We remain on a once-a-week schedule, given the holiday. We’ll publish our next edition on Tuesday, July 8th.
Each correct answer in this newsletter is a U.S. state.
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) The song “Wagon Wheel” by Old Crow Medicine Show describes a trucker who is “a-headed west from the Cumberland Gap to Johnson City.” Unless that truck’s amphibious, the trucker will struggle, as one needs to go east, not west, to get to Johnson City. WHAT state is the next word in the song’s lyrics?
2) NAME the state that passed a “Concurrent Resolution” in 1881 containing the following: “The pronunciation with the accent on the second syllable with the sound of ‘a’ in ‘man’ and the sounding of the terminal ‘s’ is an innovation to be discouraged.”
3) Bradley International Airport is the second-busiest airport in the New England region; passengers flow through Bradley to get to, among other places, the “Insurance Capital of the World.” Bradley International Airport is in WHAT state?
4) Each of Virginia (Virginia Beach), Oklahoma (Oklahoma City), and Indiana (Indianapolis) has its state’s name in the name of its most populous city. Kansas’s name is contained in its third-most populous city, Kansas City. NAME the only state that has its name bubble up in the name of its second-most-populous city.
5) As our longtime readers remember from Trivia Newsletter CXVIII, Texas is the only state that can be written with only the left side of a QWERTY keyboard. NAME the only state that can be written with the right-hand side of a QWERTY keyboard, without crossing to the left side.
6) This Question #6 is a little meandering, but stay with us.
While many states—at least fifteen, by my count—hold a particular distinction, exactly seven states hold that distinction in a certain exemplary fashion. Those seven states could even be ranked in this sense. Those rankings are as follows:
??? (8)
??? (7)
Each of the answers to Questions #3, #4, and #5 (4)
Each of the answers to Questions #1 and #2 (1)
NAME the two missing states in the above list (in either order).
Trivia Newsletter CCXCI Recap
We ran out of time and didn’t get a chance to write a proper recap. I recommend that you don’t read this recap at all, and instead read the wonderful results to the 2025 Lyttle Lytton Contest, the contest to identify the worst opening sentence to a novel, which were published a few days ago.
If you absolutely must get some trivia content out of this e-mail, I’ve included at the end of this e-mail a “Before and After” worksheet that I wrote for a live-trivia round in 2018.
1) Snellen charts are used by eye doctors; patients are asked to read the chart’s letters from top to bottom as the letters decrease in size. Herman Snellen also created a similar “tumbling” chart that shows WHAT letter pointed in different directions, so that those who can’t identify letters (like young children) can point in the direction the letter is facing to demonstrate visual acuity?
This is “E.” It looks like this:
2) The p in 720p and 1080p, used in the context of high-definition televisions and computer monitors, stands for “progressive scan.” This means that, essentially, the pixels in each new frame appear all at once, rather than as alternating scan lines. WHAT letter can come after “1080” to refer to the video mode characterized by such alternating scan lines, as opposed to progressive?
This is “i,” for interlaced.
3) “She walks in [BLANK], like the night / Of cloudless climes and starry skies;” begins one of Lord Byron’s most notable poems, named after its first four words and which is written in iambic tetrameter. WHAT word fills in the blank in the preceding sentence?
This word is BEAUTY. (“Tetrameter” was a hint that you were looking for a two-syllable word.)
4) Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination in the United States by certain employers on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. A law passed three years later commonly called the “ADEA” prohibits, according to the law’s title, workplace discrimination on the basis of WHAT?
This is AGE. The ADEA applies (in some contexts) to folks over the age of 40.
5) Rembrandt’s only known seascape painting depicts, according to its title, WHAT event on the Sea of Galilee, also described in the Gospels of Mark, Luke, and Matthew? The painting was stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990 and remains lost.
This is a STORM. The painting looks like this:
6) NAME the subscription-based smartphone application that offers 500+ “Sleep Stories” as well as “[h]ours of guided meditations covering sleep, anxiety, stress, gratitude, and much more.” The app was named Apple’s 2017 App of the Year and today has over four million paid subscribers.
This app is CALM.
7) In 2004, the Miami Heat became the first NBA team to win the NBA Finals with a team name that does not end in “s.” GIVE the team name of the team to most recently win the NBA Finals with a team name that does not end in “s.”
This is the Oklahoma City THUNDER. Two newsletters in a row with an NBA question requiring knowledge of something that happened two days prior? Sure, why not?
8) Imagine a Venn diagram with two circles containing, respectively, “Protagonists of the 29 feature films produced by Pixar” and “Protagonists of the 14 mainline single-player Final Fantasy video games.” WHAT first name, besides continuing this newsletter’s theme, could occupy the space overlapped by that diagram’s two circles?
