Happy Monday! As a scheduling update, our next post will be released early, on Wednesday, September 27th. We’ve got a fun surprise for you that day that I think you’ll enjoy. Trivia Newsletter CLXX, our next standard newsletter, will come out on Monday, October 2nd.
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) According to the official rulebook of the NHPA, there are two methods of scoring in a certain game: cancellation scoring (by which the ringers of one player cancel out the ringers of another player) and count-all scoring (by which both players receive credit for the points scored in each inning). WHAT does the “H” in NHPA stand for?
2) In the book series A Song of Ice and Fire, noble persons born out of wedlock are by custom given certain surnames. For example, such a person born in the Iron Islands is given the surname “Pyke,” and such a person born in Dorne is given the surname “Sand.” WHAT surname is given to such persons born in the North?
3) The winner of the Academy Award for Best Director for a 1986 film and a 1989 film, the winner of the Academy Award for Best Actress for a 2016 film, and a nominee for the Academy Award for Best Actress for a 1995 film all share WHAT last name?
4) Earlier this month, tennis player Coco Gauff won the women’s singles title at the US Open and thanked WHOM, the founder of the Women’s Tennis Association and whose efforts in 1973 helped ensure that women and men competing at the US Open would receive equal pay?
5) In the 1750s, Elizabeth Montagu and others formed an intellectual group in England. As the story goes, Benjamin Stillingfleet could not afford to buy the formal black silk stockings that a member of such a group would typically wear, so he instead wore everyday stockings of WHAT color? The group, and a general term for an educated and intellectual woman, took their names from Stillingfleet’s sartorial choice.
6) Each of the answers to Questions #1 through #5 can be associated with WHAT word?
Trivia Newsletter CLXVIII Recap
1) “A man goes off to war and disappears. His wife thinks he's dead. Another man takes his place,” said the host of NPR’s All Things Considered while describing the plot of WHAT film, Tobey Maguire’s first feature film (excluding a guest appearance in Tropic Thunder) since Spider-Man 3?
This film is BROTHERS. Here’s a transcript of that NPR interview. Jake Gyllenhaal, whose name I will never correctly spell on the first try, plays Maguire’s brother, and Natalie Portman plays Maguire’s wife. Upon receiving a Golden Globe nomination, Maguire said "I had no expectation about getting a nomination, but I was watching nonetheless. My wife and my son got really excited. I was sort of surprised — I was like, ‘Oh, wow,’” which I think is the correct reaction to getting nominated for a Golden Globe.
2) Anna Christina Olson (1893-1968) suffered from a degenerative muscle condition and refused to use a wheelchair in her day-to-day life; because the Olsons lived near the Wyeths in Maine, her WHAT is part of the title of a seminal work in American art?
This painting is called Christina’s WORLD. Here’s MoMA’s thoughts on it, and here it is:
3) WHAT number is the correct response to each of the following? (A) The atomic number of the element gadolinium; (B) As of today’s date, the age of each of Magic Johnson, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Emma Thompson; and (C) the base 10 number that is represented by the number 1000000 in binary. (Note: To be clear, the answer to each of (A), (B), and (C) is the same number.)
This number is SIXTY-FOUR.
Converting binary numbers to decimal numbers is something you can learn how to do in just 101 minutes. Let’s take 1000000, the number we asked about. Think of a binary number as a series of light switches—either “on” (1) or “off” (zero). Then we assign each digit a power of two, starting with 2^0 on the right and going left:
Only the “light switch” to which we assigned 2^6 is “on” (1), so the number is just 2^6, or 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2, which equals 64. If the number had been 1000001, we’d do 2^6 + 2^0, and 2^0 equals 1, so that would be 65. If the number had been 1100000, we’d do 2^6 + 2^5, or 64 + 32, which equals 96.
