Today’s questions were written by Patrick Iber, featured here on Trivia Factorial for the sixth time. His previous contributions, accessible by clicking the links in this sentence, have all been high-quality hidden-connection quizzes; this one is no exception. (If you’d like to read the recaps showing the answers to those five newsletters, the links to those are, respectively, in this sentence.)
We’re going to mention LearnedLeague, the online trivia league that many of our readers participate in, twice in this particular newsletter. If you don’t know or care what that is, just skip over those parts.
A recap for you newcomers: Patrick was the lead editor of the Hidden Connections 2 MiniLeague on LearnedLeague earlier this year, which was played by nearly five thousand people. Its sequel, Hidden Connections 3, will launch in January 2024, so if you’re a LLama, keep that on your radar. Patrick and the team have done a great job with the HC3 questions, and if you play the MiniLeague, you may see a couple of small contributions I made to the set.
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.
[Note: Today’s newsletter is untitled, other than to designate that this post is a guest post. This is not a hint about the theme—we simply chose not to include a title.]
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Before we get to the recap, we’re going to take a quick victory lap.
On October 12, 2023, in the recap for Trivia Newsletter CLXXIII, we wrote this (internal link removed):
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?
His name was Étienne de SILHOUETTE. Take note, those preparing for next week’s MiniLeague on Eponyms and Namesakes on LearnedLeague.
In last Thursday’s championship round of the Eponyms and Namesakes MiniLeague, this question appeared:
In his lifetime, what French Finance Minister became famous for austerity measures imposed on the wealthy to pay for the Seven Year War? This formed in the public mind the outline of a penny pinching bureaucrat. His name thus became known for a form of portrait that could be done on the cheap by eliminating the need for most details, although the term also can apply to similarly-styled images of objects or scenes in addition to people.
It is not actually that impressive to correctly guess the subject of one out of 78 questions about eponyms and namesakes; regardless, we nailed that one. Maybe that tidbit helped one of you!
Trivia Newsletter CLXXVII Recap
[Note: Certain words in the questions below are written in all caps and bolded. They did not appear this way in the original distribution of this newsletter.]
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.?
This is HYDRA.
There are eighty-eight recognized constellations. Of those constellations, Hydra is the “largest” one. What’s that mean? One way to measure the size of a constellation is to consider its “solid angle,” or the amount of the field of view from some particular point that a given object covers. (Our reference point is, of course, Earth.)
Think of it this way—the sun is just about 400 times bigger than the moon, but the sun is also about 390 times farther away from us than the moon is (remember, that second number is not constant). The sun and the moon have nearly the same solid angle, because that disparity between distance and size nearly “even out,” so to speak. That’s why, during a solar eclipse, the moon seems to cover almost all of the visible portion of the sun, rather than appearing much smaller than the sun.
Back to constellations. Hydra’s solid angle is about 1,303 square degrees. We’ll skip the math on how that gets calculated, but you can learn a bit more here. We’ll also skip other ways to measure the size of constellations; after all, as you dig into the universe of constellations, things can become Messier.
Ursa Major is #3 on the list of constellations in terms of its solid angle, Ursa Minor is #56, and WHAT constellation is in last place at a mere 68 square degrees? You might think this is a hard, obscure question, but it’s really of the utmost importance that you get to the heart of the matter and figure this one out. The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
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?
This is the GOLDEN HIND, Francis Drake’s flagship. A female red deer is just what a hind is. Male red deer are called stags or harts.
One of our favorite videos from The Onion is “Deer: Deer Are Fine” from their Horrifying Planet series, which is a riff on works such as Planet Earth. That’s the only YouTube video you’re getting in this recap, so watch that one.
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?
This is THE BIRDS.
Trivia, we contend, is at its best when you get a good “Hey, did you know?” nugget. Fans of sports are already pros at this sort of thing, and you see these chestnuts all the time:
Sammy Sosa hit 60+ home runs in three separate seasons…and never led his own league in home runs in any of those three seasons?
In fact, the only seasons in which that fact could have been true with respect to Sosa’s three 60+ HR seasons, in the history of baseball, are the seasons in which he hit those homers:
Wait, the MLB player who has the most seasons with one or more stolen bases and no caught stealings as a runner is Greg Maddux?
The Tampa Bay Buccaneers have won the NFC North division more recently than the Detroit Lions, despite not playing in it since 2001? (This one may change soon, as the Lions continue their promising season.)2
You don’t need to restrict this phenomenon to sports. In past editions of this newsletter, we’ve learned that the deadliest wildfire in U.S. history, which was in Wisconsin in 1871, entirely coincidentally started on the same day as the start of the Great Chicago Fire, we’ve learned that Olympic medals were once given for art, and we even did that whole rant about Lois Weber ages ago, which is one of our favorite bits of writing in Trivia Factorial history (behind that time we talked about the television show ER for hundreds of words, though).
That’s a long windup to tell you that we learned a good “Hey, did you know?” nugget writing this: There is a sequel to Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. It’s called The Birds II: Land’s End, it was released in 1994 for TV, and here’s the poster for it:
We love that tagline on the poster: “History Has a Nasty Way of Repeating Itself.” If you’re like us, you read it twice, thinking there must be some kind of bird pun. There is not. Man, you are making a sequel to The Birds—have a little fun with it! Surely we can do better? How about “A Murder is Coming” or “Humanity. It’s for the birds.” or “Looks Like We’re Not Taking the Audubon” or “We’re Going to Need a Lot More Than One Stone” or “Time to Face the Stork Reality” or “The Cardinal Rule: Stay Alive” or “Get That Albatross Off Your Neck!”?
