Below are six trivia questions. If you’d like to participate, you can either reply to this e-mail or submit your answers via Google Forms by using the button below. You can find our rules and guidelines by following this link.
1) Martin Scorsese has directed several rock-music documentaries, including George Harrison: Living in the Material World, Shine a Light (about the Rolling Stones), and WHAT 1978 film about the Band, the title of which might be said to be a more specific form of the title of a notable 2020 American sports documentary miniseries?
2) Nicki Minaj comes in hot by rapping “Spirit of Marilyn callin' me, audibly bawling” in the first lyric of the “Inferno Remix” of WHAT 2012 Alicia Keys song?
3) “The restaurant menu which announces; [redacted] - Please give 24 hours notice for this dish - is the honest one,” once wrote The Independent regarding WHAT dish available in some Chinese restaurants?
4) Queen Victoria’s summer home, where she passed away at the age of 81, is known as Osborne House, which is located in the town of East Cowes on WHAT island in the English Channel?
5) The Siege of Trencher's Farm, a 1969 horror/thriller novel by Gordon Williams, is likely best known as the source material for WHAT 1971 film starring Dustin Hoffman and Susan George (and its 2011 remake starring James Marsden and Kate Bosworth)?
6) WHAT word could most reasonably replace part of each of the answers in this newsletter?
Trivia Newsletter CC Recap
1) Whether you consider the version of the song “Cleveland Rocks” originally by Ian Hunter, the cover by the group The Presidents of the United States of America, or the truncated version of the song used in the opening credits of The Drew Carey Show, WHAT is the last word of the song’s lyrics?
OHIO!
A plot point in The Drew Carey Show involved Drew Carey’s character agreeing to enter a sham civil union with his boss in order to help his boss avoid deportation. WHAT ACTOR played that boss? He is probably more notable for his late (late) night talk show that aired from 2005 to 2014. The answer is at the end of this newsletter.1
2) WHAT is the smallest positive whole number that cannot be made from the set of numbers {1, 2, 3, 4}, using each number exactly once and using only addition, subtraction, multiplication, and/or division? [Note: Do not use concatenation (treating the numbers as digits and combining them); for example, 412 + 3 would not be a valid operation.]
This is TWENTY-NINE. Here are some illustrations for numbers just under 29:
28 = 2 x 3, then + 1, then x 4.
27 = 2 x 4, then + 1, then x 3.
26 = 3 x 4, then + 1, then x 2.
25 = 3 x 4, then x 2, then + 1.
24 = 3 x 4, then x 2, then / 1.
23 = 3 x 4, then x 2, then - 1.
If you had been able to just treat the numbers as digits and combine them, then you could have taken 42 - 13 to get to 29.
3) Florence Nightingale was born in 1820 in WHAT city, the capital of what was then the Grand Duchy of Tuscany?
Florence Nightingale was born in FLORENCE, of course. Nightingale was British, but was born in Florence while her family was traveling, so they picked that name. Were we more clever, we would have come up with a theme involving people who have the name of the place they were born, like the artist Judy Chicago (if you’ll accept a name change for this prompt).
4) NAME the Baptist pastor who has been serving as the junior U.S. Senator from Georgia since 2021; appropriately enough, his first name and middle name are both of Biblical origin.
This is RAPHAEL WARNOCK. What’s his middle name? We’ll come back to that.
The U.S. Senate’s website itself has a list of “Facts & Milestones” regarding U.S. Senators. It’s not a bad resource to brush up on your Senate knowledge. Can you name the five Senators who have won Nobel Peace Prizes, for example? Find them here. More interesting to me is the three Senators who have played in the Olympic Games.
5) “[N]obody can prove that there is not between the Earth and Mars a [BLANK] revolving in an elliptical orbit, but nobody thinks this sufficiently likely to be taken into account in practice,” once said philosopher Bertrand Russell. This statement is an example of an analogy repeatedly made by him in the context of religion, known as Russell’s WHAT?
The missing word is TEAPOT. We’ll turn it over to xkcd:
6) NAME the individual, born in 1865, to whom this newsletter most closely alludes.
This was a newsletter about WARREN G. HARDING, the president of the United States from 1921 to 1923.
Because it’s very important to a group of 154 historians and “presidential experts” that they generate clicks, the latest edition of the “Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey” came out yesterday. The headline you’ll see is that Joe Biden came in 14th place and Donald Trump came in 45th place, which, sure, whatever. Warren G. Harding comes in 40th place. Tough crowd! Here’s a chart from the survey:
Each of our questions alluded to Harding in some fashion:
Question #1: Harding was from Ohio (and the question primed you by mentioning the group The Presidents of the United States of America).
Question #2: Harding was our 29th president.
Question #3: Florence Harding was Harding’s wife and the nation’s First Lady. (Warren Harding was not a very good husband!)
Question #4: Raphael Warnock happens to have the same middle name as Warren Harding: Gamaliel. (Plus, Harding was a U.S. Senator before becoming President.)
Question #5: Harding’s legacy was deeply stained by his involvement in what is called the “Teapot Dome scandal.”
Our newsletter title, “Return to Normal C,” pointed to the unsensational nature of our 200th newsletter compared to past Trivia Factorial escapades, but also alluded to “Return to Normalcy,” Harding’s campaign slogan following the tumultuous 1910s and the First World War.
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
Drew Carey’s boss in The Drew Carey Show was played by CRAIG FERGUSON.