1.) Name 3 bands who played at Lollapalooza this past year.

• SA: "Korn, Tool..."
• P-Nut: "Tool?"
  
• SA: "Yeah, Tool played. And Snoop Dogg."
• P-Nut: "Yep. Without his Gap Band, though. His loss."

2.) What was Elvis Presley's middle name?

• P-Nut: "Aaron. And P-Nut is MY real name."
• Kerrang!: "Whatever you say..."

3.) Name the original members of the Fantastic Four.

• P-Nut: "That would be, um, Mr. Elastic, or Captain Elastic? Whatever the fuck his name was. Then, The Thing, and that chick... 'Flame on!' Help me.
• SA: "I know! I'm trying to think man!"
• P-Nut: "I can't remember which one went invisible."

4.) Who wrote the songs for the musical 'Oklahoma'?

• SA: "Rodgers and Hammerstein? Is it? Oh, my God!"

5.) What is the world's largest rodent?

• SA: "I've seen some pretty big rats!"
• P-Nut: "It's gotta be the common mouse."
• Kerrang!: "Not even Los Angeles has mince THAT big."

6.) Who was the voice of Miss Piggy?

• P-Nut: Is it someone we're supposed to know?"
• SA: "I used to know that. Shit!"
• P-Nut: "Ron Howard?"
• SA: "Penny Marshall?"

7.) Who directed the films 'Hard Boiled' and 'Face/Off'?

• SA: "John Woo"

8.) What movie soundtrack album pits rap bands and rock bands against each other in the same songs?

• P-Nut: "That would be..."
• SA: " 'Judgement Night' "
• P-Nut: "Damn! Is this a contest?"

9.) What is an acronym?

• P-Nut: "It's a word that's made from the beginning letters of other words, in order to help you to remember it."
• Kerrang!: "Correct."
• P-Nut: "Boom!" (Don't ya love when he says that!?) ;)

10.) Who was the singer for Faith No More prior to Mike Patton?

• P-Nut: "Um... Does he sing for another band right now?"
• Kerrang!: "That's debatable."
• P-Nut: "I don't know."
• SA: "Me neither."

11.) In which film does Robert De Niro play a nerdy character called Rupert Pupkin?

• SA: "This is yours, P-Nut."
• P-Nut: "Robert De Niro, Rupert Pupkin... what the fuck!?"
• SA: "Is it 'The Fan'?"
• P-Nut: "No, I don't think it was 'The Fan', and it wasn't 'Brazil' because he was rad in that... Man, I don't know- that's one of the ones I don't own!"

12.) Which University will Prsident Clinton's daughter begin attending this month?

• P-Nut: "Berkley"
• SA: "Stanford"
• Kerrang!: "SA gets this one."
• P-Nut: "Damn!"

13.) Name three species of sharks...

• P-Nut: "Hammerhead, Great White, and... the mouth-breather?"
• Kerrang!: "We don't have that one on our list...
• SA: "Tiger"

14.) What is Nirvana's Krist Novoselic's new bands named?

• SA: "Oh, man, is it called Sweet 78?"
• Kerrang!: The judges will rule in your favor on that one. It's Sweet 75"
• P-Nut: "That was close."

15.) Which year did Bob Marley die of cancer?

• SA: "'81"
• P-Nut: "I would guess '82"
• Kerrang!: "SA is correct.
• P-Nut: "Damn! You are ON today!"

16.) Which baseball team won the World Series last year?

• P-Nut: "The Yankees"
• SA: "Chalk that one up for P-Nut!"

17.) Name the five Great Lakes.

• P-Nut: "Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, and Superior. That's an acronym, by the way. H-O-M-E-S!"
• Kerrang!: "Some people take these challenges way too seriously..."

18.) What was the movie 'The Road Warrior' called nearly everywhere in the world but in America?

• P-Nut: "Mad Max 2."
• SA: "Nice!"
• P-Nut: "Three in a row!"

19.) Where were the 1976 Summer Olympics held?

• SA: "Hmmm. Nadia Comancei was in those, I think...."
• P-Nut: "Mexico City? No, I'm wrong"
• SA: "I can't remember now. Where was it? Montreal? Damn, I was gonna say that!"

20.) Who wrote the novel "A Clockwork orange"?

• P-Nut: "Anthony Burgess"

21.) Who is the current singer in Iron Maiden?

• P-Nut: "Jeez, I don't even know! Bruce Dickinson and Paul Di'Anno were the only ones that I ever listened to. No offense to the new guy, of course!"

22.) What was Eazy-E's first album called?

• P-Nut: "Was that 'Easy-Duz-it'?"
• SA: "I was gonna say that!"
• Kerrang!: Now where have we heard that before...

23.) Who has been selected to play the young Obi-Wan Kenobi in the next 'Star Wars' films?

• P-Nut: "Oh, I heard about that! He's hip and hot right now... Damnit!"
• SA: "I don't even know!"
• P-Nut: "Ewan McGregor? Really? Cool, he's a great actor."

24.) Who is Michael Balzary commonly known as?

• P-Nut: "Oh, I know that!"
• SA: "Flea"
• P-Nut: "You got me again!"

25.) What is the star sign for Capricorn?

• P-Nut: "It's a ram"
• SA: "No, it's a goat, right?..."

