Trivia Newsletter CL: Are You a Roving Contracted Quote by Nikita Khrushchev??
Trivia for June 26, 2023
This is the 150th edition of Trivia Factorial! Whether you regularly submit answers or occasionally read along, we appreciate you being a part of this. The average gestational period of an Asian elephant is a little over 600 days, which is just about how long we’ve been doing this; we’re very proud of this metaphorical baby elephant.
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Today’s newsletter has a special format to celebrate the milestone. In my favorite television show, the animated dramedy BoJack Horseman, there’s a character named Mr. Peanutbutter who repeatedly draws upon pop-culture trivia for groan-worthy puns. It’s easiest to show this by example:
[trying to warn Jessica Biel not to look behind her] “Jessica! Am I written by Albert Hammond and Diane Warren, originally recorded by Tina Turner, but popularized by Ace of Base? Because ‘Don't Turn Around!’” [“Don’t Turn Around” is a song by those folks]
[upon being told to eat breakfast] “Yeah! Breakfast! Am I Emilio Estevez, Molly Ringwald, Judd Nelson, the principal—” [Mr. Peanutbutter is cut off, but is clearly about to refer to the film The Breakfast Club, in which these actors appear]
[upon being told that, for the first time, he is leading the polling in California’s gubernatorial race] “Wow. Am I John Davidson, Cathy Lee Crosby, and Fran Tarkenton right now, because—” [Mr. Peanutbutter is cut off again, but he is about to say “That’s Incredible!”, as those folks were all co-hosts of That’s Incredible!, a 1980s reality television show]
[upon being asked if all of his breakthroughs in therapy have this format] “Are all of my breakthroughs a British prog rock band from the 70s? Because...Yes.” [Yes is a British progressive rock band]
Today, I’ve written a few questions in a similar format, with the answers linked by a theme. Your task will be to replace the brackets in each question with the correct phrase; each bracket indicates how many words are missing and how many letters each word has. (Question #6 will not provide such a hint.) Here’s a practice question:
[complimenting someone’s role in supporting his friend’s dinner party] Are you the Duke basketball team in 2010, the UConn basketball team in 2011, and William Austin, Michael Gough, Michael Caine, and Jeremy Irons as a certain occupation in the same comic-book film role? Because you [6, 6].
[If you’d like to take a guess before seeing the answer, now is the time to do it before continuing to read.]
Austin, Gough, Caine, and Irons all play the character of Alfred Pennyworth, Batman’s butler, in various Batman films, and Duke and UConn won national championships in men’s basketball in the listed years by defeating Butler University in the championship game, so the commonality and missing phrase is “PLAYED BUTLER.” We wanted two words, each of which were six letters. You knew that because the bracket we provided you was “[6, 6].”
(As a clarification: If we were asking for, say, “What’s Up, Doc?”, that would be indicated by [5, 2, 3].)
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. This newsletter has an unusual format—be sure to read the above before you begin.
1) [trying to compliment someone’s appearance] “Are you the 1990 film most closely associated with a building at Wilshire Boulevard and Rodeo Drive in Los Angeles? Because oh, [6, 5].”
2) [trying to warn of a particular impending disaster] “Is there a cocktail made with a variety of rums, lemon juice, and either passionfruit syrup or Fassionola that is also Rubin Carter’s nickname? Because [9]!”
3) [describing a willingness to be stubborn] “Are you how, until royalties were paid, someone might have described his legal strategy in response to Sam Smith’s song ‘Stay With Me’ after its release? Because [1, 4, 4, 4].”
4) [downplaying an event by saying it was in the past] “Do you contain the lyric ‘You were the one who imagined it all’? Because that was [3, 5, 5, 3].”
5) [trying to describe the events of a 1980 film] “Did Kubla Khan decree a stately pleasure-dome co-written by Olivia Newton-John and the leader of Electric Light Orchestra? Because that happened in [6]!”
6) WHAT proper noun is the theme of this newsletter?
Trivia Newsletter CXLIX Recap
1) An animated character voiced by Jack Black, one of the titular characters from the television show Teletubbies, and a river originating in the Cottian Alps that flows into the Adriatic Sea all share WHAT name?
The answer here is PO. (The Jack Black character is the, uh, kung-fu panda from Kung Fu Panda.) Po is the red Teletubby.
The Po River is the longest river in Italy. If Jeopardy! is asking you about Italian rivers, it probably wants you to say one of these:
Po
You’ll usually be spotted something about it being the longest Italian river, or it flowing into the Adriatic, or it being in northern Italy.
Arno
You’ll probably be told that Florence and/or Pisa lie on it.
Tiber
You’ll almost certainly be told that Rome lies on it.
The Rubicon
This typically comes up not in a geographic sense but instead for its idiomatic role (“crossing the Rubicon” → “crossing a point of no return”) and in connection with Julius Caesar’s historical crossing, but you might be told that it marked the boundary between Cisalpine Gaul and Italy proper.
