Nerdy Trivia: May 18, 2026

Cooking is fun and jazzy and loose, but baking is chemistry and strict and terrifying. You can wing a stir-fry. You cannot wing a soufflé. A teaspoon off and the cake sinks, the bread doesn't rise, the cookies go flat. Bakers measure flour by weight because they've been burned, and they will judge you for using a measuring cup.

Larry Hagman built J.R. Ewing into one of TV's all-time villains on "Dallas," a smirking oilman who could ruin your life over breakfast. The drawl and the cowboy hat sold the bit, but Hagman was a long way from a roughneck. His mother had four Tony Awards sitting on her shelf. Which Broadway legend was Larry Hagman's mother?

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

25 years ago TODAY, a grumpy ogre's swamp got overrun with fairy-tale rejects when "Shrek" hit theaters in 2001!

Mike Myers gave the green ogre a Scottish brogue, Eddie Murphy turned Donkey into a motor-mouthed pest, and Cameron Diaz let Princess Fiona flip the fairy-tale script. The rescue quest for tiny tyrant Lord Farquaad packed in storybook gags and pop-culture jabs at every turn. It pulled in over $487 million worldwide and took home the first-ever Oscar for Best Animated Feature.

Who was originally cast to voice Shrek before Mike Myers?

I remember squeezing my way into a single middle seat — you see, in those days you couldn't reserve movie theater seats ahead of time and your parents would let you go up to the closer seats on your own — just as the opening bass line dropped for 1990's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

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