NOTE: The answer to each of Questions #1 through #6 is the title of a film that was nominated for (and may or may not have won) the Academy Award for Best Picture.
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) “[He] is a man of an angel's wit and singular learning. I know not his fellow[,] [f]or where is the man of that gentleness, lowliness and affability? And, as time requireth, a man of marvelous mirth and pastimes, and sometime of as sad gravity. [BLANK],” wrote Robert Whittington in 1520 of the author of the work Utopia. WHAT phrase has been replaced by the [BLANK] in Whittington’s quote?
2) On the same day in 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down decisions in the cases McCreary County v. American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky and Van Orden v. Perry, each by a vote of 5 to 4. In McCreary County, a certain display was found to be unconstitutional, and in Van Orden, a different display of the same subject was found to be constitutional. Displays of WHAT, specifically, were at stake in the two cases?
3) “The first time I didn't feel it, but this time I feel it. And I can't deny the fact that you like me...right now...you like me! Thank you!” These words were spoken in 1985 by Sally Field upon winning her second Academy Award for Best Actress (for Places in the Heart), and while regularly quoted, they are often not quoted kindly nor are they quoted accurately. Field’s mention of “the first time” in the quote is a reference to her titular role in WHAT 1979 film?
4) NAME the short story written by F. Scott Fitzgerald that is sometimes published as a collection that includes the phrase “and Other Jazz Age Stories” in its title. You could swear, curse the fates, but when it comes to the end, you have to know that the story is based upon a Mark Twain quote “to the effect that it was a pity that the best part of life came at the beginning and the worst part at the end.”
5) Neil Simon, Bill Withers, Malia Obama, Post Malone, Calvin Coolidge, Geraldo Rivera, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and (arguably) the United States each share WHAT six-word distinction; or, WHAT same name is the name of an autobiography by Ron Kovic?
6) NAME any of the sixteen films that could complete the theme suggested by the answers to Questions #1 through #5. Don’t answer yet! Here’s a hint so you can have a better chance: Two of those sixteen films won Best Picture; coincidentally, they did so in consecutive years.
Trivia Newsletter CLX Recap
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?
This is Ida B. WELLS.1
In 2018, the City of Chicago renamed portions of Congress Parkway to Ida B. Wells Drive, making it the first downtown Chicago street named after a woman of color. (You can read a bit more about Wells at that link.) An amusing result is that Ida B. Wells Drive intersects Wells Street, creating a “Wells and Wells” intersection:
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.
This is MEIJI.
Tokugawa Yoshinobu, Nathan Algren, Lionel Verney, Thomas Young, and Yorick Brown share a commonality with WHAT TELEVISION SHOW that began airing in 2023? The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.2
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?
The stage name we wanted is YOUNG Thug. This was a “current events” question in disguise, as Donald Trump was also recently charged with (among other things) violations of the RICO Act in Fulton County, and comparisons between Trump’s case and Williams’s case have been in the news. Here’s how the relevant New York Times article opens:
On its face, the criminal case accusing former President Donald J. Trump and 18 of his allies of conspiring to overturn his 2020 election loss in Georgia has little in common with the other high-profile racketeering case now underway in the same Atlanta courthouse: that of the superstar rapper Young Thug and his associates.
But the 15-month-old gang case against Young Thug — which, like the Trump case, is being prosecuted by Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney — offers glimpses of how State of Georgia v. Donald John Trump et al. may unfold: with a plodding pace, an avalanche of pretrial defense motions, extraordinary security measures, pressure on lower-level defendants to plead guilty, and a fracturing into separate trials, to name a few.
Young Thug, whose real name is Jeffery Williams, was indicted in May 2022 along with 27 others under Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations statute, known as RICO. Like Mr. Trump’s RICO indictment, the charging papers described a corrupt “enterprise” whose members shared common illegal goals.
Prosecutors claim that Mr. Williams is a founder of Young Slime Life, or YSL, a criminal street gang whose members were responsible for murders and other violence, drug dealing and property crimes, with the purpose of illegally obtaining “money and property.” (The defendants say YSL is simply a record label.)
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?
The film is BUTCH Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The song is “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head.”
You might think that we’re good at trivia over here, having written 160+ of these newsletters by now. Let me assure you that the Trivia Factorial team,3 much like a math teacher staying one chapter ahead of his students, is constantly learning things that are probably very self-evident to all the eager trivia beavers reading this. For example, it was only at this moment, writing this paragraph, that we realized that the film festival is called Sundance because Robert Redford owns the ski resort at which it takes place and named the resort after his character in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. That seems like something we should have already known! But that’s the whole point, isn’t it?
By the way, no one’s ever going to ask you this, but what was the Sundance ski resort called before Redford renamed it? The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.4
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?
This color is AZURE—the French Riviera, where the resorts of Saint-Tropez and Cannes are, is called the Côte d'Azur, or “Azure Coast,” in French, and so folks there might see the azure-colored sea.
This is not exactly the greatest academic source, but you can read more about those four symbols and their influence on various modern-day works on, uh, TV Tropes.
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:
You had to know your world capitals to have a shot here. The intended answer was VADUZ, the capital of Liechtenstein. I consider Vaduz “fair game” to ask trivia enthusiasts about (Jeopardy! has, on 21 different occasions, offered clues for which it’d greatly help to know the capital of Liechtenstein), but this was definitely a tough one relative to many of these newsletters. Your clues were the distance from Cannes, the fact that it was five letters, the elimination of many other letters due to the Wordle grid, and our newsletter title. “Similar to a German Beer Mug” was meant to make you think “like a stein,” which sounds pretty close to “Liechtenstein.”
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
In 1895, Wells married Ferdinand Barnett and took the name Ida B. Wells-Barnett. We stuck with “Wells” for our answer, though; not only for the practical reason relating to the theme, but also because the 2020 Pulitzer winner is listed as Ida B. Wells.
Each of the folks listed above is the “last” something, and so the show is THE LAST OF US. Tokugawa Yoshinobu was the last shōgun of the Tokugawa shogunate of Japan; he resigned in 1867. Moritsugu Katsumoto is the eponymous “last samurai” in the film The Last Samurai, which takes place during the Meiji Restoration (the character, while fictional, is based upon Saigō Takamori who led the quite-real Satsuma Rebellion). Lionel Verney is the “last man” in Mary Shelley’s novel The Last Man. Thomas Young was a British polymath who made notable contributions in many fields; he is sometimes called “The Last Man Who Knew Everything.” Yorick Brown is the subject of the comic book series Y: The Last Man.
As we’ve mentioned before, the Trivia Factorial team consists of one person and typically our two dogs as editors. As of Tuesday, we have one dog as editor. We miss you, buddy.
Sundance, the ski resort, used to be called TIMP HAVEN.