Two notes: First, we are skipping Monday, July 3rd. We’ll be back with Trivia Newsletter CLII on Thursday, July 6th.
Second, we always like to plug things that we’re enjoying (or, in one case, expect to enjoy).1 Here are three:
From Neal Agarwal comes this devious password creation game. All you have to do is make a password that comports with some basic rules, like having five characters, including a number, and…well, you’ll see.
If you’re a baseball fan and use Twitter, you’ve likely already seen this, but the daily game Immaculate Grid is a lot of fun. Each day requires you to identify players that played for certain couplets of teams and that achieved certain career accomplishments, and your results can be shared with your friends, a la Wordle. It’s a nice add for your daily game routine if you’re into baseball.
For years, FiveThirtyEight has been running a weekly feature called The Riddler that challenges readers with math/logic puzzles. Lately The Riddler has been run by recent Jeopardy! contestant Zach Wissner-Gross, and in the wake of changes at FiveThirtyEight, Wissner-Gross is taking his talents to Substack. He’ll launch his first puzzle on Friday, July 7th, so get yourself subscribed before then:
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) WHAT English name is the Swiss Neoclassical painter born in 1741 whose works include Ariadne Abandoned by Theseus and Miranda and Ferdinand typically known by? A friend of Joshua Reynolds and Jean-Paul Marat, she, together with Mary Moser, was one of two female painters among the founding members of the Royal Academy in London in 1768.
2) NAME the individual who, in addition to competing in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, has published the following three books: Uncovering the Dome (about the construction of the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome), The Senator Next Door: A Memoir from the Heartland, and Antitrust: Taking on Monopoly Power from the Gilded Age to the Digital Age.
3) The 1927 film Love, starring Greta Garbo and John Gilbert and based on an 1877 novel, featured an alternate ending for some American audiences wherein, in lieu of the novel’s tragic ending, Garbo’s and Gilbert’s characters reunite. Garbo would play the same role in WHAT 1935 film that shares its name with the underlying novel and Garbo’s character?
4) Fashion designer Hannah Golofsky, better known by WHAT name, had her designs sold in hundreds of American department stores by the late 1970s? She was the only woman invited to participate in the historic Battle of Versailles fashion show in 1973.
5) A girl was on fire when in 2008 the song “Like You’ll Never See Me Again” replaced “No One” at #1 on the Billboard Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart; of course, it was not “Unthinkable” that WHAT artist, who performed both songs, would again be seen at #1?
6) This newsletter alludes to WHAT connection shared by Guatemala, Haiti, Bolivia, and (specifically) Mozambique, and no other member states of the United Nations?
Trivia Newsletter CL Recap
Recall that we had an unusual format here, which was summarized in last newsletter’s preview.
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].”
This is PRETTY WOMAN—the film title is based on the song “Oh, Pretty Woman” by Roy Orbison. The building we asked about is the Beverly Wilshire, and its website insists that it is A Four Seasons Hotel.
The Beverly Wilshire, A Four Seasons Hotel, offers a variety of experiences to guests who want to get the full Pretty Woman experience, ranging from free (“take a picture here!”) to $300,000 (“meet Wolfgang Puck!”). The website I just linked to, in introducing these experiences, quotes Pretty Woman:
“Welcome to Hollywood! What's your dream? Everybody comes here; this is Hollywood, land of dreams,” and Beverly Wilshire, A Four Seasons Hotel is here to make some of those dreams come true, especially for the Pretty Woman enthusiast.
The next line in that Pretty Woman quote is “Some dreams come true, some don't. But keep on dreaming.” I see why they didn’t quote that part.
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]!”
We wanted HURRICANE here. Well, we didn’t want a hurricane here.
