Hi all—we’re taking this Friday off. We’ll be back with Trivia Newsletter CCXIX on Tuesday, May 7th. We’ve got some fun surprises for you in May, including more guest posts, so stay tuned!
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 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?
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.”
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?
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?
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?
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?
Trivia Newsletter CCXVII Recap
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?
This is BURGER KING. The Hungry Jack’s logo is very similar to Burger King’s:
Read more about the history of Burger King in Australia here.
2) @molly0xFFF is a username (and pun) regularly used by WHAT writer and cryptocurrency skeptic who runs the website Web3 is Going Just Great?
This is MOLLY WHITE. In various contexts (think, like, HTML or other coding contexts), hexadecimal codes are used to generate color values, and “FFF” is the three-digit shorthand for “white.”
White’s website, Web3 is Going Just Great, is fairly clear about its mission:
Web3 is Going Just Great is a project to track some examples of how things in the blockchains/crypto/web3 technology space aren't actually going as well as its proponents might like you to believe. The timeline tracks events in cryptocurrency and blockchain-based technologies, dating back to the beginning of 2021.
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?
This is THE PAPER CHASE. Let’s hand it to Roger Ebert:
"The Paper Chase" is about an aggressive, very bright, terribly engaging first-year student at Harvard Law School. The movie respects its hero, respects the school, and most of all respects the venerable Professor Kingsfield, tyrant of contract law.
Kingsfield is really the movie's central character, even though John Houseman gets supporting billing for the role. Everything centers around his absolute dictatorship in the classroom and his icy reserve at all other times. He's the kind of teacher who inspires total dread in his students, and at the same time a measure of hero worship; he doesn't just know contract law, he wrote the book.
…
What's best about the movie is that it considers interesting adults--young and old--in an intelligent manner. After it's over we almost feel relief; there are so many movies about clods reacting moronically to romantic and/or violent situations. But we hardly ever get movies about people who seem engaging enough to spend half an hour talking with (what would you say to Charles Bronson?). Here's one that works.
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.
This is the MARSHALL ISLANDS.
In 2019, a Texas brewery named the Manhattan Project Beer Company released various nuclear-themed beers with names like “Hoppenheimer” and “Bikini Atoll.” The latter drew the ire of the government of the Marshall Islands:
Products referring to Bikini Atoll remain on the brewery’s menu today. [EDIT 4/30: The link in the previous sentence went dead sometime after publication and has been replaced.]
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.
This is PATRICIA ROBERTS HARRIS.
Harris holds a bevy of “firsts”:
In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson chose Patricia Harris to become the U.S. Ambassador to Luxembourg. She was the first African American woman named as an American envoy. She said, “I feel deeply proud and grateful this President chose me to knock down this barrier, but also a little sad about being the ‘first Negro woman’ because it implies we were not considered before.” She also served as an alternate delegate to the 21st and 22nd General Assemblies of the United Nations.
After her diplomatic career, she served as the first African American dean of a U.S. law school, at Howard University. In the 1970s, she worked as a corporate attorney until President Jimmy Carter selected her as Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. With her confirmation, she became the first African American woman to serve as a cabinet secretary. In 1980, President Carter named her the first secretary of the newly reorganized Department of Health and Human Services.
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.
This set of questions alluded to various U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justices—respectively, Burger King for Warren Burger, Molly White for Edward Douglass White, The Paper Chase for Salmon Chase, the Marshall Islands for John Marshall, and Patricia Roberts Harris for John Roberts. The only Chief Justice who was also a U.S. president is WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT, our answer. President Taft probably did not get stuck in a bathtub.
Our newsletter title, “Hail to the Chief,” alluded to the same-named song that is the president’s personal anthem, but was also a clue to help you think of “Chief” Justices.
One last connection for you: The Paper Chase, the 1973 film we asked you about, is based on a 1971 book of the same name written by John J. Osborn, Jr., a descendant of WHAT Chief Justice? The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
John J. Osborn, Jr. more commonly went by John Jay Osborn, Jr., because the author of The Paper Chase is a descendant of JOHN JAY, the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.