As we promised in our prior e-mail, today’s edition features Trivia Factorial’s fifth Wordle-themed game, because that’s what we do every XXXII newsletters. Check out our previous Wordle-themed editions below:
If you don’t know what Wordle is, this link and the rules found there may help you. Any of the above recaps should be similarly instructive.
PLEASE NOTE: In each of our four previous Wordle-themed newsletters, each answer was a word that could be validly used in Wordle. That rule does not apply this time! Answers will be five letters and may be, but are not necessarily, Wordle-eligible words.
PLEASE ALSO NOTE: The answers to Questions #1 through #6 are not intentionally connected to each other except by virtue of the Wordle grid below.
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 is the last name of the investigative reporter, with ties to both Memphis and Chicago, who was posthumously awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2020 for publishing pamphlets in the 1890s such as Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All its Phases and The Red Record?
2) Mutsuhito, the 122nd emperor of Japan who reigned from 1867 to 1912, was honored with WHAT name that means “enlightened rule” in Japanese? The same name is used generally when describing Japan’s “restoration” that began in 1868.
3) In May 2022, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis charged 28 people with, among other charges, conspiracy to violate the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. Among those charged was rapper Jeffery Lamar Williams, better known by a two-word stage name. WHAT is the first word of that stage name?
4) “When the film was released, I was highly critical: How did the song fit with the film? There was no rain,” said Robert Redford of a song that went on to win the Academy Award today known as Best Original Song for its inclusion in a 1969 film, one of only two films (together with The Sting) starring Redford and Paul Newman. WHAT is the first word of that film’s title?
5) The Vermilion Bird of the South, the White Tiger of the West, the Black Tortoise of the North, and a certain-colored Dragon of the East, sometimes together with the Yellow Dragon, are figures central to certain Asian mythologies. With WHAT color, perhaps familiar to someone in a city such as Saint-Tropez or Cannes, is the Dragon of the East associated?
6) Speaking of Cannes, WHAT city is just over 400 kilometers from Cannes (as the crow flies) and fits with the theme of this newsletter? The below image may help you:
[Do not assume the chart necessarily represents optimal guesses. As stated above, the answers to Questions #1 through #6 may be, or may not be, dictionary words that would be accepted in a standard game of Wordle.]
Trivia Newsletter CLIX Recap
Thanks again to Mister Skeleton for writing these questions! As a reminder, his trivia Substack is here and is worth checking out:
1) Three main types a’ champagne glass are a coupe, a tulip, and a WHAT? A coupe is kinda shallow and broad, whereas the type I'm askin’ about is thin and tall, which I guess is better at helping keep the bubbles in your bubbly.
This is a FLUTE glass. Online sources vary about whether a “tulip glass” is its own type of glass, or a type of flute glass, so we spotted you tulip to avoid confusion. Here’s an image from somewhere about some types of champagne glasses:
As I’ve written before in a recap, it’s important to have bits, and one of my bits is the following. An “antimetabole,” besides just being a really fun word to say (AN-ti-muh-TAB-uh-lee) is a phrase that is repeated, except with a word flipped. You hear these all the time—”when the going gets tough, the tough get going,” or “one for all, all for one” or Malcolm X saying “We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock. The rock was landed on us” in a speech that we also talked about in a recap. A pun that takes the form of an antimetabole that you hear sometimes in pop culture is “champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends.” (I probably heard that one more during my time at the University of Illinois, due to portions of its campus being in the city of Champaign.)
Anyway, my bit is that I purposefully mangle that phrase out loud a lot, saying things like “Real shams for my pain friends, friend pains for my sham reals” or “sparkling wine for my real friends, real whines for my sparkling friends” or “whiskey for my real friends, real whizz for my key friends.” Maybe you had to be there.
2) Dick Grayson, Jason Todd, Tim Drake, Stephanie Brown, and Damian Wayne are all fictional characters who’ve been better known to you ’n’ me by WHAT alias?
