Film

Today’s LL Study Guide ranges from Pablo Picasso’s tongue-twisting baptismal name and his unprecedented 90th‑birthday honor at the Louvre, to the tiny club of G‑rated Best Picture nominees standing in contrast to the X‑rated winner Midnight Cowboy. We also visit Leverkusen on the Rhine, where works team Bayer 04 Leverkusen finally shed their “Neverkusen” curse under Xabi Alonso while backed by pharmaceutical giant Bayer, and dig into the rise of fast‑fashion juggernaut Shein from its ZZKKO and SheInside days. Rounding things out: the conservation rescue of Texas Longhorn cattle by the U.S. Forest Service, the University of Texas mascot Bevo, and how Frank Sinatra’s “doo-be-doo-be-doo” scat on “Strangers in the Night” gave Scooby‑Doo his name and a half‑century of pop‑culture life. ...

Podcast Script Welcome back to the LL Study Guide daily review. I’m glad you’re here. We’re walking through another six-pack of questions, and today’s set really hops around: modern art, movie ratings, German soccer, fast fashion, Texas cattle, and a cartoon Great Dane named by Frank Sinatra. So if you felt a little whiplash playing this match day, that’s totally fair. As always, if you want the full write-up, extra examples, and links, you can check the study notes on our website at L L Study Guide dot com. I’ll just hit the key stories and connections here so you can listen on the go. ...

This match day moves quickly between big science, big media, and big money, anchored by six very “global” answers. At one end you have CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, a 27‑km ring under the French–Swiss border that is the world’s largest and highest‑energy particle accelerator and the site of the 2012 Higgs boson discovery; its superconducting magnets are cooled to an ultra‑cold 1.9 K, even colder than the 2.7 K cosmic microwave background of deep space. At the other end you have the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow passage between Iran and Oman that connects the Gulf of Oman to the Persian Gulf and carries roughly 20% of global oil flows, making it one of the most strategically sensitive waterways on Earth. ...

Podcast Script Welcome back to the LL Study Guide review podcast for another match day. I’m glad you’re here. We’re going to walk through all six questions from this day, hit the correct answers, and give you just enough background so the facts actually stick the next time you see something similar. If you want the full write‑ups, extra links, and source notes, those are all waiting for you in the study notes on our website at L L study guide dot com. Here in the audio, we’ll keep things tight and conversational so you can listen on the go. ...

Overview This match day leans heavily into the long 19th century, when science, literature, and symbolism were all exploding at once. Three questions sit squarely in that period: Lewis Carroll’s 1865 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland introduces the Queen of Hearts as a living playing card; Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo pilots the submarine Nautilus in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1869–70); and, in 1868, Janssen and Lockyer detect an unknown element in the Sun’s spectrum, later named helium and only isolated on Earth in 1895. ...

Podcast Script Welcome back to the LL Study Guide daily review. I’m glad you’re here. This episode is all about Match Day 19 from season 107, and it’s a really fun mix: classic literature, nuclear history, deep‑cut linguistics, and even the most remote spot in the ocean. As always, if you want links, visuals, and deeper dives on anything we talk about, you can check the full study notes on our website at llstudyguide.com. ...

This match day pulled together a wide range of knowledge: the structure of the Hawaiian alphabet, a live unfolding constitutional crisis in Venezuela, early‑2000s diet culture, classic TV history, camera technology, and contemporary film casting. The ʻokina question pushes you into phonetics and indigenous language preservation—Hawaiian officially treats the glottal stop as a full consonant and one of 13 letters in its modern alphabet, which is why you see it in spellings like Hawaiʻi and Oʻahu. ...

Podcast Script Welcome back to the LL Study Guide daily review. I’m glad you’re here. Today we’re walking through Match Day 17 from season 107. We’ve got a really nice mix: Hawaiian language, breaking political news, early‑2000s diet culture, classic TV, camera history, and a very busy Guatemalan movie star. As always, if you want the full write‑ups, timelines, and links, you can check the study notes on our website at llstudyguide.com. What we’ll do here is hit the key facts, then give you a couple of patterns so you can recognize similar clues next time. ...

This match day pulls you across a wide swath of 20th‑ and 21st‑century knowledge: a New York literary magazine founded in 1963, a DC superhero sequel set in the Cold War year 1984, a classic Cantonese dim sum dish built on Japanese-named daikon radish, a pasture grass whose common name points to Kentucky, a West African capital appended to its country’s name, and the Somoza family dictatorship that ruled Nicaragua for over four decades. ...

Match Day 12 Overview This match day covered a wide sweep of domains: physical geography and meteorology (trade winds in Earth’s atmospheric circulation), Latin popular music history (the rise of reggaeton), American sports trivia (Johnny “Football” Manziel and Don “Donnie Baseball” Mattingly), a core physics/mathematics concept (degrees of freedom), modern animated film canon (Frozen and Olaf), and post‑16 education in England (GCSEs and sixth form). A common thread is how names encode history and structure. Trade winds get their name from the oceanic trade routes they enabled for sailing ships; reggaeton’s very label emerged in Puerto Rico to describe a fusion of reggae en español, Jamaican dancehall, and hip hop built on the dembow beat; Don Mattingly’s “Donnie Baseball” mirrors Johnny Manziel’s “Johnny Football”; “degrees of freedom” compactly describe how many independent coordinates a system needs; and “sixth form” designates the final, A‑level‑focused stage of English secondary education after GCSEs. ...