A quick programming note: We’re taking off next week for the holiday. Trivia Newsletter CV, together with the recap for Trivia Newsletter CIV, will be released on Monday, November 28.
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 song “No Pigeons,” which was released in 1999 by the hip-hop group Sporty Thievz and which peaked at #12 on the Billboard Hot 100, contains lines such as “Them be them girls who gets no dubs from me” and thus was written as a rebuttal to a more popular song by WHAT girl group?
2) According to the International Bartenders Association, a “Dark ‘n Stormy” cocktail should be made using 60 milliliters of Goslings Rum and 100 milliliters of WHAT beverage?
3) The Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company is often associated with (and itself explicitly advertised) a story that falsely explains the etymology of WHAT word? In the apocryphal story, the most desirable passenger cabins on the company’s ships were marked with the phrase “port out, starboard home,” as those cabins were located in parts of the ship that would stay at comfortable temperatures at night.
4) Frances Houseman, played by Jennifer Grey and known by a nickname, is a main character of WHAT 1987 romantic drama film? The character would, according to the film’s most notable quote, probably fit in well in the Oval Office of the White House.
5) Huckle Cat, Lowly Worm, Mr. Frumble, Sergeant Murphy, Mr. Fixit, Bananas Gorilla and Hilda Hippo are some of the anthropomorphic animals who occupy the “busy world” of WHAT author and illustrator, responsible for more than 100 million book sales worldwide?
6) WHAT group is the theme of this newsletter?
Trivia Newsletter CIII Recap
1) The interaction of ozone molecules and isoprene, a volatile hydrocarbon naturally released by trees as a means of protection against heat and insects, produces a haze that is commonly believed to give WHAT U.S. mountain range, a part of the Appalachian Mountains, its name?
These are the BLUE RIDGE MOUNTAINS.
The first verse of the John Denver song “Take Me Home, Country Roads” is, of course:
Almost heaven, West Virginia
Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah River
Life is old there, older than the trees
Younger than the mountains, growin' like a breeze
A fact about Denver (whose real name is Henry John Deutschendorf Jr.) that comes up quite a bit is that he is responsible for two different official state songs: the aforementioned “Take Me Home, Country Roads” for West Virginia, and “Rocky Mountain High” for Colorado.
2) A fictional diamond with a distinctively shaped flaw was the titular object in WHAT 1963 film, which spawned a media franchise of almost a dozen films, as well as a series of animated shorts?
This is THE PINK PANTHER. In the film’s original storyline, the “Pink Panther” is a diamond called that because, when the diamond is held up a certain way, its flaw looks like a “springing panther.” The film’s opening credits anthropomorphized (no, that’s not quite right—felidpomorphized?) the flaw as an animated pink panther, as shown below, and so the animated “pink panther” took on a life of its own:
3) WHAT name is given to the thought experiment first devised by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, based upon an idea proposed by evolutionary biologist W.D. Hamilton in 1964, that is intended to explain selective altruism among individuals of a species? In the thought experiment, a particular vivid example of a detectable phenotypic marker causes its carrier to behave altruistically towards individuals who display the same marker.
This is the GREEN-BEARD EFFECT. This short article provides what seems like a competent summary of the effect.
Speaking of altruism, get a current-events trivia question correct soon by knowing that “effective altruism” is the name of the philosophy that, to quote The New York Times, “advocates applying data and evidence to doing the most good for the many” by, as best I can tell, making as much money as possible so that, ostensibly, more money can be given away. The movement was linked in part to Sam Bankman-Fried, the former CEO of FTX, a platform used to buy and sell cryptocurrencies that is currently in the news for stealing everyone’s money its liquidity crisis. Bankman-Fried’s role as a leading proponent of “effective altruism” has, undoubtedly, set the movement back.
By the way, WHAT PHRASE was "FTX" short for? The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
4) Erwin Wardman, the editor of the New York Press, is generally credited with being the first to publish WHAT phrase to describe the sensationalistic reporting that characterized Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal in the late 1890s?
