Hi all—we remain on spring break, and so this post continues our run of guest posts. We’ll have two more guest posts next week.
Today's newsletter is written by Conor Durkin. Besides being one of the top few performers on our Question #6 leaderboard each season, Conor is the author of A City That Works, a Substack newsletter about politics and public policy in Chicago. Here's a link to subscribe if that sounds like your cup of tea:
If you are interested in writing a guest post, perhaps to promote some endeavor of yours, we would love to hear from you! We write the recaps, so all you have to do is write six questions with a hidden theme.
[For this edition, and also for all of the guest posts this month, the newsletter title of “Guest Post” is not a clue about the theme.]
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) Having previously hosted in 1900 and 1924, WHAT city will become the second city to host the modern Olympic Games for a third time in 2024?
2) The “Triple Crown of Acting” is a term applied to actors who have won an Oscar, Emmy, and Tony Award in the acting categories. British entertainment uses a similar distinction for actors who have won a BAFTA Film Award, BAFTA Television Award, and a Laurence Olivier Award. NAME the only person to have earned both distinctions.
3) On September 12, 2023, the day after the New York Jets played their first game of the NFL season, searches for WHAT two-word calcaneal body part spiked, as suggested by the below image of a Google Trends chart?
4) A biography written by Ron Chernow describes an 1877 visit to Windsor Castle as follows: “[Queen Victoria] considered Julia ‘civil & complimentary in her funny American way’ but griped that the upstart Jesse was ‘a very ill-mannered young Yankee.’ Meanwhile, the Earl of Derby shuddered at” WHAT American present at the meeting?
5) Of the thirteen clubs that have won multiple UEFA Champions League titles, four come from England (Liverpool, Manchester United, Chelsea, Nottingham Forest), three come from Italy (AC Milan, Inter Milan, Juventus), two from Spain (Real Madrid and Barcelona) and two from Portugal (Benfica and Porto). WHAT two countries are home to the remaining two clubs?
6) The answers to Questions #1 through #5 above reference five individuals who are most famously associated with WHAT site?
Trivia Newsletter CCVIII Recap
Thanks to Patrick for writing these questions!
1) Blaise Pascal's search for a perpetual motion machine did not succeed (spoiler alert). But his efforts are credited with providing the basic technology used in WHAT game, the name of which is derived from the language Pascal spoke?
This is ROULETTE.
We’ve authored three One-Day Specials over on LearnedLeague: A 2018 One-Day about the number pi that we wish we could do over now that we have six more years of trivia experience, a 2020 One-Day about gambling, and a 2022 One-Day about The Last Unicorn. We’re continuing the trend of writing a One-Day every two years by doing “Gambling 3: Night at the Casino” later this year, which means we’ve been thinking about gambling trivia a lot lately.
The go-to trivia question about roulette is “What do all of the numbers on a standard roulette wheel add up to?” The answer is at the end of this newsletter.1
2) The French children's television show known by the shorthand name Miraculous has become an international hit, featuring two teenagers with secret superhero identities. WHAT is the identity of the show’s female protagonist, named first in the show's subtitle and the film adaptation released in France in 2023?
The show is Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug & Cat Noir, and so the answer is LADYBUG.
Do you want to learn a lot more about Miraculous? Of course you do:
There's really no discernible explanation for how a French cartoon named "Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug & Cat Noir" came to America and found such a big fan base. But it did. And the cartoon got big enough that it went through a few different broadcast licensees, beginning with Nickelodeon in 2015 and eventually moving to Netflix and Disney+.
After five seasons, the television series has grown big enough to have its own cinematic adaptation, called "Ladybug & Cat Noir: Awakening."
And while the project received a theatrical release in portions of Europe, the United States will receive the movie on Netflix, which already houses several of the episodes.
The basic premise behind the film and TV series is a girl named Marinette (voiced by Cristina Valenzuela) and a boy named Adrien (Bryce Papenbrook) are gifted magic jewels that allow them to become superheroes. And they use their powers to protect Paris from a villain named Hawkmoth (Keith Silverstein).
Hawkmoth typically spends his time trying to capture the magic jewels that give Marinette (who becomes Ladybug) and Adrien (who becomes Cat Noir) their powers, all the while trying to find their secret identities. Hawkmoth transforms unhappy citizens of Paris into monsters to wreak havoc until Ladybug and Cat Noir stop them.
