Hi all—we have a quick announcement before we get started today.
What do a film starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel, a club including (among others) Eddie Murray, Miguel Cabrera, and Ernie Banks, and an Indiana-based annual event won by Josef Newgarden in 2023 have in common with this newsletter? That’s right, they’re all associated with the number 500: (500) Days of Summer, the “500 Club” of Major League Baseball comprised of players who hit 500+ career home runs, and the Indianapolis 500—and, Trivia Factorial recently surpassed 500 subscribers!
As always: Whether you’re one of our regulars who always submits answers, or someone who occasionally checks in on our recaps, we’re very grateful that you’re here. If you’re one of our recent subscribers, you can check out our archive to see what we’ve been up to for the past two years. Our about page has a list of some of our favorite prior editions.
Finally, it’d mean a lot to us if you consider sharing this newsletter on social media or with folks you know:
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) I see a French minister of finance reviled for his austerity measures during the Seven Years’ War that became the namesake of an art form that was seen as a cheap method of portraiture, as opposed to forms such as painting or sculpture. WHAT was that minister’s last name?
2) “He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad” is the opening line of WHAT 1921 historical novel by Rafael Sabatini, which takes its title from the stock clown character in the commedia dell'arte that the protagonist portrays?
3) Director Kevin Reynolds and actor Kevin Costner collaborated repeatedly; Costner appeared in films directed by Reynolds such as Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Waterworld, and WHAT 1985 cult-classic film, Reynolds’s first feature-length film and Costner’s first starring role? The film grossed only $91,666 at the box office, perhaps because moviegoers could not yet buy tickets from the same-named company.
4) On March 17, 1990, Julio César Chávez fought Meldrick Taylor in a boxing match for the light welterweight world championship often called the greatest boxing match of the 1990s in no small part due to its controversial ending. Promoters marketed the fight by emphasizing Chávez’s power and Taylor’s speed with the phrase “WHAT Meets WHAT,” which are very, very frightening for those with astraphobia?
5) Kim Stanley Robinson is most notable for writing the Mars trilogy of science-fiction novels; he also wrote a 2009 novel, the namesake of which is WHAT seventeenth-century scientist, who is visited by 32nd-century time travelers who live on a set of four moons he discovered?
6) To WHAT work is this newsletter alluding?
Trivia Newsletter CLXXI Recap
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.
This is CARDBOARD. Here’s what the Cardboard Cathedral looks like:
As of a few weeks ago, church leaders are considering selling the building, which would likely result in its destruction:
Christchurch’s cardboard cathedral could be sold as Anglican leaders gather this weekend to consider its future.
Selling the novel building and tourist attraction could help pay for restoration of the Christ Church Cathedral.
…
The cardboard cathedral, designed by award-winning Japanese architect Shigeru Ban, opened in 2013 as a temporary place of worship. It quickly became a tourist attraction and a symbol of the Christchurch rebuild.
Mark O'Loughlin of Harcourts said the site would be attractive to developers for hospitality, residential or hotel facilities.
“It is a lovely, premium inner city site because it has a north and west aspect.
“It would be ideal for a multi-level accommodation block or a hotel block.”
He said the site would be too valuable to a developer to retain the cardboard cathedral building.
“From a commercial perspective, it wouldn’t have a benefit for a developer and would probably be disassembled.”
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?
These folks are BUZZ Aldrin and BUZZ Bissinger.
Bissinger, who has never met a lengthy subtitle or sub-subtitle he didn’t love, also wrote the book Three Nights in August: Strategy, Heartbreak and Joy: Inside the Mind of a Manager. The book covers a midseason series between the St. Louis Cardinals and Chicago Cubs from the point of view of WHOM, the manager of the Cardinals at the time who was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2014? The book was written before the manager’s two DUIs and before his disastrous return tour with the Chicago White Sox. The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
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.”
