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) La Belle Sauvage is the first work in a not-yet-complete trilogy by Philip Pullman known as “The Book of” WHAT? The trilogy is so named because it further explores a mysterious substance key to the plot of Pullman’s prior trilogy, His Dark Materials; so, if you read all of Pullman’s books, then to “it” you shall return.
2) A 1998 black comedy directed by Guy Ritchie that happens to represent Jason Statham’s feature-film acting debut and a 2005 black comedy starring Aaron Eckhart that happens to represent Jason Reitman’s feature-film directorial debut share WHAT word in their titles?
3) “The color is repellant, almost revolting; a smouldering, unclean [BLANK], strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight,” Charlotte Gilman Perkins writes in her best-remembered short story, first published in 1892. WHAT word fills in the blank in the preceding passage?
4) The Caproni Ca.3 and Voisin III are two of the earliest examples of WHAT kind of aircraft? Other examples of this one-word aircraft type include the Gotha G.IV, Avro Lancaster, Junkers Ju 88, and Consolidated B-24 Liberator.
5) Stevie Nicks is represented by “lace” and Don Henley is represented by WHAT contrasting material in the title and lyrics of a 1981 duet by the two, a single from Nicks’s solo debut studio album Bella Donna?
6) The answers to Questions #1 through #5 of this newsletter could precede WHAT sartorial word?
Trivia Newsletter CCXII Recap
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.)
This is GONZAGA University. That Latin phrase means “for the greater glory of God,” and is sometimes abbreviated as “AMDG,” which the Jesuits like to write on stuff. Some sources say that Johann Sebastian Bach (who was varyingly a Lutheran or Catholic) wrote AMDG on his finished pieces of work, and if you know whether that’s true or not, you can help resolve this minor dispute that has seemingly resided on a Wikipedia talk page for fourteen years.
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.)
Clark plays the position of POINT GUARD.
Plenty has been written about Clark’s rewriting of the NCAA record books and her outsized influence on the sport. Let’s just say that you’ve got to be pretty great at your sport to become memorialized while you’re still an active player—in Clark’s case, by this decal on Iowa’s home court marking the spot where Clark took the shot that broke Kelsey Plum's NCAA women's career scoring record:
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.)
This is THIRTEEN. We already shared the Grantland article on Bracketiatry with you a couple of newsletters ago, but let’s do it again for their coverage of Harvard in the 2014 men’s tourney (since many of the same jokes could be made for Yale):
Harvard (12-seed, South Region)
Emotion represented: What emotion are admissions officers looking for these days?
Pick if you’re #passionate about: Finding local solutions to global problems, engineering new paradigms to streamline the NGO/state-actor relationship, feeling like there’s a lot of room to pursue your own vision even if it is a big K Street firm, slowly repeating the sentence “But my real heart is in my pro bono work”
Hey, look, it’s Harvard! Tommy Amaker has brought this team to the threshold of national relevance! Which is so great. I mean, what an adorable little overachiever, with its precious 6 percent acceptance rate and $30 billion endowment. March Madness is all about giving the little guy a chance to make it.
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.)
The player we described is Angel REESE. (Our extra clue was a list of the boys from Malcolm in the Middle—that quartet became a quintet in Season 4 when Jamie, a fifth son, is added to the family.)
Reese announced earlier this week that she is skipping her last year of college eligibility to declare for the WNBA draft. Vogue, where she made the announcement, gives us a useful primer on Reese:
Reese’s final game with LSU on Monday night, which saw the Tigers fall to Iowa in the Elite Eight round of the 2024 NCAA Tournament, capped off an extraordinary college run. To summarize: After two seasons at the University of Maryland—with Reese sidelined for months during the first year with a foot injury—she transferred to LSU to play under legendary coach Kim Mulkey, and a whirlwind junior year ensued. Adoring fans nicknamed Reese the Bayou Barbie—a wink to her signature long lashes, cascading hairstyles, bold manicures, and unapologetic love of fashion. The 6’3” forward quickly became one of the highest-earning student athletes of the NIL era, inking deals with Amazon, Beats by Dre, Goldman Sachs, and more—and her dominance on the court led LSU to the 2023 national championship, where they won the first NCAA basketball title in school history, with Reese named the tournament's most outstanding player. A trash-talking gesture in the championship game, meanwhile—watched by a record-breaking 9.9 million viewers—propelled her to viral fame.
