We’ve got a lot going on this week, so we’re going to take Thursday off. We’ll be back with Trivia Newsletter CLXXVIII on Monday, November 6.
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) Lyin’, cheatin’, and stealin’ are all par for the course for WHAT fictional organization that made its first appearance in Marvel Comics’s Strange Tales #135 and that plays a major role in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, particularly films such as Captain America: The First Avenger, its direct sequel, and the television show Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.?
2) It bore a depiction of a female red deer, it circumnavigated the world, it was originally called the Pelican, and Queen Elizabeth knighted Sir Francis Drake on it. WHAT is it best known as?
3) Stable, normal situations take place in the film Love Story (1970). They do not take place in WHAT 1963 film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, loosely based on a Daphne du Maurier short story of the same name, which film held the distinction of being the most-watched film aired on television until supplanted by Love Story in 1972?
4) No bull—the singular form of the plural noun maria is WHAT word? It’s out of this world!
5) Belt up and get ready to traverse the Chisholm Trail! This weeks-long journey between Texas and Kansas was repeatedly undertaken in the late nineteenth century to collectively transport over five million WHAT?
6) “How do you like them apples?” is a line from Good Will Hunting (1997), but for this Question #6, we’ll need either another 1997 film very pertinent to this newsletter’s theme, or the final item in the list that this newsletter is alluding to. (Both potential answers have the same number of letters.)
Trivia Newsletter CLXXVI Recap
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”?
This is TITO PUENTE.
I was born in 1989. If I ever make music, I have the original idea of naming my first album after that year. Because I was born then, The Simpsons is a primary source of my knowledge about the world, and so I can tell you that Tito Puente is the guest star in the “Who Shot Mr. Burns?” episodes. The song that he sings in the episode was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award in 1996 for “Outstanding Individual Achievement in Music and Lyrics”:
The “Who Shot Mr. Burns” episodes are clearly a riff on the “Who Shot J.R.?” plotline in the season finale of the third season of the television show Dallas. By the way—WHO SHOT J.R.? The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
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?
This is YAKOV SMIRNOFF. What a country!
Do you want to listen to Ronald Reagan tell some jokes that he got from Yakov Smirnoff? No? Well, here they are anyway, and you can read more about the unlikely relationship here.
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.
This is FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT—we were trying to clue you into her most notable work, The Secret Garden, which is what Mary and Dickon are from. She also wrote Little Lord Fauntleroy and A Little Princess. Here’s what that fountain looks like:
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.
This is KETEL MARTE. Thank you to Ketel Marte for winning the NLCS MVP and therefore becoming notable enough, in my estimation, to ask about in this newsletter.
Since Thursday, Marte has also collected a hit in the first two games of the World Series, and that eighteen-game postseason hitting streak is now the longest in MLB history, without needing the caveat “to start a postseason career.” He also stole the first stolen base of the World Series, securing a free taco for anyone who visits a Taco Bell in the United States. He joins Francisco Lindor, Cameron Maybin, Mookie Betts (twice!), Trea Turner, Ozzie Albies, and Kyle Schwarber as some recent players to win tacos for America. (Thanks to the indispensable Chris Kamka for that bit.)
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?
Incredibly conveniently for our theme, Aunt Rhody needs to be told that her old GRAY GOOSE has passed away. Lots of YouTube links today, but here’s one more in case you want to hear the song. It’s not a happy song! If it were a Triple Crown race, it would be the Bleakness.
6) The answers to Questions #1 through #5 allude to types of WHAT, specifically? Your answer should be a five-letter word.
The answers alluded to brands of VODKA: Tito’s Handmade Vodka, Smirnoff, Burnett’s, Ketel One, and Grey Goose.
There’s an old Twitter joke based on someone purposefully misinterpreting the phrase “chicken fried rice” to mean “rice that was fried by a chicken” and reacting accordingly:
The joke really caught on years later when someone used “shrimp fried rice,” and variations followed, such as “So you’re telling me a chicken fried this steak?” Our newsletter title, “You’re Telling Me a Three-Base Hit Distilled This?”, is a version of the same joke. We’re referring to the claim on bottles of Smirnoff that it is triple distilled (a three-base hit in baseball is a triple). We now realize we could have served up a Mr. Belvedere question.
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
The Dallas character J.R. Ewing was shot by the character KRISTIN SHEPARD, his sister-in-law and mistress. Kristin was played by Mary Crosby, who is Bing Crosby’s daughter.