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) In a 1970 essay, Professor Masahiro Mori introduced the “uncanny valley,” a concept describing a relation between an object’s resemblance to a human being and a human’s emotional response to that object. Specifically, the essay delved into human-WHAT relations, one of Mori’s specialties at the Tokyo Institute of Technology?
2) The Edmonton Oilers, Toronto Blue Jays, and Vancouver Canucks all play their home games in different cities, but their respective home venues share WHAT word in their names?
3) “[It] was originally sold under the title of Li'l Folks, but that had been used before, so they said we have to think of another title. I couldn't think of one and somebody at United Features came up with the miserable title [REDACTED], which I hate and have always hated,” said a man born in 1922 about his most notable work, which may have taken its “miserable title” from WHAT kind of gallery?
4) The two characters shown in the below image share WHAT first name? The left character is a titular character in a Cartoon Network show that aired from 1999 to 2009, and the right character is a minor character in a 1994 film.
5) Universal Studios figured that women over thirty would never go see a film called Rocket Boys, so with the magic of anagramming, audiences in 1999 were treated to Jake Gyllenhaal and Laura Dern in a film with WHAT adjective in its name?
6) WHAT word is both this newsletter’s theme and, in reference to a 1980s band, could itself have been one of the answers to Questions #1 through #5?
Trivia Newsletter CCV Recap
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.
This is KEITH ELLISON. Ellison won his election fairly comfortably in 2018 (49% to 45.1%), but narrowly won in 2022 (50.4% to 49.5%).
One technical point about Minnesota is that, while all five statewide offices (Governor, Lt. Governor, Secretary of State, State Auditor, and Attorney General) are currently of the same party, voters in the 2022 general election didn’t just see the word “Democratic” or “Democratic Party”1 next to the names of Ellison and the other winning candidates. Instead, voters saw the word “Democratic” connected to WHAT TWO OTHER WORDS by hyphens next to Ellison’s name? The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.2
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.
This is LEIF ERIKSON. The SpongeBob folks sometimes share promotional images like the below one:
You can celebrate at the Leif Erikson Festival in Norway…Michigan (population: 2,840), on the Upper Peninsula.
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.
This is DEBBIE GIBSON.
Who’s Debbie Gibson? Let’s have her website tell you:
For more than 35 years, Debbie Gibson has been a true pioneer and force in the entertainment industry. A singer, songwriter, producer, musician, actor, and entrepreneur, she embodies what it truly means to be an icon.
A music prodigy, Gibson burst on the Billboard Pop Charts at the tender age of 16 with the self-penned “Only In My Dreams.” The “Original Pop Princess” quickly became the youngest artist ever to write, produce and perform a No. 1 hit song, “Foolish Beat,” on the Billboard Hot 100 and entered the Guinness Book of World Records. To date, she is still the youngest female to hold that record. Less than a year later, she did it again with her self-penned and produced hit “Lost in Your Eyes” making her to date the sole female artist to have written, produced and performed two No. 1 songs on the Billboard Hot 100. She also holds the title of the youngest artist to be awarded ASCAP Songwriter of the Year. Gibson has sold more than 16 million albums worldwide and released 11 studio albums and five compilations.
After conquering the pop world with 3 consecutive albums and world tours, she set her sights on the theater and starred in 17 musicals in 17 years. Gibson made her mark in the Broadway production of Les Miserables as Eponine. She broke box office records in the London West End production of Grease as Sandy. She then took the stage in the U.S. Broadway tours of Grease as Rizzo and Funny Girl as Fanny Brice. Gibson also wowed critics as Belle in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, Gypsy Rose Lee in Gypsy, The Narrator in the national tour of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Cinderella in the national production of Cinderella with Eartha Kitt, Velma Kelly in Chicago, and Sally Bowles in the Broadway revival of Cabaret with Neil Patrick Harris.
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?
This is earth’s PERIHELION.
“Wait, the earth is farthest from the sun in July?” July is part of the summer in the Northern Hemisphere and part of the winter in the Southern Hemisphere, and while “because the earth is tilted that way” doesn’t necessarily feel like a satisfactory answer, it’s the correct one.
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?
We were looking for 8-8-2, for “Tua,” as in Miami Dolphins QB Tua Tagovailoa). Dak Prescott (3rd), Sam Howell (12th), Joe Burrow (25th), Mac Jones (28th), and Joe Flacco (33rd) were some other possibilities. Some people would say that trying to get people to say “8-8-2” and doing so by asking them to type Tua Tagovailoa’s first name into a telephone keypad is an unnecessarily complicated way to get there. Those people would be correct!
6) This newsletter’s answers allude in one particular way to WHAT song?
This is “OLD MACDONALD HAD A FARM.” The idea here was that each answer, when written out in full, contained the vowels E-I-E-I-O, the vowel string that is a refrain from the song, and no other vowels:
kEIth EllIsOn
lEIf ErIksOn
dEbbIE gIbsOn
pErIhElIOn
EIght EIght twO
Our newsletter title, “My Farm Will Go On,” served two purposes. First, it alluded to the song’s longevity (since Old MacDonald’s farm has lived on in posterity by virtue of being immortalized in the song) and also, well, the fact that the contents of his farm keep going on and on throughout the song. Second, it alluded to the Celine Dion song “My Heart Will Go On”—of course, cElInE dIOn is also an example of the E-I-E-I-O phenomenon.
We should note: we found in our research that this theme has been used for NYT Crosswords in both 2010 ("Leif Erickson", "Celine Dion", "perihelion", and "President Wilson") and 2020 ("Derringer Pistol", "Rewrites History", "President Wilson" and "Vermicelli Bowls"). We tried to move sufficiently away from those in order to make this newsletter not a complete ripoff, but you can decide whether we succeeded or not.
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
If you’re sufficiently attuned to recent American politics, you may be aware that the phrase “Democrat Party” is sometimes used as a broadside against the party. What you may not be aware of is that that particular tactic is at least 68 years old, and flare-ups about the issue are quite regular.
The Minnesota-specific affiliate of the Democratic Party is the Minnesota Democratic-FARMER-LABOR Party, for various historical reasons. The other state Democratic Party affiliate with this quality (i.e., a materially different name than “Democratic Party”) is the North Dakota Democratic–Nonpartisan League Party. The Republican Party currently has no such equivalent state affiliates (i.e., every Republican Party state affiliate is some flavor of “Colorado Republican Party” or “New Hampshire Republican State Committee”).