“You don't really realize it in the moment,” Reese says about all the attention on her during the matchup, “but obviously the things you say and do can change everything. I literally woke up the next day and I was a celebrity.” In short order, Reese attended the ESPY Awards, taking home the trophy for breakthrough athlete; she graced the pages of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue; she gifted herself a Benz for her 21st birthday and jetted off to Jamaica for vacation; she made a cameo in Cardi B and Latto’s “Put It on Da Floor Again” video; I profiled her for Teen Vogue.
That excerpt mentions “the NIL era.” WHAT DOES “NIL” stand for in this context? The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
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.)
We got a bit cute here—this school is NORTH CAROLINA STATE UNIVERSITY (or “NC State”), as they accomplished this feat approximately 24 hours before UConn did.
In 1983, the NC State men’s basketball team improbably won the tournament. That team was led by coach Jim Valvano, known to many as “Jimmy V.” Valvano passed away in 1993 following a battle with cancer, but he is notable to many for giving this speech at the ESPY Awards (text) a few weeks earlier. This is the part you’ll usually hear cited:
When people say to me how do you get through life or each day, it’s the same thing. To me, there are three things we all should do every day. We should do this every day of our lives. Number one is laugh. You should laugh every day. Number two is think. You should spend some time in thought. Number three is you should have your emotions moved to tears, could be happiness or joy. But think about it. If you laugh, you think and you cry, that’s a full day. That’s a heck of a day. You do that seven days a week, you’re going to have something special.
…
We need your help. I need your help. We need money for research. It may not save my life. It may save my children’s lives. It may save someone you love. And it’s very important. And ESPN has been so kind to support me in this endeavor and allow me to announce tonight, that with ESPN’s support, which means what? Their money and their dollars and they’re helping me—we are starting the Jimmy V Foundation for Cancer Research. And its motto is, “Don’t give up . . . don’t ever give up.”
And that’s what I’m going to try to do every minute that I have left.
The actual best part of the speech, though, is when Valvano is incredulous that some poor guy is signaling to Valvano, partway through the speech, to wrap it up:
I talked about my family; my family’s so important. People think I have courage. The courage in my family are my wife Pam, my three daughters, here, Nicole, Jamie, LeeAnn, my mom, who’s right here too. That screen is flashing up there 30 seconds like I care about that screen right now, huh? I got tumors all over my body. I’m worried about some guy in the back going, “30 seconds?” You got a lot, hey va fa napoli,2 buddy. You got a lot.
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.)
(First, we have no idea why we wrote it that way—we often ask you to explicitly describe the theme. We probably meant something like “We don’t normally ask you to name the next part of the theme and say what the theme is.” Alas.)
The four teams in the men’s Final Four are #1 Purdue, #1 Connecticut, #4 Alabama, and #11 NC State, so the sum of those numbers is SEVENTEEN.
These answers were all meant to point you towards MPAA MOVIE RATINGS:
Gonzaga (“G”)
Point guard and Thirteen (“PG”-”13”)
Reese (“R”)
NC State and Seventeen (“NC-17”)
(We considered adding another question with a “PG” answer because “PG” appears twice in the set, or even pretending to “accidentally” ask the PG question twice, since we’ve been “accidentally” doing that in the Google Forms a few times over the past year exactly so we could get away with doing that here. We decided all of that would add more confusion than it’d solve, so we just let “point guard” stand in for both and figured it wouldn’t hurt anyone’s understanding of the theme.)
“Punched Their Tickets,” our newsletter title, alluded to a phrase often used when a college basketball team secures an automatic spot in the tournament, but also alluded literally to movie tickets.
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
“NIL” stands for “NAME, IMAGE, AND LIKENESS.” In 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court found in National Collegiate Athletic Association v. Alston that the NCAA’s restrictions on college athletes profiting from their name, image, and likeness were in violation of antitrust law.