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) According to a paper published by Tyler T. Schmidt of the University of Wisconsin, depending on the methodology used, it would take either 254 billion licks or 832 billion licks to reach the center of the earth if the earth were a WHAT?
2) Klingon and High Valyrian are two of the dozens of courses offered on the website of WHAT company, the primary product of which was named the 2013 iPhone App of the Year?
3) One of the literal metamorphoses in Ovid’s Metamorphoses is caused by WHAT goddess, who transforms the weaver Arachne into a spider following a tapestry-making contest?
4) “All a celebrity has is their name,” said the plaintiff during a legal proceeding, during which it was determined that a soft-drink manufacturer was allowed to use the plaintiff’s first name, but not her last name, for a bottled drink reminiscent of lemon-lime soda and grenadine syrup topped with a maraschino cherry. WHAT was that last name?
5) NAME the restaurant chain founded in Clearwater, Florida on April 1, 1983; the date was reportedly picked by the restaurant’s six founders because they believed the restaurant’s premise was doomed to fail. Eighteen years later, the restaurant chain made headlines when it awarded one of its waitresses a “toy Yoda” as a contest prize instead of a Toyota, ostensibly as an April Fools’ joke.
6) WHAT word is today’s theme?
Trivia Newsletter CCIII Recap
1) It’s almost (Augie?) March, and so we should remember Humboldt’s Gift, a novel by WHAT author? It won the 1976 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and contributed to its author winning the Nobel Prize in Literature.
This is SAUL BELLOW. Bellow also wrote The Adventures of Augie March, so we gave you that little hint in the question.
Jeopardy! is currently airing its Tournament of Champions, and we were pleased to see the show offer the below as a clue on the day after this newsletter went public (category: New U.S. Stamps for 2024):
This Nobel Prize-winning author of "The Adventures of Augie March" wears a jaunty hat on his 2024 stamp
2) John Osborne’s 1956 play Look Back in Anger, Shelagh Delaney’s 1958 play A Taste of Honey, and Karl Reisz’s 1960 film Saturday Night and Sunday Morning are generally upheld as examples of WHAT two-word type of drama? A borrowed term from an article title by David Sylvester, it refers to an object that, on stage or set, may silently indicate the impoverished circumstances of the characters.
This is a KITCHEN SINK drama (sometimes “kitchen sink realism”). More on that:
The quality of life for the British working classes was, in the 1950s, poor. It is this pre-consumerist, post-war world that is captured by the English painter John Bratby. Along with playwrights such as Osborne and Sheila Delaney, of Taste of Honey fame, and novelists like Alan Sillitoe (The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner) and John Braine, (Room at the Top), Bratby and other realist artists – including Derrick Greaves, Edward Middleditch and Jack Smith, who became known as the Beaux Arts Quartet – documented the everyday life of ordinary people.
The term ‘kitchen sink’ was originally used as the title of an article by the critic David Sylvester in the December 1954 issue of the journal Encounter in which he wrote that these artists’ work ‘takes us back from the studio to the kitchen’. Their subject was, he claimed: ‘An inventory which includes every kind of food and drink, every utensil and implement, the usual plain furniture and even the babies’ nappies on the line. Everything but the kitchen sink – the kitchen sink too’. Sylvester emphasised that these kitchens were those ‘in which ordinary people cooked ordinary food and doubtless lived their ordinary lives’. In contrast to the prevailing neo-Romantic fantasies of painters like John Piper, Eric Ravilious, and David Jones, this raw work implied a new social, if not political, commentary.
3) John Lithgow, Patrick Ryecart and Pip Torrens are three of the very few actors who reprised their Season 2 roles in Season 3 of WHAT television show that began airing in 2016?
This is THE CROWN. Most of the cast from Season 2 does not take on their Season 3 roles—so, as one of many examples, Claire Foy plays Queen Elizabeth II in Seasons 1 and 2, but Olivia Colman plays her in Seasons 3 and 4.
Peter Morgan, the creator of The Crown, based the show on a film he wrote that came out in 2006 and a stage play that premiered in 2013. NAME EITHER that film or that stage play. Here’s a hint: Like The Crown, both have titles in the style of “The [Noun].” The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
4) Argentine writer Mariana Enríquez was shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize for her psychological horror short-story collection Los peligros de fumar en la cama—or, in its translation by Megan McDowell, “The Dangers of” doing WHAT?
This is THE DANGERS OF SMOKING IN BED. Enríquez has written two short-story collections; the other is Las cosas que perdimos en el fuego, or Things We Lost in the Fire, which we suppose is itself a danger of smoking in bed.
