These are the candidates I liked in this season's LearnedLeague Very Best Wrong Answer contest, with my 3 votes at the end.
A: A mini-resurgence of history-based plays on Broadway began in part with the 2007 debut of a drama by playwright Peter Morgan. The play was set in California in 1977, and starred Michael Sheen and Frank Langella as what title characters? (Note, name both characters.)
B: What is essentially the UK's equivalent to Japan's NHK, Italy's RAI, Ireland's RTÉ, and Germany's ZDF (and perhaps ARD)?
C: What Netflix series, based on a 1989 novel and a 1990 British series of the same name, follows a manipulative congressman and his equally strategic wife as they scheme their way to the top of American politics? It was Netflix's first major original production and the first streaming show to win a major Emmy.
HOW I MET GEORGE SANTOS'S MOTHER
D: While Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen considered 1873's Kejser og Galilaer(Emperor and Galilean) his masterpiece, his international fame was secured by two social plays that followed, titled Et Dukkehjem(1879) and Gengangere (1881). The former is known in English as A Doll's House; give the common English translation of the latter.
WOMEN ON THE VERGE OF A NORDISH BREAKDOWN
E: In baseball, one of the statistics that measures a pitcher's performance, essentially how many baserunners a pitcher allows, is abbreviated WHIP. What do the letters in WHIP stand for?
F: "Relief printing" involves carving away unwanted areas from a surface and inking what remains raised (like a rubber stamp). What Italian word refers to the opposite technique, in which the artist cuts into a plate, fills the grooves with ink, and wipes the surface clean before pressing paper onto it?
G: What chicken finger purveyor began in 1996 with a single location near the campus of Louisiana State University and, by the end of 2025, had grown to nearly 1,000 locations and more than $5 billion in annual sales?
H: Geosmin, a compound produced by soil-dwelling bacteria, helps create the familiar smell that comes with the first rain after a dry spell. What sensory term, coined from Greek roots in 1964 by Australian researchers Isabel Joy Bear and Richard G. Thomas, refers to this scent?
ANSWER REDACTED - TRADEMARKED BY YANKEE CANDLE
I: A possibly apocryphal 1807 story by English journalist William Cobbett about using a pungent fish to divert hunting hounds is widely credited (and widely questioned) as the source for the name of what literary device?
J: What Swedish warship sank on her maiden voyage in Stockholm harbor in 1628, was eventually salvaged in 1961, and has been housed since 1990 in a museum on the city's island of Djurgården?
K: In February 2022, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky reportedly declined a U.S. government offer of evacuation from Kyiv by saying, "The fight is here; I need [BLANK], not a [BLANK]." What two words fill in the blanks in this quote?
And
my votes went to:
3: In February 2022, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky reportedly declined a U.S. government offer of evacuation from Kyiv by saying, "The fight is here; I need [BLANK], not a [BLANK]." What two words fill in the blanks in this quote?
2: The Yang-Mills existence, Navier-Stokes existence, Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture, and Hodge conjecture are all associated collectively with what prize?
FIFA MATHEMATICS PRIZE1: While diamonds are not geologically rare (they're more common than emeralds and rubies), they became artificially scarce due in large part to the actions of what company, which controlled 80-90% of the rough diamond distribution from 1888 to the early 2000s, and essentially created the tradition of diamond wedding engagement rings in America in the 1930s and 1940s?
EVERY KISS BEGINS WITH KAPITALISM
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