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) A chess variant listed at Lichess.org, the second-most-popular chess server in the world, has all of the rules of standard chess, except that a player can also win by moving their king to any of the spaces d4, d5, e4, or e5. WHAT is the name of this variant, also the name of a television show that aired from 1997 to 2010 (and that is being revived on Hulu)?
2) Rabbi Joseph Telushkin once wrote that “[m]ost of the great women in the Bible either are married to a great man or related to one,” but that a rare exception to this pattern is WHAT woman, “perhaps the Bible’s greatest woman figure”? He adds that the only thing we know about her personal life is the name of her husband, Lapidot.
3) The television show NCIS has been on the air since 2003 and has aired 457 episodes. That’s just over twice as many as the 227 episodes of WHAT show, of which NCIS is a spin-off and that was once described by The New York Times as a cross between Top Gun and A Few Good Men?
4) 2000 AD is a British sci-fi weekly anthology comic. The most famous character to come from 2000 AD by far is WHAT character, who has appeared in novels, video games, and perhaps most notably in a 1995 film and in a 2012 film?
5) More is known about the life of a woman named Oney than any other person with whom she was enslaved, as she gave several interviews to abolitionist newspapers in the 1840s. She lived most of her life in New Hampshire as a fugitive due to the first iteration of the Fugitive Slave Act, signed into law by WHAT person, from whom Oney escaped and who repeatedly wrote letters entreating others to recapture her?
6) WHAT is the theme of this newsletter?
Trivia Newsletter CLXXXI Recap
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?
This is the THIRD AMENDMENT to the Constitution, which states “No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.” As you can imagine, situations requiring interpretation of this amendment do not come up very much, and yet the Second Circuit (a federal appellate court) had to grapple with these novel Third Amendment claims in the case we asked about, Engblom v. Carey.
As always, there is an applicable article from The Onion, and this time it’s “Third Amendment Rights Group Celebrates Another Successful Year.” The piece even mentions Engblom:
Davison recalled the "dark days" of 1982, when the federal case of Engblom v. Carey threatened to strip Americans of their fundamental Third Amendment freedoms. The ruling by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals acknowledged that the State of New York had indeed violated the Third Amendment rights of the plaintiffs. The case, according to Davison, was "a chilling reminder of how even an established 200-year-old right hangs by a slender thread."
"I don't think people fully understand how close we came to completely losing such a basic right," Davison said. "If the Second Circuit had ruled otherwise, we'd be living in a world in which soldiers would be quartering amok upon our very hearthstones."
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?
You’ll have TWENTY-FIVE PERCENT of the relevant sphere area, because the formula to find a sphere’s surface area is 4πr², so the operations we described will get you one-fourth of the surface area.
A hypothetical megastructure that would encompass a star and capture its solar power output is named WHAT kind of sphere, after a physicist who passed away in 2020 due to a paper he wrote called “Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation”? The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
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?
This is “SHAVE AND A HAIRCUT”—it’s a riff that is generally used as a door knock, or to cap off some sort of musical performance. Here’s that scene:
As the clip shows, the associated response to “shave and a haircut” is “two bits!” It’s one of those things you’ll start hearing everywhere once you listen for it—it’s how the opening theme for The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson ended, it’s how the credits to Barney the Dinosaur ended for a time, it’s how “Gee, Officer Krupke” from West Side Story ends, it’s how the original version of Frank Sinatra’s “Love and Marriage” ends, and it even comes up in Star Wars: Andor as a knock at a window.
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.
Bainbridge Island is in WASHINGTON.
Pickleball is now the official state sport of Washington. We always get a kick out of reading the published legislative intent behind laws such as the law that made pickleball the official state sport. There’s just something incredibly funny about a statement such as “The legislature finds that pickleball is a game that can be played by anyone”:
"The legislature recognizes that the sport of pickleball was created in 1965 on Bainbridge Island by Joel McFee Pritchard, who went on to be elected lieutenant governor and member of Congress for Washington, along with two of his friends, Bill Bell and Barney McCallum. These men created the game at Pritchard's summer cabin after they "persuaded" their abnormally hyper children to go outside to play a few games of badminton, but there was no badminton equipment to be found. Instead, these fathers did some brainstorming and created a new game using ping-pong paddles, a net, and a neighbor's plastic wiffle ball. The rules that they created for the new game, which they named pickleball, are still used today by the USA Pickleball Association.
