Trivia Newsletter CCXC: Alternative
Trivia for June 17, 2025
We’re taking off the rest of this week for the federal holiday. We’ll be back on Tuesday, June 24th. Our schedule may continue to be choppy for a few weeks as we navigate the end of the calendar quarter at work and other upcoming holidays.
To make up for our schedule, today’s newsletter is a “choose your own adventure” newsletter of sorts. Questions #1 through #5 each have two prompts with a different answer. The first prompt is intended to be easier than the second prompt. Certain words below are bolded; this is for readability and is not a hint for today’s theme. Question #6 requires two answers.
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 either (i) the 2024 film that won the Academy Award for Best Picture at the most recent Oscars ceremony; or (ii) the actress who received a nomination for Best Supporting Actress at the same ceremony for her role in The Brutalist.
2) NAME either (i) the Orlando-based NBA team that acquired Desmond Bane in a blockbuster trade with the Grizzlies two days ago; or (ii) the now-defunct Arizona-based NHL team, the assets of which were transferred to the Utah Hockey Club (now the Utah Mammoth) in 2024.
3) NAME either (i) the metal that is the most abundant metal in the earth’s crust; or (ii) the element that is the most abundant element in the earth’s crust.
4) NAME either (i) the stage name of the artist whose song “Die with a Smile,” a collaboration with Bruno Mars, topped the Billboard Hot 100 for five weeks in 2025; or (ii) Morgan Wallen’s first solo single to top the same chart, doing so for one week in 2024, in which he sings about wanting to find “somethin' stronger than the whiskey.”
5) NAME either (i) the country at the eastern end of the Arabian Peninsula named after its seven territories, five of which are Sharjah, Ras Al Khaimah, Fujairah, Umm Al Quwain, and Ajman; or (ii) the country that contains Pointe des Almadies, the westernmost point in the Afro-Eurasian landmass.
6) NAME BOTH (i) the only province, of Canada’s ten provinces, that shares this newsletter’s theme, AND (ii) the only territory, of Canada’s three territories, that DOES NOT share this newsletter’s theme.
Trivia Newsletter CCLXXXIX Recap
1) NAME the Major League Baseball stadium that opened in 1962 and that is located at the address “1000 Vin Scully Avenue.”
This is DODGER STADIUM.
MLB: The Show is the primary baseball video game these days—think Madden, but baseball. Each game has a intro video that plays when you load up the game. The best of those videos is the video they used for MLB: The Show 2017:
I’ll just borrow this Fox Sports explanation of the video:
The video takes fans through some of [baseball]'s most iconic moments with a chalk artist providing visuals to pair with authentic audio from some of the most famous play-by-play calls. From Jackie Robinson stealing home, to Hank Aaron setting the all-time home run record, to Bill Buckner's costly 1986 error, to Lou Gehrig's farewell speech, to the Cubs finally breaking their World Series drought last season -- some of the most memorable moments in baseball history are remembered in spectacular fashion.
Video game intro productions seem to be a lost art these days. A lot of games just throw some gameplay footage over music and call it a day, if they even make an intro video at all. It's understandable, considering most gamers just end up skipping past the title sequence after first viewing, but this spectacular piece of work from MLB The Show is certainly worth watching more than once. Personally, I'd put it up with some of the best in the history of sports video games.
Vin Scully was your clue for Question #1. He was the play-by-play announcer for the Dodgers from 1950 to 2016, and so the MLB: The Show 2017 intro opens with his iconic call to start every Dodgers’ broadcast:
2) A particular television show originally aired from 2012 to 2017. Of the 23 people that IMDB credits with appearing in 10+ episodes of the show, 20 share the same last name. The other three people are John Goodwin (longtime employee), Justin Martin (longtime employee), and Tim Guraedy (air-conditioning repairman/radio host). NAME the show.
This is DUCK DYNASTY. The show is centered around Phil Robertson, his family, and his hunting and outdoor recreation company Duck Commander.
Robertson passed away last month. Here’s the New York Times on him:
Phil Robertson, the patriarch of the hit show “Duck Dynasty” and the founder of the duck hunting gear business that became the foundation of his family’s reality television empire, died on Sunday. He was 79.
…
Mr. Robertson was one of the stars of “Duck Dynasty,” an A&E series that starred his family — Mr. Robertson and his wife, Kay; their sons; the sons’ wives; an uncle; and some grandchildren — and revolved around their business making and selling duck hunting gear.
…
Mr. Robertson was initially opposed to the idea of a television show, his son Willie told The New York Times in 2013. “He said, ‘I’m already as famous as I want to be.’” Willie Robertson said. “I explained to him, ‘Phil, this can expand your platform to talk about the things you like to talk about,’” including his Christian faith and his conservative politics.
