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) “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?
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?
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.)
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.
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?
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.)
Trivia Newsletter CLXVII Recap
1) The Roland TR-808, as heard on songs such as “Planet Rock” by Afrika Bambaataa and the Soul Sonic Force and “Sexual Healing” by Marvin Gaye, and as referenced in songs such as Kesha’s “Your Love is My Drug,” is a machine used to simulate WHAT action?
This is DRUMMING. I don’t love using the reference, but Kanye West’s fourth album was entitled 808s & Heartbreak, with “808s” being a reference to the same drum machine, and I suspect the impact of that album made references to 808s in songs more common. Kesha’s “Your Love Is My Drug,” released just two years later, asks “Do I make your heart beat like an 808 drum?” (Kesha dropped the dollar sign from her stage name years ago, so we did too.)
2) “Der Rattenfänger von Hameln” is the German title of a legend also known by WHAT English title? For example, Robert Browning’s poem regarding the tale in his 1842 collection Dramatic Lyrics has this title.
This is THE PIED PIPER OF HAMELIN.
What the heck does “pied” mean in this context? Here you go:
Browning’s Piper wears a long coat “from heel to head” which is “half of yellow and half of red.” The coat is what gives him his name.
The adjective pied means “of two colors.” Originally, the two colors were black and white, the colors of a magpie. Magpie is where the “pie” comes from. The word usually refers to an animal with markings of two colors, especially a bird: pied kingfisher, pied flycatcher, pied finch, etc.
In the Middle Ages, the Carmelites were called “pied friars” because their religious habit consisted of a brown tunic and a white cloak. The Benedictines and Cistercian monks were called “pied monks” because they wore a white tunic and a short black cloak.
A pied horse—piebald—has black and white patches, although some speakers use the word pied or piebald to describe patches of any differing colors.
3) In the novel The Lord of the Rings, the Shire Calendar used by Hobbits features twelve months, each with 30 days, plus two Yuledays (the first and last days of the year) and three Lithedays (three midsummer days known as 1 Lithe, Mid-Year’s Day, and 2 Lithe). On occasion, the day Overlithe is also observed; Overlithe is equivalent to WHAT two-word day on our Gregorian calendar?
This is a LEAP DAY.
One of the most essential episodes of 30 Rock is “Leap Day.” The episode’s premise is that, in-universe, Leap Day is a beloved holiday celebrated with candy for children, a bizarre mascot named Leap Day William who emerges from the Mariana Trench, and a cheesy holiday movie starring Jim Carrey and Andie MacDowell. Brief excerpts of the in-universe film were shown in the episode and can be seen here:
4) In 1934, Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, and Hanya Holm were three members of the legendary “Big Four” teaching WHAT art form at Bennington College in Vermont?
This is DANCE. Charles Weidman is the member of the Big Four we excluded—more on that below.
Jeopardy! has, on a few occasions, asked contestants to name the composer Aaron Copland or Martha Graham by naming a particular ballet (later arranged as an orchestral work) created by Copland and choreographed by Graham. NAME the work, which won Copland a Pulitzer and which takes place in Pennsylvania in the nineteenth century. The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
5) Michael Bay made an iconic commercial that first aired in 1993 and that features an eccentric collector of memorabilia relating to the duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton. The collector is unable to win a radio contest that asks “Who shot Alexander Hamilton in that famous duel?” because he, unfortunately, is eating a peanut-butter sandwich at an inopportune time. A voiceover then asks WHAT two-word question?
This is “GOT MILK?” “Wait, Michael Bay directed the first ‘Got Milk?’ commercial?” is a good example of why we do these newsletters. The ad campaign became iconic, of course, but the 1993 commercial is also excellent. Here, watch it for yourself:
6) We won’t keep going, but WHAT’S the theme of this newsletter?
These answers pointed to the lyrics of the song “THE TWELVE DAYS OF CHRISTMAS”:
On the twelfth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me
Twelve drummers drumming (“Drumming”)
Eleven pipers piping (“The Pied Piper of Hamelin”)
Ten lords a-leaping (“Leap Day” in The Lord of the Rings)
Nine ladies dancing (“Dance” by the three female members of the “Big Four”)
Eight maids a-milking (Michael Bay made a “Got Milk?” commercial)
Our title was “184 Birds” because if you take the lyrics of the song literally, and assume that each verse recounts a new day with a new set of gifts, then the song’s singer is left with 184 birds—12 partridges (in pear trees), 22 turtledoves, 30 French hens, 36 calling birds, 42 geese a-laying, and 42 swans a-swimming. Would it have been better to release this one during December, which very well might have been around our 184th newsletter? Absolutely, yes. But the saying is “‘tis the season,” and not “that other time is the season,” so here we are—hey, if it’s early enough for retailers, it’s early enough for me.
184 birds is alot of birds! Is that the right way to hear the song? Or, alternatively, is the better understanding of the song that a person merely got one new gift a day, and the rest of the list is just recounting past gifts? (So, for example, on the second day, the song’s singer was gifted two turtledoves, but not a second partridge in a pear tree.) The song seems to suggest the first reading and not the second—after all, the song says on each day that the list is what “my true love gave to me,” and not what “my true love had given to me.” But wouldn’t receiving 184 birds be absurd? Surely that’s not what the folks who came up with the song meant. Right?
This juncture is where a lawyer might turn to what are called canons of statutory construction, which are nonsense that give judges political cover to reach the outcomes they already wanted meant to give judges common-sense guidelines to interpret text. For example, the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students Act of 2003 (HEROES Act) empowers the Secretary of Education to “waive or modify any statutory or regulatory provision applicable to [federal student loan programs] as the Secretary deems necessary in connection with a … national emergency.” You, a normal person, might read the word “modify” to mean “to change.” The Supreme Court, however, found that the word “modify” actually means “to change moderately or in minor fashion,” because sometimes words do not mean what words mean.
Back to “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” Let’s open what I think is the first poll in Trivia Factorial history. Is your interpretation of the song that the singer received 23 birds (1 partridge, 2 turtledoves, 3 French hens, 4 calling birds, 6 geese, 7 swans), or is your interpretation that the singer received all 184 birds? Worded differently—are you a Noel Pragmatist who interprets the song to avoid an absurd number of birds, or are you a Yuletide Originalist who takes the song literally?
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
The Copland/Graham ballet we asked for is APPALACHIAN SPRING.