That name is LIGHTNING. Meet Lightning McQueen, the protagonist of Cars (2006) and Cars 3 (2017), but not Cars 2 (2011):
And meet Lightning, the protagonist of Final Fantasy XIII (2009):
This was a newsletter that asked you for pairs of items where typically one comes before the other, but in reverse order:
The answers to Questions #1 and #2 were E and I, even though I is said to come before E generally, except in specific delineated contexts (“i before e, except after c…”)
The answers to Questions #3 and #4 were beauty and age, even though “age before beauty” is the idiomatic humorous phrase.
The answers to Question #5 and #6 were storm and calm, even though “the calm before the storm” is the idiomatic phrase meant to suggest caution when things seem fine.
Your task was to realize this pattern, figure out Question #7 (thunder), and come up with something that typically comes before thunder: Lightning. Or, perhaps you are just a big Pixar/Final Fantasy fan. Our newsletter title, “Up Ante,” similarly took the phrase “ante up” but put it in reverse order, with “ante”—a prefix meaning “before”—coming second, to give you an idea of the theme.
Owen Wilson (the voice of Lightning McQueen) did an episode of “Hot Ones” recently. It’s pretty good! I like the part where he crosses up Cars and Behind Enemy Lines:
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link. (We’re delayed a week here.)
Bonus “Before and After” Questions
These questions are just for fun, given our low-content recap, and have nothing to do with our theme. These questions were presented in January 2018. The below was my “rough draft” of the set, because that was the easiest version to copy/paste. I’ve done absolutely no fact-checking, updating, or spell-checking of the below. In the footnotes of this newsletter is all of the answers grouped together, so if you want to play along, try to avoid getting to the end until you’re ready to see all of the answers.
The name of the Super Bowl MVP in Super Bowl XXXV, AND the two most notable members of the Corps of Discovery, a special unit of the United States Army founded in 1803.
The player who led Major League Baseball in home runs in 2008 with 48 AND the name of the 1986 American science-fiction comedy film based on a Marvel Comics property that was directed by Willard Huyck with George Lucas as executive producer.
The song that won the Grammy Award for Song of the Year in 2012, AND the 1999 film containing Samuel L. Jackson's character's death, which appears on multiple online lists of the greatest surprise movie deaths of all time.
The ska/pop punk band formed in 1992 whose most commercially successful album was Anthem (2003) and whose top songs (by number of Spotify plays) include "Look What Happened" and "The Science of Selling Yourself Short," AND of the five quarterbacks Tom Brady has defeated in Super Bowls, the one with the longest last name.
The name of the TV show that started in 2005 and that has had characters die in episodes named "Flight," "Now or Never," and "Losing My Religion," AND the 1959 courtroom crime drama film starring Jimmy Stewart which currently holds a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
The 2004 romantic comedy-drama starring Zach Braff and Natalie Portman, AND the subtitle to the American release of the sequel to the 2002 film xXx starring Vin Diesel.
The Viking who was Leif Erikson's father AND the nickname of Texas Tech's sports teams.
The pen name of the American short story writer famous for his surprise endings, AND the U.S. Senator from Massachusetts who was Nixon's running mate in the 1960 presidential election.
The American businessman, investor, and TV personality who is also the owner of the NBA's Dallas Mavericks, AND the event that is the subject of Thirteen Days, a 2000 historical political thriller film.
The Charles Dickens novel that centers around heroine Esther Summerson and a long-running legal case, AND the representative branch of the legislature of Virginia from 1619 to 1776 that was the first legislative assembly of elected representatives in North America.
The name of the song that spiked in popularity on Spotify on the afternoon of August 21, 2017, with 3521% more plays than normal, AND a name for the condition that is the major symptom of gastroesophageal reflux disease.
The name of the Nez Perce tribe leader who surrendered to US forces in 1877 and gave the famed "I will fight no more forever" speech, AND the British-Polish author whose most famous work is likely Heart of Darkness.
The 20th prime number (counting from 2 as the first prime number) and the atomic number for lutetium, AND the second film to win the five major Academy Awards (Best Picture, Actor in Lead Role, Actress in Lead Role, Director, Screenplay).
The US state whose capital was renamed in 1873 to honor a German political leader, AND the name of the actress who, as a child, appeared in films such as Man on Fire (2004), War of the Worlds (2005), and Charlotte's Web (2006).
The second-oldest stadium still in operation in Major League Baseball, AND the 1989 Kevin Costner film that was selected for preservation in the U.S. National Film Registry in 2017, AND the name of the 1995 book which was later described by The Guardian's Rob Woodard “as easily the most honest, daring, and ambitious volume put out by a major US politician in the last 50 years.”1
Here are the answers to those Before and After questions:
Ray Lewis and Clark
Ryan Howard the Duck
Rolling in the Deep Blue Sea
Less Than Jake Delhomme
Grey's Anatomy of a Murder
Garden State of the Union
Erik the Red Raiders
O. Henry Cabot Lodge
Mark Cuban Missile Crisis
Bleak House of Burgesses
Total Eclipse of the Heartburn
Chief Joseph Conrad
Seventy-One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
North Dakota Fanning
Wrigley Field of Dreams of My Father