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) The Case of the Velvet Claws, a novel written by Erle Stanley Gardner and published in 1933, marks the first appearance of WHAT fictional criminal-defense lawyer? The same character has appeared in films, a radio series, and most notably a television show that premiered in 1957 and ran for nine seasons.
2) WHAT word is paired with “lovesick” in the title of a song by BLACKPINK, “most” in the title of a song by Hailee Steinfeld, “bad” in the title of a song by M.I.A., and with no other words in the title of a song by the Beastie Boys?
3) The baseball player who accrued more walks (as a batter) in an MLB season than any other person happens to have WHAT same first name as the college football player who accrued the most rushing yards in a single season (in NCAA’s Division I Football Bowl Subdivision)?
4) According to a 1903 press release in which author Frank Baum was quoted, the last (alphabetically) of the filing cabinets on Baum’s desk inspired WHAT word?
5) Bilbao, a Basque city in Spain, is home to a statue of WHAT U.S. president? Before he was president, he visited Spain briefly (together with another future president) while conducting research for his three-volume work A Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America.
6) WHAT, which launched in 1972, is this newsletter’s theme?
Trivia Newsletter CLXIV Recap
1) “I walked down Seventh Avenue and saw grown men weeping like children, and women sitting in the curbs with their heads in their hands,” Langston Hughes wrote regarding an event in 1936 between Max Schmeling and WHOM? Hughes was presumably happier with the event’s 1938 sequel.
This is JOE LOUIS. Let’s turn to the Encyclopedia Britannica for a quick summary:
American boxer who was world heavyweight champion from June 22, 1937, when he knocked out James J. Braddock in eight rounds in Chicago, until March 1, 1949, when he briefly retired. During his reign, the longest in the history of any weight division, he successfully defended his title 25 times, more than any other champion in any division, scoring 21 knockouts (his service in the U.S. Army from 1942 to 1945 no doubt prevented him from defending his title many more times). He was known as an extremely accurate and economical knockout puncher.
Schmeling, a German boxer who had held the world heavyweight title for a two-year period in the early 1930s, upset Louis in their 1936 bout as a heavy underdog. Their 1938 rematch, in which Louis knocked out Schmeling in the first round, carried strong nationalist and racial connotations. Schmeling was disfavored by Nazi leadership following the humiliating loss. Just a bit more on Schmeling:
From an interview with a Holocaust survivor, [two professors] learned that Schmeling put himself at risk to hide [two Jewish] teenagers in his Berlin hotel room during Kristallnact, the “Night of Broken Glass,” when scores of Jews were killed as Nazis and their supporters smashed and burned their homes.
“Little did I dream that this guy, whose reputation was that of a Nazi, had done something remarkably courageous,” [Professor] Weisbord said. “My feeling was that he had been done a disservice and the record should be corrected.”
On January 14, 1952, Joe Louis told The New York Times that “We’ve got another Hitler to get by”; a few days later, he broke yet another barrier by becoming the first Black person to compete in an event put on by WHAT ORGANIZATION that is still around today? The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
2) The actor Nathan Lane was born Joseph Lane; he took Nathan for his stage name from a character he played in a 1992 revival of WHAT musical that premiered on Broadway in 1950 and was nicely nicely received both times, winning five Tony Awards in 1951 and four in 1992?
This is GUYS AND DOLLS; Lane played the character Nathan Detroit in the musical. “Nicely nicely” was a small hint, as Nicely-Nicely Johnson is a character in the musical. You’ll want to know for trivia purposes that Guys and Dolls is based in part upon the short stories “The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown” and “Blood Pressure” by Damon Runyon, that Frank Sinatra played Detroit in the 1955 film version, and that the song “Luck Be a Lady” is from the musical.
3) NAME the musician missing from the following headline to a 2019 article from the website The Ringer: “[BLANK] and the Curious Case of the Missing 48 States.”
This is SUFJAN STEVENS. In 2003, Stevens released the album Michigan, with each song focused on some facet of the state of Michigan. Stevens subsequently released Illinois in 2005, and it seemed that he’d keep going:
In April, Stevens played an early version of “Chicago,” Illinois’s centerpiece-to-be, during a show at New York’s Knitting Factory. The 2006 Danielson Family documentary captures the moment: Stevens tentatively strumming the tune backstage, then debuting the future classic in front of an adoring crowd. “The saying goes that I am recording a record for each of the 50 states,” he tells the audience (a coy choice of words). “Seven Swans is a little break from that. Now that we’ve had time to breathe and reassess the entire project, I’m moving on. We’re gonna end our set with a song from a record I’m working on now called Illinois.” The crowd cheers, thrilled to be let in on this little secret. In the documentary, this leads into a montage of press clippings signifying Stevens’s newfound stardom. One headline proclaims: “The 50 States of Rock.”