The legislature finds that pickleball is a game that can be played by anyone, one-on-one, or as a team, and has expanded far beyond Washington to become a nationally and internationally beloved game; over four million people play pickleball in the United States and there are currently 67 member countries in the International Federation of Pickleball. Soon pickleball will even be televised by Fox Sports. The legislature intends to honor and recognize the Washingtonians who created, popularized, and continue to enjoy this sport by designating pickleball the official sport of the state of Washington."
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.
This is HQ2.
This Vox article, though critical of the decisionmaking of Amazon and local governments, provides a useful description as to why the HQ2 search occurred:
The original pitch for HQ2 was tantalizing to mayors, governors, and real estate developers all across the land when it was released in September 2017. Amazon issued a request for proposals to become the home to a vast new corporate campus that promised 50,000 jobs spread across 8 million square feet of office space at an average salary of $100,000 a piece.
This was both a huge economic development prize and a potential logistical nightmare.
Amazon wanted a new base of operations, after all, primarily because the company’s explosive growth was putting enormous strain on the city of Seattle. Despite a construction boom in the city’s relatively small downtown, most of Seattle’s land area is zoned for single-family detached houses and it is ringed by suburbs that enact even more exclusionary zoning practices. Consequently, economic growth in Seattle has proven to be a double-edged sword, with rents soaring and many working-class residents not eligible for high-paid tech jobs left behind.
The city began to address this with a dramatic minimum wage hike, but also started moving to tax Amazon and other large employers to fund homelessness services. Amazon successfully spooked the City Council out of enacting that tax earlier this year. (The tax was not very well designed, but some experts argue it was about the best the city could do given the constraints of state law in Washington.) The fight confirms Amazon executives’ judgment that piling more and more eggs into the Seattle basket is fundamentally unworkable.
Hence the HQ2 sweepstakes naturally began to immediately fuel speculation about an Amazon-driven renaissance of a city like St. Louis or Baltimore that’s fallen on difficult times.
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.)
Each of these folks will be honored by appearing on U.S. QUARTERS MINTED IN 2024, as part of the 2024 American Women’s Quarters Program. Let’s discuss these honorees before we go back to the theme:
Dr. Pauli Murray was a civil rights activist. They2 accomplished far more than can be summarized in a single blurb (as is true for everyone on this list), but one notable accomplishment was coming up with the legal argument that formed the basis of the civil-rights victory in the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education.
Patsy Mink was discussed in our recap to Trivia Newsletter LXXII last year. Mink was the first woman of color elected to Congress. Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 (usually just called “Title IX”), which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in federally funded educational programs, was renamed the Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act upon Mink’s death in 2002 due to her work on the law.
Dr. Mary Edwards Walker was discussed in our recap to Trivia Newsletter CXI earlier this year. An abolitionist and prisoner of war, she is the only woman to have won the Medal of Honor.
Celia Cruz was a Cuban singer and one of the most popular Latin artists of the 20th century. The thing to know about her is that she is often called the “Queen of Salsa” and that her catchphrase is ¡Azúcar!" ("Sugar!").
Zitkala-Ša was a writer and political activist. A member of the Yankton Dakota, she was the cofounder of the National Council of American Indians and wrote the libretto and songs for The Sun Dance Opera (1913), the first American Indian opera. “Zitkala-Ša” means “Red Bird” in Lakota.
The expectation for this newsletter was for you to come up with “QUARTERS”:
Question #1: The Third Amendment prohibits the QUARTERING of soldiers in certain contexts.
Question #2: 25% is ONE QUARTER of the surface area we asked about.
Question #3: “Two bits,” the follow-up to “shave and a haircut,” is an old phrase referring to a quarter.
Question #4: The State of Washington was meant to be reminiscent of who is on the front of the U.S. quarter.
Question #5: HQ2 represented the search for Amazon’s second headquarters.
Our newsletter title, “Trimonthly,” was an awkward way to say “once every three months.” A much more common way to refer to a very similar concept is, of course, quarterly.
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link. (We’ll be behind on updates for a newsletter or two as we come out of the holiday.)
The physicist who is the namesake for the sphere we described above is Freeman DYSON.