This alias is ROBIN, as these are various iterations of Batman’s sidekick throughout the decades. For example, in the television show Batman that aired from 1966 to 1968 (probably most famous for starring Adam West as a very campy Batman), Dick Grayson was Robin’s in-universe name. By the way, WHAT ACTOR played Robin in that show? The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
I don’t have a lot more to say about Robin, but I really like these specific few pages of a recent Batman comic that came up on Reddit a while back. It’s a fun little compare/contrast between Batman and Superman that would be fun to see in the movies, whenever DC decides to try to make good movies.
3) WHAT fruit, member of the genus Cydonia, usually isn't eaten raw, but instead gets processed into a paste or “cheese” that's kinda like a jelly or a marmalade? Well, not just like a marmalade—it is marmalade, that's literally the Portuguese name for this fruit! Anyway, what’s this fruit's English name? That's what I wanna know.
This is QUINCE.
For whatever reason, Jeopardy! loves to ask about the Edward Lear poem “The Owl and the Pussy-Cat,” and one way the show will sometimes clue you in is to mention the line “They dined on mince, and slices of quince, / Which they ate with a runcible spoon;”. Lear is mostly known as a writer of nonsense poems, but he also illustrated some of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poems. Lear’s gravestone features lines written by Tennyson (originally about a mountain):
— all things fair.
With such a pencil, such a pen.
You shadow'd forth to distant men,
I read and felt that I was there.
4) In 1801, Captain Robert Richard Randall established a marine hospital in Manhattan for “aged, decrepit and worn-out seamen.” A couple a’ decades later the complex was moved to the north shore of Staten Island, and nowadays it's a cultural center and botanical garden operated by the New York City Department of Parks ’n’ Recreation. WHAT’S it called?
This one is SNUG HARBOR. I’ve never been to Snug Harbor (or New York, for that matter), but here’s a nice picture of what I understand to be a portion of Snug Harbor that someone put online earlier this year:
5) It's not just a nose, ‘cause it's also a mouth and jaw. Ya might also call it a muzzle, or a proboscis if you're fancy. I mean, if you’re super-duper fancy ya might call it a rostrum, although I think that'd get ya some raised eyebrows (unless you're writin’ in a fancy science paper or something like that). Anyway, WHAT FIVE-LETTER WORD is in the title of a William Carlos Williams poem, along with the word “weasel”?
This is a SNOUT. Here’s that William Carlos Williams poem. Irritate all of your English major friends by saying “why doesn’t he just write poems correctly?”
6) A quark is an elementary particle that comes in one a’ six possible “flavors.” WHICH of these flavors best fits the theme of this newsletter?
The six flavors of quark are up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom. (Gosh, why didn’t we ever make that a newsletter theme?)
The flavor you wanted here was BOTTOM, because the questions all pointed to characters from the Shakespeare play A Midsummer Night’s Dream—and, specifically, the six “mechanicals” who perform that play’s play-within-a-play, Pyramus and Thisbe. Those characters are Francis FLUTE, ROBIN2 Starveling, Peter QUINCE, SNUG, Tom SNOUT, and finally Nick BOTTOM (who, for whatever it’s worth, has more lines in A Midsummer Night’s Dream than any other character).
Our newsletter title, “Amazon Prime,” was a clue to point you to another character in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons (and so, the “Amazon Prime,” if you will). Her conversation with Theseus is how the play begins.
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
Adam West is to Batman as BURT WARD is to Robin, as it was Burt Ward who played Robin in Batman (1966-1968). Ward occasionally reprised the role together with West, including as recently as 2017’s Batman vs. Two-Face, an animated film which marks West’s final time voicing Batman. (Julie Newmar, who played Catwoman in the 60’s television show, also voices Catwoman in Batman vs. Two-Face.)
This didn’t help you unless you already knew the theme, I suppose, but in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Puck’s name is also ROBIN Goodfellow.