“Duck Dynasty,” which ran over 11 seasons from 2012 to 2017, was once ranked among the most popular shows on cable, and at its height had as many as 12 million viewers. It was loosely centered on the Duck Commander business, run by Willie, Mr. Robertson’s third son with his wife, Kay. It drew fans for its idiosyncratic humor, the characters’ offbeat antics and the way the family was able to mine self-deprecating wisdom from the redneck caricature.
3) In most varieties of spoken English, the phrase “no highway cowboys” phonetically combines adjacent vowel sounds within each of its five syllables. Worded differently: The phrase has five “gliding vowels,” or five of WHAT, from the Ancient Greek for “two sounds”?
These are DIPHTHONGS. Here’s more on diphthongs:
The word "diphthong" comes from the Greek di (meaning "two") and phthongos (meaning "sound" or "voice"), highlighting the fact that two distinct vowel sounds are combined into one fluid sound. Importantly, both vowel sounds occur within the same syllable, which distinguishes diphthongs from instances where two vowel sounds belong to separate syllables, such as in "naive."
English contains eight primary diphthongs: /aɪ/ (as in "my"), /eɪ/ (as in "day"), /aʊ/ (as in "now"), /oʊ/ (as in "go"), /ɔɪ/ (as in "boy"), /ɪə/ (as in "beer"), /eə/ (as in "air"), and /ʊə/ (as in "tour"). Each diphthong begins with one vowel sound and glides smoothly into another, forming a single, elongated sound that enriches the flow of spoken English.
4) Various online listicles refer to establishments such as Jimmy’s Woodlawn Tap, L&L Tavern, Parrots Bar & Grill, Rainbo Club, and Rossi’s as Chicago’s exemplars of WHAT two-word phrase? The term likely first appeared in the New York Herald in 1871 and refers to a physical action one might take to enter such a establishment.
These are DIVE BARS. More on the etymology:
The term "dive bar" has murky origins. According to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, it first appeared in an 1871 copy of the New York Herald. The term dive would describe disreputable places, often located in cellars or basements, so patrons would "dive" into the establishment. While the push for prohibition wouldn't gain momentum for another few decades, drinking, was still seen as sinful behavior for the puritanical public.
My advice: If you’re someone who likes bars, the bars you want to be going to are the bars that your bartenders go to after their shifts are over.
5) A tourism slogan for a particular U.S. city (pop. 27,788 or so) urges tourists, contrary to sometimes-heard advice, to “get the heck into” WHAT city?
This is DODGE CITY. The slogan is a reaction to the idiom to “get out of Dodge”:
Get out of Dodge means to leave a place, especially in a hasty manner. The phrase get out of Dodge often is used with a qualifier, as in get the heck out of Dodge, or other phrases using stronger words. The expression get out of Dodge came into use during the mid-twentieth century in the United States and is a reference to the Old West town of Dodge City, Kansas. Dodge City, Kansas, was known as a “Wicked Little Town” because it was perched on the edge of the wild frontier. Buffalo hunters and then cowboys stopped in Dodge City for rest and relaxation, which was often wild and dangerous and involved saloons, gambling halls, brothels, and shoot-outs. Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson and their brothers were lawmen who famously kept the peace. By the turn of the twentieth century, settlers had moved into the area and Dodge City became a respectable hamlet. The legendary status of Dodge City was boosted when a radio serial set in Dodge City, [BLANK], came on the air in the 1950s and then made the transition to television, where it ran until the mid-1970s. The fictional lawman on the series, Marshal Dillon, was known for exhorting bad men to move on, or get out of Dodge.
WHAT word did we remove from the penultimate sentence above? The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
6) This newsletter’s theme most closely relates to WHAT, released nearly exactly 21 years ago? (A single word is acceptable.)
This is DODGEBALL, or more specifically, the film Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story. There’s a joke in Dodgeball about learning “the five D’s of dodgeball: Dodge, Duck, Dip, Dive, and Dodge.” Those five words are at the beginnings of each of this newsletter’s answers: Dodger Stadium, Duck Dynasty, diphthong, dive bars, and Dodge City.
Our newsletter title, “Let’s See If It Pays Off,” is a reference to another line from the film:
Let’s end with an excerpt from The Ringer’s very good oral history of Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, describing the film’s legacy:
Dodgeball went on to make $168 million globally that summer and became one of the top-grossing domestic movies of 2004. In the years that followed, it became a DVD and cable staple, reignited dodgeball as a recreational sport throughout the country, and even inspired ESPN to create an “Ocho Day” in 2017, making Dodgeball one of the few sports comedies to transcend its era and leave a cultural footprint.
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link. (We’ll be delayed for a newsletter here.)
We removed the word GUNSMOKE from the recap for Question #5, referring to the radio and TV drama series.