This upcoming Saturday is the two-year anniversary of Trivia Factorial! Happy birthday to us.
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) NAME the activist, generally recognized as the co-author of President Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty” program, who is most notable for the ten-year period in which he transformed the National Urban League into a leader in the civil-rights movement.
2) The New York Jets now have the longest postseason drought among teams in the four major North American sports leagues, as the Jets have not made the postseason since the 2010 NFL season. WHAT team, which won its Pacific Division in the 2022-23 season to end its 16-year playoff drought, held this distinction prior to the Jets?
3) “Laugh, and the world laughs with you; / Weep, and you weep alone. / For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth / But has trouble enough of its own” spun WHAT poet in her poem “Solitude” (1883)?
4) The song “My Kind of Town,” an ode to the city of Chicago recorded by Frank Sinatra, was originally part of the score for a 1964 musical film starring Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., and Bing Crosby. That film reimagines WHAT legend in a 1920s gangster setting? For example, Crosby plays the character Alan A. Dale.
5) The following persons share WHAT last name? (i) The U.S. Senate Majority Leader from 1989 to 1995 who was the architect of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement (and known to baseball fans for a different reason); (ii) Tom Cruise’s character in the Top Gun films; and (iii) the author of the novel Cloud Atlas.
6) The answers to Questions #1 through #5 allude to, respectively, the second, seventh, eighth, thirteenth, and sixteenth items on a particular ordered list. WHAT is #1 on that list? (Here’s a hint: if the fourth item on that list were applicable to your commute, so to speak, you might need an umbrella.)
Trivia Newsletter CLXXIII Recap
1) The direct sequels to the following films, some of which were made for television, all have WHAT word in their titles, with varying grammatical results? The Jerk (1979), Splash (1984), Teen Wolf (1985), Look Who’s Talking (1989), Why Did I Get Married? (2007), Think Like a Man (2012).
This word is TOO, taking the place of what would traditionally be “2” in the titles of the films. Teen Wolf Too (1987) happens to mark the film debut of Jason Bateman, who plays the main character, the cousin of Michael J. Fox’s character from Teen Wolf. WHAT is that character’s name? What, you mean you aren’t at all times armed with Teen Wolf Too minutiae? Weird. Okay, it’s the same first and last name as the current director and executive producer at Bethesda Game Studios, which is responsible for games such as The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Fallout 3, and this year’s Starfield. Due to his front-facing role and the popularity of Bethesda’s games, he is often the subject of memes in the online video-game community. The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
2) WHAT last name fills in both of the blanks in the following list? Tatum (1971-76); Walker (1976-83); Miller (1983-84); Eisner (1984-2005); [BLANK] (2005-20); Chapek (2020-22); [BLANK] (2022—). [Note: Your answer should be just one name.]
This name is IGER for Bob Iger, as this is a list of CEOs of The Walt Disney Company. We omitted the first name on that list, which was Roy Disney (1929-71).
Ron Miller (the 1983-84 name above) occupies a small slice of Disney’s CEO history. The son-in-law of Walt Disney, Miller was ousted in one of the corporate takeovers that was common in the time period. Miller was also briefly an NFL player:
The Old Maestro sat in the stands of Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum soaking up the warmth of the southern California autumn sun. Down on the field, the Chicago Cardinals and the hometown Los Angeles Rams collided again and again in the raucous fashion for which the early NFL was known. Walt Disney didn’t care for football; it was too brutish. He cared for sport, to be sure, most notably baseball and polo — games which take a bit more mental acumen than simply running headlong into another man clad in leather armor.
Walt turned his attention to the game as Rams quarterback Norm Van Brocklin checked a pass down to a rookie tight end. Before the rookie could turn upfield, the elbow of Cardinals star Dick Lane — “The Night Train” — smashed into his face and knocked him unconscious.
Disgusted, Walt left the Coliseum; he never saw another football game again.
However, at the end of the season, Walt did speak to that Rams rookie. “You know, I don’t want to be the father to your children,” Disney said to his son-in-law. “You’re going to die out there. How about coming to work with me?” Ron Miller left the Rams and joined Team Disney in 1957.
Dick “Night Train” Lane, mentioned in the above anecdote, still holds the NFL record for interceptions caught in a season (14), despite the fact that the record was set in a 12-game season (the league now plays a 17-game regular season).
3) Eithne Pádraigín Ní Bhraonáin is better known by WHAT mononym? Generally credited as her nation’s best-selling solo artist, she is notable for songs such as “Orinoco Flow (Sail Away)” and “Only Time.”
This is ENYA.
