We’re going to take off next week for the holiday. We’ll be back with Trivia Newsletter CLXXXII on Monday, November 27th.
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) In 1979, the New York State Department of Corrections went on strike. The State of New York activated its National Guard to maintain the state’s prisons and housed the Guardsmen in administrative buildings that had served as residences for the striking correctional officers. These events led to a court ruling that implicated WHAT rarely litigated constitutional amendment, part of the Bill of Rights?
2) Squaring a sphere’s radius and multiplying that number by pi won’t yield that sphere’s surface area—instead, those operations will yield WHAT percentage of that sphere’s surface area?
3) A plot point in the film Who Framed Roger Rabbit? is that Judge Doom, in order to catch cartoon characters, says WHAT four-word phrase, represented by the first five notes in the below image, in order to induce the “toons” to respond with a phrase represented by the final two notes below?
4) Congressman Joel Pritchard and his friends invented the sport of pickleball in 1965 while at Pritchard’s home on Bainbridge Island, a city and island that is part of WHAT U.S. state? It is the second-largest city in Kitsap County by population; the largest is Bremerton.
5) In 2017, Amazon received bids from over 200 cities for the site of a sprawling real estate development commonly referred to by WHAT alphanumeric designation? Amazon decided to split the development between northern Virginia and Long Island City, though the latter was scrapped in 2019.
6) WHAT commonality is shared (or, more accurately, will soon be shared) by Dr. Pauli Murray, Patsy Mink, Dr. Mary Edwards Walker, Celia Cruz, and Zitkala-Ša? (This newsletter’s one-word theme is an acceptable answer.)
Trivia Newsletter CLXXX Recap
1) NAME the phrase, now used as an idiom, that fills in the blank in the following passage from William Shakespeare’s The Tempest describing Prospero’s condition post-shipwreck: “Full fathom five thy father lies; / Of his bones are coral made; / Those are pearls that were his eyes; / Nothing of him that doth fade, / But doth suffer a [BLANK] / Into something rich and strange.”
This is a SEA CHANGE. Though Shakespeare was likely using the phrase literally (and we spotted you “shipwreck” in case you aren’t familiar with the plot of The Tempest), the phrase now is untethered from the sea and just refers to any kind of sweeping change. (Can something be tethered to the sea?)
A common format for a trivia question is to ask readers for a 1932 novel, the title of which comes from a speech Miranda gives in Act V of The Tempest. The desired answer is Brave New World:
Oh, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in ’t!
Instead, we’ll ask—with WHAT FOUR-WORD REJOINDER does her father Prospero respond? Audiences at the time may have been amused by Prospero’s cranky response to his young daughter. The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
2) In 2017, Virginia Tech discontinued the playing of WHAT children’s song, spelled differently by the school’s fans, between the third and fourth quarters of its football games?
This is the “HOKEY POKEY”—or, as they’d say, the “Hokie Pokie,” because Virginia Tech’s team’s name is the Hokies. What’s a Hokie? Well, Virginia Tech has the page for you! That same page features, uh, this image:
“You do the Hokey Pokey, and you turn yourself around. You turn yourself around. That’s what it’s all about.”
3) Of the various cards that can be played in a standard game of Uno, NAME the only type of card that has a different function depending on whether the game is played with 3+ players or just two players, as its standard function would not be useful in a two-player Uno game.
This is the REVERSE CARD. In 3+ player play, a Reverse card reverses the order of play, which wouldn’t be useful in a 2-person game, so instead a Reverse card is treated like a Skip card.
There are many variations on Uno, which is itself just Crazy Eights with two decks and some gimmick cards. As we learned from this Substack post, one of the strangest variants is Nonpartisan Uno, which just changes the colors so that there are no red or blue cards. This is presumably a measure to avoid having Uno cards be reminiscent of the Democratic Party or Republican Party, which is a phrase we didn’t expect to ever write. The Amazon reviews suggest that Nonpartisan Uno is also nifty for color-blind folks.
4) The Illinois law codified as 625 ILCS 5/11-802 contains limitations on WHAT driving maneuver, also the title of a forgettable 1997 crime thriller that grossed only $6.6 million but that was directed by Oliver Stone with a star-studded cast that included Sean Penn, Jennifer Lopez, Nick Nolte, Claire Danes, Joaquin Phoenix, Jon Voight, and Billy Bob Thornton?
This is a U-TURN. A U-turn is not a Michigan left, which is way more complicated, but it’s also not totally unlike a Michigan left.
Roger Ebert had fun with his review of U-Turn:
I imagine Stone made this movie as sort of a lark, after the exhausting but remarkable accomplishments of "Nixon," "Natural Born Killers," "Heaven and Earth" and "JFK." Well, he deserves a break--but this one? Stone is a gifted filmmaker not afraid to take chances, to express ideas in his films and make political statements. Here he's on holiday. Watching "U-Turn,'' I was reminded of a concert pianist playing "Chopsticks'': It is done well, but one is disappointed to find it done at all.
5) An advocacy group based in Colorado and made up of U.S. military veterans was formerly known as “Iraq Veterans Against the War”; since then, the group has changed its name to include, appropriately enough, the name of WHAT two-word, two-count military command?
This is an ABOUT FACE—the group’s full name now is “About Face: Veterans Against the War.” The University of Nebraska’s ROTC tells us how to perform the command:
6) The lyrics of a particular 1983 song, the video for which has over one billion views on YouTube, start with two words that fit into the theme of this newsletter. NAME the song, or those two words that are repeated several times in the song’s lyrics.
The phrase is “TURN AROUND,” and the song is “TOTAL ECLIPSE OF THE HEART.” Each of the answers in this newsletter related in some way to turning around, whether in a literal or metaphorical sense:
A “sea change” can be said to be a total turnaround in behaviors/attitudes.
The “Hokey Pokey” involves turning oneself around.
An Uno reverse card involves turning around the order of play.
A U-turn is a maneuver that reverses your direction.
An “about face” changes your direction as well.
Our newsletter title, Terref, refers to the British idiom “reverse ferret,” meaning a sudden reversal in an organization’s or person’s stance on something. For example, here’s The Guardian trying to jam all of Noah’s Ark into a headline: “Lindsey Graham, reverse ferret: how John McCain's spaniel became Trump's poodle.”
One last clue is that this was Trivia Newsletter CLXXX, or “180,” itself a term meaning both a literal turn in the opposite direction and a metaphorical reversal.
We didn’t give you a lot of clues to get from all that to the song specifically, but we had hoped that the song is prolific enough that you had a fighting change. The interesting thing about “Total Eclipse of the Heart” is that it is actually a vampire love song.
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
After Miranda says “O brave new world, / That has such people in ’t!” in The Tempest, Prospero says “‘Tis new to thee.”