This week’s questions:
- What’s unusual about the way a lobster flees its enemies?
- What were car owners required to put on their homemade license plates when New York became the first state to mandate them in 1901?
- What crucial role did Boston’s Green Dragon Tavern play in U.S. history?
- What words from Genesis are said as ashes are applied to a worshipper’s forehead during Lent?
- What English novelist wrote of a heroine’s interest in baseball 41 years before Abner Doubleday’s oft-cited invention of the game?
This week’s answers:
- It swims backward, unable to see where it is going. When threatened, a lobster faces its enemy (or the perceived danger) and then propels itself blindly backward through the water by snapping its abdomen and powerful tail.
- Their initials. New York required the plates but did not issue them, making it necessary for car owners to provide them.
- The tavern, described by Daniel Webster as the “headquarters of the Revolution,” was where the Sons of Liberty, whose members included John Hancock and Paul Revere, planned the Boston Tea Party and attacks on the British at Lexington and Concord.
- “Remember, man, that you are dust and unto dust you shall return,” after Genesis 3:19.
- Jane Austen.
Source: Workman Publishing/”Page-A-Day”