To be clear, these are not happy stories:
A schoolgirl yanks out her fingernails with her teeth in response to “what the man with slicked-back hair made her do”. A boy who jumps in front of a train is obliterated so thoroughly that just his left arm remains between the tracks, “like a greeting or message”. In the title story, women begin to set fire to themselves in response to male violence. The relentless grotesquerie avoids becoming kitsch by remaining grounded in its setting: a modern Argentina still coming to terms with decades of violent dictatorship.
The effect is so immersive that the details begin to feel like the reader’s own nightmares. The stories here are not formally connected but together they create a sensibility as distinctive as that found in Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son or Daisy Johnson’s Fen. They are a portrait of a world in fragments, a mirrorball made of razor blades.
Oh, what the heck, let’s do two questions in this recap. Enríquez’s short story “The Well” begins with this quote:
I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.
Those lines are from the poem “Elm,” first published in 1965 by WHOM? The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.2
5) In football, a “flea flicker” play seeks to trick the defense into thinking a run is occurring, so that the runner can lateral the ball back to the quarterback to attempt a pass. University of Illinois coach Bob Zuppke is credited with debuting the flea flicker in a 1925 game against Penn. NAME the player who galloped in the touchdown on that play.
This is RED GRANGE. Once every few years, Jeopardy! will want you to know that Red Grange was nicknamed the “Galloping Ghost,” and so “galloped” was a clue for you.
Zuppke was quite the innovator; in addition to the flea flicker, he’s credited with inventing the spiral pass from center, the onside kick, the screen pass, and the offensive huddle.
If you don’t know Red Grange, you should. Here’s the NYT in 1988:
Red Grange, the fabled ''Galloping Ghost,'' the legendary sports figure of the 1920's, has outlived the other celebrated athletes of a hero-worshipping age.
There were Babe Ruth in baseball, Jack Dempsey in boxing, Bobby Jones in golf, Bill Tilden in tennis and Red Grange on the gridiron, the most famous football player of his era and the one credited with giving the infant National Football League the drawing power it did not enjoy until he turned pro in 1925.
…
He is now 84 years old, and age has taken the spring from the powerful legs of the halfback from the University of Illiniois, and later the Chicago Bears, that carried him away from tacklers a thousand times and inspired the chroniclers of the game to call him the most exciting running back to grace the football playing grounds. ''He was three or four men and a horse rolled into one,'' Damon Runyon once remarked.
In 1969, on college football's 100th anniversary, the Football Writers Association made Red Grange the lone unanimous choice for its all-time All-America team.
…
In three seasons at Illinois he scored 31 touchdowns in 22 games, five coming on a single Saturday against Michigan, a national powerhouse, whose coach was reported to have remarked on the eve of the game, “All Grange can do is run.”
To which the Illinois coach, Bob Zuppke, referring to a famed opera star of the age, responded, “And all Galli-Curci can do is sing.”
6) “Get a clue” and tell us WHAT connects each of this newsletter’s answers.
The New York Times offers a variety of games to their readers. A relatively recent addition to the lineup is the game Connections, a totally original concept wherein players are given sixteen items and must group them into four distinct categories.
We noticed that a lot of folks on social media seemed annoyed at one particular recent category:
We immediately decided that it would be very funny to base a newsletter on the same category, banking on the facts that some of our readers surely play Connections and that we get to give extra clues (with the title and the clue in Question #6).
To be clear, the theme was that the last word of each answer was A COLOR, EXCEPT THE FIRST LETTER WAS CHANGED:
Question #1: Saul Bellow (“yellow”)
Question #2: kitchen sink (“pink”)
Question #3: The Crown (“brown”)
Question #4: smoking in bed (“red”)
Question #5: Red Grange (“orange”)
“Get a clue” in Question #6 was us giving you a clue (“blue”), and the newsletter title (“The Cray Lady”) was a reference to the NYT’s nickname, The Gray Lady, except that we used the slang word “cray” to imply that the newspaper was being a bit silly (and because it’s another example of the theme).
Similarly to how Connections will often have red herrings, we threw in some misdirects (e.g., both Questions #1 and #5 related closely to the State of Illinois; “Red Grange” as an answer that explicitly mentions a color; Questions #1 and #4 have a “smoking” theme).
In retrospect, it should have been more foreseeable to us that the theme that annoyed a bunch of people online might also annoy some of you!
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
The Crown is based on the 2006 film THE QUEEN and the 2013 play THE AUDIENCE.
“The Elm” is a poem by SYLVIA PLATH.