This newsletter includes a challenge for our readers (like you!).
My goal in Trivia Newsletter CVIII was to construct a question that pointed to “Brazil and Croatia” in order to build towards the newsletter theme. This was Question #2 in the below recap.
I was not very happy with my result! Turns out, Brazil and Croatia don’t have much of a history with one another and it was very hard to write a good question tying them together.
A challenge: Can you write a better trivia question where the answer is “Brazil and Croatia,” or where the question implicates Brazil and Croatia in a way that helps a reader determine the theme? The question should not actually be about the 2022 World Cup or soccer. Ideally the question would target some connection between the countries, but creativity is always appreciated. If you want to participate, use the Google Forms button below that we normally use for submissions.
We’ll highlight my favorite submissions in Trivia Newsletter CX.
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) Chance the Rapper’s song “How Great” includes the lyric “Hosanna Santa invoked and woke up enslaved people from Southampton to Chatham Manor.” “Southampton” almost certainly refers to Southampton County, Virginia and to a rebellion led by WHAT man in 1831?
2) The Creation, The Seasons, and The Seven Last Words of Christ are some of the many works of WHAT Austrian composer, sometimes called the “Father of the Symphony” and whose tomb, oddly enough, contains two skulls?
3) The below image depicts a painting by Roy Lichtenstein (based on original art by Tony Abruzzo) that is one of the most famous pop-art paintings. It is sometimes known by the names Secret Hearts or I Don’t Care! I’d Rather Sink, but is most commonly known by WHAT quite literal two-word name?
4) The Royal Burial Ground in the Frogmore estate near Windsor Castle is generally used by the British royal family for the burial of family members who were not themselves sovereigns. Of the approximately thirty people buried in the Royal Burial Ground, NAME the only person who was born in North America; this person passed away in 1986.
5) The title of a film that won the Academy Award for Best Picture in the 1980s, the titles of two different songs that are both in the Rolling Stone’s top 250 songs of all time, and the name of a certain horseshoe-shaped geographic belt that is about 25,000 miles long all end with WHAT two words?
6) Here are some pairs of numbers that have a certain property, which property is related to the theme of this newsletter. IDENTIFY the number that has been replaced by X in the final pair shown:
(1, 8)
(7, 9)
(8, 10)
(10, 19)
(19, X)
Trivia Newsletter CVIII Recap
1) The Battle of Al Wajbah took place in March 1893 on a small peninsula on the northeastern coast of the Arabian Peninsula. The battle, between the Ottoman Empire and one of its provinces, is considered a defining moment in the eventual establishment of WHAT nation as an independent state, thanks in part to the leadership of Jassim bin Mohammed Al Thani?
This is QATAR (and a big hint for what the theme will be!). Your path here was “Al Thani.” The House of Thani has been the ruling family of Qatar for its entire existence.
Last Saturday, longtime sports journalist Grant Wahl passed away while covering the World Cup in Qatar. He was 49 years old and one of the most prominent soccer journalists in the English-speaking world. A few weeks ago, Wahl reported not being let into the World Cup due to his pro-LGBTQ shirt (despite having received prior assurances that the shirt would be allowed), as shown in the tweet below:
Many suspect foul play in Wahl’s death; in addition to his brief detainment due to his shirt, one of his last pieces of writing was about Qatar’s apathy over migrant worker deaths. Little is known at this time about the circumstances of Wahl’s death, though; CNN reports that Wahl had been feeling ill for days beforehand.
Wahl’s death has sent shockwaves through the sports journalism world. “I can’t believe my friend is gone,” wrote Molly Knight in an affecting tribute:
“He was the best of us,” wrote Joe Posnanski in another excellent but terribly sad piece:
Let’s end with a series of tweets (condensed for readability) from Spencer Hall, an SBNation contributor (censorship mine on one curse word):
Grant Wahl was the first soccer writer I can remember reading on the internet, and pushed harder to make Americans love the sport like he did. It worked. I hope he knows that.
A horrendous loss.
I’m f****** shocked
Grant went everywhere to cover the game. I couldn’t name a place I’d been without him going “oh yeah, they’ve got a great concession stand in [PLACE THAT TAKES EIGHT WEEKS TO HIKE TO AND PLAYS ONLY ONE GAME A YEAR UNDER THE BLOOD MOON]”
He would go anywhere for the game and did
One more thing, I see a lot of people talking about how his kindness, his principles, and his willingness to help others are irreplaceable, which they are but
That has to be you now
You have to be that person for someone
2) The below statement contains placeholders X, Y, and Z, each of which stands in for a word. NAME any of what X, Y, or Z stands for:
Although sources vary, according to the Pew Research Center, the European countries with the highest percentage of X among their populations (excluding microstates such as, of course, the Vatican) are, in no particular order, Poland, Ireland, Malta, Italy, and Y, a country that borders the Adriatic Sea. The country in the world with the most X in the world is not in Europe, though; according to the CIA Factbook, Z has more X than any other country.
X was “CATHOLICS,” Y was “CROATIA,” and Z was “BRAZIL.”
As I alluded to at the start of this newsletter, I did not love this question! I think it was pretty mealy-mouthed and I wish I had found a more concise way to tie together Brazil and Croatia. Again, you have a chance to do better in the Google Forms submission form above, if you’d like to give it a swing.
My first draft of this question was something like:
Of the 56 foreign embassies in Croatia’s capital city, only one of them is the embassy of a country that (i) has the same number of letters in its common English name as Croatia’s capital city’s common English name, and (ii) has a “z” in its name. NAME the country.
