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 top-ranking assistant to a film crew’s chief electrician or key grip is, regardless of gender or age, typically identified as WHAT kind of boy? In a visual gag in an episode of television show BoJack Horseman, Massimiliano Dessena, Steve Daley, Jim Holmes, Michael Stoecker, and Vincent Pierce are identified as potential nominees in a repetitively named fictional Oscar category honoring this role.
2) In a quote commonly attributed to Winston Churchill, “democracy is the [BLANK] form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” WHAT word fills in the blank in the preceding sentence?
3) In dentistry’s “universal numbering system” (sometimes called “the American system”), each adult tooth is assigned a number from 1 to 32; for example, one’s maxillary central incisors are 8 and 9, and one’s mandibular central incisors are 24 and 25. The teeth identified with the numbers 1, 16, 17, and 32 are colloquially described with WHAT six-letter adjective?
4) Take the name of Ashanti’s highest-charting single as a lead artist—it topped the Billboard Hot 100 for ten weeks in 2002—and append to it the last name of a coauthor of the 1957 memoir The Untouchables, and now you’ve got WHAT noun?
5) Tamar Gendler, a philosophy philosopher, coined in 2008 the concept of alief—for example, a person who looks down from a tall building may have an understanding that they are safe, but may alieve that they are unsafe and feel physical discomfort. The title of her 2008 essay describing this concept contrasts alief with WHAT more common word?
6) The answers to Questions #1 through #5 are the first five words in a particular set of words found in WHAT, the title of which is also five words?
Trivia Newsletter CCXVIII Recap
1) “The City on the Edge of Forever,” a 1967 time-travel episode of Star Trek commonly regarded as one of the show’s greatest episodes, was written by WHAT science-fiction master, who the same year published a work that won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story and who sometimes went by pseudonyms such as Cordwainer Bird and Jay Solo?
This is HARLAN ELLISON. The short story we alluded to is “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.”
That story was adapted into a 1995 video game. The story and game are outrageously bleak, which led to the game being censored in multiple countries. (Here’s a summary of all that, with a warning that it’s, well, the sort of thing that gets censored in multiple countries.) Perhaps more wild—Ellison was involved with the game’s creation, and also wrote the preface to the game’s strategy guide. The preface is…lively, to say the least:
2) NAME the 2005 song by the band Hawthorne Heights that is (by far) the group’s most-streamed song on Spotify; while the song’s title may sound reminiscent of a Virginia tourism slogan, the song’s title includes not Virginia but the other state that sometimes claims the title “the mother of presidents.”
This is “OHIO IS FOR LOVERS,” which may have reminded you of the slogan “Virginia is for Lovers.” Let’s let the commonwealth of Virginia tell us about the slogan, which has endured for over fifty years:
The timing was right in 1969 when the Virginia State Travel Service (now the Virginia Tourism Corporation) adopted what would become its world-renowned "Virginia is for Lovers" slogan. The Travel Service could not have known that the Yippies would become Yuppies — and later, Boomers — or that the Volkswagen microbus with the peace sign on the dashboard would give way to the station wagon as the official car of a generation, but they knew where the future was in tourism: a new generation of visitors.
A favorite book in 1969 was Erich Segal’s Love Story. Jacqueline Susann’s The Love Machine was a best seller. Henry Mancini scored with Love Theme from "Romeo and Juliet." The Woodstock Music and Art Fair in 1969 drew more than 300,000 young people for a weekend of peace, music and mud. Given the tenor of the times, the roll-out of "Virginia is For Lovers" appealed to younger consumers who were the market of the future.
3) “The Year of the Three Emperors” in German history refers to a year during which Germany had three leaders; Frederick III ruled for ninety-nine days during that year, bookended by WHAT two leaders?
We were looking for KAISER WILHELM I and KAISER WILHELM II. Sometimes folks use the phrase “drei Achten, drei Kaiser” (three eights, three emperors”) to remember that the Year of the Three Emperors was 1888.
Twelve days before Wilhelm II took power, and unrelatedly (at least, we expect), American poet Ernest Thayer’s most famous poem was first published. That poem contains the following named characters, listed in order of appearance in the poem: Cooney, Barrows, [BLANK], Flynn, and Jimmy Blake. WHAT CHARACTER, whose name also appears in the name of the poem, has been omitted from the preceding list? The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
4) Over a quarter of U.S. states, beginning with New Hampshire, were named in a statement by WHAT person while in a ballroom in West Des Moines, Iowa on January 19, 2004?
This was HOWARD DEAN. This question was invoking Dean’s notable speech following his third-place performance in the Iowa Democratic caucuses in the leadup to the 2004 presidential election:
5) Once called “rap’s greatest storyteller,” Dennis David Coles is a member of the hip-hop collective Wu-Tang Clan together with RZA, GZA, Method Man, Raekwon, Inspectah Deck, U-God, and Masta Killa. Coles is better known by WHAT stage name?
This is GHOSTFACE KILLAH.
On the topic of rap music, you’re going to want to know that Drake and Kendrick Lamar are currently beefing. Since our last newsletter came out, the two have released a half-dozen songs or so attacking each other. We won’t even try to summarize the beef, as there might be two more songs by the time this newsletter “goes to print.” There are plenty of places to read more, but we think the best source is to just go to this Wikipedia page and scroll down to “Full song chronology.”
6) The answers to Questions #1 through #5 indirectly allude to a particular word. WHAT notable painting, in name and subject, best expresses today’s theme?
The theme of this newsletter was THE SCREAM, the Edvard Munch painting. You know, this one:
Each of our answers indirectly alluded in some way to the word and/or concept of screaming:
Harlan Ellison is likely most notable for “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” (and the question nudged you to make that connection).2
Hawthorne Heights and “Ohio is for Lovers” are consummate examples of the “screamo” subgenre of music (and the song itself features a great deal of screaming).
The Wilhelms were meant to make you think of the Wilhelm scream, the famous stock sound effect in film.
As this question reminded you, Howard Dean’s most notable contribution to the zeitgeist may be his “scream” that is (probably unfairly) credited with dooming his campaign.
Ghostface Killah alluded to the Ghostface Killer that is the primary antagonist in the Scream films.
Our newsletter title, “What Would We Do for a Klondike Bar?”, pointed to the series of commercials that asked what would “you” do for a Klondike Bar, a brand of ice cream bar, but also pointed to a much older song. What do you do, I do, and we all do for ice cream? Scream, of course.
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
The missing name from the list is CASEY—the poem is “Casey at the Bat.”
(For a look under the hood: This connection, between Ellison and screaming, was the most tenuous of this set, and we worked pretty hard, though unsuccessfully, to find a better one.)