Skeleton Trivia for Wednesday, 2025-06-25
Pan-dimensional strawberry parfait
Hiya Skeleton Crew,
I’m told it’s National Strawberry Parfait Day. At least, that’s what some random websites say it is. But I wonder ... if we’re just makin up holidays, why not go big, make it INTERnational Strawberry Parfait Day? Why not InterGALACTIC Strawberry Parfait Day?? Stickin to “National” just seems a li’l narrow-minded to me, a li’l parochial, is all.
Anyways, go have a National Strawberry Parfait! Tell em Mr. Skeleton sentcha!
Answers to Last Time
Andrea Palladio was Italian architect whose stately symmetrical forms are maybe most familiar to Americans in the design of Thomas Jefferson’s estate, Monticello.
Verona is the home to the Casa di Giulietta, a.k.a. Juliet’s House, as in the Juliet from Romeo & Juliet.1
Today’s Trivias
Trivia 1
Romeo & Juliet are popular amongst wordplay/puzzle enthusiasts, not so much for their tragickal love story as for their inclusion in the NATO phonetic alphabet.
But radio communicators weren’t always in love with ol’ Romeo & Juliet!
The modern NATO alphabet was developed as a standardized successor to the various radiotelegraphy alphabets used by the Yanks & Brits in WWII. Those were all a li’l different from each other, & pretty substantially different from what we’ve ended up with. Like e.g. they used to have Able n Baker instead of Alfa n Bravo. Or the old word for J was Jig, instead of Juliet.2
Well: what name got used for R? You’ll still hear it in modern day radio comms as a kinda I guess ya might call it a vestige of its older use.
Trivia 2
Here’s an extremely useless piece of wordplay/trivia: the actress who portrayed Mrs. Capulet in Romeo + Juliet is Diane Venora, & her last name is an anagram of Verona ... where Romeo & Juliet takes place!! Crazy, right?!?!
Maybe one of youse guys can figure out somethin to do with that tidbit of knowledge to make it more interestin? All I could think of was to add some exclamation points.
But since we’re talkin Romeo + Juliet, maybe you could tell me who played Juliet opposite Leo DiCaprio’s Romeo in that adaptation? The movie came out in 1996, which was only two years after this actor’s film debut as Beth March in Little Women.
OK then
Byeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
Of course it’s not ACTUALLY her house, since, y’know, she wasn’t a real person. But it used to belong to a family by the name of Cappello, which I guess is close enough to Capulet for some enterprisin Veronan landowner to spin it into honest-to-goodness tourist attraction! Good for em, I guess?
F used to be just Fox; I guess they changed it to Foxtrot at the same time they changed Jig to Juliet to satisfy the Law of Conversation of Dances in Phonetic Alphabets.