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) Shigeru Ban, the winner of the 2014 Pritzker Architecture Prize, is celebrated for his innovative work with WHAT cheap and sustainable material? A cathedral in Christchurch, New Zealand designed by him and named after this material is made up in part of 86 tubes of it.
2) The word around town is that the person born in 1930 who authored the thesis Line-of-Sight Guidance Techniques for Manned Orbital Rendezvous while earning his doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology shares WHAT nickname with the author of the 1990 nonfiction book Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream?
3) Also a word describing you right now, a biweekly newspaper and media outlet with WHAT name describes itself as “Chicago’s alternative nonprofit newsroom”? It was the original home of the nationally syndicated question-and-answer column “The Straight Dope.”
4) “I am not a post-feminism feminist,” Rebecca Walker wrote in Ms. magazine in 1992, following the appointment of Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court, in an article entitled “Becoming the Third” WHAT?
5) WHAT is the last name of the minimalist composer notable for operas such as Einstein on the Beach and Satyagraha? In addition to writing music for his cousin on This American Life on National Public Radio, he’s been nominated for three Academy Awards for Best Original Score, including for the 2002 film The Hours.
6) Each of the answers to Questions #1 through #5, when associated with WHAT other word, make up a finite list that is this newsletter’s theme?
Trivia Newsletter CLXX Recap
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?
These are GUMBOS. Paul Prudhomme, who passed away in 2015, was the proprietor of K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen in New Orleans and is all but synonymous with Cajun and Creole cuisine.
I know The New York Times is kind of a silly place to learn about gumbo, but this passage from an article of theirs is a nice primer on the things you’ll probably want to know about gumbo for trivia:
The simplest definition of gumbo is a soup made by simmering meats, seafood, vegetables and spices in a thickened stock. Usually it's served over rice. But over the centuries it has taken on the same aura associated with biscuits and pie crust: homey and simple, but not easy to execute.
The one thing that really defines it, though, is the way it is thickened. Gumbo is much denser than a simple soup; the broth has a thick, almost viscous consistency. And that characteristic is most commonly created by making a roux, cooking flour and oil together until they thicken and darken. Otherwise, gumbo can be thickened with file, which is just powdered dried sassafras leaves. Or it can be thickened with okra, which adds a brambly flavor along with a mucilaginous substance. (The name gumbo comes from the Bantu word for okra.)
Roux, okra and file powder are the holy trinity of gumbo, and it is in them that most of the gumbo partisanship is vested. Families throughout the South can be arranged more or less along the three lines, though many will use a combination.
The mythic roux not only thickens but also broadens and enhances the stewed flavors of the gumbo. To Frank Brigtsen, of Brigtsen's in New Orleans, “a good roux has a deep, nutty taste like roasted peanuts or pecans that marries with the stock to give gumbo its flavor.”
Creole cooks in Louisiana usually prepare some variation of three basic recipes: a “Creole gumbo” that includes sausages, beef, veal, ham, chicken, whole crabs or shrimp and is thickened with roux and file powder; a simpler “okra gumbo” thickened with okra and including a variety of shellfish; and a “gumbo aux herbes” (or gumbo z'herbes), made with as many as 10 varieties of greens and traditionally served during Lent.
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?
These are KOALAS. This is Blinky Bill:
According to, uh, one guy on Reddit, the beloved television show Bluey is the first good Australian television show since The Adventures of Blinky Bill (1993-2004). The latter took a strong stance against the logging industry, including the line “Save us from that woodchip mill” in its opening credits, which led some forest industry groups to lobby ABC and cause the line to be changed to “You’ll never catch him standing still.”
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?
This is (a) MYRIAD.
The Sand Reckoner is a work by Archimedes of Syracuse, probably the most famous mathematician and inventor of ancient Greece. If you’re being asked about Archimedes in trivia, it’s probably about how he exclaimed “Eureka!” after realizing how buoyancy works, or perhaps about the Archimedes screw used to move water from lower to higher altitudes.
