This newsletter marks our return to our standard schedule. Trivia Newsletter CXC will be released on Monday, January 8th.
I posted yesterday about some life changes I made last year:
That post didn’t come directly to your inbox, because you’re signed up for a trivia newsletter and not a “me” newsletter. There is some trivia in there, though, and some of you may find the post interesting.
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) Many universities have “facebooks,” directories of current students with photographs. The facebook for the University of Chicago Law School, from which Laura Wingfield presumably did not graduate, bizarrely shares its name with WHAT 1944 memory play?
1) William Goldman never published a sequel to his novel The Princess Bride, but he did build me up with suspense by including a chapter of the sequel in some editions of the novel. The unfinished sequel includes in its title the name of WHAT character, also the titular character of The Princess Bride?
1) A woman between the ages of 18 and 34, as one example, must run a qualifying marathon with a time under three hours and thirty minutes in order to qualify for a general spot in WHAT race, which has been held 127 times? Due to the race’s popularity, the cutoffs are even stricter than the published times—for the 2024 edition of the race, 11,039 qualifying runners applied and were nonetheless turned away.
1) Whoopi Goldberg is the first Black woman to win the Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album (called the Grammy Award for Best Comedy Recording at the time). NAME the second Black woman to do so, for the album Black Mitzvah; she’s also won a Primetime Emmy for hosting Saturday Night Live, and she appeared in the 2017 film Girls Trip.
1) Tom Cruise has starred in many box-office blockbusters, but according to film-industry website The Numbers, Cruise has taken three “L”s in his career, as his three lowest-grossing films (domestic) have been Losin’ It (1983), Lions for Lambs (2007), and WHAT 1980s film directed by Ridley Scott?
1) Decius Brutus (Julius Caesar), Sebastian (The Tempest), and Timon (Timon of Athens) are the only three characters in Shakespeare’s plays to say WHAT word (whether singular or plural), this newsletter’s theme, which is also mentioned several times in the King James Bible?
Trivia Newsletter CLXXXVIII Recap
1) Legendary Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman is not related to legendary Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman; instead, their most direct connection was a 1978 film with WHAT season in its title? Ingmar directed and Ingrid acted in this film, the last feature film of the latter’s career.
The film is Autumn Sonata, so we were looking for AUTUMN.
This article makes the claim that the best (Ingrid) Bergman film is Casablanca. Someone who disagrees, depending on what alternative film they suggest, might be Gaslighting you.
2) Change one letter in a nine-letter noun that could be the basis for someone losing their job (due to rudeness), and you can get WHAT noun that could also be the basis for someone losing their job (due to laziness)?
These words are insolence and INDOLENCE.
When I was Googling around for things to write in this recap, I ran into this piece that suggests that “insolence” and “indolence” are commonly confused words. I didn’t accept that claim. It took me a beat too long to realize that the website, Rephrasely, is a website that spits out AI-generated claims based on your searches. It does not spark much joy about the future of Google searches.
3) The most commercially successful album by the alternative rock band the Smashing Pumpkins earned the group seven Grammy nominations. The first two words of the album’s title were probably not selected to pay homage to one of the longest-serving Cabinet members in American history and a group of dog breeds; instead, they were likely selected due to collectively sounding like WHAT word?
The album is Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, and so the word is MELANCHOLY. Andrew Mellon was the long-serving Cabinet member—he’s also the “Mellon” in Carnegie Mellon University.
Mellon served from March 4, 1921 until February 12, 1932 in WHAT Cabinet position? The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
4) “With loyalty will I endeavor to aid the physician in his work and devote myself to the welfare of those committed in my care” is the last line of one version of a pledge called WHAT, named after a key figure in the history of the profession held by those making the pledge?
This pledge is known as the NIGHTINGALE pledge (or sometimes Florence Nightingale Pledge), as it is intended to be said by nurses.
Florence Nightingale is well known in trivia circles as the founder of modern nursing—you’ll want to know for Jeopardy! purposes that she’s called the “Lady with the Lamp.” Did you know that she’s also a critical figure in the history of the pie chart, and that she may also be the first person who used a statistical graph to try to persuade people of the need for change?
5) Among the most famous sculptures by Antonio Canova is one commissioned in 1787 that depicts the god Cupid reviving WHOM with a kiss?
This is PSYCHE, and here’s the sculpture:
What is the sculpture portraying? Here you go:
A prophecy announced that the young Princess Psyche would grow up to be more ravishingly beautiful than Aphrodite herself. The latter, furious, ordered her son, Cupid, to make Psyche fall madly in love with the ugliest being in the world. Though he was prepared to carry out his mission, instead Cupid fell in love with Psyche himself.
He sent an oracle to the young woman’s father, asking him to keep her safely hidden. Locked in a luxurious palace, Psyche received a visit from Cupid every night. However, she refrained from looking at his face, in order to avoid knowing his identity. One night, Psyche broke down and watched her sleeping lover by the light of a lantern. When a drop of hot oil falls on the young god’s skin, he flies away.
Psyche, in search of her lover, became Aphrodite’s slave. Aphrodite ordered Psyche to get a vial from Hades that she must not open. Psyche couldn’t resist and opened the bottle. Breathing in the vapors, she fell into a deadly sleep that only Cupid can break. Cupid kissed her and brought her back to life. Canova’s sculpture captures this moment. Cupid, recognizable by his quiver and arrows, rests on the rock where his beloved lies unconscious.
6) NAME the object missing from the set suggested by the answers to this newsletter, or the person most closely related to that set.
Your choices here were GRECIAN URN or JOHN KEATS.
Keats, the British Romantic poet, wrote six odes in 1819 that are among the most notable poems in the English language: “To Autumn,” “Ode on Indolence,” “Ode on Melancholy,” “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode to Psyche,” and “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” It was that sextet of ode-objects that made up this newsletter’s theme.
It’s hard to overstate how influential the poems have been in the language. One of many examples is that F. Scott Fitzgerald borrowed the title to his novel Tender is the Night from “Ode to a Nightingale”:
Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night
Our newsletter title, Schillersfreude, was a nod to the borrowed word from German schadenfreude, which comes from Schaden (“harm”) and Freude (“joy”) and refers to the satisfaction that comes from learning of another person’s troubles. It wasn’t schadenfreude we wanted you to think about, though—it was Schiller’s freude, as German poet Friedrich Schiller wrote the poem we know as “Ode to Joy.” By thinking of that ode, perhaps you might have thought of some other odes and figured out our theme. “Ode to Joy,” of course, is most famous for being incorporated into Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
Andrew Mellon was the SECRETARY OF THE TREASURY. After he left office, the Department of Justice sought to indict him on tax-fraud charges, and when that failed, he was sued civilly on his taxes. Some speculate that this legal action was retaliation by the Roosevelt Administration.