By the way, WHAT CLASSIC NOVEL first published in 1908 has an early scene in which a character complains that she cannot see the Arno from the location at which she is staying? The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
2) In conjunction with the release of Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones, a website called the HoloNet News promoted the film by sharing “in-universe” news stories. One such story was headlined “Senator Grebleips to Fund Extragalactic Survey”; this, together with a previous cameo appearance in the Galactic Senate in Episode I, are generally understood to be Easter eggs referring to WHAT 1982 film?
This is E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL. The hint here was that “Grebleips” is “Spielberg” backwards.
In E.T., our main characters briefly meet a child dressed as Yoda for Halloween, and the soundtrack (by John Williams, who also scored the Star Wars films) even briefly references Yoda’s theme.
George Lucas felt that he owed Spielberg a cameo in return, so in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, in a meeting of the Galactic Senate, viewers are for a moment shown three characters who look very much like E.T.:
In a normal film franchise, this would be the end of the story. This is Star Wars, though, so instead the species was given its own name (Asogians) and, in parts of the hierarchy of the impossible-to-parse Star Wars canon, a fleshed-out backstory.
3) You can add a letter to a 2020 Taylor Swift album title (Evermore) to get a word that appears eleven times in the poem “The Raven” by Edgar Allen Poe (“nevermore”). Similarly, you can subtract four letters from another 2020 Taylor Swift album title and be left with WHAT word that ends the second line of “The Raven”?
The album is folklore and the word is “LORE.” The first two lines of “The Raven” are the following: “Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, / Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—”.
Swift is in the midst of her Eras Tour, which is shattering records left and right. We’re usually loathe to quote Wikipedia, but this summary seems adequate:
In the first day of its presale alone, the Eras Tour sold over 2.4 million tickets, the most sold by an artist in a single day, surpassing Robbie Williams, who had sold 1.6 million tickets for his Close Encounters Tour in 2005. Billboard reported on December 15 that the Eras Tour had already grossed an estimated $554 million, and projected the U.S. leg to finish with $591 million, surpassing the former all-time female record set by Madonna's Sticky & Sweet Tour ($407 million) in 2008–2009.
Here in Chicago, where the Era Tour spent a weekend earlier this month, lots of folks with no tickets apparently just hung out outside the stadium and had a great time. Taylor did a number on Chicago—but honestly, baby, who’s counting?
4) WHAT number, when raised to the power of an exponent that equals the product of “the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter” and “a solution to the quadratic equation x^2 + 1 = 0”, equals negative one?
This is E, which is (among other things) the limit of (1 + 1/n) raised to the power of n as n approaches infinity. Which number is better, pi or e? This was already resolved as part of The Great pi/e Debate in 2005, which is a joy to watch.
This question asked you for a form of Euler’s identity, which is shown in the image below and about which you can read more here. Commentators often point to the identity’s beauty and simplicity.
5) The equivalent of WHAT French word is en in Dutch, und in German, e in Portuguese, and, and och in Swedish?
The French word is “ET,” as these are all ways of saying “and” (we had a little fun with throwing in “and” near the end of the question). Claude Moët was the first winemaker in Champagne (in France) to exclusively produce sparkling wine, and the Champagne house that he founded later became what we know as Moët et Chandon, one of the world’s largest champagne producers. You’ve possibly seen a bottle of their mainline product, which looks like this:
6) The following is a list of the initials of twenty-four individuals in chronological order (most recent to least recent) who share WHAT connection? AL, JH, TKH, JFH, CW, NT, PL, WSM, KR, CS, DH, TK, LG, BC, SK, RP, RH, RD, MVD, JB, MS, HN, RW, RPW. (A two-word answer is sufficient.)
These are the most recent POET LAUREATES of the United States. The trick here was that the answers to Questions #1 through #5 could be construed to spell out the word “poet laureate” phonetically (PO - ET - LORE - E - ET). Ada Limón is the current poet laureate and the first Latina poet laureate (of the United States). Read more about some of the recent poet laureates here.
The newsletter’s title, “The Hill We Climb,” is the name of the poem that Amanda Gorman read at Joe Biden’s inauguration in 2021. Gorman was named the first National Youth Poet Laureate of the United States in 2017.
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
The 1908 novel is A ROOM WITH A VIEW by E.M. Forster—the Arno is part of the titular view that is desired. A Room with a View is one of the four books shown to be read by the “Finer Things Club” from a Season 4 episode of the U.S. version of The Office. To quote Angela Martin (Angela) from the podcast Office Ladies that she does with Jenna Fischer (Pam): “Well, Jenna, here's the Finer Things Club reading list and a little bit about their art and music selection. They are currently reading A Room with a View, which is a novel by E.M. Forster. In flashbacks, we see them reading The House of Spirits, also known by its original title as La Casa de los Espiritos. It's by Isabel Allende. Then they are reading Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden. … And the end of this episode is a flash forward to their next meeting where they are discussing Angela's Ashes [by Frank McCourt].”