Today’s Q10 comes to us straight from Forbes. Do a good job at Thanksgiving and this could be you, next year! These are yearly earnings, by the way, not total earnings.

10. Anthony Bourdain, $1.5 million. I was pleased to see this, because I love Anthony Bourdain. I especially like the No Reservations where he ends up stranded in Romania because of a crappy rental car and the guide he is with throws is back out trying to move the car. So, the guide drinks to try to alleviate the pain. Eventually, the guide (who was also Bourdain’s friend) ended up pounding on a table with his fist drunkenly yelling, “Tony! Tony!” It was fabulous. The figure seems low to me, though, considering the restaurants, the show, the books, etc.

9. Bobby Flay, $1.5 million. I don’t have much to say about Bobby Flay, ‘cause I don’t really like him. OK, that’s not fair. He is the owner and executive chef of six restaurants, has eight cookbooks, and has hosted seven Food Network shows.

8. Tom Colicchio, $2 million. The Top Chef judge owns the Craft line of restaurants, including ‘wichcraft. He also used to be the co-owner, co-founder, and executive chef of NYC’s Gramercy Tavern.

7. Mario Batali, $3 million. This seems low, too – he’s owns not one… not two… but 13 restaurants in New York, L.A. and Vegas. But he’s also got the cookware. I guess if he runs low on cash he could always approach Crocs about becoming a spokesperson.

6. Paula Deen, $4.5 million. My mom’s favorite! (more…)

It’s almost Thanksgiving, which means it’s time for TV shows to start rolling out their holiday specials, with a healthy dose of family values and nostalgic morals. Of these 11 descriptions of Thanksgiving episodes, can you identify the show they came from?

Take the quiz: Turkey Day on the Tube

At the end of the Beatles song “Strawberry Fields Forever” from the Magical Mystery Tour album, John Lennon mutters “cranberry sauce.” There was no intended meaning to this; it was just supposed to add to the surreal feeling of the song.
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A can of whole-berry cranberry sauce contains about 99 cranberries.
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Irish band The Cranberries were originally named “The Cranberry Saw Us” (cranberry sauce).
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Cranberries are harvested by flooding the cranberry beds. A machine goes through and removes the berries from the vines. The harvested berries then float on top of the water and can be rounded up easier.
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You can always buy cranberry sauce – a lot of people like to plop it out of the can directly to a plate because it holds the shape of the can perfectly, ridges and all. But if you’d like a more, shall we say, wholesome alternative, here’s a recipe for you.

I’m happy to announce some winners to our last How Did You Know trivia hunt. First, Nathan Richards from Seattle successful prevented our reigning champions from the trifecta. Congrats Nathan! I’ll post his pic and bio below, and his answers after the jump.

But first we have more winners!

The team of Jeremy Burgher and Mikaela Brown were our random winners this month, proving that, yes, you can submit all the correct answers a day late and still win here on HDYK. Congrats guys. And nice job presenting your logic.

Speaking of nice presentations, we felt obliged to throw a t-shirt Kate and Caro’s way. They submitted early yesterday, and might have won it all had they shown us their logic. Instead, they wrote their answers in rhyming couplets, which I’ll post after the jump. We’ve never seen anything like it! For the extra labor, we figured they deserved a prize too.

See everyone back for another round on the 16th of December.

Thanks so much! This contest has been the highlight of my month for nearly half a year now. I’m a Seattlite currently attending Central Washington University in lonely Ellensburg, WA (quite possibly the least prestigious University ever to be featured on How Did You Know). I’m a senior one quarter away from graduating with a degree in Education, with certification in Elementary grades as well as middle school math and science. My free time as of late has involved copious amounts of coloring, glitter and vinegar/baking soda volcanoes. It’s a sweet life, I’m not gonna lie.

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When Americans sit down with their families for Thanksgiving dinner, most of us will probably gorge ourselves on the same traditional Thanksgiving menu, with turkey, cranberry sauce, stuffing, and pumpkin pie taking up the most real estate on our plates. How did these dishes become the national “what you eat on Thanksgiving” options, though? Are they holdovers from the First Thanksgiving, or did they gradually sneak in?

