Trivia Newsletter CLXXVI: You're Telling Me a Three-Base Hit Distilled This?
Trivia for October 26, 2023
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) The song “Oye Cómo Va,” one of the most famous Latin jazz songs of all time, was notably covered by the group Santana in 1970 but was originally written by WHAT product of Spanish Harlem, sometimes called the “Mambo King”?
2) A speechwriter for Ronald Reagan once said that, if the president’s giving a speech about Russia, on the list of people you’d call would be WHAT comedian born in 1951 in Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union?
3) Conservatory Garden, located in Central Park in New York City, is not a secret—it contains a fountain and sculpture created in honor of, and named after, WHAT British-American novelist? The sculpture depicts the literary characters Mary and Dickon.
4) On Tuesday, the National League Championship Series ended in seven games with the Arizona Diamondbacks advancing to the World Series. NAME the player who received the NLCS Most Valuable Player Award for that series. He has collected at least one hit in all sixteen playoff games of his career—that’s the longest hitting streak to start a postseason career in MLB history.
5) In the folk song “Go Tell Aunt Rhody,” which originated as a gavotte composed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau for his opera Le devin du village, the news to be delivered to Aunt Rhody is that WHAT has passed away?
6) The answers to Questions #1 through #5 allude to types of WHAT, specifically? Your answer should be a five-letter word.
Trivia Newsletter CLXXV Recap
1) NAME the diving position that is generally considered the easiest to assume; it makes up the four body positions in diving together with straight, pike, and free…OR, NAME the American who won Olympic gold medals in the springboard and platform events in both 1984 and 1988; he is widely considered one of the best divers in history.
These answers are TUCK and GREG LOUGANIS.
Louganis was diagnosed with HIV in 1988 before he won the ‘88 gold medals, and he came out as HIV-positive in 1995. At the 1988 Olympics, he suffered an injury while diving that led him to bleed into the pool, leading some to question Louganis’s decision not to disclose his condition at the time.
There are no known cases of HIV infection through sports, says Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases: "You need direct exposure of an open wound to infected blood."
That's why Greg Louganis's blood in the Olympic pool posed about zero risk. The blood was diluted by thousands of gallons of water, and "chlorine kills HIV," says Dr. John Ward, chief of HIV-AIDS surveillance at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Also, skin is a very effective barrier to HIV; only a diver with an open wound would face any risk. "If the virus just touches the skin, it is unheard of for it to cause infection: the skin has no receptors to bind HIV," explains Fauci. And unlike cold and flu viruses, a retrovirus like HIV cannot survive outside a body; it must insinuate itself into a cell's genes.
Hey, I wonder if that Fauci guy ever wound up doing anything else.
2) NAME the co-prosecutor in the O.J. Simpson murder case who co-wrote The Trials of Nikki Hill and whose last name happens to trade on the New York Stock Exchange as stock symbol DRI…OR, NAME the person best known as the lead prosecutor in the same case, who co-wrote Without a Doubt.
These folks are CHRISTOPHER DARDEN and MARCIA CLARK. DRI is Darden Restaurants, Inc.—they are the world’s largest full-service restaurant company, as they own the brands Ruth’s Chris Steak House, Eddie V’s, The Capital Grille, Olive Garden Italian Restaurant, LongHorn Steakhouse, Bahama Breeze, Seasons 52, Yard House, and Cheddar's Scratch Kitchen.
Writing something earnest about these famous people who made millions of dollars off of failing to successfully prosecute O.J. Simpson is not very exciting to us, so, uh, here’s the time that Marcia Clark appeared as a guest diner on Hell’s Kitchen:
3) NAME the word for the rear of a boat that fills in the blank from this quote by a character named Quint in a 1974 novel: “Brody, cast off the [BLANK] line”…OR, NAME the author of that novel, who has a cameo as a reporter in the 1975 film based on that novel.
This is STERN and PETER BENCHLEY—this is a question about Jaws, which Benchley wrote.
Here are some thoughts on the book Jaws from the BBC—we just really adore the last sentence of this excerpt:
One suggestion for the book's title was The Stillness in the Water - not, Mr Congdon said, a name that rolled off the tongue.
When the book finally got its toothy title it became one of the publishing sensations of US book history, rivalling Herman Melville's other tale of great white denizen of the deep, Moby Dick.
Compared to Steven Spielberg's resulting film, the book had a darker underlying theme. Matt Hooper, the marine biologist brought in to fight the shark, has an affair with Brody's wife Ellen.
