Hi all—we had an unexpected Xfinity outage over the weekend, and so we don’t have a newsletter today. Our long-time readers know that we do a Wordle-themed newsletter every XXXII editions, and so our next newsletter (Trivia Newsletter CLX), our fifth Wordle-themed game, will come out on Monday, August 21st.
Here’s one question to tide you over: What do Ja Rule, a statement that LeBron James made in 2010,1 and the Old Stone Age have in common? That answer’s at the end of this post, so don’t scroll down until you’re ready!2
One last note: This has been a very touch-and-go summer, and we appreciate your patience through our occasional fits and starts. We expect to be more consistent starting in September. Thanks, as always, to our guest posters, who have helped keep Trivia Factorial going throughout the past few months. More importantly, thanks to you for reading along! We’ll soon be at this newsletter’s two-year anniversary, and none of this would have happened without all of your participation and encouragement. It’s a joy knowing you read along, and we hope to put out a newsletter worthy of your time.
This is a good example of the benefits of the Oxford comma, lest you briefly wonder whether LeBron was making statements two million years ago. The man’s had a long career, but not quite that long.
Each of these shares the name of a diet. Ja Rule’s non-stage name is Jeffrey Atkins (the Atkins diet), LeBron James announced that he was taking his talents to South Beach (the South Beach diet), and the Old Stone Age is another name for the Paleolithic era (a paleo diet). As you might be able to guess, this was a potential newsletter theme that we never got off the ground. That newsletter would have been called “The Back Twenty-One,” which would have been a riff on the phrase “the back nine” in golf. The phrase “the back twenty-one” presupposes a strange golf course where the final hole may be Hole 30 (instead of the typical Hole 18), which is a homophone for the Whole30 diet.