4) The first twin brothers to both win boxing world titles most notably go by WHAT last name? Kaokor held the World Boxing Association’s bantamweight title twice between 1988 and 1989, but it’s his brother Khaosai who was out of this world—arguably the greatest pound-for-pound Thai boxer of all time, Khaosai held the WBA super-flyweight title between 1984 and 1991.
These are the GALAXY brothers. (“Out of this world” was a little hint for you.)
Let’s let the Boxing Hall of Fame teach us a bit more about Khaosai:
THIS TOUGH, brawling southpaw earned the moniker, “The Thai Tyson” during his record-setting reign for 115 pounders in the late-1980s and early-90s. He was as good and dominating as the then-heavyweight champion. Galaxy was relentless in his pursuit of his opponents and usually finished them off with a powerful left hand.
Galaxy, whose real name is Sura Saenkham, was born on May 15, 1959 in Petchaboon, Thailand. As with actors and actresses in the West, it is not unusual for a Thai athlete to change his name. This future national hero, who was managed by Niwat Laosunwanawat, began his career in contact sports as a kick boxer. In 1980 he stopped using his feet and switched to the orthodox ranks. In his sixth fight, he lost a decision to Sakda Saksuree. It's worth mentioning Saksuree, whom Galaxy knocked out in a rematch, because he's the only man to ever defeat the Thai legend.
When reigning WBA junior bantam king Jiro Watanabe failed to defend the title against Galaxy, the belt was declared vacant. On Nov. 21, 1984, the Thai beat Eusebio Espinal by sixth-round kayo to win the WBA crown. What followed was one of the most impressive -- and largely ignored in the West -- championship reigns ever.
Galaxy successfully defended the title 19 times, 16 by knockout, over the next seven years. Both are division records. Unfortunately, only one of those bouts, a 1986 win over Israel Contreras in Curacao, an island in the Caribbean, was outside the Orient. Nevertheless, in 1992 he joined a very small fraternity when he retired as champion and never tried a comeback. The Saenkham family earned further distinction in ring circles when Khaosai's twin brother, who took the name Kaokor Galaxy, won the WBA bantamweight title. From 1988-89 that household boasted two champions.
Thailand's greatest boxer left the ring with a 49-1 (43) record and was acknowledged by many has the best, and most significant 115-pounder in history, as well as one of the greatest fighters from Asia.
5) “A man goes off to war and disappears. His wife thinks he's dead. Another man takes his place,” said the host of NPR’s All Things Considered while making a comparison between the film that is the answer to Question #1 and WHAT other work composed in dactylic hexameter?
This is the ODYSSEY, and truly it was an odyssey coming back to this question after starting with the same quote.
By the way, the Odyssey is divided into sections called “books.” The books correspond to the letters of the Greek alphabet; thus, HOW MANY books make up the Odyssey? Just for fun, please give your answer as a binary number, since you just learned how to do that. The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
6) The character central to this newsletter’s theme is celebrated by some on a particular calendar date each year, as the date, when formatted in a certain way, resembles the name of the character. NAME that DATE. (Note: Providing the character’s name will not be sufficient. Please provide the date.)
The date is MARCH 10. Each of our answers is a word that appears in one of the major installments of Nintendo’s “Super Mario” series of video games—these games are generally among the best-selling and most influential video games of all time. Our list went chronologically from the oldest games to the newest ones:
Question #1: Super Mario BROTHERS
Question #2: Super Mario WORLD
Question #3: Super Mario 64
Question #4: Super Mario GALAXY
Question #5: Super Mario ODYSSEY
Mario Day is celebrated on March 10th because “Mar 10” looks like “Mario.” Our newsletter title, “The Other Nike Logo,” refers to what I’d call Nike’s second-most famous logo (behind their iconic “swoosh” logo), the silhouette of Michael Jordan:
This logo is sometimes called the “Jumpman” logo, and “Jumpman” was a very early name given to the character we now know as Mario.
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
There are 24 letters in the Greek alphabet, and so there are 24 books of the Odyssey. 24 in binary is 11000 (2^4 + 2^3 is 16 + 8, or 24).