…and we’re back! Thanks to Patrick, Conor, Matt, and Mark for holding down the fort and writing guest posts.
We’re big sports fans over here, and we’ve been closely following March Madness. This newsletter is all about catching up with those tournaments. Not a college basketball fan? No worries, we’ve added in italics to each question some non-basketball ways for you to get to the answers and try to figure out today’s theme.
For this newsletter, please interpret “men’s tournament” to mean “the NCAA Division I men’s basketball tournament” and “women’s tournament” to mean “the NCAA Division I women’s basketball tournament,” so that we don’t need to keep writing those phrases out.
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 university that holds the active record for most consecutive Sweet Sixteen appearances in the men’s tournament, making the Sweet Sixteen each year since (and including) the 2014-15 season. This year, the school was knocked off in the Sweet Sixteen by Purdue.
(The school once tweeted that its motto is “Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam,” a phrase attributed to Saint Ignatius of Loyola, who founded the Jesuits.)
2) Several hours before publication, the University of Iowa defeated Louisiana State University in the women’s tournament in a rematch of last year’s championship game. Iowa was led by its star player Caitlin Clark, who scored 41 points. WHAT position, also played by Magic Johnson and Sue Bird, does Clark play?
(Both words of this two-word answer are worth the same value in a standard game of Scrabble.)
3) The first weekend of the men’s tournament was notably “chalky,” or relatively upset-free. The most dramatic upset (by seed) in the first round was Oakland’s win over Kentucky, but the second-most dramatic upset (by seed) was Auburn’s loss to the lovable and scrappy Yale Bulldogs. WHAT was Yale’s numeric seed in the bracket?
(The Great Seal of the United States has this many olive leaves, as well as this many stars and this many arrows.)
4) We earlier mentioned last year’s championship game in the women’s tournament. WHAT is the last name of the LSU player who was named Most Outstanding Player in that tourney? She put up seventeen points and twenty (!) rebounds against Iowa last night in LSU’s loss.
(The same name completes this quartet from a sitcom that aired from 2000 through 2006: Francis, BLANK, Malcolm, and Dewey.)
5) A few hours ago, the University of Connecticut defeated the University of Southern California in the women’s tournament. UConn also defeated the University of Illinois in the men’s tournament last Saturday. Thus, the UConn women’s win last night makes UConn the first school to have both its men’s and women’s teams make the Final Four in the same year since WHAT school last did so?
(This school’s men’s basketball team plays in the same stadium as the NHL’s Hurricanes.)
6) The sum of the seeds of the four teams currently in the men’s tournament’s Final Four continues today’s theme. Please provide BOTH that number, and WHAT today’s theme is.
(We don’t normally ask you to explicitly describe the theme, but don’t let that send you reeling! You can use a specific four-letter initialism or a generalized two-word phrase to describe today’s theme.)
Trivia Newsletter CCXI Recap
Thanks to Mark for writing these questions!
1. Doris Day, Albert Einstein, and Richard Nixon are among the many individuals mentioned in WHAT Billy Joel song that in December 1989 reached #1 on the Billboard Hot 100?
This is “WE DIDN’T START THE FIRE.” In 2023, the band Fall Out Boy released a cover of “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” updating the song for events that had occurred since the original song.
Much of the charm of the original song, we contend, comes from the fact that the lyrics allude to events that occur in (roughly) chronological order (or folks whose notability peaked in chronological order). The Fall Out Boy version does not do that. For example, here are the opening verses:
Captain Planet, Arab Spring, L.A. riots, Rodney King
Deep fakes, earthquakes, Iceland volcano
Oklahoma City bomb, Kurt Cobain, Pokémon
Tiger Woods, MySpace, Monsanto, GMOs
Harry Potter, Twilight, Michael Jackson dies
Nuclear accident, Fukushima, Japan
Crimean Peninsula, Cambridge Analytica
Kim Jong Un, Robert Downey Jr., Iron Man
We won’t bother sharing the song, but the lyrics do not get better.
2. WHAT novel, twice adapted to film, derives its title from an alternate name for a mushroom cloud? The first movie, with the same title as the novel, was the fourth in a long series; the second, with a different title, came eighteen years later but starred the same actor as the protagonist.
This is THUNDERBALL, the James Bond novel; both film adaptations star Sean Connery.
We’re really stretching the definition of a trivia question here, but it’s something like 3 AM here, so: In the 1965 version of Thunderball, Connery’s Bond impales the henchman Vargas (played by Philip Locke) with a harpoon gun. Bond is infamous for his groan-worthy puns, and in this scene, he pulls off an all-timer, saying “I think he got” the WHAT?1
3. In one of his last television appearances, Charlton Heston at age 74 played himself in the 14th episode of the fourth season of WHAT sitcom?
This is FRIENDS.
Quite a few folks were nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series or Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series for making a guest appearance on Friends: Christina Pickles, Marlo Thomas, Susan Sarandon, Christina Applegate (twice), Bruce Willis, Tom Selleck, Gary Oldman, Brad Pitt, Hank Azaria, and Danny DeVito were all nominated for appearances, and Applegate (once) and Willis won. Gosh, that might have made a decent newsletter theme.
(If you’re a Trivia Factorial long-hauler, you might remember that one of our very earliest themes was about Friends.)
4. WHAT adjective did scholar William Muir use to describe two verses in the Qur'an known to Arab historians as gharaniq? The word was famously used in the title of a controversial 1988 novel.
This word is SATANIC, as in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. The work is deeply controversial (why? Read more here.)
In 2022, Rushdie was stabbed in connection with his publication of the novel decades earlier. The trial of the man accused of stabbing Rushdie will take place later this month; the trial was delayed due to the defense’s desire to read the memoir that Rushdie is publishing regarding the attack (which can be preordered now).
5. WHAT name comes next in the following series? Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss, _____.
The missing name is Rishi SUNAK, as this is a list of recent British prime ministers. Sunak has been the British PM for almost a year and a half, or over ten times longer than Liz Truss’s tenure as PM.
6. There are three nations of the world that would continue the pattern established by the previous five answers. Two of those countries are in Europe; NAME the third such country, which is in Asia.
This is MONGOLIA.
This newsletter’s theme was that each answer started with the first three letters of a day of the week: WE Didn’t Start the Fire, THUnderball, FRIends, SATanic, and SUNak for Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Thus, your job was to come up with MONgolia (and not MONaco or MONtenegro), for Monday.
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link. (We’re all caught up, so please let us know if you think we missed your previous submission of a correct answer.)
In the Thunderball scene we’re describing, Bond kills a henchman with a harpoon gun and then says “I think he got THE POINT.”