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What the Heck Do You Know?
Has a Love/Hate Relationship with Popular Culture

Book 14 Cover

1) Diesel’s new fragrance is called Only the Brave. What should its next fragrance be called?



a) Get Your Face Outta My Shit
b) I Will Fuck You Up
c) Montana Flywheel


2) An orangutan used a branch to short circuit a security fence and used debris to scale a wall that would have allowed it to escape. After 30 minutes of freedom, though, the orangutan returned to its enclosure. Why would it do that?



a) the orangutan didn’t believe the president’s economic recovery plan was going to work
b) the orangutan realized that welfare wasn’t going to be able to cover its 20 banana a day habit
c) the orangutan was afraid of being drafted into the army (it’s gay)


3) Why does John Dore have his own TV show?



a) bearded men are underrepresented in Canadian televised comedy
b) Carrot Top was unavailable
c) for the same reason the frogs are disappearing, although scientists are still trying to find the connection


3a) Okay, you’ve had your fun. Now, what is the real reason?



a) the show costs about a nickel and helps fulfill The Comedy Network’s Canadian content requirements


4) According to the Republican Party, waterboarding is not torture. But, they also say that Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi needs to be investigated because she knew about torture by the Bush administration. In what universe are these statements compatible?



a) in the universe where Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, teenagers naturally want to wait until they are married before they have sex but dirty movies make them screw like rabbits and unicorns can fly
b) in the universe depicted in the film Blade Runner, but with less rain and more tequila shooters
c) in the alternate universe that is the Fox News network’s editorial bullpen (where it is now known as “quantum torture”)


5) Back in your college days, you wrote an opinion piece for your school newspaper calling for the decriminalization of marijuana, the abolition of central government and compulsorily daily viewings of The Simpsons for everybody in kindergarten to grade 12. Why not? Everybody else was doing it! Only, now, the newspaper has put all of its archives online, and the recruitment officer for the investment bank you’re hoping to get a job at has found it. How do you respond?



a) by putting your hands over your ears and shouting “Neener, neener, I can’t hear you,” until you are ejected from the building
b) by getting out your Blackberry, going online and finding something equally embarrassing about the recruitment officer for the investment bank
c) what the hell are doing, going for a job at an investment bank in this economic climate? Do yourself a favour and become a hippy instead – there’s more of a future in it!


6) What does the word “puckish” mean?



a) not what you think, you dirty-minded old man
b) in the manner of an obscure character in a Shakespearean play that nobody has actually seen performed in 200 years
c) in the manner of a hockey projectile


7) Who said, “We live in a land that you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite marriage?”



a) Beverly. She’s six. She likes drawing pictures of unicorns. When she’s old enough, she will marry Tom Cruise. But, not the icky Tom Cruise of today. The Tom Cruise of Risky Business. He can’t fight it. It’s fate.
b) Alex Rodriguez (who subsequently admitted to using banned substances to take public attention away from the gaffe)
c) Betty Boop (she’s never been the same since her grandchildren put her in the home: boo boo be – oops)


8) Uhh, what, exactly, is opposite marriage?



a) the union between a Mary Matalin and a James Carville (because the union of two James Carvilles would just be freaky weird, although I would definitely watch the union between two Mary Matalins)
b) when your life partner contradicts everything you say
c) I’m not sure, but it’s in the Bible, so, whatever it is, it must be god’s will


9) What is “phantom liquidity?”



a) a DC Comics hero from the 1940s
b) the punchline to a joke about a man crawling across the desert
c) another accounting trick used to convince you that the fact that you’ve lost your life savings is your own fault


10) According to Industry Minister Tony Clement, “Buy American” restrictions on trade are going to hurt them as much as they are going to hurt Canada. How so?



a) American CEOs will be laughing so hard at him, they will bust a gut
b) Americans will be deprived of superior Canadian television shows (and, we all know how much Americans love foreign culture)
c) they’re going to have to listen to Industry Minister Tony Clement whine about “Buy American” restrictions on trade for the next few months


11) Why do men go to sleep after having sex?



a) they don’t have the energy to go bowling
b) they don’t have the will to argue about who will control the remote
c) that’s when the anti-cuddling gene is at its strongest


12) How do you know when a position stated by Harry Reid is pure political calculation?



a) his cheeks puff out and he gets all self-righteous
b) there is an inverse proportion law at work, here: the more Reid takes a stand on personal conviction, the less he actually sounds like it’s his personal conviction
c) when is a position stated by Harry Reid ever not pure political calculation?


