The Best Piece Of Trivia You Learned This Week: David Bowie Edition

Transcript

OPHIRA EISENBERG, HOST:

Welcome back to ASK ME ANOTHER, NPR and WNYC's hour of trivia puzzles and word games. I'm Ophira Eisenberg and with me is our one-man house band Jonathan Coulton and our puzzle guru Mary Tobler. We're about to put our VIP Meg Wolitzer in the puzzle hot seat. But first, here's a trivia tidbit sent to us over Twitter. Jennifer Livengood (ph)...

JONATHAN COULTON, BYLINE: Jennifer Livengood?

EISENBERG: Yep.

(LAUGHTER)

COULTON: She's doing fine.

EISENBERG: Yeah, she's doing great.

(LAUGHTER)

EISENBERG: So she wrote us to tell us that David Bowie...

COULTON: Yeah?

EISENBERG: ...Invented...

COULTON: (Laughter) I like it so far.

(LAUGHTER)

EISENBERG: ...The board game - if you want to call it that - Connect Four, but he did it under his real name, David Jones.

COULTON: Wait a minute (laughter).

EISENBERG: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well - yeah.

COULTON: He invented the game Connect Four?

EISENBERG: Yeah.

COULTON: Under his real name, David Jones?

EISENBERG: His birth name, David Jones.

COULTON: He also invented the locker, right?

(LAUGHTER)

EISENBERG: (Laughter) Yeah, he invented the locker and all kinds of problems came from that.

COULTON: So did he...

EISENBERG: I mean, it could be false or true, you know? It's up to you.

COULTON: It could be false. Well, it sounds suspicious only because it seems like Connect Four is one of those things that has been around forever. It doesn't seem like anybody invented it.

EISENBERG: I think...

COULTON: Just emerged naturally from the...

(LAUGHTER)

EISENBERG: I think David Bowie's kind of timeless.

COULTON: Well, that's true.

EISENBERG: Do we know how old that guy is?

COULTON: He is a vampire.

(LAUGHTER)

EISENBERG: (Laughter) He's a vampire?

COULTON: He is one of the eternals.

EISENBERG: How do you explain, like, Ziggy Stardust, yet married to Iman? Like, there's a lot of things - how do you explain "Changes?"

(LAUGHTER)

COULTON: Turn and face the strange diagonally.

EISENBERG: That's right.

(LAUGHTER)

COULTON: Jeez, it's so weird. I'm going to guess this is true.

EISENBERG: You and a lot of other suckers believe it is.

(LAUGHTER)

COULTON: Aw, come on.

EISENBERG: Actually it's totally false.

COULTON: OK, good.

EISENBERG: But a British radio personality named Stuart Maconie made it up and all the British people heard it and they were like yeah, that's totally true. That's totally true.

COULTON: Well, it makes complete sense.

EISENBERG: They were like David Bowie, indeed - yeah, brilliant, brilliant.

(LAUGHTER)

EISENBERG: So it gets repeated a lot, but it's totally false. It was actually invented by a Hasbro employee named Howard Wexler. See, that makes way more sense.

(LAUGHTER)

COULTON: Right, that makes perfect sense. That I believe.

EISENBERG: Yeah, Howard Wexler is like David Bowie did not create my game.

(LAUGHTER) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.