Tuesday Trivia and Google-Proofing

Over at Ken-Jennings.com he has a Tuesday Trivia (don't click, until you've thought about last week's 'google-proof' question, answer appears in post) game that he emails to anyone who subscribes.

It's in its second week, and the email consists of 7 questions, the first six are pretty normal trivia questions that could be googled and gotten easily (though he discourages people from doing so, and then claiming they knew the answer the old fashioned way when emailing back).

The seventh question is different, he's attempting to come up with google proof, 'why are these things alike' question.

I'll skip reposting the 1-6 questions but I'll share the last two 7th questions, this week's has me stumped, and last week's had me stumped, too (though in retrospect, should have figured it out)

Last week's

What do these four literary characters have in common: Charles Darnay, Tom Brown, Jane Bennet, and Fyodor Karamazov?

(answer in inviso-text (hopefully, haven't tried this trick before), reveal by highlighting)

All share a first name with the author who created them: Charles Dickens, Thomas Hughes, Jane Austen, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky

This week's

What unusual distinction is shared by these eight movies: Grand Hotel, My Little Chickadee, The Red Shoes, Shane, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Russians Are Coming The Russians Are Coming, Spider-Man, and Good Night and Good Luck?

I haven't a clue what these films could have in common, my first inclination was, they were filmed in part at the Sony Studios lot (which was the long time MGM lot, and a few pretty famous films (the MGM list) and TV Shows were shot there (the Sony list), it's one of the older studios in Hollywood (Culver City calls itself The Heart of Screenland, since many of the most famous Hollywood pictures were shot in Culver City, not Hollywood), tour information here) in Culver City, which would be the same lot where Ken had his magnificent run, but Red Shoes (and probably more than just that film) screws that one up. There can't be an Academy Award connection cause some of the films on the list haven't even been nominated, and I seriously doubt any actor or behind the scenes person worked on all those films, so the connection is esoteric, though something that should be reasonably discernable once revealed. This will bug me until next Tuesday and a new 'google-proof' trivia question is dropped in my lap.

The attempt to google-proof is interesting though. If you have a contest, and give people more than 4-5 seconds to answer, you can count on people in the aggregate (even when there's no reward, people still cheat, which seems rather silly) to use search tools to facilitate their answers (even when admonished not to). Instead of a trivia contest what you have is a search word treasure hunt.

Anyone interested in trivia, I recommend adding your name to the the mailing list, it's something to look forward to every Tuesday.

And Ken is doing the Instapundit thing and shamelessly plugging his forthcoming book Braniac in just about every post on his site. Hopefully, I'll get to do the same one day.

(you can bet that if I get a publishing deal I'll be shamelessly whoring myself at every opportunity, as an Oliver Stone character who you weren't supposed to sympathize with, yet do anyway, said, "Greed is Good", and I'll add, "Self-Promotion is the Purest Form of Greed" and therefore purely good)