Happy Friday! Before we get started, we wanted to plug a gift idea for the Jeopardy!-lover in your life.
If you closely follow the Jeopardy! community, you have probably heard of longtime Jeopardy! fan Lilly Nelson, who was profiled by the show for posting daily commentary on Twitter about the fashion choices made by the show’s contestants. (Lilly also maintains a Substack newsletter.)
Lilly has an Etsy shop where you can buy cool unofficial Jeopardy! merchandise.1 We thought the throw blanket where you can plug in customized categories (and one customized clue), for example, was an incredible idea:
Check out Lilly’s Etsy shop with this button:
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) WHAT U.S. fast-food chain restaurant has hundreds of Australian locations, each of which is called Hungry Jack’s due to the fact that a restaurant in Adelaide already had the chain’s name before the chain expanded down under?
2) @molly0xFFF is a username (and pun) regularly used by WHAT writer and cryptocurrency skeptic who runs the website Web3 is Going Just Great?
3) John Houseman is likely most notable for his years-long collaboration with Orson Welles, but he also won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for portraying the demanding contract law professor Charles W. Kingsfield in WHAT 1973 film?
4) Between 1946 and 1958, the United States tested over sixty nuclear weapons on or near Bikini and Enewetak Atolls, which atolls are part of what is today WHAT nation? Its capital is Majuro.
5) Kamala Harris is the first African-American woman to be at the top of the presidential line of succession; she coincidentally has the same last name as the first African-American woman to enter the presidential line of succession at all. NAME that woman (first and middle name required), who first entered the line of succession in 1977.
6) Parts of the answers to Questions #1 through #5 allude to members of a particular list of seventeen people. NAME the only person on that list who was also a U.S. president.
Trivia Newsletter CCXVI Recap
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?
This is SHAFT. The question is quoting the Isaac Hayes song “Theme from Shaft,” because the song is, uh, the theme from Shaft (1971).
Besides “Theme from Shaft” and being the voice of Chef on the television show South Park, Hayes is likely most notable for writing (with David Porter) the 1967 song “Soul Man,” covered by Sam & Dave. If you think you don’t know that song—well, you probably do:
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?
The phrase is “THE PERFECT STORM.” The slightly convoluted second sentence of the question was alluding to the fact that Lake Superior State University, given its name, might have a vested interest in attacking perfect storms, like the one that sunk the Edmund Fitzgerald, as popularized in the 1976 Gordon Lightfoot song “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”
(We debated internally whether we could properly call that storm a perfect storm, but the song itself says “The searchers all say they'd have made Whitefish Bay /
If they'd put fifteen more miles behind her,” which we’re counting as an exceptionally unlucky set of circumstances.)
The Ojibwe name for Lake Superior is “gichi-gami.” Lightfoot writes that as “Gitche Gumee” in the opening lines of his song (“The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down / Of the big lake they called Gitche Gumee”), as Lightfoot lifted that spelling from a line of WHAT 1855 EPIC POEM (“By the shore of Gitche Gumee, /By the shining Big-Sea-Water”)? The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.2
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?
The initialisms are “left-hand TRAFFIC” and “right-hand TRAFFIC.” You can read a short retrospective about Samoa’s switch here. Our only source is squinting at this pixelated newspaper cover (below), but something Samoa apparently did as part of the switch was close all of their nightclubs at 10 PM for a while, which seems very sensible.
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?
This question was angling for ERIN BROCKOVICH. You can read one of those articles here.
Erin Brockovich—the actual one—actually has a newsletter on Substack, where she wrote (after the publication of this question) about the ruling:
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?
We were looking for GLADIATOR. “Pollice verso” is apparently Latin for “with a turned thumb,” so knowing that might’ve helped you. Here’s the painting:
The story goes that, after seeing this painting, Ridley Scott signed on to direct the film Gladiator (2000). Speaking of which…
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.
Did you know ciabatta, the bread, was invented in 1982? Doesn’t it feel like ciabatta should be hundreds of years older? I can’t find where on X or Reddit we first saw that a couple days ago, but that’s wild to us. Read more about the creation of ciabatta here.
Why are we talking about ciabatta? Well, there’s a lot to be excited about today (Thursday, one day before you’re reading this). Our Chicago Bears are presumably about to draft Caleb Williams, potentially our long-term quarterback and first “very good” QB since Sid Luckman. Our Chicago White Sox are working on improving what I assume is their 21-3 record—we haven’t looked at the standings in a while. And ciabatta, the bread, was invented the same year that the film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial came out! That’s outrageous.
Something we’re not excited about, though, is defending this Question #6. Perhaps the heat death of the universe will occur before we finish writing this sentence so that we don’t have to explain this one.
No?
Okay, here’s what we were up to. All of the answers in this newsletter—Shaft,3 The Perfect Storm, Traffic, Erin Brockovich, and Gladiator—were films that came out in the year 2000, and the foursome we spotted you in Question #6—Blues Brothers, Dracula, Godzilla, and Pokémon—are all suggestive of films with titles that include the number “2000”: Blues Brothers 2000 (1988), Dracula 2000 (2000), Godzilla 2000: Millennium (1999), and Pokémon the Movie 2000 (2000). Thus, we were looking for “2000 FILMS,” because we were giving you two sets of “2000 films,” albeit with some overlap.
Looking back, we probably just should have asked for the relevant number, but we went looser this time so as to give you less information and try to make you work your way to “they’re all movies” and then the 2000 connection. Hindsight, we suppose, is 2000.
Why was the title “Millennium Approaches”? Well, besides pointing you to the answer (the four words in Question #6 are all parts of title where the new millennium is coming up at the end of the title), Millennium Approaches is the name of the first part of the play Angels in America. But what’s the subtitle of Angels in America? That’s right, it’s “A Gay Fantasia on National Themes,” and the Disney film Fantasia 2000 (1999) is another “2000 film” of sorts.
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
As is generally the case on Trivia Factorial, we have received no consideration for this plug, and are sharing it because we think it’s cool and think some of you might think it’s cool too.
Gordon Lightfoot was channeling the epic poem “THE SONG OF HIAWATHA” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
The 2000 Shaft is a remake/reboot of the 1971 Shaft, and in 2019, the film Shaft was released as a sequel to the 2000 Shaft. That’s not confusing at all, yeah?