Skeleton Trivia for Thursday, 2025-11-13
It’d be weird if they put the Transantarctic Mountains in, like, Asia
Hiya Skeleton Crew,
Happy World Kindness Day! It’s a good day to be kind to folks.
That way, ya basically have a free pass to be mean & cruel & miserable & just a real SCROOGE to everyone for the rest of the year!
Nah, just kiddin: ya should ALWAYS be kind. It’s like one of the best things ya can do! I feel pretty safe in sayin that it’s the official stance of Mr. Skeleton’s Trivia Zone that It’s Cool To Be Kind™.
Answers to Last Time
- The R. F. Kuang book I wanna read is called Katabasis, which is a Greek word meanin “descent”. It’s an antonym of anabasis, which means “ascent” & is also the title of a Xenophon text ’bout a military jaunt.
- All that weird stuff I talked about yesterday—a nurse sellin poppies from a tray, a banker with a motorcar, a fireman with an hourglass—were all things from that song “Penny Lane” by the Beatles. (I gave ya credit if ya said Liverpool since that’s where the original Penny Lane was located.)
Today’s Trivias
Trivia 1
Now, lemme be clear, I definitely don’t got no first-hand experience with any sorta katabasises! I’ve never been down to Hell, definitely never done that, no-how no-way & even if I HAD been it’s not like I could ever come back from Hell, I’m pretty sure once you’re there you’re kinda stuck there forEVER, that’s basically the whole point, they definitely don’t let ya outta there, not even if you’ve been transformed into a undying skeleton person cursed to roam the material plane for all eternity.
Nope, none of that!!
That said, I AM familiar with somethin called a katabatic WIND, but that’s a pretty different thing altogether, it’s a type of downslope wind caused by air masses of different densities slammin into each other—or somethin like that, I wasn’t really payin too close attention in AP Enviro if I’m bein honest.
But one cool thing (literally!) I DO remember ’bout katabatic winds is they’re what’s responsible for some of the most desert-y desert corners of the world, ensconced between the Transantarctic Mountains down there in (surprise!) Antarctica.
What’s the name for these ice-free “oases” that’re actually some of the most extreme environments ya can find on Earth’s surface? Matter of fact, they’re SO extreme that NASA likes to use ’em as a training ground for the li’l robots they send on up to Mars.
Trivia 2
What National Park is the southernmost U.S. national park outside of Hawai’i? Basically the only way to get there (short of chartering a seaplane or somethin, I guess) is to head on over to Key West where ya can hop on a ferry called the Yankee Freedom. From there it’ll take ya to Fort Jefferson, which is (fun fact!) the largest brick masonry structure in the Western Hemisphere!
The islands that make up the park—which don’t got any fresh water on ’em, FYI—got their names from one Sr. Juan Ponce de León, who decided he’d name ’em after some animals he spotted there.
OK then
Byeeeeeeeeeeeeee