This e-mail contains the following:
Trivia Newsletter CII (today’s questions)
The recap of Trivia Newsletter CI (the answers to last Monday’s questions)
A link to a walkthrough of Trivia Newsletter C (last Thursday’s “escape room”)
One quick note before we jump in: A lot of you seemed to enjoy Trivia Newsletter C, and I wanted to thank long-time reader Ross Worobel for doing all of the work on the technical side to bring Trivia Newsletter C to life. Everything from “the answers work whether you type them in lower-case or upper-case letters” to “you can’t just cheat and type in ‘RoomSix’ in the URL to skip most of the game” was thanks to Ross. You can learn more about Ross’s current academic pursuits here.
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. Like most trivia, the answers can be readily found via Google, so you’re on the honor system (i.e., do not use external resources to help you answer any of the questions). The SIXTH question of each set is generally designed to be a question that cannot be easily Googled; correct answers to those will be tracked and recognized in the next newsletter. The answers, and the next set of questions, will be published on Mondays and Thursdays.
1) The character Mars Blackmon, a shoe-loving fan of the New York Knicks who first appeared in the 1986 film She’s Gotta Have It, was played by WHOM? The character went on to appear in Nike commercials for the “Air Jordan” line of basketball shoes.
2) The 1973 parody story “A Trekkie’s Tale,” written by Paula Smith for her Star Trek fanzine Menagerie, features “the youngest Lieutenant in the fleet—only fifteen and a half years old,” who, in the course of a few paragraphs, wins over the crew of the Enterprise, performs heroic feats, and passes away. WHAT was the lieutenant’s name in “A Trekkie’s Tale”? The term is now generically used in writing communities to refer to inexplicably competent and virtuous characters, usually women.
3) On August 16, 1986, a 45-year-old Pete Rose played his final full game with the Cincinnati Reds. On the next day, in the eighth inning, Rose became the most recent (and probably last-ever) person in MLB history to do WHAT? He ended up going 0-for-1 in the game with a strikeout.
4) Usnavi de la Vega is a major character in WHAT musical that opened on Broadway in 2008? Usnavi, a bodega owner in a certain Manhattan neighborhood, takes his unusual name from the fact that, upon coming to America, his parents saw a ship with the words “US Navy” on it.
5) The following quote, excerpted from a work that was written approximately 2400 years ago, is (within the work) said by WHOM?
However, I think that I could afford a minae, and therefore I propose that penalty; Plato, Crito, Critobulus, and Apollodorus, my friends here, bid me say thirty minae, and they will be the sureties. Well then, say thirty minae, let that be the penalty; for that they will be ample security to you.
6) WHAT notable distinction is generally believed to be shared by each of the following works of art? At the Moulin Rouge (Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec), The Desperate Man (Gustave Courbet), Las Meninas (Diego Velázquez), The Procuress (Johannes Vermeer), The Prodigal Son in the Brothel (Rembrandt), The Wounded Deer (Frida Kahlo), Young Sick Bacchus (Caravaggio).
Trivia Newsletter CI Recap
1) The Greek letter lambda has many uses in science and mathematical contexts. Specifically in the context of nuclear physics and radioactivity, though, lower-case lambda is used for WHAT five-letter constant, also sometimes called the disintegration constant, rate constant, or transformation constant?
The word here is DECAY. (The connection here is why lambda is the logo for the popular video game series Half-Life.)
The term “radioactivity,” perhaps unsurprisingly, was coined by Marie Curie. The Curie family holds the distinction for most Nobel Prizes won by a family, with four prizes given to five individual laureates: the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics (Marie and Pierre Curie), the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (Marie Curie), the 1935 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (Irène Joliot-Curie, Marie and Pierre’s daughter, together with Irène’s husband Frédéric Joliot-Curie), and, oddly, the 1965 Nobel Peace Prize (Henry Richardson Labouisse Jr., the husband of Marie and Pierre’s daughter Ève Curie, on behalf of UNICEF).
Curie picked WHAT NAME for the first chemical element she discovered, after a part of her identity? The answer’s at the end of this recap, after the Question #6 explanation.
2) The Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984, the effect of which remains disputed today, is the instrument that set the conditions for the transfer of Hong Kong from British control to Chinese control. WHAT single word is generally used to describe the two wars (the first ending in 1842, the second ending in 1860) that initially led to Great Britain’s claim over Hong Kong?
This answer is OPIUM (the First Opium War and the Second Opium War, collectively called the Opium Wars).
In 2018, Rebecca F. Kuang (who writes under the pen name R.F. Kuang) published her first novel, a fantasy novel called The Poppy War. The name of the novel is clearly (to me, anyway) inspired by the Opium Wars, but the novel itself is a fantasy retelling of the Second Sino-Japanese War in the 1930s and 1940s. I read it and its sequels—it’s bold and worth reading. Or, to quote Kuang (and this is a bit of a spoiler):
Some people have been describing it as grimdark, which I suppose makes sense given the level of violence in the latter half of the book. It’s probably best described as a book that fools you into thinking it’s a young adult school story, then does a 180 and punches you in the face, then burns down your house and kills your pets.
3) Take the last word of the title of a 1963 war film that established its leading actor as a box-office star, add one letter to the end of that word, and now you’ve got a synonym for the title of a 1993 film that was also a critical success with a bankable star as the lead character. WHAT is that created synonym?
