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) Celebrity chef Paul Prudhomme’s website currently features recipes to make at least nine different WHAT, also associated with Allen Ellender (D-LA) and reportedly added to the menu of the U.S. Senate cafeteria following Ellender’s death?
2) Blinky Bill, a beloved character in a series of children’s novels written by Dorothy Wall, as well as the characters Buster Moon from the film Sing and Krebbs from the film The Rescuers Down Under, are all WHAT animal, the only extant representative of the family Phascolarctidae?
3) WHAT word, generally used in everyday English as either an adjective or a noun to refer to a large but unspecified number, comes from a Greek word for the number 10,000?
4) NAME the 1994 cult-classic film that was shot on a budget of $27,575 and that is generally considered the first film in what is called the “View Askewniverse,” a fictional universe shared by several other films subsequently directed by the film’s director.
5) The Reverend James H. Magee, in response to a jingoistic 1899 poem by Rudyard Kipling about the Philippine–American War, formed in Chicago the same year an association named after the “Black Man’s WHAT”?
6) Identify ANY of the missing U.S. cities in the below pairings, each of which corresponds to this newsletter’s theme:
Hagåtña, Guam; ???
Kailua-Kona, HI; ???
???; Washington, DC
???; Rock Springs, WY
Burbank, CA; ???
Trivia Newsletter CLXIX Recap
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?
The “H” stands for “HORSESHOE,” as in the National Horseshoe Pitchers Association.
Perhaps you’ve heard the phrase “Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades,” referring to the fact that, generally, being “close” (as in, almost achieving something) isn’t sufficient, except in the game of horseshoes and except for the effectiveness of hand grenades. NAME the person who reportedly first said that quote; he, the only baseball player to win the Most Valuable Player Award in both the National League and the American League, was also the first Black manager in Major League Baseball history. The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
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?
This name is SNOW, most famously monikered by the character Jon Snow. It took a couple of tries to write this question without using the word “bastard.”
If you bought a Blu-Ray of a season of the television show Game of Thrones, it came with a series of short animated videos called “Histories & Lore,” explicating some of the lore of Westeros. (I suppose the videos would be on the Blu-Ray if you didn’t buy it as well.) One of those videos, “The Bastards of Westeros,” can be watched on YouTube:
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?
These facts refer to Oliver, Emma, and Sharon STONE. The films referenced in the question are, respectively, Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, La La Land, and Casino.
With the help of the indispensable Oracle of Bacon, we can see that Emma and Sharon Stone have not appeared together in a film, but can be separated by just one link: for example, Emma Stone was in Movie 43 with Halle Berry, who was in Catwoman with Sharon Stone, or if you prefer a sillier one, Emma Stone was in Popstar: Never Stop Never Popping with 50 Cent, who was in Streets of Blood with Sharon Stone.
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?
Gauff thanked, among others, BILLIE JEAN KING. The US Open’s courts showed a logo honoring the 50th anniversary of King’s efforts during play:
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.
Those stockings were BLUE, and bluestocking is the general term we were after. “Bluestocking” holds the distinction of being the correct response on Jeopardy! exactly one time (Category “Red”, “White”, or “Blue”: “A lady with literary leanings”).
6) Each of the answers to Questions #1 through #5 can be associated with WHAT word?
Our answers were horseshoe, snow, stone, (Billie Jean) King, and blue, and each of those words can be associated with CRAB—so, a horseshoe crab, snow crab, and so on. Our newsletter title was “Tevye the Fisherman?”, which is a reference to Tevye the milkman (or sometimes dairyman), associated with the musical Fiddler on the Roof—a fiddler crab is another type of crab, and we dropped in “fisherman” to try to get you closer to our crab theme.
One last tidbit that we didn’t get to work into this newsletter—you can find one of Shakespeare’s most scene-stealing characters, the dog Crab, in the play The Two Gentlemen of Verona.
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
The horseshoes/hand grenades quote referenced in the recap is by FRANK ROBINSON.