As a reminder, our next edition, Trivia Newsletter CLXXXVII, will be released on Thursday, December 21.
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) British Columbia’s Thutade Lake is the ultimate source of WHAT river, the longest river within Canada?
2) WHAT is the colorful name for the random movement of particles suspended in a liquid or gas? The motion is generated by the particles’ collision with the fast-moving molecules in the fluid.
3) ‘Tis the season to know that in 1939, the state of Oregon designated Pseudotsuga menziesii, more commonly called a WHAT, as its state tree?
4) Guglielmo Marconi, a key figure in the development of radio, happens to be the great-grandson of the founder of the company most notable for WHAT brand of liquor, the best-selling brand of its specific type of liquor around the world? Tullamore Dew, Bushmills, and Redbreast are some of this product’s direct competitors.
5) On December 5, 2014, Cho Hyun-ah, daughter of the CEO of Korean Air Lines, was on a Korean Air flight when a flight attendant gave her a serving of a particular kind of nuts in a bag, instead of on a plate. She assaulted the attendant, caused the flight to return to its gate, and ultimately served a short prison sentence. This incident, sometimes called the “nut rage incident,” led to a massive spike of sales in WHAT kind of nut, native to Australia, in South Korea?
6) The answers in this newsletter collectively relate most closely to WHAT country with a population under ten million people?
Trivia Newsletter CLXXXV Recap
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.
This is CELERY.
Waldorf salad is often dressed in mayonnaise, which is simply ludicrous. Mayonnaise is sort of the Maroon 5 of condiments, in that there’s nothing singularly objectionable about it but also you can always just find a better replacement. Your Trivia Factorial Holiday Cooking Tip™ is not to use whipped cream in lieu of mayo, as many would suggest, but instead to use yogurt.
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?
This is SEA—as in, “from sea to shining sea” from the song “America the Beautiful,” for which Bates wrote the lyrics. Everything I learn about Bates makes her sound awesome:
Katharine Lee Bates, a professor of English at Wellesley College, had a chestnut-eyed collie named Hamlet and a green parrot named Polonius. She taught Shakespeare, and she wrote poetry. She loved to travel.
At her rambling Victorian house, a brisk walk from campus, she kept dozens of souvenirs, propped up on the mantel, displayed in glass-doored cabinets: a brass Buddha from China, an alabaster urn from an Egyptian tomb, a bottle of sand from Panama. She made a list of her favorites in a little inventory she once typed up, everything from “a lamp bought from a boy in Nazareth” to “a tin slate of a verse from the Koran.” On her desk she kept a framed portrait of Dante; she’d picked it up in Florence.
She’d been to Syria. She’d toured Palestine. She’d ridden a camel in Damascus. She’d hiked the Alps. She’d even seen the Dead Sea. But Katharine Lee Bates is best remembered for a single trip she took in 1893, a pilgrimage across the United States, and for the poem she wrote about that trip. She had an eye for grandeur and for wonder, for landscape and miniature, the poet’s version of the photographer’s eye.
These are the first four lines of “America the Beautiful”:
O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
The line “purple mountain majesties” refers to a specific mountain. In fact, Bates’s first draft of the poem that we know now as “America the Beautiful” wasn’t called “America the Beautiful” but instead was entitled the name of this mountain, which is WHAT? A nearby Major League Baseball team selected one of its colors as a nod to the connection between “America the Beautiful” and this mountain. The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
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?
This is TABLE MOUNTAIN, and the constellation is Mensa. Table Mountain overlooks Cape Town in South Africa:
Jeopardy! has been on a real Table Mountain kick lately—they also want you to know that the clouds covering Table Mountain are sometimes called "the tablecloth”:
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?
This film is THE ROCK.
I found this claim a bit hard to believe, so I dug through the thousands of pages of “The Report of the Iraq Inquiry,” and yes, this is a thing that actually happened:
Here’s that chemical weapon from The Rock, by the way:
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?
This place is BATH, as in “The Wife of Bath,” a story from The Canterbury Tales. (“Pilgrimaged” was a clue for you to think about the pilgrimage central to The Canterbury Tales.)
The Wife of Willesden is Smith's adaptation of Chaucer's "The Wife of Bath," a story from the 14th century collection The Canterbury Tales.
Her debut play follows Alvita, a Jamaican-born British woman and local legend who takes over a North West London pub where she reigns. In her mid-50s, Alvita has much life experience—including five marriages, children, and more. Smith has put a modern translation spin on Chaucer's work, showcasing wit, delving frankly into sexuality, and exploring the human talent for telling elaborate stories.
“Chaucer could not have imagined the way we have re-embodied his lines,” said Smith in a statement. “Yet I felt the presence in the rehearsal room, of Chaucer’s humor and bawdiness, his philosophical depth and intellectual perversity. All transformed by the process of passing through these various flesh-and-blood actors, with their human voices and human gestures, with which they are able to perform the miracle of turning text into experience, words into action, ideas into something like ‘life.’”
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?
This is SALT. Each of our answers is a type of salt: celery salt, sea salt, table salt, rock salt, and bath salt.
Our newsletter title, “Don’t Look Back, Bae,” was a reference both to Salt Bae, the Turkish restauranteur famous for his social-media exploits and for founding Nusr-Et, a chain of luxury steakhouses, and to Lot’s wife from the Bible, who in the Book of Genesis was turned into a pillar of salt because she disobeyed an order to not look back at Sodom and Gomorrah as fire and sulfur were rained upon them.
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
“Purple mountain majesties” from “America the Beautiful” is a nod to PIKES PEAK. The Colorado Rockies use purple in their logo and uniform because of this connection.