13) What is the Democrat Socialist Party?



a) I’m not sure, but, just to be on the safe side, don’t look under your bed tonight…
b) the punchline to a very sad joke at the expense of the Republican Party
c) a new brand of after dinner mint


14) Who said, “They [terrorists] have never lacked for grievances against the United States. Our belief in freedom of speech and religion…our belief in equal rights for women…our support for Israel… these are the true sources of resentment…?”



a) David Duke
b) Jerry (of Tom and Jerry fame – but, what the cartoon cat does in his off hours is really nobody’s business!)
c) Dick Cheney. Dick Cheney? Oh, no, he dihen’t!


15) A day after refusing to release deficit numbers, Ottawa did so, claiming it wanted to avoid inaccurate speculation. The budget deficit it announced was $50 billion, give or take. Given this, what could the inaccurate speculation possibly have been?



a) fifty billion and one – but it was that extra dollar that would have bankrupted the country!
b) that when Jim Flaherty and Stephen Harper assured Canadians that our economy was one of the strongest in the world, they actually knew what they were talking about
c) if you have to ask, the country can’t afford it


16) Why does former Vice President, and Darth Vader stunt double, Dick Cheney continue to be given so much air time?



a) he’s got more charisma than Michael Steele
b) he’s cuddlier than Rush Limbaugh
c) he mind-melded with Roger Ailes and convinced him – wait, that’s not the right science fiction reference, is it? – no matter: do you want to explain the mix-up to Cheney?


17) Why are Republicans so dead set against Barack Obama’s choice of Sonia Sotomayor as Supreme Court Justice?



a) she’s not smart enough for the job (okay, she was second in her class at Princeton and an editor of the Yale Law Review, so maybe she is smart enough for the job, but this isn’t racism, it…it’s jealousy – none of her Republican critics has ever been second for anything worthwhile in their lives!)
b) she’s a left-wing extremist activist judge (okay, so there really isn’t anything in her rulings as a judge on lower courts that would support this claim, but this isn’t racism – we say it about all judges nominated by Democratic Presidents)
c) her name is hard to pronounce (okay, this is racism, but we blame the Democrats: if they hadn’t nominated a Hispanic woman, we wouldn’t have been forced to sink to this level!)


18) When British football fans visit Rome for a match, they are sometimes stabbed in the buttocks. Why the buttocks?



a) on the British, they make such an inviting target…
b) it may be linked to medieval dueling, when slashing an opponent’s backside was supposedly considered very skillful (and, you thought the phrase “I’m gonna get medieval on their asses” was just a metaphor!)
c) it’s a metaphor for how British football fans often make asses of themselves


19) The Conference Board of Canada had to withdraw three reports on copyright and intellectual property when it was discovered that they had lifted ideas and entire paragraphs from a document produced by the American lobbying organization International Intellectual Property Alliance. How does the Conference Board explain this?



a) it wasn’t plagiarism – it was an homage
b) it wasn’t an homage – it was a remake (we just hadn’t cleared all the rights first – you know how cutting back staff affects everybody in this recession)
c) the Conference Board had never been cited by the Absurd Ironyometer, and it was jealous


20) B’Nai B’rith Executive Vice President Frank Dimant is on the faculty of Charles McVety’s Christian College, and accepted an honourary doctorate from the school. What does the Jewish community gain by having one of its spokespeople aligned with an openly ferocious homo hater?



a) in our history, Jews have often been wrongfully accused of promoting hateful causes – for once, we’ll see if things are different when the accusations are correct
b) another ally who supports the right of all Jews to emigrate to Israel so that they can be slaughtered in order to fulfill Christian prophecy (because we can never get enough of those!)
c) a martyr to be named later


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