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) Also a word meaning “to worry” and a word referring to collective offspring generally, WHAT particular word is used to refer to groups of periodical cicadas? For example, what one outlet is calling “The Great Cicada Invasion of 2024” will occur this year in Illinois because two of these will co-emerge.
2) NAME the most populous county AND the second-most populous county in the state of New York; each is coterminous with a borough of New York City.
3) Legend of the Crystals, The Spirits Within, Unlimited, Advent Children, Last Order, Kingsglaive, Brotherhood, Dad of Light, and Episode Ardyn - Prologue are parts of the titles of WHAT video-game franchise’s forays into film and television?
4) Many Twitter users (we suppose it’d be more thematically appropriate to say “X users”) excitedly posted the phrase “Black Adam vs. Peacemaker” on April 7, 2024 in reference to developments occurring at the second night of WHAT event at Lincoln Financial Field?
5) The Schism of 1378 was, simply put, caused by multiple persons attempting to claim WHAT title?
6) Each of the answers to Questions #1 through #5 alludes to groups that share WHAT particular commonality with one another, at least most of the time? On this count, they share the commonality with Trivia Factorial as well. (A two-word phrase will suffice.)
Trivia Newsletter CCXIV Recap
1) NAME the volcanic island territory in the Caribbean with a flag that displays the Union Jack as well as, perhaps surprisingly, a woman clutching a Celtic harp.
This is MONTSERRAT. Read more about “the other Emerald Isle” here.
2) Viewers of a particular television show that aired from 1966 to 1968 repeatedly saw an iconic vehicle bearing license plate numbers such as TP-3567, BT-1, and BAT-1. That vehicle was designed by George Barris based upon an existing concept car called a Lincoln WHAT? (That’s pretty hard, so if you don’t know the answer, just give us an alternate answer of the fictional city the vehicle would most regularly be found.)
The car is a Lincoln FUTURA. This question was all about the Batmobile, so the alternate answer, the city where you’d find it, is GOTHAM.
Decoupled from the context of the Batmobile (as it was when the concept was unveiled in 1955), the Futura is very funny to look at:
A Futura then got painted red so that it could appear in the 1959 film It Started with a Kiss, starring Glenn Ford (Jeopardy! hasn’t asked for his name since 2002, but remember anyway that he was in the original 3:10 to Yuma and Gilda) and Debbie Reynolds (remember her for Singin’ in the Rain, but the primary Jeopardy! proposition she gets brought up for is being the mother of Carrie Fisher):
So then what? Let’s hear from the guy who owns it, for what happened next.
3) As listeners to a particular song released in 1983 may know, どうもありがとうミスター ロボット is a phrase that can be used to express gratitude. WHAT does ロボットmean in English? (Because this Question #3 may not show up correctly in your e-mail, below is an image of it.)
[Image omitted]
The song is “Mr. Roboto” by Styx, the phrase is “Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto,” and our answer is ROBOTO. At least, we hope so. More than one of you suggested that we might’ve mangled this question, despite our best efforts at Googling.
WHAT COMPANY, founded in 1911, is explicitly name-checked in the lyrics of “Mr. Roboto”? The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
4) Seaweed No. 2 and (more notably) Red Canna are, as best we can tell, the only two works by a particular artist in the High Museum of Art, the largest museum for visual art located in its U.S. state. NAME that state, which shares its name with the artist.
The High Museum of Art is in Atlanta, Georgia, and so the artist is GEORGIA O’KEEFFE. O’Keefee painted many red cannas, but you can(na) read more about the one at the High Museum here.
5) The Vault Dweller, the Chosen One, the Lone Wanderer, and the Sole Survivor are the canonical titles for the playable characters in the mainline video games in the Fallout series. The applicable canonical title for the spinoff game Fallout: New Vegas is WHAT profession, since your character was in the employ of the Mojave Express?
Your character in Fallout: New Vegas is called the COURIER.
The town of Goodsprings, Nevada is about a 35-minute drive southwest of the Las Vegas Strip. As of the 2020 census, Goodsprings has a population of 162 people. In the video-game world, the town’s claim to fame is that it is the starting location of the player character in Fallout: New Vegas. This has led to many of the game’s fans making pilgrimages to Goodsprings, including sometimes at the same time:
We can’t speak for how the residents feel, but it seems that the Pioneer Saloon (depicted above) has come to embrace this phenomenon.
6) Whether these characters are portrayed as princesses in their films or not, there are thirteen characters officially designated as “Disney Princesses” by Disney. Change one letter in the names of one of those thirteen princesses, and you get WHAT, another example of today’s theme?
Montserrat, Futura, Gotham, Roboto, Georgia, and Courier are all fonts,2 so the intended answer here was ARIAL, one letter off from The Little Mermaid’s Ariel.3
We wanted to make this set pretty tough (rather than trying to give you Times New Roman and such), but looking back, we probably erred too much in favor of the modern/Google fonts. The best font is Garamond, anyway.
Our newsletter title, “Tribal, Yet Futuristic” probably didn’t help much—it’s a reference to the best Saturday Night Live sketch they’ve ever done, in which Ryan Gosling’s character becomes obsessed with the fact that the font for the logo of the film Avatar is Papyrus:
A sequel to the sketch didn’t make it to air, but was released on YouTube a few days ago. Maybe we are just the type of folks who really enjoy comedy sketches based on fonts, but Gosling does some of his best acting here since Blade Runner 2049:
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
The company that you’ll hear in the lyrics of Styx’s “Mr. Roboto” is IBM: “I've got a secret I've been hiding under my skin / My heart is human, my blood is boiling, my brain IBM.”
Or they’re typefaces? We’ve read the difference between fonts and typefaces a dozen times in a dozen different ways and still don’t quite understand that distinction. We don’t think it mattered here, however.
A key feature of trivia is making wild guesses when you don’t know the answer, which is always better than leaving the question blank (at least when answering incorrectly isn’t penalized). Congratulations to our one reader who wildly guessed “Milan” and was given credit, as Milan is one letter off of a Disney Princess (Mulan) and is also a font.