1. Bamako
   Lagos
2. Addis Ababa
   Accra

Mali is a West African country and former imperial power whose capital, Bamako, is the fastest-growing city in Africa. It is on the Niger River.

1. Wildebeest
   Springbok
2. Cheetah
   Coyote

Cheetahs have been clocked at short distances going over 70 mph, making them the fastest land animal.

1. 25
   10
2. 27
   19

There are 27 Amendments, though only 26 are in force as the 21st repealed the 18th (the one that prohibited alcohol).

1. Windsor
   Gustav
2. Svensson
   Bernadotte

The House of Bernadotte has held the Swedish throne since 1818.

1. Whoop
   Sloth
2. Herd
   Goldilocks

Sometimes a group of bears is called a sloth. This may be because of the sloth bear. It would be much cooler if it were a Goldilocks though!

1. 5
   8
2. 2
   11

It's a curious feature of how folding works that eventually the paper will get too fat along the fold to successfully fold again.

1. Copper prices were so high that the pennies cost more to make than they were worth.
   Pennies are really annoying.
2. They wanted to replace the image of Abraham Lincoln with that of Martin Luther King.
   There was a spate of people swallowing pennies as a YouTube challenge.

Pennies were indeed worth more melted down than they were as pennies. People have often argued that pennies are so hefty that they actually slow down the financial system.

1. 299,792,458 meters per second
   671,000,000 mph
2. 38 mph
   407 mph

If you put light through an ultracold atomic gas, it goes much slower than you might expect. "Light speed" is the measure of how fast it goes in a vacuum.

1. A way of measuring "thag", which means the density of steel
   A special kind of paint-drying gun
2. A military laser that was briefly tested before being surpassed by superior technology
   The spike on a stegosaurus' tail

The thagomizer was named by cartoonist Gary Larson in a 1980s cartoon from his popular "Far Side" series.

1. None
   1
2. 2
   3

The Python features are Life of Brian, Holy Grail and The Meaning of Life. Otherwise Python are primarily known for their sketch show and songs.

1. Parrot
   Goat
2. Ferret
   Reindeer

Pollyanna lived on HMS Trident for six weeks after Russians gave it to the Brits!

1. Its name is a portmanteau of two different languages' word for "village".
   It has no roads, just canals.
2. Everyone in it has won the lottery at least once.
   It has a microclimate that means it is always snowy.

Giethoorn is unusual for having no roads at all. Even Venice has a few of them, but Giethoorn is all canals!

1. Oxidized salty water
   Blood, duh
2. Acid rain
   Bauxite deposits

The water is tainted by iron oxide, and it really is bright red. It's a beautiful and chilling sight.

1. Screaming Lord Sutch
   Mr. Fishfinger
2. Bus-Pass Elvis
   Lord Buckethead

All four answers were "real" satirical candidates who stood in the British elections - which tend to attract a lot of such people as just about anyone can enter for a few hundred pounds. Lord Buckethead has been a couple of different people, however, and thus has a certain longevity. He has stood against three Tory Prime Ministers. British elections require all candidates to stand in a row while results are read, and then shake hands, meaning the serious candidates have to stand on camera next to the silly ones and pretend not to feel undermined.

1. 4
   7
2. 108
   2

Roy C. Sullivan simply kept getting hit by lightning and eventually was so distressed by it that he shot himself.

1. Trick question: Harry Houdini is his real name.
   Bert Smith
2. Eric Weiss
   Jesse Mullins

Harry Houdini was a from a Jewish Polish background. His real name was Eric Weiss, but he changed it to honor his hero Robert Houdin and also to sound less ethnically distinct.

1. German
   French
2. Kenyan
   British-American

You knew this had to be a trick, didn't you? Samuel German named the cake for himself but now, of course, everyone thinks it's German as in the nationality.

1. J
   X
2. Q
   B

The letter J does not exist in the Roman alphabet, as you can see from the way they spelled eg Julius Caesar or Jesus as Iulius or Iesus.

1. Anything undignified
   Monopoly, because it gets too vicious
2. Stratego, because someone might beat the Queen
   Chess, because it is Russian and thus communist

Apparently the Royal Family abolished Monopoly from family gatherings as they are too competitive. It is well known that they love charades though.

1. They taste like chicken.
   They can talk.
2. They faint when they are surprised.
   They can jump three times their own height.