The Pilgrims may not have had turkey

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For some families, the Thanksgiving feast is a sacred and solemn occasion. For others, the holiday is orchestrated by the control freak who insists that everything be picture-perfect. And quite a few families put their personal tensions and passive-aggressiveness on display. The perfect remedy for these uptight feasts is a ridiculous holiday hat.

1. The Gobbler

The Gobbler Hat has it all: a turkey who still has his head, feathers, and his own Pilgrim hat. This hat is so popular that it is sold out at the half-dozen or so suppliers I checked. Maybe next year.

2. Sexy Turkey Hat

Here’s a much fancier (and more feminine) turkey hat.

There are some people, I am told, that have elegant Thanksgiving suppers. Then there are the rest of us.

No, you can’t buy it, but you can buy the knitting pattern and make your own by next year.

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After several late nights (and early mornings) fact-checking the upcoming issue of mental_floss, my wife Kara took Monday to catch up on her rest. I should have done the same, but instead, I watched Monday Night Football. I still forget that it’s on ESPN now instead of ABC, but that just shows my age.

Anyway, last night’s game involved the Green Bay Packers and the New Orleans Saints. Noting that both of those location/team combinations were three words long, the names of NFL teams begged some research, and I came up with today’s Brain Game. (So now I can feel like my TV watching contributed to my job. Woohoo!)

When it comes to current location-team combinations,
what NFL team has an eight-syllable name
(longer than any other)?

HERE is the solution.

How to Organize and Cook Holiday Dinner for a Crowd (42) using Spreadsheets. Just one of the many geeky Thanksgiving tips from Instructables. (via Metafilter)
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Scientists reveal that long-lasting romantic love is possible, at least according to brain scans. And all this time we assumed some people were lying to themselves for the sake of the kids.
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Mark Johnson traveled the world to record musicians all performing the same song, Stand By Me. The result is entertaining, uplifting, and totally cool.
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Making Visible Embryos. Eight sections of this site detail the history of how we came to understand and illustrate unborn humans. (via Bioephemera)
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Saturday night, Space X fired up all nine engines, burned half a million pounds of propellant, and scared the daylights out of the locals. “Space-X shook the T-Bone off the grill hit my dog on the head, he thought I smacked him, he bit my ankle.”
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Watch the birth of a tornado. It grows tall and strong and then wanders off in search of a trailer park to destroy.
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Six Manly Ways to Prepare Turkey. If you want to be super manly, shoot a wild turkey, marinate it in whiskey, steam it with beer, stuff it with other animals, wrap it in bacon, and deep-fry it.

The Mythbusters are officially crazy. Using “Leonardo 2.0,” a custom paintbull gun (actually an array of guns), they managed to paint a rough version of Mona Lisa in 80 milliseconds. “Leonardo” consists of:

• 1 mile of vinyl tubing
• 600 pounds of aluminum
• 1,100 paintballs
• 2,100 gallons of air (pressure: 150 pounds per square inch)

Here’s a video of the paint robot in action. First they use “Leonardo 1.0″ with a single gun to paint a smiley face (starts around 2 minutes). Then the 1,100-gun beast gets going around 8 minutes. (The best part is the slow-motion shot around 8:50.)

After the jump: in a second public demonstration of “Leonardo 2.0,” watch Mythbuster Jamie Hyneman get shot with 1,110 red paintballs live on stage.

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If you’ve made it this far, I commend you! One more puzzle to solve and you’re home free. First one to send in the correct answer to the challenge below, along with the correct answers found all along the path this week, AND, the logic behind ‘em (which is to say: HOW DID YOU KNOW?), gets a pick of any two t-shirts and book from our store. We’ll also be awarding one t-shirt to a random winner who has all the answers correct, as well.

Avery Dale, Ken Laskowski, Colin Utley, and Hayley Wells are our current champions and they’re going for the trifecta this month. So let’s see if someone can knock them out before they claim the big, mysterious trophy. You can read about them here.

As comments have been turned off for the length of the hunt, please click on the following link and send your answers and logic to us at: TriviaHunt@Gmail.com

If you missed Day 1, Day 2, Day 3 or Day 4’s challenges, there might still be time to solve them all. No one knows how long it’ll take for one of you trivia junkies to nail down the whole megillah, so make haste, make haste. And now, on the next page, I present the final puzzle, drawing on all the answers you dug up along the trail.

(Be sure to check back Dec 16th for the next HDYK puzzle)

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