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 gamekeeper Oliver Mellors is the titular character, in a sense, of a 1928 novel that was banned in the United States for obscenity. After that ban was lifted, Tom Lehrer satirically sang “Who needs a hobby like tennis or philately?/I've got a hobby: rereading” the 1928 novel. WHAT word is Mellors known by in the novel’s title?
2) Sculptor Kristen Visbal created a 2017 sculpture of a girl described, in the work’s title, by WHAT adjective? Appropriately enough, the sculpture was designed to stare down Charging Bull, another sculpture; however, following a legal dispute, Visbal’s sculpture was relocated.
3) Ben Franklin said that glass, china, and WHAT are easily cracked, and never well mended?
4) In 2016, volunteer editors Emily Temple-Wood and Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight for the website Wikipedia were named the Wikipedians of the Year for their efforts addressing the current gender bias in Wikipedia content. Their efforts are known as a project called Women in WHAT, named after the appearance of hyperlinks in existing Wikipedia articles that indicate that the linked article has yet to be created?
5) To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, some two million people joined hands to form a human chain spanning over 400 miles across Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in protest of Soviet rule. This event, sometimes called the Baltic Way or Baltic Chain, occurred in WHAT year?
6) WHAT person is this newsletter’s theme?
Trivia Newsletter CLXXXIII Recap
1) NAME the element that is often used for light-bulb filaments and X-ray tubes due to the fact that it has the highest melting point of all known metals. [Note: This question has been revised from its original form.]
This is TUNGSTEN. Remember for Jeopardy! purposes that tungsten is known alternatively as wolfram—that’s why its chemical symbol is W. Hey, maybe that even matters for our theme.
This question had a factual error. Our original draft of the question stated that “it has the highest melting point of all known metals,” which is true, but before publication, we changed “metals” to “elements,” which is untrue—the element with the highest melting point is carbon. The part about filaments and tubes is true, but the rest isn’t.
I wish I had a good explanation for this error, but the actual explanation is that I thought “Hey, isn’t the element with the highest melting point carbon?”, Googled it, and got burned by relying on a Google search preview and from cursorily reading the results instead of digging in:
I apologize for any confusion the question may have caused. A good lesson: Never trust Google search previews.
2) Amelia Earhart worked from 1935 to 1937 as a visiting faculty member at WHAT university, which also paid for the plane Earhart flew on her attempted around-the-world flight? The university’s connection to aviation continued: More than one third of NASA's crewed space missions have had at least one graduate as a crew member.
This is PURDUE UNIVERSITY. Purdue has an online collection of papers and such related to Earhart. We’re still a bit on tilt from the tungsten thing, so we’re going to keep it light today and point out that we suspect someone was having fun with the word “navigate” on the collection’s home page:
We know that may seem like a stretch, but as Exhibit A for our argument, look at what they did with the word “landing” in the site’s menu, for a link that leads you back to that home page:
Fantastic.
3) Haribo, the company that first created gummy candy by making gummy bears in 1922, is a syllabic abbreviation formed from the name of its founder, Hans Riegel, and from the name of WHAT city where it was founded?
This is BONN (HAns RIegel BOnn). Let’s keep the barely educational freestyle association going. Here’s a sentence on Haribo’s Wikipedia page we can’t get past: “In Germany, Haribo was not an exclusive gourmet product, but a mere candy.” This sentence comes after a sentence explaining that Haribo began selling gummy bears in the United States in 1982, but still, this may be the funniest sentence we have ever read. Where to start? Why would anyone expect gummy bears to be anything other than “mere candy”? What is the word “mere” even doing? Just an incredible sentence.
4) Of the 32 current teams in the National Hockey League, 21 have won the Stanley Cup: the Ducks, Bruins, Flames, Hurricanes, Blackhawks, Avalanche, Stars, Red Wings, Oilers, Kings, Canadiens, Devils, Islanders, Rangers, Flyers, Penguins, Blues, Lightning, Maple Leafs, Capitals, and Golden Knights. Eleven have not: the Coyotes, Sabres, Blue Jackets, Panthers, Wild, Predators, Senators, Kraken, Canucks, and WHAT two other teams?
These teams are the (SAN JOSE) SHARKS and the (WINNIPEG) Jets.
Unlike the other major North American sports, “shifts,” or changes in the players on the ice, happen very frequently in the NHL. With respect to NHL skaters (i.e., not goalies) in the 2022-23 season, the average shift change per game for the median player was 42 seconds, with that number rarely going over one minute for any player. Sometimes it actually is a sprint and not a marathon.
5) Several sources place the age of the Appalachian Mountains at around 480 million years, and the age of fossils of certain cyanobacteria at around 3.8 billion years old, which could cast doubt on the veracity of a claim made in the first verse of WHAT 1971 song, if taken literally?
This is John Denver’s “TAKE ME HOME, COUNTRY ROADS,” which is one of West Virginia’s four state songs, despite the lively debate about whether the song refers to West Virginia or western Virginia.
The first verse of the song tells us:
Almost heaven, West Virginia
Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah River
Life is old there, older than the trees
Younger than the mountains, growin' like a breeze
We asked about the statement in the song that life there is younger than the mountains, which probably should not be taken literally.
6) Of the two dozen or so folks who have publicly declared that they are running for president in the 2024 U.S. presidential election, WHICH person best fits within this newsletter’s theme? (Last name acceptable.)
This is CORNEL WEST. West is a progressive scholar running for a third-party bid. What you probably don’t know about West is that he has appeared in a major film franchise. Specifically, he appeared in a 2003 film and in its sequel released the same year; combined, the two films grossed over a billion dollars at the box office (worldwide). WHAT FILM FRANCHISE did West appear in? The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
This was a newsletter all about going west:
Question #1: Tungsten’s chemical symbol is W, which is also often shorthand for “west.”
Question #2: Purdue University is in West Lafayette, Indiana.
Question #3: Bonn was the capital of West Germany.
Question #4: The Sharks and the Jets were the rival gangs from West Side Story.
Question #5: “Take Me Home, Country Roads” is associated with West Virginia and is one of its official songs.
Newsletter Title: “Cardinal Batman” was asking you to think of the actor who played Batman whose name is a cardinal direction—so, Adam West.
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
Cornel West has a minor role in the MATRIX films—The Matrix Reloaded (2003) and The Matrix Revolutions (2003). He’s this guy.