The running tie that binds these three people together is Adrien's father, Gabriel, is secretly Hawkmoth. But neither of them knows each other's alter egos. And Adrien and Marinette both attend high school together. They're also forbidden from trying to discover each other's real names by the man who gave them their magic powers, an old guardian named Wang Fu (Paul St. Peter).
3) When George Orwell volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War, as described in Homage to Catalonia, he ended up affiliated with the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM), a group often described as Trotskyist. He fought in intra-factional combat in Barcelona, fighting against Moscow-aligned groups. Among Orwell's allies in that combat were members of the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT). WHAT English word describes the philosophy of the CNT?
This is ANARCHIST/ANARCHY.
Here’s an excerpt of a conversation between a Vox writer and Sophie Scott-Brown, the author of Colin Ward and the Art of Everyday Anarchy.
Sean Illing: We’re all familiar with the stereotypes, but as someone who thinks seriously about anarchism, what does the term mean to you?
Sophie Scott-Brown: Yeah, I completely accept the stereotypes. Before you can get to any sort of serious anarchist philosophy, you have to do quite a lot of work deconstructing that for people. So here’s a working definition that might help. Anarchism, if you just take the very word itself, all it entails is a commitment to a lack of permanent authority.
4) Track star Carl Lewis was such an athletic talent that in 1984 he was selected in 12th round of the NFL draft, by the Dallas Cowboys (though he had not played college football). That same year, he was also selected with the 208th pick of the NBA draft, though he had not even played high school basketball. WHAT team -- that made a more consequential choice at #3 that year -- drafted Lewis?
This is the CHICAGO BULLS. The #3 pick that year was Michael Jordan.
A funny thing about being a Bulls fan is running into statistics like this one, shared last week after DeMar DeRozan had a big game:
Most 45+ point games in Chicago Bulls history:
73 — Michael Jordan
6 — Zach LaVine
5 — DeMar DeRozan
3 — Bob Love
2 — Jimmy Butler
5) The western meadowlark is the official state bird of six states, but WHAT bird has been named the state bird by seven contiguous states?
This is the CARDINAL. Here are those states:
6) WHAT novel, published in 1830, is suggested by today’s theme? Al Gore, playing somewhat against stereotype, has called it his favorite novel.
This is THE RED AND THE BLACK. If you haven’t heard of that novel, here’s a quick summary to catch you up:
The French literary classic The Red And The Black was written by Stendhal (pen name of Marie-Henri Beyle - 1783 to 1842) in 1830[.] … The Red and The Black (in French Le Rouge et Le Noir) is often credited as the first psychological novel.
The story is set in 1827 during the Bourbon Restoration in the fictional towns of Verrières and Vergy near the French Alps and centers around the ambitions of the young Julien Sorel (Lucas Wells). Julien is poor and of the lower class. Much to the chagrin of his peasant family, he has received an education from an old Napoleonic soldier who taught him to read and instructed him in history and Latin (and who left Julien dozens of books at his death) as well as instruction from the old local priest Chélan (Jeremy Johnson) in theology and advanced Biblical Latin. Indeed the “The Red And The Black” is a reference to the red uniforms of the military and the black robes of the clergy. Julien’s education above his “station” combined with his learned admiration of Napoleon (He often asks himself, “what would Napoleon do?”) and ”liberalism” and his sense of injustice is arguably the root of his downfall.
Each of today’s answers alluded to something that is typically red and black, or is commonly represented by a red and black symbol: roulette, Ladybug, anarchy, the Chicago Bulls, and the cardinal.
What’s up with Al Gore liking it? Read more about that here.
If you want one last thing to read going into the weekend, check out this interview in 2022 with the “last man standing in the floppy disk business.”
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link. (Updates to the leaderboard may occur irregularly until April.)
A typical roulette wheel has a 0 (and a double-zero in the US, and lately in Las Vegas casinos a triple-zero) and the numbers 1 through 36. Those numbers add up to 666, which some people find notable because 666 is the number of the Beast.
If you are ever implausibly in a situation where you need to find the sum of consecutive numbers, just remember Gauss’s lesson: You take the first and last number (1, 36), add them together (37), and multiply that number by how many pairs of numbers are in your set (36 / 2 = 18). That gives you the answer: 37 x 18 = 666.