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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 is the same link as the button above.)
1) Naomi, a 2022 television series that aired on The CW and was based on a comic book, was co-created by Jill Blankenship and WHAT filmmaker, who is also the first Black woman to be nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Director?
2) WHAT author, born in 1956, is most notable for writing a 54-book series (with ten companion books) centered on Jake, Marco, Cassie, Rachel, Tobias, and Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill and their abilities to transform into any animal they touch?
3) The 2018 film At Eternity’s Gate is based upon the final years of the life of WHOM? The film contains what are likely false claims about the recent discovery and publication of an object known as the “lost Arles sketchbook.”
4) “I have read the Greeks; I find the Hindus deeper,” once said WHAT scientist famously associated with a quote from the Bhagavad Gita?
5) NAME the video game publisher and developer headquartered in Bellevue, Washington that in 2022 released the Steam Deck, a portable gaming system.
6) As of July 20, 2023, WHAT do the following U.S. presidents, and no other U.S. presidents, have in common? Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses Grant, Grover Cleveland, William McKinley, Franklin Roosevelt, Richard Nixon.
Trivia Newsletter CLV Recap
Thanks again to Patrick for writing these questions!
1) WHAT Midwestern river was named “River of the Year” in 2019 by the American Rivers conservation association, celebrating extraordinary improvement on the 50th anniversary of an infamous incident?
This is the CUYAHOGA River, which bisects the city of Cleveland. The infamous incident was this one:
Many credit the fires on the polluted Cuyahoga, including the most famous one in 1969, as an impetus for the various environmental laws passed in 1969 and 1970, including the National Environmental Policy Act (which led to the EPA) and the Clean Water Act.
2) A copy of Action Comics #1, published in 1938, sold in 2014 for more than three million dollars. It features the first appearance, most notably, of WHAT character?
This is SUPERMAN. Here’s that cover:
Tag yourself! I pick the guy in the corner:
That’s me when I realize that the next answer in this recap is ZITHER. Zither? I hardly, well, knew what one was.
3) WHAT neckless instrument with strings stretched across a thin, flat body had a resurgence of interest after the release of a 1949 film noir directed by Carol Reed?
This is a ZITHER, and the film is The Third Man, with the theme famously done on the zither by Anton Karas. You can listen to the theme here. It’s hard to overstate how big of a deal this theme was—it charted at #1 for weeks and is at least in part responsible for the business model of releasing film music themes as singles.
Zither. Zither. It’s like one of those words that starts sounding like nonsense if you keep saying it. That’s called semantic satiation, which you remember because you read the recap to Trivia Newsletter CXXII. Here’s a zither, by the way:
A few years ago, Jeopardy! asked this (Classical Music, $1200):
Virtuoso Nigel North is primarily known for playing this instrument, which looks like a pear-shaped guitar
One contestant went with “zither,” which was incorrect. WHAT WAS THE CORRECT RESPONSE? The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
4) WHAT is the name of the Cold War broadcasting project established in 1949 with the support of the CIA? In its early years, it featured the voices of many exiles from Communist Eastern Europe. Today, a successor organization is operated by the U.S. Agency for Global Media.
This is RADIO FREE EUROPE. [Note: An earlier version of this newsletter incorrectly indicated that this answer was “Radio Free America.” This typo is mine and not Patrick’s.]
I feel a bit silly writing something here about the Cold War, because I am some guy who barely knows what a zither is, and Patrick, who wrote these questions, is the author of Neither Peace nor Freedom: The Cultural Cold War in Latin America, a book that literally won an award for being good at describing foreign policy. Maybe we’ll just refer you to Encyclopedia Britannica to learn more about Radio Free Europe, and you can also consider reading a wonderful piece Patrick once wrote on other CIA-funded efforts to become a player in culture.
5) You’re driving along I-30 from Little Rock to Dallas. WHAT border city is the largest (by population) you would pass through along the way?
This is TEXARKANA, which is on the Texas-Arkansas state line and right by the area where Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana meet (sometimes called Ark-La-Tex).
I was surprised to learn while writing this that not only does Texarkana have an Amtrak station, but a Chicago resident can get on an Amtrak train and not get off the train until it arrives in Texarkana a brief sixteen hours later by taking the Texas Eagle line.
6) WHAT four-word description, applicable to exactly twelve human beings in all of history (though never for very long), fits today's theme?
This description is “MAN ON THE MOON,” because twelve folks have been to the moon.
The theme of this newsletter was that “Cuyahoga,” “Superman,” “Zither,” “Radio Free Europe,” “Texarkana,” and “Man on the Moon” are all SONGS BY THE BAND R.E.M., notable for songs such as “Losing My Religion,” “Everybody Hurts,” and a karaoke standard of mine, “It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine).”
Not at all coincidentally, today is the 54-year anniversary of the first moon landing, which occurred on July 20, 1969. Why not celebrate that by reading about those twelve men who landed on the moon?
This was a tougher theme to crack, but your paths were to realize the song connection or to know that the number of folks to visit the moon was twelve (since telling you the exact number of folks to do anything narrows down the range of what the task could be). Michael Stipe is the lead singer of R.E.M. and one of its songwriters, so our newsletter title, “Stipend,” was meant to point to how you’d say that word: Stipe penned, as in “Michael Stipe wrote or co-wrote these songs.”
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
The answer to the classical music Jeopardy! prompt above is the LUTE. Jeopardy! will not often ask for the zither, and every time it has (at least, in the episodes available on J-Archive), it will either mention The Third Man or it will spot you something about how the instrument is spelled (such as starting with “z,” ending with “ither,” being an end-of-the-alphabet instrument, or including “whither” in the prompt as a clue).
On the differences between a zither and lute specifically, check out this link.