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) Idaho (ID), Wichita (TX), Glens (NY), Great (MT), Twin (ID), Cuyahoga (OH), Cedar (IA), Post (ID), Menomonee (WI), Klamath (OR), and Tinton (NJ) are all words that come before WHAT word in the names of certain American cities?
2) “The sedge has withered from the lake, / And no birds sing,” a line from John Keats’s ballad “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” evokes an image of a ruined environment and thus inspired the title of WHAT 1962 work?
3) Of the works generally considered to be the “Seven Wonders of the Ancient World,” only the Great Pyramid of Giza remains largely intact. The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus was most recently destroyed, likely by earthquakes in the fourteenth century. WHICH wonder was destroyed most recently before the destruction of the Mausoleum? Also destroyed by earthquakes, its site was used for the Citadel of Qaitbay on the Mediterranean coast.
4) The Meat Racket: The Secret Takeover of America's Food Business, a work by Christopher Leonard published in 2014, focuses on WHAT heavyweight company founded in 1935 and based in Springdale, Arkansas?
5) NAME the only city that, with respect to the 2023 MLB season and the 2023-24 NFL season, hosted both a World Series game and an NFL playoff game.
6) This newsletter’s answers, or parts thereof, make up names (or part of names) that surround WHAT, which has an area of approximately 43,000 acres?
Trivia Newsletter CCI Recap
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?
This is THE LAST WALTZ. The miniseries is The Last Dance, about the 1997-98 Chicago Bulls, so you might say that a waltz is a more specific type of dance. Here’s a quick IMDB summary of The Last Waltz:
Thanksgiving, 1976, San Francisco's Winterland: the Band performs its last concert after 16 years on the road. Some numbers they do alone, some songs include guest artists from Ronnie Hawkins (their first boss, when they were the Hawks) to Bob Dylan (their last, when as his backup and as a solo group, they came into their own). Scorsese's camera explores the interactions onstage in the making of music. Offstage, he interviews the Band's five members, focusing on the nature of life on the road. The friendships, the harmonies, the hijinks, and the wear and tear add up to a last waltz.
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?
This is “GIRL ON FIRE.” In 2022, Keys released a graphic novel also called Girl on Fire:
Lolo Wright always thought she was just a regular fourteen-year-old dealing with regular family drama: her brother, James, is struggling with his studies; her dad’s business constantly teeters on the edge of trouble; and her mother . . . she left long ago. But then Lolo’s world explodes when a cop pulls a gun on James in a dangerous case of mistaken identities. Staring down the barrel, with no one else to help, Lolo discovers powers she never knew she had. Using only her mind, she literally throws the cop out of the way.
…
Girl on Fire is a young adult graphic novel about a girl who’s a flame. It’s the first-ever graphic novel from beloved GRAMMY® Award-winning artist Alicia Keys, co-written by Andrew Weiner and illustrated by Brittney Williams.
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?
This is PEKING DUCK.
Trivia Factorial already asked about Peking duck in 2022:
Bianyifang and Quanjude are restaurants particularly notable for WHAT classic dish, characterized by its method of preparation (roasting) and by its thin crispy skin? Legend has it that the dish, named after a city, was a favorite of Henry Kissinger’s following a secret visit he made in 1971.
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?
This is the ISLE OF WIGHT.
Let’s stick with the Brits: WHAT was the pen name of author and veterinary surgeon James Alfred Wight? He is perhaps most notable for his memoir All Creatures Great and Small. The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
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)?
This is STRAW DOGS. Here’s the NYT on the remake:
“Straw Dogs” — Rod Lurie’s odd and interesting remake of Sam Peckinpah’s venerable and violent button pusher — begins with a clash of cultural stereotypes. David Sumner (James Marsden) is a Hollywood screenwriter with an Ivy League education (or at least a Harvard T-shirt and fond memories of the Harvard-Yale game), newly arrived in his wife’s hometown, Blackwater, Miss. He is an effete coastal liberal, the kind of person who orders light beer at the local bar and grill, disdains its celebrated fried pickles and tries to pay with a credit card. He listens to classical music, uses big words like “acutely” and stays in shape by jumping rope. He can’t fix a roof or change a tire.
The local guys, for their parts, swear and fight and love guns, God and football. They listen to Lynyrd Skynyrd, and a few of them look as if they could moonlight as roadies for that shaggy, tragic Southern band. They leer at David’s wife, Amy (Kate Bosworth), and are generally ill-mannered when they are not being ostentatiously and menacingly polite. They work with their hands and aren’t much for book learning. On an especially hot day, one of them says, “This must be that global warmin’ you educated fellers are always goin’ on about.”
The hyperbole is more amusing than offensive. Mr. Lurie, a former film critic whose earlier movies include politically tinged thrillers like “The Contender” and “Nothing but the Truth,” is holding a fun-house mirror up to an America that seems, at the moment, to thrive on polarization and mutual contempt. The reality is more complicated, but something of the corrosive, absurd logic of the culture wars is captured in the interactions between David and the gang of good ol’ boys who become his mortal enemies.
6) WHAT word could most reasonably replace part of each of the answers in this newsletter?
The word we were looking for is “MAN.” Each answer would mean something different but recognizable if a word were replaced with the word “man”:
Question #1: The Last Waltz could become The Last Man, Mary Shelley’s dystopian novel.
Question #2: “Girl on Fire” could become the 2004 film Man on Fire.
Question #3: Peking duck could become Peking Man, the subspecies of Homo erectus.
Question #4: The Isle of Wight could become the other British island called the Isle of Man.
Question #5: Straw Dogs could become a “straw man,” the logical fallacy.
Our newsletter title, “Zone Coverage,” is also an example of this (“man coverage” is a distinct type of coverage in American football), but was also meant to be taken a bit literally: we were referring to the idea of men being covered up, as they were in these answers.
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
Wight’s pen name is JAMES HERRIOT.