Hi!

A few weeks ago, Steve Hunt, a Now I Know reader, reached out to me. He’s building a new web-based trivia game and wanted to share it with me — and ultimately, with all of you. It’s called Troyale, and specifically, he put together a quiz focused on mascot trivia. You can play it at that link.

The rules are simple. There are ten questions, and each of which has a few answers for you to select from. Pick the right answer and you get N points, where N is the number of answer choices offered. If you earn more than 25 points, you win.

I won— but barely. The quiz starts easy-ish if you read between the lines, but it gets harder over time. I was able to narrow most questions down to two choices but did a not-great job at those 50/50 guesses — well enough to beat the game, though!

Give it a try and let me know what you think; I’ll pass the feedback on to Steve. Thanks!

The Now I Know Week In Review

This was a week of stories that have long been on my to-do list — I’ve been planning to share Monday’s for years and Thursday’s for months. The latter happened because I had a post-it note on my desk that read “NIK Pentagon Pizza” and my son looked at me and asked why, assuming I had already shared that story.

Monday: The Cartoon That Shut Down Boston: Guerrilla marketing goes a bit too guerrilla.

Tuesday: The Song That Puts You to Sleep (On Purpose): This is such a cool idea but I’d probably get nervous that it wouldn’t work, which defeats the whole purpose.

Wednesday: When a Truck Driver Had a Very Delicious Meltdown: Anything that involves Carvel is something I care about.

Thursday: The Surprisingly Cheesy Early Warning System: Welcome to the Pentagon pizza theory.

Long Reads and Other Things

Here are a few things you may want to check out over the weekend:

1) ”Secrets of the bees: Revealing the sneaky genius of nature’s brightest thinkers” (National Geographic, 14 minutes, March 2026). You may need to give Nat Geo your email address to read this, but it’s worth it — read it yourself to see what all the buzz is about (sorry!!).

2) “How I Found Out I Knew a Serial Killer” (New York Times/gift link, 7 minutes, April 2026). There’s a much easier way to find this out, but it usually doesn’t end well for you.

3) “David Attenborough and the Voice That Revealed a Planet” (The Ringer, 29 minutes, May 2026). A nice story in honor of Attenborough’s 100th birthday.

Have a great weekend, and a happy Mother’s Day!

Dan