The word is “ESCAPEE,” as the films are The Great Escape (Steve McQueen) and The Fugitive (Harrison Ford).
Steve McQueen happens to be the name of both the aforementioned American actor (who lived from 1930 to 1980) and a British film director (born in 1969) most notable for directing the 2013 film 12 Years a Slave. McQueen (the second one) created and directed Small Axe, an anthology film series telling distinct stories about West Indian immigrants in London in the late twentieth century.
The first of the Small Axe films, Mangrove, tells the (true) story of the “Mangrove Nine.” In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a restaurant called The Mangrove in London was an important meeting space for black activists in the area. The police repeatedly raided the restaurant over the course of months, and subsequently the community staged a protest that led to the arrests and attempted prosecution of nine people for incitement to riot. The Mangrove Nine, by adopting novel legal tactics, dragged out the trial to 55 days. They were found not guilty of the most severe charges, and the case led to the first recorded judicial acknowledgement of racial prejudice in London’s police department.
Letitia Wright (“Shuri” from the Black Panther/Avengers films), who plays activist Altheia Jones-LeCointe in Mangrove, said of the Mangrove Nine that “it’s not in the textbooks at school. The stronghold of Black History Month in the U.K. is American history. You have mostly—and I honor and respect them always—Martin Luther King and Malcolm X on the posters, but you don’t have the Altheias.”
4) The first Asian woman to swim across the English Channel (doing so in 1959) happens to have the same first name as Joe Biden’s current chief science advisor, who is also the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy and who was at one time in charge of the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). What is that shared first name?
ARATI SAHA is the swimmer, and ARATI PRABHAKAR is Biden’s chief science advisor.
Swimming across the English Channel is about a 21-mile trip, as a straight line, though weather and geographical reality mean that a swim across tends to cover more distance. Matthew Webb in 1875 became the first person to do so without artificial aids, taking a zig-zagging course that was over 40 miles long. A few more men consequently did so before Gertrude Ederle became the first woman to cross the Channel in 1926; Ederle at the same time set the record for the fastest trip across the Channel, at 14 hours and 34 minutes. The first person to meet Ederle at the beach was a British immigration officer, who demanded to see a passport. A Disney+ film called Young Woman and the Sea starring Daisy Ridley as Ederle finished filming a few months ago and will presumably be released soon.
One more: Sarah Thomas, a marathon swimmer, became in 2019 the first person to complete four consecutive non-stop swims across the Channel (so, England to France, then back to England, then back to France, then back to England again). This absolutely ludicrous 130-mile trip took over 54 hours. To quote Thomas herself, shortly after completing the fourth crossing:
I'm pretty tired right now.
Arati Saha, who crossed the Channel only a few days after her 19th birthday, was honored with a nifty Google Doodle in September 2020, on what would have been her 80th birthday:
5) In 2012, in an all-time editing error, a Yahoo! News article stated that Zooey Deschanel left her husband, who (in the article) had a very strange name, so that she could be with the frontman of a band that does not exist. In the universe of this incorrect news story, WHAT is the name of that nonexistent band?
Zooey Deschanel was for a time married to Ben Gibbard, the lead singer of the band Death Cab for Cutie. The “true” headline to describe what happened was “Zooey Deschanel Divorces Death Cab for Cutie Frontman Ben Gibbard.” However, the Yahoo! News folks clearly misunderstood the name of the band, because they wrote:
Deschanel filed for divorce from husband Death Cab, throwing him over for Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard, in January. Deschanel and Cab were married for a little more than three years, and Deschanel said that, along with babies, dating was not a priority either.
Thus, our nonexistent band was CUTIE. The (real) band Death Cab for Cutie takes its name from the 1967 song “Death Cab for Cutie,” a doo-wop song by the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band that tells the story about a “cutie” who goes out on the town against her lover’s wishes and is killed when her taxicab crashes. Gibbard later said that “I would absolutely go back and give it [the band] a more obvious name. Thank God for Wikipedia. At least now, people don’t have to ask me where the f****** name came from every interview.”
6) Of the seven vices commonly grouped together as the “Seven Deadly Sins,” WHICH ONE best fits with the theme of this newsletter?
The Seven Deadly Sins are lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride. Our answer this time was ENVY.
This was a wordplay newsletter—each of our answers is a word that can be expressed phonetically as a string of single letters (this is called a “grammagram”), such as “odious” (O-D-S) or “expediency” (X-P-D-N-C):
Question #1: DECAY (D-K)
Question #2: OPIUM (O-P-M)
Question #3: ESCAPEE (S-K-P)
Question #4: ARATI (A-R-T)
Question #5: CUTIE (Q-T)
Question #6: ENVY (N-V)
Newsletter Title: “Epistolary” is a word usually applied to a novel to mean “made up of letters,” and we wanted you to think of things made up of letters in a different sense here.
The answer to the above recap question (about Marie Curie), by the way, is POLONIUM, named after her native Poland.
Trivia Newsletter C Recap
The button below will take you to the complete text of Trivia Newsletter C. Obviously, the game will be completely spoiled by reading this walkthrough, so if you’re interested in playing the game (which will remain live for the foreseeable future), do not read this guide yet!
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.