Rubin Carter was a boxer who was imprisoned for a 1966 triple homicide; the sentence was overturned in 1985. The story is the inspiration of the Bob Dylan song “Hurricane” (more on that later) and the 1999 film The Hurricane. Carter passed away in 2014—read more about him here:
In his last weeks he campaigned for the exoneration of David McCallum, a Brooklyn man who has been in prison since 1985 on murder charges. In an opinion article published by The Daily News on Feb. 21, 2014, headlined “Hurricane Carter’s Dying Wish,” he asked that Mr. McCallum “be granted a full hearing” by Brooklyn’s new district attorney, Kenneth P. Thompson.
“Just as my own verdict ‘was predicated on racism rather than reason and on concealment rather than disclosure,’ as Sarokin wrote, so too was McCallum’s,” Mr. Carter wrote.
He added: “If I find a heaven after this life, I’ll be quite surprised. In my own years on this planet, though, I lived in hell for the first 49 years, and have been in heaven for the past 28 years.
“To live in a world where truth matters and justice, however late, really happens, that world would be heaven enough for us all.”
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].”
The answer here is I WON’T BACK DOWN, citing the Tom Petty song “I Won’t Back Down.” Sam Smith’s “Stay With Me” sounds a great deal like “I Won’t Back Down,” leading to the dispute. There are a lot of covers of “I Won’t Back Down” (Johnny Cash’s may be most famous), and if you’re a huge fan of bands that were a big deal twenty years ago, you might like the cover that O.A.R. and the Goo Goo Dolls recorded together just a few weeks ago.
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].”
This is ALL THOSE YEARS AGO, echoing the title of George Harrison’s 1981 song honoring John Lennon after Lennon’s murder in 1980 (the quote in the question refers to the song “Imagine”). I thought this post had a nice little writeup on the song:
Released in May 1981, ‘All Those Years Ago’ is a song that not only reunited The Beatles for a brief foray but, in the wake of the tragic murder of John Lennon, offered a sincere reflection of the lost icon provided by those who knew him most sincerely. It’s hard to quantify what life as Beatle was truly like, and, in honesty, there are only ever four people who can know. It’s a unique bond that Harrison, Lennon, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr will always share.
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]!”
The answer here is Xanadu. We referred to both the 1980 film Xanadu and the poem “Kubla Khan” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge that begins “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree:”.
By the way, WHAT British composer and conductor, born in 1875, was sometimes called the “African Mahler” and is especially known for his three cantatas on the poem The Song of Hiawatha? He fittingly wrote one piece called “The Legend of Kubla Khan.” The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.2
6) WHAT proper noun is the theme of this newsletter?
Each question alluded to a particular song, and we wanted you to think of the folks mostly closely associated with those songs:
Question #1: “Oh, Pretty Woman” by Roy Orbison
Question #2: “Hurricane” by Bob Dylan
Question #3: “I Won’t Back Down” by Tom Petty
Question #4: “All Those Years Ago” by George Harrison
Question #5: “Xanadu” (from the Xanadu soundtrack) by Olivia Newton-John and Electric Light Orchestra (and written/produced by, and with vocals from, Jeff Lynne of ELO).
Orbison, Dylan, Petty, Harrison, and Lynne formed the TRAVELING WILBURYS in 1988, and that supergroup was the answer to Question #6. The newsletter’s title (“Are You a Roving Contracted Quote by Nikita Khrushchev??”), besides being intended to capture the silly nature of Mr. Peanutbutter’s cultural references on which this newsletter was based, refers to Khrushchev’s famous 1956 statement to the West as the de facto leader of the Soviet Union, “We will bury you.” “Roving” is a synonym for “traveling,” making the quote a contracted quote makes it “we’ll bury you,” and “we’ll bury” sounds a lot like “wilbury.” The full “Mr. Peanutbutter-ism to get the connection here would be “Are you a roving contracted quote by Nikita Khrushchev? Because traveling wilbury, you!”, which is the connection you had to make.
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
As always, I have no affiliation with these websites/links/persons and am not promoting these items for any self-interested reason, other than my own interest in seeing more participation in things I like (so that more such things will exist).
The British composer we mentioned in the recap to Question #5 is SAMUEL COLERIDGE-TAYLOR, whose namesake is the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge.