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Below are six trivia questions. You can reply to this e-mail if you’d like to participate. Like most trivia, the answers can be readily found via Google, so you’re on the honor system (i.e., do not use external resources to help you answer any of the questions). The SIXTH question of each set is designed to be a question that cannot be easily Googled; correct answers to those will be tracked and recognized in the next newsletter. The answers, and the next set of questions, will be published on Mondays and Thursdays.
1) John Oates and Darryl Hall met while students at WHAT university, which led to the formation of the legendary pop rock duo Hall & Oates? Bob Saget (may he rest in peace), Adam McKay, and Diplo are some other alumni of the D-I school, the basketball team of which has not been to March Madness since a “First Four” loss in 2019 and the football team of which went 3-9 last year, with their biggest loss coming against Cincinnati.
2) Yeehaw! In a 1962 interview with Time, folksinger and political activist Joan Baez made the analogy that a [BLANK] is to folk singing as a jam session is to jazz. NAME the Appalachian colloquialism that fills in the blank.
3) The below excerpt appears in Plato’s dialogue Cratylus:
Perhaps, however, the name Theonoe may mean "she who knows divine things" better than others. Nor shall we be far wrong in supposing that the author of it wished to identify this Goddess with moral intelligence, and therefore gave her the name ethonoe; which, however, either he or his successors have altered into what they thought a nicer form, and called her [BLANK].
Here, Socrates is guessing at the etymology of the name of WHICH Greek goddess?
4) Spoiler alert! In the Season 1 episode of Scrubs entitled “My Occurrence,” protagonist J.D. spends much of the episode trying to get a bad diagnosis fixed, believing it to be a clerical error; he instead realizes he was living a daydream, the unhappy diagnosis was true, and no time had passed. This episode (together with many other works, such as the Black Mirror episode “Playtest” and the 2005 film Stay) is an homage to WHAT 1890 American short story?
5) NAME the actress known for her roles on Heroes, The Blacklist, The Good Wife, and recently as the adult version of Taissa on the hit TV show Yellowjackets. What, you aren’t watching Yellowjackets? Okay, don’t go insane in the membrane: just combine a colorful name for a style of port wine with part of the name of Louisiana’s state tree, and you’ll get her first and last name.
6) WHAT unusual distinction is shared by each of the following films? Bambi (1942), The Sword in the Stone (1963), Clash of the Titans (1981), The Fox and the Hound (1981), Blade Runner (1982), The Last Unicorn (1982), Labyrinth (1986), Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001), Sonic the Hedgehog (2020).
Here are the answers from last time:
1) Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara, both of Schitt’s Creek fame, also starred together with notable comedians like John Candy on the Canadian sketch comedy show SCTV, which aired from 1976 to 1984. WHAT does “SC” stand for in SCTV? (The answer is not “sketch comedy” or a derivation thereof.)
The show bounced around a few names and networks, but “SC” consistently stood for “Second City,” as the show was created as an offshoot of Toronto’s Second City comedy troupe. If someone’s asking you a question about SCTV, they’re probably going to ask you about Bob and Doug McKenzie, the characters who appeared in the recurring “Great White North” sketches and the film Strange Brew.
2
) NAME the living composer born in Worcester, Massachusetts with a presidential name who composed the 1987 opera Nixon in China and the 2002 piece On the Transmigration of Souls, the latter of which was commissioned as a memorial piece for the victims of the September 11th attacks and which won the Pulitzer Prize for Music.
This is John Adams—Massachusetts was meant as a bit of a clue. Adams’s middle name, unbelievably, is Coolidge. Another opera he wrote that is commonly asked about is Doctor Atomic, which is about the first tests of the atomic bomb at Los Alamos. The librettist for Doctor Atomic was Peter Sellars, a key figure in recent opera history. I had a draft of a very tedious question that relied on Peter Sellars having this role for Doctor Atomic while Peter Sellers played several key roles in a different atomic-adjacent work, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, but that seemed too clever by half.
3) In 1992, Mae Jemison became the first Black woman to travel into space when she served aboard the Endeavour. NAME the woman who, fourteen years later, became the second Black woman to travel into space—as of today, she has spent more days in space than any other Black woman, and as a shortlisted candidate for the Artemis program, she may soon become the first woman to walk on the Moon.
Stephanie Wilson is the astronaut here. I tried to find some fact about Wilson that was interesting for this blurb (you know, more interesting than GOING TO SPACE MULTIPLE TIMES), and I learned that she likes collecting stamps! Unfortunately, you’re not allowed to bring postage stamps into space. I’ve found multiple sources to corroborate that stamps can’t be brought into space, and I have no idea why. A mystery for another day, I suppose.
4) In the past twenty years, a film that shares its name with a U.S. state capital was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture; in the subsequent year, a film with the same name as that capital’s state was also nominated for Best Picture. NAME the two films, neither of which won Best Picture.
The films are Lincoln (2012) and Nebraska (2013). Lincoln is certainly the more famous of the two; Nebraska, which I’ve never seen, is a black-and-white comedy-drama road film directed by Alexander Payne that stars Bruce Dern, Will Forte, June Squibb and Bob Odenkirk. It was nominated for six Oscars and received a great deal of critical acclaim.
(I would not blame you if you, at this point, thought this was going to be a presidentially themed quiz.)
5) Jonathan Goldsmith is a character actor who made minor appearances in a variety of films and television shows throughout the late twentieth century; however, he is much more famous for his commercials, which aired from 2007 through 2015, for WHAT brand? I’m told that he lives vicariously through himself.
“I don’t always answer trivia questions correctly, but when I do, I prefer Dos Equis.” Jonathan Goldsmith is probably best known outside of his friends and family for being The Most Interesting Man in the World. By the time you’re reading this, the advertising campaign has probably already been rebooted and we’re going to see all sorts of new entries in TMIMITWCU.
6) Many U.S. cities are missing from the following list of cities that share a specific distinction (but are listed in no particular order); name any one of the missing cities. [Note: “Chicago” is not a correct answer.]
Tucson, AZ
Stamford, CT
Madison, WI
Cleveland, OH
Birmingham, AL
Cedar Rapids, IA
Saint Louis, MO
Gulfport, MS
Columbus, GA
San Diego, CA
Each of these is its state’s second-largest city, by population. That meant you had forty cities to pick from, in order to answer the question. I expected Aurora (IL), Pittsburgh (PA), Buffalo (NY), and San Antonio (TX) to be among the most-guessed answers for folks who sorted out the theme.
The name of the newsletter (“Chicago”) was an allusion to its nickname “the Second City.” Question #1’s answer was the same (“Second City”). John Adams, the answer to Question #2, was the second president of the United States. Question #3 was a reference to a person to accomplish something for the second time. Question #4, in addition to orienting us towards cities and states, was about runners-up. Question #5 was used for the reference to “dos,” Spanish for “two.” In addition, within the question numbering, I used strikethrough text for the “1” in the first question and bolded/italicized the “2” in the second question.
We don’t normally ask you to come up with a substantive trivia fact after you’ve determined the theme. What about the poor folks who figured out the “second-most populous city” theme but weren’t able to confidently pick one? Well, our answer to Question #4 was one gift—Lincoln, NE is a correct answer. But what if you didn’t get that one? Well, if you had just said Worcester, MA, which I purposefully inserted into Question TWO, that would have been a right answer. I tried to allude to the existence of the hints by telling you that Chicago is not a right answer—but I didn’t say anything about other name-dropped cities.
The current-ish Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.