Nerdy Trivia: January 3, 2026

Does Tolkien count as multilingual if the languages he speaks are ones he came up with? Like, I could put "speaks five languages fluently" on my resume too if I could just claim four of them are languages with rules that I invented.

One does not simply walk into Mordor, mainly because it's an absurdly long walk. Frodo and Sam spent six months trekking across Middle-earth to destroy the One Ring (and no, we're not going to talk about why the eagles couldn't just fly them there). J.R.R. Tolkien was so meticulous about his worldbuilding that scholars have been able to roughly calculate the mileage from Bag End to Mount Doom. How many miles is it from the Shire to Mordor?

Take a swing at some random trivia. When you get the answer, just hit "Random Question" to keep going!

37 years ago TODAY, late night got a new chant when “The Arsenio Hall Show” premiered in syndication in 1989!

Arsenio Hall didn’t do polite couch chat, it was more like an after party that snuck onto the airwaves. It was younger, louder, and less buttoned-up than anything else on at 11:30 p.m. His audience was integral to the success, and so was treating hip-hop and R&B like the center of the culture instead of a novelty segment.

Born on October 9th, 1940, we probably really don’t need to explain much about John Lennon to you. He was in the Beatles, a monumental cultural force, an artist, an all-time great songwriter, and so much more.

Check out more celeb birthdays in today's birthday post!