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 original recipe for a Waldorf salad listed three primary ingredients: apples, mayonnaise, and WHAT vegetable? Grapes, blue cheese, raisins, lettuce, and (especially) walnuts can be found in modern-day versions.
2) Melinda Ponder’s 2017 biography of poet Katharine Lee Bates is subtitled with a five-word phrase that is the last line of a verse of the 1911 version of Bates’s most notable work. WHAT word appears twice in that subtitle?
3) Known as Huriǂoaxa in Khoekhoe and as Tafelberg in Afrikaans, WHAT mountain is the only terrestrial feature that one of the International Astronomical Union’s recognized constellations is (in a sense) named after?
4) “The Report of the Iraq Inquiry,” a 2016 report about the United Kingdom’s role in the 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq, suggests that in the lead-up to the invasion, a description from the UK’s intelligence community of the spherical glass contents of an Iraqi chemical weapon was “remarkably similar to the fictional chemical weapon” portrayed in WHAT 1996 box-office success?
5) Theatergoers pilgrimaged to see the first play by novelist Zadie Smith, The Wife of Willesden. The play is an adaptation of a story that is over six hundred years old about a woman of WHAT city?
6) Each of the answers in this newsletter (or parts thereof) could relate to WHAT, which can also be found in the name of a U.S. state capital?
Trivia Newsletter CLXXXIV Recap
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?
This is LOVER, as this novel is Lady Chatterley’s Lover (“philately” kind of rhymes with “Chatterley”), which was written by D.H. Lawrence.
They don’t get the love that other literary opening lines get, but the opening lines of Lady Chatterley’s Lover are among my favorites:
Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.
This was more or less Constance Chatterley's position.
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.
This word is FEARLESS, for the sculpture Fearless Girl. Charging Bull stands in Manhattan’s financial district and is a symbol for Wall Street (you know, a “bull market”), and so Fearless Girl was imagined as a challenge to the bull. Here are those statues:
The legal dispute began with an argument by the Charging Bull folks that their legal rights were violated by the placement of Fearless Girl. If your reaction to that sentence is “Wait, how does someone have a legal right to how their public art is interpreted?”, this extremely long NYU Law article has some answers for you (or just look up “moral rights” and “derivative work” on Wikipedia).
3) Ben Franklin said that glass, china, and WHAT are easily cracked, and never well mended?
This is REPUTATION.
WHAT is the name for the Japanese art of repairing broken ceramic not by hiding breakage, but rather making the breakage part of the ceramic’s history by filling the cracks with lacquer mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum? The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
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?
This is RED, as the program is Women in Red. On Wikipedia, a red hyperlink indicates that no Wikipedia article exists for the relevant person. For example:
A Wikimedia Research paper entitled Interpolating Quality Dynamics in Wikipedia and Demonstrating the Keilana Effect shows a correlation between the efforts of Temple-Wood (whose username on Wikipedia is “Keilana”) and the quality of Wikipedia articles about women scientists.
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?
This was 1989. The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was the treaty of non-aggression between Germany and the Soviet Union that was reached just days before Germany’s invasion of Poland, which marked the beginning of the European theater of the Second World War, which means that it happened in 1939.
Here’s a bit more about the Baltic Chain:
From old men to young children, pro-independence protesters in the then-Soviet socialist republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania spanned almost 400 miles through the capitals of Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius. They stood marking the anniversary of a bloody crossroads in Baltic history, when in 1939, the foreign ministers of Adolf Hitler’s Germany and Joseph Stalin’s USSR signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-aggression pact. A secret protocol in the agreement, denied by the USSR for decades, condemned the Baltic countries to illegal annexation by the Soviet Union and the repressions that followed.
Fifty years later, bearing the long-banned flags of their independent states and passing the words for freedom — vabadus, brīvība, laisve — up and down the line, Baltic people defied Soviet authorities to demand their human rights be restored.
“You could literally see that half the country was out in the road and holding hands,” said Juris Kaža, a Latvian American freelance journalist who filmed the demonstration over Latvia from a surreptitiously hired helicopter. “It really, really was practically all three nations holding hands and saying, ‘We want to get out of the Soviet Union, that’s it.'”
6) WHAT person is this newsletter’s theme?
This was a newsletter about TAYLOR SWIFT, and specifically some of her albums that mark the “eras” in her Eras Tour. Taylor Swift’s ten albums (not counting various re-releases, live albums, and the such) are Taylor Swift, Fearless, Speak Now, Red, 1989, Reputation, Lover, Folklore, Evermore, and Midnights, and five of those made up our answers. Our newsletter title, Bob Gibson: 1.12; Dwight Gooden: 1.53,” was an example of two famous seasonal earned run averages in baseball—you know, an “ERAs tour”?
Congratulations to Taylor Swift for being named TIME’s Person of the Year yesterday. This is in a sense Swift’s second nomination, as the 2017 Person of the Year was “The Silence Breakers,” folks who spoke out against sexual abuse and harassment. Swift was featured on that magazine cover and in the magazine’s coverage.2
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
The Japanese art we mentioned above is KINTSUGI. Here’s one Reddit user’s (great!) attempt at it:
Although Swift was a content creator in 2006, we will skip the somewhat hacky observation that this may technically be Swift’s third time as TIME’s Person of the Year, if you count that “You” were the 2006 Person of the Year.