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) Little is agreed upon when it comes to the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains (sometimes called the Battle of Châlons)—the battle’s name, where it was fought, why it was fought, and who won the battle are all subject to debate. Two points that are not generally disputed are that the battle was fought in the year 451 AD, and that it entailed the Romans and Visigoths fighting against an invading force led by WHAT king?
2) “Here Odo the bishop holding a club strengthens the boys” is the English translation of a phrase written in Latin on WHAT object, likely commissioned by Odo, that portrays his whereabouts on October 14, 1066?
3) WHAT is the signature attack of the character Goku from the Dragon Ball manga and its associated media franchise? The attack, a concussive energy beam, takes its name from a person born around 1758 who is one of the 99 individuals today portrayed with a statue in the National Statuary Hall Collection in Washington, D.C.
4) NAME the author who passed away on April 21, 1910 and who is buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in Elmira, New York. His grave is, appropriately enough, marked by a monument that is twelve feet high (or two fathoms).
5) NAME the Italian painter from the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries who is notable for his frescoes, including those in the Scrovegni Chapel (also called the Arena Chapel) in Padua; he was also the namesake to the European Space Agency’s contribution to a 1986 mission.
6) NAME the commonality shared by, among many others, Samuel Barber, Thomas Burberry, Andrew Carnegie, Emilia Clarke, Fanny Eaton, Megan Fox, Kit Harington, John Harvard, Akira Kurosawa, Shia LaBeouf, Leopold II, James Monroe, Mother Teresa, Rafael Nadal, Horatio Nelson, Ashley Olsen, Mary-Kate Olsen, Django Reinhardt, and Maximilien Robespierre. (Note: A particular two-word answer is sufficient.)
Trivia Newsletter CLXXVIII Recap
Thanks again to Patrick for writing these questions!
1) Probably the best known single work of art from the “Regionalism” school of art is American Gothic by Grant Wood. In WHAT state—which became a territory in 1838, a state in 1846, and moved its capital westward in 1857—was it painted?
This is IOWA. You know American Gothic—it’s this one:
It all looks so straightforward. A man and a woman stand and stare with unblinking and unselfconscious hostility. They have the snapshot look of truth about them, calling to mind the tintype photographs of ancestors once kept in albums by families of modest means — including the artist’s own — across the Midwest. But, like many an image of apparently unvarnished reality, American Gothic was carefully contrived.
Read more about that contrivance here.
2) The Pioneers is the first in a series (by publication date); The Deerslayer is the fifth. WHAT work is the second? It was released as a film more than 160 years after it was published as a novel.
This is The Last of the Mohicans.
We’ve never run with it, because it isn’t a very good theme, but we’ve thought about trying to do a newsletter about sets of novels that have dissimilar chronological orders and publication orders. The Narnia books may be the most notable example of this. The Leatherstocking Tales by James Fenimore Cooper, the pentalogy that this question asked about, is another such series.
The film The Last of the Mohicans was directed by Michael Mann, also notable for films such as Heat, The Insider, Ali, and Collateral. The Last of the Mohicans won the Academy Award for Best Sound, which is the only Academy Award that Mann’s films have picked up.
3) At a critical moment in the French Revolution, representatives of the Third Estate gathered and swore an oath “not to separate and to reassemble wherever necessary until the Constitution of the kingdom is established.” It is known in French as the serment du Jeu de paume; today, top-ranked Aryna Sabalenka could perhaps tell you how the oath's location is designated in English. Give that name.
This oath happened on a TENNIS COURT.
Sabalenka had an incredible 2023 in tennis; she won the Australian Open, reached the finals in the US Open, and reached the semifinals in the French Open and at Wimbledon. She was the top-ranked tennis player (by WTA rankings) when this question was published, but as of today, Iga Swiatek is ranked #1 thanks to her win at the WTA Finals earlier this week.