Mayor Vaughan's insistence on keeping the beaches open, meanwhile, may have something to do with the fact he owes money to the mafia.
Spielberg has admitted that when he first read the book he found most of the characters unlikeable, and wanted the shark to win.
4) NAME the actor whose final acting appearance at a particular Washington, D.C. theater came on March 18, 1865, when he portrayed the villainous Duke Pescara in The Apostate…OR, NAME the painter who, together with his brother Hubert, painted the Ghent Altarpiece—he liked to punnily sign his paintings with the phrase “Als Ich Kan.”
This is JOHN WILKES BOOTH, better known for other work, and JAN VAN EYCK. The pun with “Als Ich Kan” is that it means something like “as best I can,” but “Ich” sounds like “Eyck.”
Another Van Eyck work that Jeopardy! likes to ask about is this one:
What’s the NAME of this painting, by the way? (It goes by multiple names, but we’re primarily concerned with the last names of the folks in the painting.) The answer’s at the end of this newsletter,1 and once you’ve checked that out, you can read this piece by Hannah Gadsby about the work and its mysteries.
5) NAME the co-founder and, from 1925 to 1951, the editor-in-chief of The New Yorker who was also an original member of the Algonquin Round Table literary group…OR, NAME another original member of that group who won an Academy Award for his short comedy film How to Sleep and who happens to be the grandfather of the author mentioned in Question #3 above. [Note: This question has been edited from its original text, as described below.]
This is HAROLD ROSS and ROBERT BENCHLEY.
First, a mea culpa—Robert Benchley is Peter Benchley’s grandfather, not his father. We had that wrong in the original draft of the question. That’s a critical miss, and I apologize for it.2
Dorothy Parker, the most famous person in trivia/quizzing circles when it comes to Algonquin Round Table folks, is famous for her various witticisms. One I hadn’t seen before writing this paragraph is “Take me or leave me; or, as is the usual order of things, both.”
Another fact I didn’t know about Parker is that, when she passed away with no heirs in 1967, she left her literary estate to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.; when King was assassinated the following year, the Parker estate went to the NAACP, which to this day benefits from royalties from Parker’s works.
6) For Trivia Factorial’s two-year anniversary, we have two themes today! Many folks could fit into this newsletter’s first theme, but NAME a Pulitzer Prize winner who does…OR, of the many singers and models who appeared in Taylor Swift’s music video “Bad Blood,” NAME the person who best fits this newsletter’s second theme.
The first halves of each question made up our first theme, and the second halves of each question made up our second theme. Those themes, respectively, were (1) top business schools in the U.S., and (2) the kids’ names from the television show The Brady Bunch.
Question #1: Tuck (the Amos Tuck School of Business Administration is the business school at Dartmouth) and Greg Louganis (Greg is the oldest Brady son)
Question #2: Christopher Darden (the Darden School of Business is the business school at the University of Virginia) and Marcia Clark (Marcia is the oldest Brady daughter)
Question #3: Stern (the Leonard N. Stern School of Business is the business school at NYU) and Peter Benchley (Peter is the middle Brady son)
Question #4: John Wilkes Booth (the Booth School of Business is the business school at the University of Chicago) and Jan van Eyck (Jan is the middle Brady daughter)
Question #5: Harold Ross (the Ross School of Business is the business school at the University of Michigan) and Robert Benchley (Robert, or “Bobby,” is the youngest Brady son)
Surely there are other Pulitzer winners who have the name of a U.S. business school, but your most available answer was EDITH WHARTON, the author of The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth, who was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. (The Wharton School is the business school at the University of Pennsylvania.)
Alternatively, a model who was in the music video “Bad Blood” who has the same name as the youngest Brady daughter is CINDY CRAWFORD.
The newsletter title (“We Mean Business…Or ELSE!”) was fairly literal: We’re asking you for business schools, or for something else.
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
Jeopardy! more often than otherwise calls that Van Eyck painting the ARNOLFINI PORTRAIT, but you’ll see Arnolfini Wedding sometimes, as well as variations thereon. The key word is “Arnolfini.”
The Trivia Factorial Style Guide does not exist, but if it did, it would say that we use the “royal we” for everything except for errors, which are described in the first person, because I’m the first person to blame for such things (and also no one else works on the newsletter other than me and my dog). The Trivia Factorial Style Guide would not be a very good style guide.