News Quiz

No. 401: “Dawn Monkey”

Speaking for his colleagues at Northern Illinois University, Dr. Daniel Gebo announced the discovery of something they call “dawn monkey.” Why is this important?

Send your answer by 5 p.m. ET Sunday to newsquiz@slate.com.

Wednesday’s Question (No. 400)—”Expeditious Story”:

Pending government approval, something will soon go on sale that makes it possible to do only once a week what many people must now do once or twice a day. Explain.

“Get up off the couch and live.”—Vincent Basehart

“If it’s brushing your teeth, I’d just as soon they didn’t publicize it.”—Jim Derby (Mark Wegener had a similar answer.)

“I was so tired of feeding that darn cat. Thanks to the miracles of science, I can leave for a week’s vacation without worry.”—Winter Miller (similarly, Greg Diamond)

“The ‘I Was Stopped and Frisked by the NYPD and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt’ T-shirt. Now with freshness dating!”—Beth Sherman

“Please put me down as a ‘similarly’ for all responses involving bodily functions.”—Greg Diamond (similarly, A S Kabir)

Click for more answers.

Randy’s Wrap-Up

It is surprising what people claim to do daily, and it is also hard to believe. Any survey shows that every day everyone has a real conversation with the kids, makes tender and passionate love to the spouse, and prays. This is, perhaps, not so much deceit as a false self-image born out of wishful thinking. That’s the kind of person one wants to be. Or at least wants to be thought of as by others. If you’d ask an outside observer, you’d find that the likelier diurnal routine is praying that the kids aren’t making tender and passionate love to their classmates at the high school. Junior high. This is disturbing, of course, and even more so when you think about how that outside observer knows all this. Binoculars? Maybe those night-vision ones that make everything look all green? Clearly, the lesson here is always draw the curtains. And to remember that focus groups and surveys can be utterly unreliable when they demand that people have that most difficult to achieve of virtues, self-knowledge. How the hell do I know if I’d like your movie more if the protagonist had a dog? Do I know what I like? I can’t even remember what I did once or twice yesterday, although I’m nearly certain it involved exercise, fresh vegetables, and a good book.

Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibiting Answer

Eli Lilly and Co. filed an application with the Food and Drug Administration to sell a new version of Prozac that need only be taken weekly and is available in Extra Crispy. Or perhaps not.

If new Cajun-style (or not) Prozac is approved, it will be the only once-a-week antidepressant (except for television’s Friends; their zany antics always make me put a smile on my face or a gun to my head). Lilly is eager to shore up sales for the drug which has been losing out to newer pills and soon will have to compete with inexpensive generic medication when its patent expires in 2004. Some of these generics may be produced with Zesty Ranch flavor. Some may not.

Janice Zazinski’s James Bulger Most Wanted Follow-Up Extra

Another fun fact about James J. “Whitey” Bulger, for you non-Bostonian barbarians: His brother, William “Billy” Bulger, was for many years a state representative and president of the Massachusetts Senate. Bulger (Billy, not Whitey) is now president of the University of Massachusetts system. And this January cops dug up the bodies of long-ago vanished-without-a-trace minor hoodlums near Boston’s Southeast Expressway; they had allegedly been killed by Bulger (Whitey, not Billy).

Either/Or Extra

  • “I’m going to have to battle with a vice president who’ll say risky this, risky that.”—G.W. Bush derides Al Gore’s prudence either about condoms or about massive tax cuts.

  • “When you see some atrocity out there, some tragedy, whatever it is, we collect ourselves and say, ‘Is there something that we can do to prevent that from happening in the future?’ “—Joseph Bruno, majority leader in New York’s Republican-controlled state Senate, is either going to push for a bill banning Sex and the City, or finally stop thwarting gun control laws.

  • “Others will make it with fat and not mark it as fat which is very bad. You must not fool the client.”—Robert Linxe, of France’s Maison du Chocolat, is either saying something needlessly cruel about Elizabeth Taylor, or condemning a decision that allows the European sale of inferior English chocolate made with vegetable fat.

  • “Their style, as we’ve seen from the last eight years, is to demean and degrade.”—G.W. denigrates either News Quiz or the Clinton-Gore administration.

Common Denominator

Various bodily functions.