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) Vipera berus, the only venomous species of snake native to the British Isles, is sometimes called the common European viper or WHAT other five-letter word (that is not “snake”)?
2) The Treaty of Frankfurt, signed on May 10, 1871, gave residents of WHAT hyphenated region until October 1, 1872 to decide whether to emigrate to France or remain and become German citizens?
3) In chess notation, the symbol # signifies checkmate. WHAT symbol, also the name of Ed Sheeran’s debut studio album, signifies check?
4) Susette Kelo of New London, Connecticut is most notable in American legal history as the named plaintiff in a lawsuit that alleged that New London misused WHAT two-word power, which the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution requires be used only “for public use”?
5) “If you’re wrong, admit it” is part of a chapter title in a 1936 self-help book by Dale Carnegie, the title of which book suggests that the book will teach the reader how to do WHAT two things?
6) WHAT NUMBER should be listed next to Dwight Eisenhower’s name in the following list, which list is related in some fashion to this newsletter’s theme? (All unlisted U.S. presidents would, if listed, have a “0” next to each of their names.)
George Washington (3), Thomas Jefferson (1), James Madison (2), James Monroe (5), Andrew Jackson (2), John Tyler (1), James Polk (3), Millard Fillmore (1), James Buchanan (3), Abraham Lincoln (2), Andrew Johnson (1), Ulysses Grant (1), Grover Cleveland (1), Benjamin Harrison (6), Theodore Roosevelt (1), William Taft (2), Dwight Eisenhower (???).
Trivia Newsletter CLXV Recap
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.
This is PERRY MASON. The 1957 television show was invoked by Sonia Sotomayor during her confirmation hearings:
Sotomayor recalled watching the TV series about the fictional defense attorney as a child and said it inspired her to pursue a career in law. She remembered one of Mason's courtroom rivals telling him, “Justice is served when a guilty man is convicted and when an innocent man is not.”
“That TV character said something that molded my life,” Sotomayor said.
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?
This word is GIRLS. “Bad Girls” is a song on M.I.A.’s fourth album, which is called WHAT? The album’s name is a variant of M.I.A.’s first name and is the name of a Hindu goddess considered to be the Tantric form of Saraswati, the goddess of music and learning. The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
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)?
These folks are BARRY Bonds and BARRY Sanders. Sanders’s 1988 season at Oklahoma State is often regarded as the best college football season of all time.
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?
This word is “OZ,” as Baum is the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Here’s that quote from Baum:
I have a little cabinet letter file on my desk that is just in front of me. I was thinking and wondering about a title for the story, and had settled on the “Wizard” as part of it. My gaze was caught by the gilt letters on the three drawers of the cabinet. The first was A-G; the next drawer was labeled H-N; and on the last were the letters O-Z. And “Oz” it at once became.
This Snopes piece digs into some other potential explanations of where “Oz” may have come from.
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.
This is JOHN ADAMS. (The future president was his son, John Quincy Adams.)
“Wait, there’s a statue of John Adams in Spain?” is one of those fun chestnuts that can turn into a trivia question, and that’s what happened on this one. See, here it is:
6) WHAT, which launched in 1972, is this newsletter’s theme?
This theme was the television network HBO, as each of the answers (Perry Mason, Girls, Barry, Oz, and John Adams) is also the name of a program that at one time aired on HBO. “Domestic Returns,” our newsletter title, was intended to get you to think of a film’s domestic box office take, and “domestic returns” is a synonym of sorts for “home box office,” which is what “HBO” stands for.
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
The M.I.A. album we asked about is Matangi. M.I.A.’s name is Mathangi “Maya” Arulpragasam.