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 the cat that won't cop out when there's danger all about, WHO, according to a song’s next spoken word, is the man that would risk his neck for his brother man?
2) In 2008, the blog Grammarphobia suggested retiring WHAT three-word idiom used to describe a confluence of unpleasant circumstances? The year prior, the public relations department at Lake Superior State University suggested banning the phrase as well—perhaps as revenge for the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald thirty-two years earlier on Lake Superior?
3) Australia, Bhutan, Indonesia, Japan, Mozambique, Nepal, Suriname, Thailand, and the United Kingdom are some “LHT” nations, while the majority of nations (including, as examples, Canada, China, France, Italy, Russia, and the United States) are “RHT” nations. Samoa switched from being a RHT nation to a LHT nation in 2009. WHAT does “T” stand for in LHT and RHT?
4) Last week, the California State Water Control Board voted to adopt a maximum contaminant level of 10 parts per billion of hexavalent chromium in drinking water, the first U.S. law to so target the contaminant. Multiple headlines for articles describing the vote included the name of WHAT activist, who thirty years ago was instrumental in the bringing of a lawsuit captioned as Anderson, et al. v. Pacific Gas & Electric?
5) Pollice Verso, an 1872 painting by Jean-Léon Gérôme, shows a group of spectators (including a group of vestal virgins) making a particular gesture in the direction of a standing murmillo and a lying retiarius. A murmillo and a retiarius are each a specific type of WHAT nine-letter profession?
6) The answers to Questions #1 through #5 share a particular hidden connection; that connection is shared in a different way among the Blues Brothers, Dracula, Godzilla, and Pokémon. NAME the hidden connection.
Trivia Newsletter CCXV Recap
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.
The word here is BROOD.
According to a CBS News article, the Illinois broods mostly won’t overlap, except with respect to some portions of central Illinois:
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.
The counties are KINGS County (coterminous with Brooklyn) and QUEENS County (coterminous with Queens).
New York County is coterminous with Manhattan, and Bronx County is coterminous with the Bronx. New York doesn’t have a “Staten Island County,” though—instead, the borough of Staten Island’s county is called WHAT? The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
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?
These are all subtitles (or otherwise parts of titles) for films and shows associated with the FINAL FANTASY franchise.
You have probably never heard of Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV, a 2016 animated film that is annoyingly required viewing in order to understand the backstory of the video game Final Fantasy XV. Therefore, you probably don’t know that, best we can tell, the English-language version of Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV is the only film collaboration featuring the (voice) talents of both Sean Bean and Lena Headey (who were both notably in Game of Thrones), which is a heck of a “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” connection. Aaron Paul also lends his talents to Kingsglaive, which makes sense; crystals are often central to Final Fantasy plots, and Aaron Paul has some acting experience in that field.
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?
This event was WRESTLEMANIA, the pay-per-view professional wrestling event. Black Adam is a DC Comics character played by Dwayne Johnson (in the 2022 film Black Adam), and Peacemaker is a DC Comics character played by John Cena (in 2021’s The Suicide Squad and the 2022 television show Peacemaker), and Johnson and Cena briefly fought at WrestleMania, so this was a wrestling question by way of superhero media.
The opening credits of Peacemaker are the best television opening credits of all time (non-BoJack Horseman division). Every show should have its dramatis personae do a silly dance before the show starts:
The song playing during those credits is “Do Ya Wanna Taste It,” by Wig Wam. Wig Wam is a Norwegian glam metal band whose greatest claim to fame is, uh, writing the song “Do Ya Wanna Taste It” that appears in the opening credits for Peacemaker. So why does this superhero show open with a dance number featuring a song no one had ever heard of where everybody is doing something incredibly ridiculous and looking incredibly serious while they are doing it? Let’s ask James Gunn:
“I really wanted to do a dance number where everybody was doing something incredibly ridiculous, and looked incredibly serious while they were doing it.”
So there you go.
5) The Schism of 1378 was, simply put, caused by multiple persons attempting to claim WHAT title?
The title we were after is POPE.
On February 2, 2018, Jeopardy! aired an episode in which contestant Jenny Rhodes defeated Caitlin Silberman and four-game champion Ryan Fenster. On the third question of the Double Jeopardy round, the group was asked the following (category: Roamin’ Catholics, for $1200):
St. Thomas Aquinas died traveling to Lyon, France while attempting to heal this rift between the Latin & Greek churches
Fenster buzzed in with the response “What is the Great Schism?” and was ruled incorrect. Nobody else buzzed in, and the desired answer was merely “schism.” Had Fenster been given credit for his response (and nothing else in the game had changed2), he plausibly could have won the game, instead of finishing with not enough money to affect the outcome, given a conservative wager on Final Jeopardy by Rhodes.
This juncture was a rare example where Jeopardy! later acknowledged that their ruling was incorrect, as “the Great Schism,” they found, could refer to both a 1054 schism and also to the 1378 schism that the Jeopardy! clue (and our Question #5) referred to. Therefore, because the show had unfairly prejudiced Fenster, they brought him back for another game. The Jeopardy! folks wrote about the process of bringing back Fenster here. Fenster won three additional games during his second run, winning a total of seven and earning a Tournament of Champions spot.
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.)
Cicada broods, kings and queens, Final Fantasy games, WrestleManias, and popes are all typically counted USING ROMAN NUMERALS, which was our theme. Our newsletter title, “(A) Civil Mix,” was a title using only letters that can be Roman numerals as well (except for the “A” in parentheses). Trivia Factorial, of course, also has a longstanding tradition of counting our flagship editions with Roman numerals. (Question #4, where we referred to Twitter as X, included another clue about Roman numerals.)
We’re going to digress here a bit to talk about WrestleMania numbering. It’s true that, much of the time, “Roman Reigns” when it comes to WrestleMania numbering, but not all of the time. Here is a complete list of what each WrestleMania has been titled:
WrestleMania
WrestleMania 2
WrestleMania III
WrestleMania IV
WrestleMania V
WrestleMania VI
WrestleMania VII
WrestleMania VIII
WrestleMania IX
WrestleMania X
WrestleMania XI
WrestleMania XII
WrestleMania 13
WrestleMania XIV
WrestleMania XV
WrestleMania 2000
WrestleMania X-Seven
WrestleMania X8
WrestleMania XIX
WrestleMania XX
WrestleMania 21
WrestleMania 22
WrestleMania 23
WrestleMania XXIV
WrestleMania 25
WrestleMania XXVI
WrestleMania XXVII
WrestleMania XXVIII
WrestleMania 29
WrestleMania XXX
WrestleMania 31
WrestleMania 32
WrestleMania 33
WrestleMania 34
WrestleMania 35
WrestleMania 36
WrestleMania 37
WrestleMania 38
WrestleMania 39
WrestleMania XL (this is the April 2024 one)
It’s weird that they keep switching, right? And don’t get us started on X-Seven and X8. What will the WWE pick for the next WrestleMania? We’re rooting for XXXX-One, ourselves.
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
The borough of Staten Island is coterminous with RICHMOND COUNTY. “Richmond” feels as though it could’ve been its own theme (“What’s integral to each of Virginia, Staten Island, The Masters Tournament, and Ted Lasso?”)
The remaining clues on the board, including potential wagers on Daily Doubles, may have played out differently as well, of course.