
4. What common item is manufactured by compressing powdered gypsum rock into 10-centimeter cylinders? Turns out chalk is made from gypsum, not from chalk rock at all. well now I know
5. "Miss Fannie Bright was seated by my side" in the little-sung second verse to what song? "Miss Fannie Bright" isn't a drag-queen name...she's the narrator's sleigh-riding companion in "Jingle Bells." I wonder if she knows "Miss Katie Casey," who appears in the little-sung verse to "Take Me Out the the Ball Game."
6. Due to an inscription error on the statuette, what comic strip hero accidentally won the 1938 Best Actor Oscar? Spencer Tracy won the Oscar that year for Boys Town...but his statuette was inscribed to "Dick Tracy"! Tracy sent it back and asked it to be fixed, possibly on his two-way wrist TV radio. I tried until the very end to get an actor's name out of Lil' Abner or Snuffy Smith.
7. What unusual distinction is shared by these U.S. states, and no others? Arizona, California, Maryland, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Utah, and West Virginia. There were ships named for all these states docked at Pearl Harbor at the time of the 1941 Japanese attack. The Utah and Arizona, in fact, are still there today. correct!