4) According to Robert Altman, while directing one of his films he asked composer Johnny Mandel for the “stupidest song ever written.” Altman asked his 15-year-old son to write the lyrics, which he did in five minutes. The song, used for the film’s title sequence, went to #1 in the U.K. and had a long afterlife on television in instrumental form. Altman reportedly made $70,000 as the movie's director, while his son has made more than a million dollars for the song lyrics. Name the relevant FILM.
This is M*A*S*H. We’re going to let Johnny Mandel talk us through this one (interview questions omitted):
So Bob and I were sitting around getting rather ripped one night. Bob said to me, "You know, I need a song for the film. It’s that Last Supper scene, after the guy says he’d going to do himself with a pill because his life is over, because couldn’t get it up with the WAC the night before." I said, "A song for that?" He said, "Yeah, that Last Supper scene where the guy climbs into the casket and everybody walks around the box dropping in things like scotch, Playboy and other stuff to see him into the next world. There’s just dead air there."
Bob said, "We’ve got one guy in the shot who can sing and there's another guy who knows three chords on the guitar so we can’t use an orchestra." Bob also said the song had to be called Suicide Is Painless. "Since [Capt.] Painless commits suicide with a pill, that would be a good title," he said. Then he said, "It’s got to be the stupidest song ever written."
I said to myself, "Well I can do stupid." Bob was going to take a shot at the lyrics. But he came back two days later and said, "I’m sorry but there’s just too much stuff in this 45-year-old brain. I can’t write anything nearly as stupid as what we need."
Bob said, "All is not lost. I’ve got a 15-year-old kid who’s a total idiot." So Michael Altman, at age 15, wrote the lyrics, and then I wrote the music to them. It was the first scene in the movie that they were going to shoot. They had to have the song for it as a pre-record, so the actor could mouth the words, allowing for a dub later.
Surely you’re wondering what the lyrics are? Well, here you go. We won’t agree that the lyrics are “stupid,” because one of the side effects of sending thousands of words you write every week to strangers is that you get a little more charitable about everyone else’s efforts at creativity, but “A brave man once requested me / To answer questions that are key” is a pretty funny line.
5) The Australian TV show Bluey—featuring mum, dad, Bingo and Bluey—primarily streams on WHAT subscription service in the United States? The service was established in 2019.
This is DISNEY+.
I am not sure you should take IMDB episode rankings seriously—it sure seems like Attack on Titan fans care a lot about them. If you do believe in the rankings, though, then you may care that the “Sleepytime” episode of Bluey is the 14th highest-ranked television episode in the history of TV. The eight-minute episode focuses on Bingo’s struggles with nighttime separation anxiety, as visualized in a dream adventure through space. It’s a sweet episode that you can watch right here, but it’s also a suite episode in that it features adaptations of parts of a seven-movement orchestral suite by WHAT English composer? The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
6) Each of this newsletter’s answers has a connection to a particular word. Specifically, each answer contains one (or more, perhaps many more) of that word. WHAT type of animal contains two of that word?
Each of the answers in this newsletter contains some number of Hawkeyes:
Question #1: Iowa is the Hawkeye State, so Iowa has over three million Hawkeyes.
Question #2: The Last of the Mohicans contains its protagonist, Nathaniel “Natty” Bumppo; one of his nicknames is Hawkeye.
Question #3: Hawk-Eye is a computer vision system used in many sports, including in tennis; a professional tennis court could be said to contain one Hawk-Eye.
Question #4: “Hawkeye” Pierce is the main character of M*A*S*H (both the television show and movie)—in fact, in the show’s plot, he explicitly is nicknamed after the character from The Last of the Mohicans.
Question #5: Disney+ is also where you can watch the television show Hawkeye.
The way to answer Question #6 was to know that an animal that contains two hawkeyes is, obviously, A VULTURE THAT RECENTLY ATE A HAWK. Nah, just kidding, it’s a HAWK.
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
The composer whose work is heard in the Bluey episode “Sleepytime” is GUSTAV HOLST—the suite is The Planets, which makes sense because we told you it was a space adventure.