The Sand Reckoner is quite literally about reckoning sand—specifically, how much sand might fit into the known universe. It’s a fascinating work in which Archimedes grapples with how to think about large numbers, and he uses myriads to get there:
In fact the names of the numbers up to the name of ten-thousand happen to have been provided to us, and beyond the name of ten-thousand we ascertain a number of ten-thousands of units when we say, “even up to ten-thousand myriads.” And so let the presently stated numbers up to ten-thousand myriads be called by us first numbers, and let ten-thousand myriads of the first numbers be called a unit of the second numbers, and let units of the second numbers be counted, i.e. from the units decads (10's), hekatontads (100's), chiliads (1000's), myriads (1,0000's) up to ten-thousand myriads. Again let ten-thousand myriads of the second numbers be called a unit of the third numbers, and let units of the third numbers be counted and from the units decads, hekatontads, chiliads, and myriads up to ten-thousand myriads.
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.
This film is CLERKS.
It’s important to have a few idiosyncratic opinions to keep folks on their toes. One of mine is that Clerks: The Animated Series is one of the great adult-animation works of all time.
The show had six episodes, which aired out of order. This led to a bunch of narrative problems—for example, one of the jokes in the show is that the second episode is a clip-show episode, despite the fact that all of the clips are from the same episode are from the first episode. ABC aired the show’s fourth episode first, and then aired the second episode next, despite the fact that the entire joke of the episode is that it is repeatedly referring to the first episode. Gosh, that’s not very clear, is it?
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”?
This word is BURDEN.
Another response to Kipling’s 1899 poem “The White Man’s Burden” was “To the Person Sitting in Darkness,” an anti-imperialist satirical essay written by WHOM? The essay attacks many politicians of the day, but most notably attacks the Reverend William Scott Ament, a Congregationalist minister affiliated with the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
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; ???
This was an airport codes newsletter—each of the answers to Questions #1 through #5 was a six-letter word made up of two of the three-letter geocodes promulgated by the International Air Transport Association (IATA). You’ve seen them—“ORD” for Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, “LAX” for L.A.’s airport, and so on. Thus, the task for you was to realize that connection and, using the answer to at least one of the questions, finish one of the pairings of cities.2 We endeavored to make the answers some of the most guessable airport codes:
Hagåtña, Guam (GUM); BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS (BOS)
Kailua-Kona, HI (KOA); LAS VEGAS, NEVADA (LAS)
MYRTLE BEACH, SOUTH CAROLINA (MYR); Washington, DC (IAD)
CLEVELAND, OHIO (CLE); Rock Springs, WY (RKS)
Burbank, CA (BUR); DENVER, COLORADO (DEN)
“SLIGHT DELAYS,” our newsletter title, was meant to make you think of air travel, but also is composed of six-letter words that are mashups of international IATA codes that would require you to go from Los Alamitos, CA to Ghat, Libya and then from New Delhi, India to Waycross, Georgia.
If you want to explore the world of airport-code wordmaking, this Atlas Obscura piece that digs into one artist’s attempt to create a list of words made up of IATA codes is a nice start. If you really want to explore this world, you can check out Nasser Hussain’s SKY WRI TEI NGS, a book of poetry made entirely out of IATA airport codes (SKY used to be Griffing Sandusky Airport in Ohio, WRI is McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey, TEI is Tezu Airport in India and NGS is Nagasaki Airport in Japan.) It was his work I borrowed “SLIGHT DELAYS” from and, at least in a JIN ERR ALL sense, borrowed this newsletter theme.
Let’s close with the story of poor Sioux Gateway Airport (SUX), servicing Sioux City:
SIOUX CITY, Iowa — City leaders have scrapped plans to do away with the Sioux Gateway Airport’s unflattering three-letter identifier — SUX — and instead have made it the centerpiece of the airport’s new marketing campaign.
The code, used by pilots and airports worldwide and printed on tickets and luggage tags, will be used on T-shirts and caps sporting the airport’s new slogan, “FLY SUX.” It also forms the address of the airport’s redesigned Web site.
Sioux City officials petitioned the Federal Aviation Administration to change the code in 1988 and 2002. At one point, the FAA offered the city five alternatives — GWU, GYO, GYT, SGV and GAY — but airport trustees turned them down.
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
“To the Person Sitting in Darkness” was written by MARK TWAIN.
For the list of paired cities, we went with the city serviced by, or most commonly associated with, the relevant airport. This approach has drawbacks for accuracy (Dulles is technically in Dulles, VA and not in DC), but I think it hews closer to how people actually think about airports and talk to one another—plus, “Dulles, VA” would have been a bit of a giveaway.