This ends up being a “Do you know that the capital of Croatia is Zagreb, and can you think through other countries?” question, which isn’t that interesting—lots of countries have lots of embassies. Worse, “Belize” and “Zambia” are possible answers that are incorrect (they have no embassy in Zagreb), so while you can reason that Brazil, given its population, is far more likely to have an embassy in Croatia than those countries, it’s still not very satisfying. We could have tinkered with (ii) in the question, but it just wasn’t working; still, I’m not sure the real question did either.
Croatia is a subject of this meme:
Contrary to the silly meme, Bosnia and Herzegovina actually does have a coastline with the Adriatic Sea near its southern tip. It’s about twelve miles long and is called the Neum Corridor. Read more about how all that happened in this good article.
Bosnia and Herzegovina’s coastline is the second-shortest coastline of any country in the world (for countries with non-zero coastlines). WHAT country, which barely touches the Mediterranean Sea, has the shortest coastline (of countries with non-zero coastlines) of any country? The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
3) In the late 19th century, a series of stock market crashes and depressions hit many countries around the world; for example, Argentina faced a years-long depression that hit immigrants especially hard. An association of wealthy immigrants in Buenos Aires formed the “Wilhelmina Society,” a charity intended to help their fellow countrymen who had come to Argentina from WHAT specific nation?
This is THE NETHERLANDS. This was a “Did you know that Wilhelmina II was a very notable queen of the Netherlands?” question. She ruled from 1880 to 1948. Some sources (but not necessarily good ones) credit her with being the world’s first female billionaire.
The Wilhelmina Mountains are a mountain range in central Suriname. Suriname was a Dutch colony until 1954, becoming fully independent in 1975—it is the only country outside of Europe that has Dutch as an official language. Julianatop, a peak in the Wilhelmina Mountains, is the highest point in Suriname. (Jeopardy! is unlikely to ask you for Ipinumin, the peak’s native name, but they will ask about “Juliana Top.”) Julianatop is named after Queen Wilhelmina’s only child, Juliana, who was queen of the Netherlands from 1948 to 1980.
4) The Desastre de Tânger refers to a massive military failure in 1437 by WHAT person, generally regarded as the primary initiator of the “Age of Discovery”? Though this person is generally known by a famous appellation, he was not known by it at the time; that title came from German historians and British biographers in the nineteenth century.
This is HENRY THE NAVIGATOR. “Desastre de Tânger” was meant to make Portuguese a possibility (with the circumflex over the “a”), and Tangier is a city in northwestern Morocco. Henry never embarked on any exploratory voyages, but that didn’t stop him from getting the name “Navigator” (centuries after his death).
Encyclopædia Britannica gives Henry the Navigator a tough time:
Although the colonization of Madeira proved, at least for a while, to be a brilliant success, most of his enterprises failed. The Canary Islands, the focus of his most unremitting obsessions, eventually fell to Spain, and Portugal did not succeed in garnering much of the African gold trade until more than 20 years after the prince’s death. His desire to convert the peoples of the Canary Islands and West Africa to Christianity was often voiced but was largely unsupported by action. Nor is Henry’s traditional reputation as a champion of the advancement of science supported by any genuine evidence. His sponsorship of the trade in enslaved West Africans, moreover, began an enterprise that culminated decades later in the transatlantic slave trade, in which some 10 to 12 million enslaved Africans were transported to the Americas for forced labour.
5) The following quote, describing the thoughts of a character contemplating the guillotine, is the last sentence of WHAT novel? “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.” Part of the work’s first sentence, which is 119 words long, is likely more famous.
This is A TALE OF TWO CITIES, the Charles Dickens novel.
The film The Dark Knight Rises (2012), of all things, draws heavily from A Tale of Two Cities. I pulled the paragraph below directly from Wikipedia, which I am usually loathe to do. I admit, though, that the paragraph is almost perfectly constructed to make you go from “okay, it seems like sort of a stretch that the people who made this very expensive superhero action movie really drew from A Tale of Two Cities” to “oh, they absolutely did” by the paragraph’s end:
A Tale of Two Cities served as an inspiration to the 2012 Batman film The Dark Knight Rises by Christopher Nolan. The character of Bane is in part inspired by Dickens's Madame Defarge: He organises kangaroo court trials against the ruling elite of the city of Gotham and is seen knitting in one of the trial scenes like Madame Defarge. There are other hints to Dickens's novel, such as Talia al Ghul being obsessed with revenge and having a close relationship to the hero, and Bane's catchphrase "the fire rises" as an ode to one of the book's chapters. Bane's associate Barsard is named after a supporting character in the novel. In the film's final scene, Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman) reads aloud the closing lines of Sydney Carton’s inner monologue—"It's a far far better thing I do than I have ever done, it's a far far better rest I go to than I have ever known"—directly from the novel.
6) WHAT is the theme of this newsletter, as suggested by the first five questions and the newsletter title?
This was a newsletter about the Men’s 2022 FIFA World Cup, and specifically about the four quarterfinal matchups that took place between the distribution of the last newsletter and this newsletter:
Question #1: We asked about Qatar, where the World Cup is being held, to anchor us to the theme.
Question #2: The question pointed to a connection between Croatia and Brazil, the first quarterfinal matchup of the World Cup.
Question #3: The question pointed to Dutch immigrants in Argentina—Argentina and the Netherlands played the second quarterfinal matchup of the World Cup.
Question #4: Pointing to Tangier was meant to clue you into the fact that the military disaster happened between Portugal and Morocco, the third quarterfinal matchup.
Question #5: The two cities in A Tale of Two Cities are London and Paris, pointing you towards the final quarterfinal matchup, England and France.
Newsletter Title: “Faint Quarrels,” besides pointing to some of these long-ago works and disputes, is an anagram for “Quarterfinals.”
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link. (Updates may continue to be somewhat sporadic until we get past the holiday season.)
MONACO is the country with the shortest (non-zero) coastline.