“Only Time” has one of the stranger Billboard histories I can imagine. The song came out in 2000, but took on new meaning in the United States in 2001 when news media regularly used the song as the backdrop to montages and tributes regarding the September 11th attacks. This association led “Only Time” to hit #10 on the US Billboard Hot 100, Enya’s peak in the US. Here’s Enya in 2005 speaking about this association:
Well, basically, we got news from people in America who saw footage, where CNN were using the song, ‘Only Time.’ I was out there promoting it that year. And when I saw the footage it was absolutely so moving. But, in a way, I think everybody in the world felt that if there was any way that we could help them in New York, because it was so traumatized. And they felt there was going to be no more normality ever in the city. And they leaned toward certain songs and one of them was ‘Only Time’ because the song is about time will heal. ‘Only Time’ can tell, and this is what their hope was. So, what we did then was we released the single, the single had never been released there, so we released the single, and then gave all the proceeds then to the fire department. (..) It was strange. But, I’d hoped that the song meant a lot to me as well about how time can heal, and I’d hoped that this was the message that we’re getting into a lot of people. That is what the message they were getting because when I went there to perform it and to sing it, it was nice to be able to give them back some healing because they were so desperate you know, to get any help at that time.
Twelve years later, the song was used for, uh, a Volvo commercial starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, which caused the song to hit #43 on the Hot 100.
4) Identify the single word, repeated multiple times, omitted from the following sentence describing efforts to describe past events that is sometimes used as a demonstration of the value of punctuation: James, while John [BLANK] [BLANK] “[BLANK],” [BLANK] [BLANK] “[BLANK] [BLANK]”; “[BLANK] [BLANK]” [BLANK] [BLANK] a better effect on the teacher.
This word is “HAD.” Sometimes you’ll see this sentence written sans internal punctuation: “James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher.” This is, of course, too cute:
Wikipedia does a pretty good job explaining what’s going on here:
The sentence refers to two students, James and John, who are required by an English teacher to describe a man who had suffered from a cold in the past. John writes "The man had a cold", which the teacher marks incorrect, while James writes the correct "The man had had a cold". James's answer, being more grammatical, resulted in a better impression on the teacher.
The sentence is easier to understand with added punctuation and emphasis:
James, while John had had “had”, had had “had had”; “had had” had had a better effect on the teacher.
5) Photography pop quiz! Either (a) Give the first name which the artist born Emmanuel Radnitzky is most commonly known by; his Le Violon d'Ingres became in 2022 the most expensive photograph ever sold at auction; or (b) give the last name of the British photographer born in Calcutta who is notable for her soft-focus photographs of Victorian men and women; she is sometimes credited as the first person to take “close-ups.”
These folks are MAN Ray and Julia Margaret CAMERON. Here’s the Met on Cameron:
In December 1863, little more than a year after Roger Fenton retired from photography and sold his equipment, Julia Margaret Cameron received her first camera. It was a gift from her daughter and son-in-law, given with the words “It may amuse you, Mother, to try to photograph during your solitude at Freshwater.” Cameron was forty-eight, a mother of six, and a deeply religious, well read, somewhat eccentric friend of many of Victorian England’s greatest minds: the painter G. F. Watts; the poets Robert Browning, Henry Taylor, and Alfred Lord Tennyson, her neighbor at Freshwater on the Isle of Wight; the scientists Charles Darwin and Sir John Herschel; and the historian and philosopher Thomas Carlyle. In the decade that followed the gift, the camera became far more than an amusement to her: “From the first moment I handled my lens with a tender ardour,” she wrote, “and it has become to me as a living thing, with voice and memory and creative vigour.” Her mesmerizing portraits and figure studies on literary and biblical themes were unprecedented in her time and remain among the most highly admired of Victorian photographs.
6) WHAT four-letter body part shares the theme suggested by the answers to Questions #1 through #5?
Each of our answers was the name of a country, with one letter removed; thus, a four-letter body part that could have fit here was CHIN, for China. Here’s that list:
TOO (Togo)
IGER (Niger)
ENYA (Kenya)
HAD (Chad)
MAN (Oman) or CAMERON (Cameroon)
Our newsletter’s title was Pain Per(du). Pain perdu is generally what the French would call what Americans call “French toast.” Pain perdu literally means “lost bread,” since French toast is one way to “save” stale bread that might otherwise be lost. Why was that our title? Well, three reasons:
The parentheses were meant to point you towards PAIN PER and realize that the exact words were critical here—these were two more examples of what we were doing (Spain and Peru). (Plus, our answers were predominantly in Africa and predominantly involved chopping off the first letters of each country, and we wanted to make it clearer we weren’t going for just those two conditions.)
We wanted you to think about countries, so we pointed you towards “French” toast.
Just as French toast is a way to save stale bread that might be lost, these newsletter questions were a way to save country words that otherwise “lost” a letter.
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
The Teen Wolf Too character and Bethesda personality is TODD HOWARD.