You don’t need to be a reader of the excellent Knowing Without Understanding newsletter here on Substack, written by a Trivia Factorial reader and focused on film trivia, to know that The Birds II: Land’s End did not become one of the great movies of all time. But if you aren’t a reader of that newsletter, check it out! It’s good:
In any case, here’s a review of the The Birds II, which is an “Alan Smithee” film. That’s something to remember for trivia—a film’s director who does not want to be associated with the film will have the film credited to the pseudonymous name Alan Smithee. The practice was formally discontinued by the Directors Guild Of America in 2000.
4) No BULL—the singular form of the plural noun maria is WHAT word? It’s out of this world!
This is a MARE, which means “sea” in Latin and is the name for a plain of lower elevation on the moon.
Can we just keep talking about The Birds II: Land’s End? No, just kidding. Here’s an interesting bit from Nature on how maria are named:
After the Soviet spacecraft Luna 3 retrieved the first pictures from the far side of the Moon in 1959, the justifiably proud Soviets started to call one of the lunar lava plains Mare Moscoviense, after their capital. The move seemed to defy a decades-old tradition that such maria are named after mental states (Tranquillitatis, for example, or Serenitatis), or words for water. At the 1961 meeting of the International Astronomical Union (IAU), French astronomer Audouin Dollfus was able to restore tranquillity in the astronomical community with a serene move. Moscoviense worked as a name, he said, because Moscow is, in fact, a “state of mind”.
To avoid further disputes as proud pioneers sought to thank benefactors, curry favour or merely indulge themselves, the IAU went on to establish working groups to set rules and conventions for nomenclature.
Procedures now make sure that mountains on Mercury are named with words for 'hot' in various languages, canyons on Venus christened after goddesses and small craters on Mars twinned with villages on Earth. Just last month, a 39-kilometre-wide Martian crater was named Moanda, after a town in Gabon.
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?
These are CATTLE.
Let’s read a little bit about Shirley Chisholm from this piece that uses “Chisholm Trail” for a pun:
Shirley Anita St. Hill Chisholm was the first African American woman in Congress (1968) and the first woman and African American to seek the nomination for president of the United States from one of the two major political parties (1972). Her motto and title of her autobiography—Unbought and Unbossed—illustrates her outspoken advocacy for women and minorities during her seven terms in the U.S. House of Representatives.
…
In 1964, Chisholm ran for and became the second African American in the New York State Legislature. After court-ordered redistricting created a new, heavily Democratic, district in her neighborhood, in 1968 Chisholm sought—and won—a seat in Congress. There, “Fighting Shirley” introduced more than 50 pieces of legislation and championed racial and gender equality, the plight of the poor, and ending the Vietnam War.
…
Discrimination followed Chisholm’s quest for the 1972 Democratic Party presidential nomination. She was blocked from participating in televised primary debates, and after taking legal action, was permitted to make just one speech. Still, students, women, and minorities followed the “Chisholm Trail.” She entered 12 primaries and garnered 152 of the delegates’ votes (10% of the total)—despite an under-financed campaign and contentiousness from the predominantly male Congressional Black Caucus.
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.)
This was a newsletter about the twelve labors of Hercules, so we wanted you to give us the 1997 film HERCULES, or the subject of Hercules’s final labor, CERBERUS.
We spotted you eleven of the twelve labors throughout the questions and answers to this newsletter, sometimes as homophones. The labors are sometimes presented in different orders and given different names, so we tried not to trouble ourselves too much with the exact order:
Slaying the Nemean lion (“Lyin’” appearing early in Question #1)
Slaying the nine-headed Lernaean Hydra (“Hydra” as the answer to Question #1)
Capturing the Ceryneian Hind (“Hind” as part of the answer to Question #2)
Capturing the Erymanthian Boar (“Bore” appearing early in Question #2)
Cleaning the Augean stables in a single day (“Stable” appearing early in Question #3)
Slaying the Stymphalian birds (“The Birds” as the answer to Question #3)
Capturing the Cretan Bull (“Bull” appearing early in Question #4)
Stealing the Mares of Diomedes (“Mare” as the answer to Question #4)
Obtaining the girdle of Hippolyta, queen of the Amazon (“Belt” appearing early in Question #5)
Obtaining the cattle of the three-bodied giant Geryon (“Cattle” as the answer to Question #5)
Stealing three of the golden apples of the Hesperides (“Apples” appearing early in Question #6)
Capturing and bringing back Cerberus (“Cerberus” as an answer to Question #6)
Our newsletter title, “He’s Going for Speed,” is a reference to the 1996 song by Cake, “The Distance.” The chorus of that song begins “He’s going the distance / He’s going for speed,” and we wanted you to think of that because the song from Hercules nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song was Michael Bolton’s “Go the Distance.” The Trivia Factorial editorial position is that “Zero to Hero” is a better song.
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
The smallest constellation is CRUX, which you may know as the Southern Cross. The Southern Cross appears on five national flags: New Zealand, Australia, Brazil, Samoa and Papua New Guinea.
To be clear, none of these sports facts is original—each has been around Twitter, Reddit, and plenty of other venues for years.