Trivia Newsletter CCXCIII: Charged, with a Crime
Trivia for July 8, 2025
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 Patek Philippe Henry Graves Supercomplication, commissioned by Henry Graves as part of a competition, took eight years to design and create. WHAT is the Supercomplication? (One word will suffice.)
2) Jac Caglianone, Lucas Erceg, John Schreiber, and, as of 2023, Salvador Perez are all currently members of the Kansas City Royals who have WHAT letter stitched onto their home-field jerseys (in addition to advertising patches and insignias denoting their team affiliation)?
3) Following his success as the frontman of Genesis, Peter Gabriel has released ten solo studio albums. His first four solo albums are all titled Peter Gabriel. To avoid confusion, Gabriel’s first solo album is often called WHAT word, referring to the Lancia 2000 depicted on its cover?
4) The Vienna Convention on Road Traffic states that cross-border vehicles must display a “distinguishing code” for the country of registration on the vehicle’s rear. Currently, Austria’s code is “A,” Switzerland’s code is “CH,” and Gabon’s code is “G.” WHAT is Germany’s distinguishing code?
5) Fitch, Inc. and Standard & Poor’s are two of the major agencies that provide credit ratings for corporate and government bonds. BB+ is the highest rating given to non-investment-grade bonds, also known as “junk bonds,” by both agencies. WHAT is the highest rating that the two agencies give to investment-grade bonds?
6) Imagine a light bulb that has a resistance of 6 ohms and a maximum current of 1.5 amperes. WHAT is the maximum amount of electrical potential difference that can be applied before the bulb will break? (Please express your answer in the unit of measurement that will cause your answer to be an example of this newsletter’s theme.)
Trivia Newsletter CCXCII Recap
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?
This is TENNESSEE. There are at least five other places named “Johnson City” in the United States, which is why we decided to pin this question to the song lyrics.
WHAT notable distinction is shared by “Wagon Wheel” as well as by “Ballad of Easy Rider” by Roger McGuinn, “Wanted Man” by Johnny Cash, "Farewell, Angelina” by Joan Baez, and “Steel Bars” by Michael Bolton? The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
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.”
This is ARKANSAS. Folks from Arkansas would not want you to pronounce “Arkansas” with “the sound of ‘a’ in ‘man’ and the sounding of the terminal ‘s,’” since that would sound like “Ar-Kansas.”
Whereas, confusion of practice has arisen in the pronunciation of the name of our state and it is deemed important that the true pronunciation should be determined for use in oral official proceedings.
And, whereas, the matter has been thoroughly investigated by the State Historical Society and the Eclectic Society of Little Rock, which have agreed upon the correct pronunciation as derived from history and the early usage of the American immigrants.
Be it therefore resolved by both houses of the General Assembly, that the only true pronunciation of the name of the state, in the opinion of this body, is that received by the French from the native Indians and committed to writing in the French word representing the sound. It should be pronounced in three (3) syllables, with the final "s" silent, the "a" in each syllable with the Italian sound, and the accent on the first and last syllables. 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?
This is CONNECTICUT—Hartford, CT is the “Insurance Capital of the World.” The busiest airport in New England is, of course, Logan International Airport, which serves Boston.
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.
This is COLORADO; Colorado’s second-most-populous city is Colorado Springs.
If Jeopardy! is asking you about Colorado Springs, it likely wants you to know at least one of these facts:
Colorado Springs is the setting of the television show Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman.
The U.S. Air Force Academy is near Colorado Springs.
Pikes Peak is near Colorado Springs.
A campus of the United States Olympic Training Center is in Colorado Springs.
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.
This is OHIO.
This doesn’t have anything to do with Ohio, Texas, or really keyboards, but WHAT U.S. state capital is the only state capital not to share any letters with its state? (For example, “Columbus” is wrong because COLUMBUS and OHIO share an “O,” and “Austin” is wrong because AUSTIN and TEXAS share an “A,” a “T,” and an “S.” The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.2
6) This Question #6 is a little meandering, but stay with us.
While many states—at least fifteen, by my count3—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).
This is…a question that probably would’ve benefited from a rewrite.
The answers were, in order, MISSISSIPPI and MISSOURI. This is a list of RIVERS THAT SHARE THE NAMES OF U.S. STATES, RANKED BY THE NUMBER OF STATES IN WHICH THAT RIVER IS THE STATE’S LONGEST RIVER (excluding rivers that are the longest rivers in no states). So, for example, the Ohio River is the longest river in four states: Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. The Mississippi is the longest river of eight different states, and the Missouri is the longest river of seven different states.
That’s all obviously pretty esoteric—there was a low chance that you would reason out the exact nature of the list out, based on the provided information. The goal of this newsletter was for you to be able to get to the right answers, even though you didn’t know precisely what the list in Question #6 was ranking. I hoped that you’d come up with some of Tennessee, Arkansas, Connecticut, Colorado, and Ohio, and think “hey, aren’t those also rivers?” and then “What are some other rivers named after states?”4
The Mississippi River and the Missouri River are, by a pretty wide margin, the longest rivers in the United States. The idea was that a player, though not knowing what the list was ranking, would think “Okay, Mississippi and Missouri haven’t been named yet—surely they are at the top of most river-related rankings that could be constructed” and answer with those.
You had two other clues to work with:
This newsletter’s title was “Rank Cuomo.” Facially, that’s a reference to the Democratic primary of the 2025 New York City mayoral election. That election used ranked-choice voting, and so voters were urged to rank (or not rank) candidates, including former governor and alleged sex pest Andrew Cuomo. We wanted you to think not of Andrew Cuomo or the Cuomo family influential in New York politics, though; we wanted you to think of Rivers Cuomo, the lead singer of Weezer. The newsletter title was telling you that we were ranking rivers.
Each question included an allusion, in varying degrees of helpfulness, to water:
Question #1 mentioned the trucker’s truck in “Wagon Wheel” being amphibious.
We specifically mentioned “Concurrent Resolution” in Question #2 so that we could slip in “current.”
Question #3 used the phrase “passengers flow through.”
Question #4 had the phrase “bubble up” included, both as a hint for the answer (Colorado Springs) and as a hint for the theme.
Question #5 mentioned a “crossing.”
Question #6 used the word “meandering"—a meander is a term for a curve in a river.
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
With respect to that list of songs in the Question #1 recap, Bob Dylan co-wrote, or otherwise contributed to the writing of, each of those songs.
PIERRE does not share any letters with its state, SOUTH DAKOTA. This is a somewhat startling confession from someone who has written a trivia newsletter for almost four years, but this fact is the only way that I can keep straight that Pierre is the capital of South Dakota and that Bismarck is the capital of North Dakota (because if Pierre were the capital of North Dakota, this factoid would not be true).
The awkward wording in Question #6 was in part because there can be definitional confusion about what is a “river.” For example, there is a tributary of the North Platte River in Colorado that is about 69 miles long and that is called the Michigan River. Many reputable sources do not consider the Michigan River as a distinct river (instead categorizing it as a tributary). By my count, Alabama, Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio, Tennessee, and Wisconsin are the 15 states that pretty unequivocally share their names with something broadly considered a “river,” but I hedged the question to avoid disputes.
EDIT AFTER PUBLICATION: It was inartful of me to say “rivers named after states,” given that in likely every case, the names of the rivers pre-date the names of the states (and, indeed, the states were likely named after the rivers).