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) NAME the current attorney general of Minnesota; he became the first Muslim elected to a statewide position in the U.S. when he won the race for that position in 2018, which was twelve years after he became the first Muslim elected to the U.S. Congress.
2) In “Bubble Buddy,” a Season 2 episode of SpongeBob SquarePants, a costumed SpongeBob is seen celebrating a holiday named after WHAT explorer? The show's fans may be surprised to learn that the holiday is not fictional and is observed on October 9th of each year in several U.S. states.
3) NAME the pop artist who, according to her website, is the youngest artist ever to write, produce and perform a #1 song on the Billboard Hot 100—not “Only In My Dreams” or “Lost in Your Eyes” but “Foolish Beat,” which charted in 1988.
4) At 12:06 AM (Central Time) on July 5, 2024, the earth will reach its aphelion, or its farthest point from the sun. In contrast, at 7:28 AM (Central Time) on January 4, 2025, the earth will reach its closest point to the sun, or its WHAT?
5) The “ITU-T E.161 standard” is a fancy way of referring to the typical telephone keypad wherein the numbers correspond to letters—so, “2” corresponds to each of “A,” “B,” and “C,” for example. If you wanted to use the ITU-T E.161 standard to demonstrate that you know the first name that the NFL’s 2023 leader in regular-season passing yards goes by, you would press WHAT three telephone keys?
6) This newsletter’s answers allude in one particular way to WHAT song?
Trivia Newsletter CCIV Recap
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?
This is a TOOTSIE POP. This was really a question about whether you remember those Tootsie Pop commercials that seemed to transcend generations. Let’s go straight to the source:
Suppose the earth was made of Tootsie Pop, how many licks would it take to reach the center? This is not the type of question, which comes to mind often, but out of curiosity I decided to do the math. On average, the distance to the Earth’s core is 6.371 billion millimeters. Using the Miley method it would take approximately 832 billion licks to reach the center and 254 billion licks while placing the tongue back in the mouth between licks.
That paper concludes that the average number of licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop is, rounded to the nearest hundred, WHAT number? The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
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?
This is DUOLINGO. According to the site’s “Courses” page, High Valyrian (from Game of Thrones) has 815,000 learners, right between Czech and Hawaiian, and Klingon (from Star Trek) has 381,000 learners, between Haitian Creole and Esperanto.
We decided to briefly sign up to learn High Valyrian, and were immediately interrogated for doing so:
Well…
We didn’t do well:
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?
This is ATHENA.
Madeline Miller is the author of The Song of Achilles (2011) and Circe (2018). Let’s let her talk to us about the myth of Arachne:
One of the earliest Greeks myths I remember is the story of the artist Arachne, whose name means “spider” in Greek. Back then, it seemed fairly standard: hubris, a confrontation with a god, transformation as punishment (to, unsurprisingly, a spider), with some natural explanation thrown in (this is why spiders spin webs!)
But when I got a bit older, and read Ovid’s full version of the myth, Arachne quickly became one of my favorite heroines. First of all, she’s one of the few ancient females who isn’t a princess or beautiful nymph. She’s the daughter of a tradesman, a Lydian dye-merchant, with no noble connections, nor extraordinary looks. She is famous, Ovid tells us, for her skill in weaving alone. I particularly love his description of her at her loom—how gracefully and deftly she handles the threads, how the nymphs abandon their fields and forests to come stare in awe. I have always found it so pleasurable to watch someone do something that they are truly gifted at, and Ovid captures that feeling perfectly.
Arachne is relentlessly proud of her excellence, and defiant in the face of attempts to cow her into modesty. She is, she says, as skilled as Athena in her work. Why should she lie and say she is not? There aren’t too many heroines in ancient literature who are so single-minded and proud–usually those characteristics are identified with men like Achilles and Ajax. In fact, that comparison does her a bit of a disservice, since her rebelliousness and pride are actually much more deliberate and intellectual than either of those two heroes (much as I love them). A better comparison might be another favorite of mine, Pentheus, the ill-fated King of Thebes, who loses his life standing up to Dionysus. Like him, Arachne dares to criticize the gods, and doesn’t back down even when threatened. Foolish? Maybe. But also principled and courageous.
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?
This is TEMPLE, as in SHIRLEY TEMPLE. (Temple married Charles Alden Black in 1950 and her name thereafter was Shirley Temple Black, so we had to craft this one in a way to not make “Black” acceptable.)
Shirley Temple is on the record as someone who does not like Shirley Temples. Why wouldn’t someone like Shirley Temples? Here’s one argument, though we do not endorse it (we’re more of “drink whatever!” people):
I think that the problem I have with the Shirley Temple is that it's the antithesis of what makes a good drink, at least a good cocktail. A good cocktail's all about, you know, balancing flavors. You have sweet. You have sour. You have bitter. You have these different elements in there, and getting that balance right is sort of a trick and an art.
And with the Shirley Temple, what you have is you have sweet plus sweet and then garnished with sweet. You start with the ginger ale, which is sweet. You add the grenadine, which tends to be just high-fructose corn syrup with some flavoring and coloring. And then you add an artificial cherry, which has been sitting in also high-fructose corn syrup. So it seems to me you're training generations of kids to associate the sort of sophistication and a big-event drink with something that's just sweet. And if you gave them something a little more interesting, maybe they'd expand their interest and their tastes.
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.
This is HOOTERS.
The “toy Yoda” waitress, of course, sued Hooters once it became clear she was not going to get a Toyota. Was she entitled to a Toyota? If you’re interested in that question from a legal perspective, you can turn to this law-review article with a delightful name: You Asked for It, You Got It … Toy Yoda: Practical Jokes, Prizes, and Contract Law.
6) WHAT word is today’s theme?
The theme of this newsletter was OWLS. Each of our answers is, or alludes to, something typically symbolized or associated with an owl:
Question #1: An owl is central to the decades-long marketing campaign asking how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop.
Question #2: Duolingo’s mascot is an owl (its name is “Duo”).
Question #3: Athena is often depicted with an owl.
Question #4: Temple, the university, plays in athletics as the Temple Owls.
Question #5: Hooters uses an owl in its branding and marketing.
Our newsletter title, “Parliament,” refers to the phrase “a parliament of owls” that you’ll sometimes run into. For example, here’s Jeopardy!:
Is a group of owls really called a parliament? Our advice is to be deeply skeptical of anyone who insists uncritically that any group of X animal is called a Y (that’s called a “term of venery,” by the way). Let’s turn it over to Audubon Magazine to make that argument for us. (You should carry that same skepticism anytime anyone ever tells you that anything is “an African proverb,” without further evidence.)
“Parliament of owls,” though, comes up quite a bit in the English language and has for a while. Read more about that here.
One last tidbit—you’ll sometimes run into the Geoffrey Chaucer poem “The Parliament of Fowls” in trivia. The link in the last paragraph explores a bit whether the phrase “parliament of owls” comes from that poem, or vice versa. Another reason to remember that poem, though, is that it’s one of the earliest (and perhaps the earliest) written references to St. Valentine’s Day being a day for lovers.
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
That paper suggests that it takes 419 licks to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop, and cites earlier research setting the number at 417, so we were looking for FOUR HUNDRED licks.