Space may be the final frontier, but 311 makes it seem like the first. With a child's sense of wonder, the band squeezes vast tracts of inner and outer space into its new album, "Transistor," whose 21 songs include titles like "Galaxy," "Inner Light Spectrum" and "Jupiter."

No follower of trends, 311 had turned its gaze heavenward long before Sojourner cruised the Red Planet, and well before the world became enamored with the passing comet Hale-Bopp. Its self-titled 1995 album was adorned with space-travel artwork, and the band's five members even wore "alien" makeup for liner photos.

Though it still looks toward the far reaches of outer space, 311 gazes inwardly too, inspired by Zen Buddhism and a host of other mystical pursuits. The bipolar tug might pull apart a lesser group, but not 311, whose meteoric rise from small-town band to chart-topper occured in a span of just four years.

The quintet's popularity came in such a flash, said S.A. Martinez, one of the band's two vocalists, that 311 has yet to perform at the biggest venue in its former hometown of Omaha, Nebraska - a city of 350,000 that's dead-center in the United States and best-known, perhaps, for its Mutual of Omaha insurance company and the city's resident financial wizard, Warren Buffett.

The quick-rising fortune of the prairie boys' move West - they now call Los Angeles home - may have raised eyebrows in the recording idustry, but the members of 311 weren't surprised, Martinez said in an interview.

"One of the reasons we wanted to come out here was, we wanted to prove ourselves on foreign ground in a big market. We just really believed in ourselves more than anything. We didn't ever NOT believe it was going to happen. It was a matter of WHEN."

That faith remained unshaken even when flames destroyed 311's equipment shortly after the band moved to L.A. in 1991.

"Those were the most difficult, lean years, so everything's been gravy since then," he said. Today, he added, life for 311 is "WAY PAST better."

The good karma seems to have left the band with more time to explore the heavens than a weather balloon over Roswell, N.M. And while a star map might be needed to ply the perplexing philosophical terrain of "Transistor," its down-to-earth pleas for harmony and interpersonal communication need no translation.

"We're all connected," Martinez said about the album title. "Transistors receive and emit energy, and that's basically what we all are. We're receiving signals and giving off frequency, too, and really all of life is frequency."

Unfortunately, those signals are sometimes misread by others, as when false rumors spread that the band's name is a cryptic reference to the Ku Klux Klan - 311 representing three times the 11th letter, K.

"That's such a sensational rumor that once kids hear it, it just takes off," Martinez said.

In truth, 311 "was originally a police call for indecent expsure in Omaha," where, on hot summer nights, landlocked teens without recourse to beaches often trespass and skinny-dip in public pools.

"The original guitarist and (bass player) P-Nut were out pool hopping, and the guitarist, his name is Jimmy, he was naked, so once they got caught he got cited for a 311. They thought that was pretty cool and kept the moniker."

Not so cool, Martinez said, is how Earthlings have grown numb to what he sees as cosmic changes that are afoot.

"The more I research it, the more questions I have. So many anomalies occur in this world. It just trips me out, man - artifacts, prophecies from native cultures."

Particularly intriguing, he said, was the Heaven's Gate mass suicide in Rancho Santa Fe last March.

"What's interesting about the Heaven's Gate deal is that no one questioned the fact, everyone took it for granted, that it was suicide these people committed. Yet in their video, none of them mentioned that's what they were gonna do."

His mind is open regarding the episode. "What if these people from Heaven's Gate saw something in even greater detail? It just seems a little weird to me that it all happened the way that it did."

However, he lamented, "No one is questioning anything. Not too long ago there was a big thing over the skies of Phoenix. Hundreds, probably thousands were seeing these formations in the sky, these lights. In Mexico City there are numerous sightings, and it's like 'big deal,' because they happen so frequently. Who knows what's going on?"

He subscribes to a theory that a planet once orbited between Mars and Jupiter. It somehow was disintegrated, its remnants forming an asteroid belt between the two other planets. Its absence, he said, "has thrown the whole system out of sync," with the result that "lots of things are changing right now, culturally, environmentally, economically.

"The Hopis say we go through cycles where the Earth is trying to get back into a point of equilibrium. It gets to this balance, and then it goes out of balance again. And we repeat the cycle.

"It's so trippy that it makes sense."

Indeed, trippy is an apt descriptionfor muchof "Transistor," which continues to blend hard rock and rap, but leansmore toward lighter funk, reggae, and dub arrangements.

Yet while "Transistor" may strike some as a departure, it's simply part of 311's natural progression, Martinez said. "I think, if anything, we are enhancing our sound with different textures and what-not, but I don't really thik we can make that much of a turn at this stage in our career."

For the new album, which will be released Tuesday, "we came up with so many tunes, it was a chore to plug lyrics to a lot of them. I didn't think we would be able to do it, but we did."

Because its previous album, which yielded the breakthrough single, "Down," is widely viewed as the band's debut (it actually was 311's third LP), "Transistor" has generated anticipation generally reserved for a band's second album. "It is almost as if it's our sophomore record, (but) I don't really think about it," Martinez said. "I don't have any expectations of selling what we did, for one. If we sell, great. It's so hard, there's so much product out there."

The bottom line, he said, is that the band's touring has built a strong following - so record sales be damned.

"We have touring that we have counted on for our livelihood, thank God. We got that following solid, because if we had blown up immediately with our first release, I don't know if we could have turned out the way we had. We needed to get those lean years done and get the word out. That really primed us to explode.