This publication is the Chicago READER. They do a lot of hard investigative work, but on the lighter side of things, their “Best Of” series is always a good read. They have fun with their categories; for example, here’s Chicago’s “Best low-key place to impress a dog”:
If you’re looking to impress a dog with a playdate, Bosly’s Backyard is all a dog could want. Kiddie pool full of tennis balls? Check. Obstacle course of jumps and tunnels? Check. Bridges to traverse and a wide-open, soft floor to run around on with pals? Check! But this is not some random doggy daycare where your dog will be subject to stranger danger or less well-behaved pooches. No, here you control the invitation list. Bosly’s rents their space by the half hour and hour, and it’s up to you which pups to bring. If that sounds too fancy, consider the Bosly’s Backyard mission.
Owner Kim Theobald left the advertising world to pursue her passion: making dogs happy. A long track record of working with rescues like One Tail at a Time left her well-positioned to reach the Chicago dog community. After some pop-up and pandemic trials, she opened the permanent location in Ravenswood in 2020.
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?
The word is WAVE—this article is the origin of what is generally called third-wave feminism. Rebecca Walker is the daughter of Alice Walker, who most notably wrote The Color Purple. You can read “Becoming the Third Wave” right here. Here’s how it ends:
I am ready to decide, as my mother decided before me, to devote much of my energy to the history, health, and healing of women. Each of my choices will have to hold to my feminist standard of justice.
To be a feminist is to integrate an ideology of equality and female empowerment into the very fiber of my life. It is to search for personal clarity in the midst of systemic destruction, to join in sisterhood with women when often we are divided, to understand power structures with the intention of challenging them.
While this may sound simple, it is exactly the kind of stand that many of my peers are unwilling to take. So I write this as a plea to all women, especially the women of my generation: Let Thomas’ confirmation serve to remind you, as it did me, that the fight is far from over. Let this dismissal of a woman’s experience move you to anger. Turn that outrage into political power. Do not vote for them unless they work for us. Do not have sex with them, do not break bread with them, do not nurture them if they don’t prioritize our freedom to control our bodies and our lives.
I am not a postfeminism feminist. I am the Third Wave.
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.
This is PHILIP GLASS.
In October 1992, to recognize the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the New World, the Metropolitan Opera for whatever reason commissioned Glass to make an opera about it. That opera was The Voyage, and here’s what the NYT had to say about it at the time:
"The Voyage" is meant to be, in fact, a grandly scaled, grand operatic reaction to a theme that has tended to become monochromatic in recent years. Intent on avoiding the historical debates about Columbus's arrival in the Western Hemisphere (and the increasingly demonic character attributed to him and his voyage), Mr. Glass decided instead to use Columbus as just an example of a much bigger issue: the human urge to discover and the confrontations between cultures that take place after any such voyage.
It is a theme Mr. Glass seems to know firsthand: "The Voyage" itself marks his arrival in a cultural landscape to which he was once alien. Sixteen years ago, Mr. Glass's opera "Einstein on the Beach" played at the Met but only as a rental presentation; the house was filled with downtown listeners. Then in other houses came productions of the composer's new operas, gradually proceeding uptown in their New York performances, beginning at the Brooklyn Academy of Music ("Satyagraha"), continuing at the New York City Opera ("Akhnaten") and with a few detours now climaxing with a certificate of citizenship.
The opera is the most expensive commission in the history of the Met (Mr. Glass was paid $325,000) and only the second new work the house has presented in 26 years, coming just a year after the first, John Corigliano's "Ghosts of Versailles." The opera not only involved the unstinting financial support of the Met but also brought in traditional opera stars like Tatiana Troyanos and Timothy Noble along with Glass veterans like Douglas Perry. The audience, which gave the work a standing ovation, was a piquant mixture of uptown and downtown, a blend of traditional first-night operagoers and hip explorers from other musical worlds.
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?
Each of these is a project that was discontinued by GOOGLE—Google Cardboard, Google Buzz, Google Reader, Google Wave, and Google Glass. You can find what appears to be a comprehensive list of shelved Google projects right here.
Our newsletter title, “Minus Plus,” referred to Google+, Google’s attempt at a social-networking website, and specifically how you could get to the right answer (Google) by subtracting the plus sign from that project.
I don’t really have anything interesting to say about non-extant Google products, so if you’ve gotten this far and you are at all a fan of fantasy football, you should read this fantastic Reddit post about bizarre rules in a fantasy-football league.
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
The baseball manager who is the subject of Three Nights in August is TONY LA RUSSA.