This is YELLOW JOURNALISM. Right now, some kid in an Advanced Placement U.S. History class is probably studying how to write essays on terrible political cartoons such as the below:
There is exactly one good “political cartoon,” and it is this advertisement made for the 2010 Georgia gubernatorial election.
5) Please answer either of the following questions: (a) NAME the author and illustrator who created the Arthur series. He also served as an executive producer for the same-named PBS television show that holds the distinction as the longest-running children’s animated television show in American history; OR (b) WHAT is the alliterative term oft-applied to overly ornate text that distractingly takes away from even an obsequious reader’s enraptured attention by producing a too-liberal font of fanciful adjectives and unnecessarily lurid adverbs?
The answers here are, respectively, MARC BROWN or PURPLE PROSE.
The Bulwer-Lytton Writing Contest encourages others, in their words, “to write an atrocious opening sentence to the worst novel never written. Our whimsical literary competition honors Sir Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, whose 1830 novel Paul Clifford begins with ‘It was a dark and stormy night.’” The Bulwer-Lytton Writing Contest is great, because it’s whimsical and silly and not mean-spirited and not-for-profit, so it should be celebrated for those reasons. Its problem, though, is that it can’t get out of its own way. Consider the most recent winning entry:
“I knew she was trouble the second she walked into my 24-hour deli, laundromat, and detective agency, and after dropping a load of unmentionables in one of the heavy-duty machines (a mistake that would soon turn deadly) she turned to me, asking for two things: find her missing husband and make her a salami on rye with spicy mustard, breaking into tears when I told her I couldn't help—I was fresh out of salami.”
It’s just…too long, right? Too many jokes, too dense. But that’s not an original view—it’s why the vastly superior Lyttle Lytton Contest exists, which sets out to accomplish the same goal, but limits entries to 200 characters (originally 25 words). If you search the word “Ryan” on the pages for the 2021 Lyttle Lytton Contest and the 2018 Lyttle Lytton Contest, you can see a couple of submissions I made for the “Found” portion of the contest (i.e., terrible sentences that appeared in real life, and were not made up by the author).
6) Of the 363 colleges and universities that participate in NCAA’s “Division I” in men’s basketball, only one of them fits the theme of this newsletter. NAME the team. (One word is acceptable.)
The answer here was SYRACUSE (or SYRACUSE ORANGE, or just ORANGE).
You may have noticed that the answers related to colors, and considered teams such as the Duke Blue Devils, DePaul Blue Demons, Texas Tech Red Raiders, Stanford Cardinal, Bowling Green Falcons, Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets, Army Black Knights, Harvard Crimson, Alabama Crimson Tide, or Brown Bears—there were other choices, too. We tossed in the note about how “only one of [the teams]” works for the theme in the hopes of dissuading you from just picking a team with a color.
This was a newsletter based upon the board game Trivial Pursuit, using the color and category combinations present in most standard editions of the game:
Question #1: In Trivial Pursuit, Geography questions are coded by the color blue, so we asked about the BLUE Ridge Mountains.
Question #2: Entertainment is coded by pink, so we asked about The PINK Panther.
Question #3: Science & Nature is coded by green, so we asked about the GREEN-beard effect.
Question #4: History is coded by yellow, so we asked about YELLOW journalism.
Question #5: Trivial Pursuit is inconsistent on whether Arts & Literature is coded by brown or purple, so we asked about both MARC BROWN and PURPLE PROSE.
Question #6: The last remaining category is Sports & Leisure, and exactly one D-I team has “Orange” anywhere in the school or team name: the Syracuse ORANGE.
Newsletter Title: In the game of Trivial Pursuit, players seek to collect plastic wedges; thus, this issue of the newsletter was a “WEDGE ISSUE.”
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
FUTURES EXCHANGE.