Myotonic goats get a temporary paralysis when they are very shocked, and fall down and die. It's not clear why evolution favored this particular adaptation.

1. Dancing bears
   Dogs with gills
2. Swimming pigs
   Snorkeling chickens

The swimming pigs live on a reef sometimes that can get wet when the tide comes in - so they just swim until the water goes out again! They are left over from a shipwreck a couple hundred years ago.

1. Popeye and Olive Oyl
   Mickey and Minnie Mouse
2. Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote
   Bugs Bunny and Yosemite Sam

These two voice artists played Mickey and Minnie and then fell in love and married. One imagines their vows sounded very creative indeed.

1. Diplodocus
   Woolly mammoth
2. Triceratops
   Plesiosaur

The mammoth's skull has a hole located in such a way as to seem like there is one big eye in the middle

1. 7%
   6%
2. 2%
   4%

So many munitions were fired on this beach that 4% of its "sand" is actually crushed-up shrapnel.

1. Flowers
   Trees
2. Vegetables
   Spirals

The whole village is decorated with flower murals, which attract many tourists.

1. Rocks for opening clams and mollusks
   GPS trackers inserted by conservationists
2. Poison sacs for stopping enemies
   Nothing

Otters use little rocks for opening clams and other shelled creatures - but since you can't always find a rock, they carry them around if they find a good one.

1. Columbia Law took its first female student.
   New York city transit was desegregated.
2. The minimum wage was created.
   The first workers' unions in New York were founded.

Elizabeth Jennings Graham heroically refused to leave the streetcar (as required by then existing law) 100 years before the Civil Rights movement really kicked off, and the result was desegregation of streetcars. Sadly wider society did not learn their lesson, meaning Rosa Parks had to do the same thing 100 years later.

1. "Some fellow named Adolf Hitler is getting traction in Germany, but we do not think he will last."
   "We have decided to call this economic period the Little Depression, as it will be over soon."
2. There was none!
   "There's a man in India called Mahatma Gandhi who is organizing marches, but we do not think he will affect much there."

Yep - it was a really boring day, apparently, as the reporters informed the viewers, ""There is no news." As they said this: Hitler was rising to power, the stock market was in a shambles as world trade collapsed following the Wall Street Crash, the Dust Bowl was kicking off across half of the USA, and Mahatma Gandhi had recently started marching across India. None of these things apparently rated coverage, though!

1. John Miami
   Rosa Miami
2. Julia Tuttle
   Henry Flagler

This makes Miami one of very few cities founded by women and the only major US one. Tuttle persuaded Henry Flagler, a railroad tycoon, to build the railway down to Miami and incorporated the city with its mighty population of 300. It is now the most important port in the southeastern USA.

1. To prevent masturbation
   To encourage sexual desire
2. To help athletes carb-load before the newly-founded New York marathon
   To monetize leftover pieces of corn that nobody else wanted

Kellogg was a religious zealot who thought that eating anything too nice or delicious would surely induce naughty behavior, and invented corn flakes to be so boring that nobody would be provoked into such lustfulness. It seems abundantly clear that it didn't work.

1. Mars Mission Counter by Tangerine Dream
   Life on Mars by David Bowie
2. Happy Birthday
   Venus and Mars by Wings

The Curiosity Rover sings Happy Birthday to itself, every year on August 5, the anniversary of its arrival on Mars. As the Mars year is longer than the Earth year (and the Mars day is 40 minutes longer), it is technically getting further and further out of sync with the Martian year.

1. Trick question: it's not about a real person.
   Mary Anning
2. Molly Malone
   Moll Flanders

Famous paleontologist Mary Anning (1799-1847) was a great British scientist whose exploration of Jurassic marine fossil beds in Dorset added greatly to our understanding of the dinosaurs!

1. Pufflings
   Puffers
2. Puffs
   Pufflets

They really are called pufflings and they are every bit as cute as the name implies.

1. 18.2%
   1.7%
2. 32.8%
   6.8%

This still represents more than 2/3 of the freshwater on the planet.

1. Pulsar
   Quasar
2. Supernova
   Black hole

A supernova is a collapsed star. A pulsar is a star with a very regular light signature. A black hole is (usually) a massive star that collapsed a very long time ago (though sometimes they may be as old as the universe or galaxy). A quasar, however, just looks like a star through a telescope due to all the light it gives off, but it's actually a supermassive black hole plus a disk of gas, and not a star at all.