Second Banana - Random Trivia Answers

• A1) Canada. Even after the breakup of the Soviet Union, Russia dwarfs the nearest contender by over 40%.
• A2) Saturn. Jupiter is the largest of the gas giants with more than three times the mass and 1.7 times the volume of its nearest outer neighbor.
• A3) Thomas Jefferson. From 1801 to 1809 he served under John Adams, who had been the first Vice President.
• A4) Robert Scott. Not only did he come in second to Roald Amundsen, the British naval officer and his entire expedition perished on the return trip.
• A5) Man o' War. A year before winning the Preakness and Belmont Stakes in 1920, the Hall of Famer was left behind at the start of the Sanford Stakes, allowing the 7-2 underdog Upset to pin Man o' War with the only loss of his 21-race career.
• A6) Warner Baxter. He won for playing the Cisco Kid in the the 1929 movie In Old Arizona. Emil Jannings had captured the first award for The Last Command and The Way of All Flesh, while Janet Gaynor and Mary Pickford picked up the first two Best Actress awards.
• A7) Amelia Earhart. In 1932, five years after Charles Lindbergh had flown from Long Island to Paris aboard the Spirit of St. Louis, Earhart duplicated the feat in the Lockheed Vega 5b. Three years later, she would become the first to make the solo trip from Hawaii to California.
• A8) Thomas Dewey. The Chicago Daily Tribune trumpeted the New York Governor's victory, only to see Harry Truman catch up and pull away in the late polls, ultimately capturing 49.6% of the popular vote (to Dewey's 45.1%, 0.8% less than he'd received in 1944) and 303 electoral votes (to 189).
• A9) Buzz Aldrin. Neil Armstrong got the speech and the glory, while poor Michael Collins got oh-so-close but was required to stay behind in the Command Module.
• A10) Virginia. The then-mighty Cavaliers, led by 7'4"-tall back-to-back-to-back Player of the Year Ralph Sampson but suffering from overconfidence and the effects of a trip to Japan, lost 77-72 in Honolulu, Hawaii.
• A11) Judith Resnick. She was a mission specialist on the Discovery space shuttle's first launch in 1984, a year after Sally Ride's mission on the Challenger, but tragically died during the disastrous launch of the latter on January 28, 1996.
• A12) Garry Kasparov. The Russian was outcalculated by IBM's Deep Blue in 1997. Just over a decade later, the best chess computers can now give a handicap to the top grandmasters and still win.