When I think of Stevens, I can’t not think of how the folks who made the television show The Bear used one of his songs for an episode intro (there are no spoilers in this clip) that serves as a little love letter to the city and features the talents of WXRT’s Lin Brehmer, who passed away earlier this year:
4) As any viewer of Law & Order and its various spinoffs may know, each of the trial-level courts of general jurisdiction in the New York State Unified Court System somewhat confusingly has WHAT word in its name that is, in other states, usually reserved for a single court?
This word is SUPREME. The reference to Law & Order is meant to point to screens such as this one that permeate the show:
What my state of Illinois would call one of its many “circuit courts” is, in New York, a “supreme court,” which implies to me that New York does not know what the word “supreme” means.
5) Marguerite Norris was the first woman (1954) and Katy Boettinger is the most recent woman (2023) to have their names engraved onto WHAT?
This is the STANLEY CUP. Norris was the first female executive in NHL history; she was a daughter of James Norris, who was an owner of the Red Wings and was a significant figure in the early days of the NHL. James Norris is the namesake for the NHL’s Norris Trophy, awarded to the league’s top defenceman each year. Boettinger is the Director of Hockey Administration for the Las Vegas Golden Knights. There’s her name (sixth row):
Boettinger is the 18th woman to have her name engraved on the chalice. The first was Marguerite Norris, president of the Detroit Red Wings during their 1954-1955 Cup-winning-season victory. Sonia Scurfield, co-owner of the 1988-1989 Cup champion Calgary Flames, is the only Canadian woman to have her name inscribed on the artifact. In all, more than 3,000 names grace the Cup.
6) WHAT U.S. city, alluded to in the questions or answers to Questions #1 through #5, also shares a certain commonality with the following three cities and no other cities? Charlotte, NC; Cincinnati, OH; Jacksonville, FL.
The missing city is DETROIT, Michigan. Each of our questions referenced Detroit in some fashion:
Question #1: Joe Louis is closely associated with Detroit; the Detroit Red Wings played at Joe Louis Arena from 1979 to 2017.
Question #2: Nathan Lane took his stage name from the character Nathan Detroit.
Question #3: Sufjan Stevens is from Detroit, and the album Michigan (pointed to in the question) features a Detroit-focused song.
Question #4: We asked about multiple Supreme Courts to point you to the Supremes, the girl group that is closely associated with Motown Records and Detroit.
Question #5: Marguerite Norris was an executive for the Detroit Red Wings.
The other way to get to this answer was to realize that a commonality among Charlotte, Cincinnati, and Jacksonville is that each has a NFL team with a cat mascot (Panthers, Bengals, and Jaguars, respectively), and the missing cat team is the Detroit Lions. This was a stealth current event, as this newsletter was published thirteen hours before the Lions took on the Kansas City Chiefs in the first NFL game of the 2023 season.
A subset of Panthers, Bengals, Jaguars, and Lions fans call themselves the “Cat Team Brotherhood” and share a subreddit with that name on the website Reddit. The teams, besides hating their sworn bird-team enemies, vie for possession of the Sword of Omens when they play each other, which is a reference to a sword from the 1980s cartoon ThunderCats. That’s why “The Sword of Omens” was our newsletter title.
Here’s a recent bit of art of the Cat Team Brotherhood by the Reddit user CornDoggyLOL:
If the style looks a bit familiar, it’s because u/CornDoggyLOL also made the logo for, well…
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
Joe Louis, in addition to his many other accomplishments, was also a golfer and was the first Black person to compete in an event sanctioned by the PGA, playing in the 1952 San Diego Open. Louis’s friend Bill Spiller, often credited as a key figure in breaking golf’s color barrier, was barred from playing in the event. Charlie Sifford is the first Black person to play on the PGA Tour and is generally regarded as the “Jackie Robinson of golf.” “I probably wouldn’t be here” without Sifford, Tiger Woods said in 2015.