Our next edition, Trivia Newsletter CLXXXVIII, will be released on Thursday, December 28. “CLXXXVIII” is a Roman numeral represented by nine letters, and we won’t reach that length again until Trivia Newsletter CCXXXVIII in July 2024 or so.
As a stocking stuffer for you, we’ve made a quality of life upgrade in our archives. If you're scrolling through our old editions on Substack—let’s say you want to read our Christmastime edition from last year, for example—the bottom of each post now has “Previous” and “Next” buttons that you can use to navigate between editions, so you can more readily find the recap for the questions you’re reading. The below image shows what that looks like:
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) In 1991, a certain flea market opened in Orlando, Florida near International Drive. The flea market, apparently a hangout for local teens, became the namesake for WHAT, which outlasted the flea market and celebrated its 30th anniversary earlier this year?
2) Near Pushkar Lake in the state of Rajasthan in northern India, one can find the most prominent temple dedicated to WHAT Hindu god, who has far fewer temples in his honor than the other members of the Trimurti?
3) Throughout the dozens of films in which Godzilla has appeared, he’s fought with and against kaiju such as Anguirus, King Kong, Mothra, and Rodan (and mecha kaiju such as Mechagodzilla). Godzilla’s most notable foe, though, may be WHAT kaiju, who has appeared in at least ten films, including Destroy All Monsters (1968) and Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019)?
4) The football team AEK Athens, one of the three most successful Greek clubs, features WHAT animal on its emblem? The same animal is found on the flag of a country (“Country 1”) that borders Greece, a country (“Country 2”) that borders Country 1, and a country (“Country 3”) that borders Country 2.
5) NAME the United States Navy rear admiral, instrumental in the creation of the computer language COBOL, who was the first person to be interviewed for a second time on the television show 60 Minutes.
6) NAME any person, fictional or historical, who completes the theme suggested by the previous answers to this newsletter.
Trivia Newsletter CLXXXVI Recap
1) British Columbia’s Thutade Lake is the ultimate source of WHAT river, the longest river within Canada?
This is the MACKENZIE RIVER.
We asked you about the second-longest river entirely within Canada back in July 2022. We also spotted you the caveats that the Yukon River and the Saint Lawrence River partially go through the United States (and are therefore not correct answers). WHAT was that second-longest river again? The river shares a name with, but was not named after, a person who died on board what is today the oldest commissioned warship in the world. The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
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.
This is BROWNIAN MOTION.
In 1905, a young patent clerk applied the molecular theory of heat to liquids to explain the puzzle of Brownian motion. That man’s name? Albert Einstein. No, really:
In 1827, the English botanist Robert Brown noticed that pollen seeds suspended in water moved in an irregular "swarming" motion. Einstein then reasoned that if tiny but visible particles were suspended in a liquid, the invisible atoms in the liquid would bombard the suspended particles and cause them to jiggle. Einstein explained the motion in detail, accurately predicting the irregular, random motions of the particles, which could be directly observed under a microscope.
When Einstein's paper first appeared in 1905, the notion of atoms and molecules was still a subject of heated scientific debate. Ernst Mach and the physical chemist Wilhelm Ostwald were among those who chose to deny their existence. They argued that the laws of thermodynamics need not be based on mechanics, which dictated the existence of invisible atoms in motion. Ostwald in particular advocated the view that thermodynamics dealt only with energy and how it is transformed in the everyday world. [He and his followers were known as "energeticists" as a result.]
However, by May 1908, Einstein had published a second paper on Brownian motion providing even more detail than his 1905 paper, and suggesting a way to test his theory experimentally.
…
Eventually the experimental evidence supporting Einstein's theory of Brownian motion became so compelling that the naysayers were forced to accept the existence of material atoms.
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?
This is the DOUGLAS FIR. According to the state of Oregon:
Our state was built with this tree – families were nurtured by it for generations. Many still are. It is crucial to our economy. In 2004, over 417 million board feet of this softwood was harvested in western Oregon, providing jobs and every-day products we all use, including the highest quality lumber – which Oregon leads the country in producing. It is also the world’s most popular Christmas tree – and Oregon’s nurseries lead the nation in Christmas tree production.
The Douglas fir, of course, is not a true fir.
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.
This is JAMESON, the brand of Irish whiskey. The barrels in which Jameson is aged are generally not new barrels—they’re barrels that have been previously used to age bourbon or sherry. Your Trivia Factorial gift-giving advice for the whiskey drinker in your life is to buy a bottle of Redbreast 12.
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?
These are MACADAMIA nuts. Following other scandals, Cho Hyun-ah resigned from her position with Korean Air Lines years later.
6) The answers in this newsletter collectively relate most closely to WHAT country with a population under ten million people?
We were looking for SCOTLAND here. (The “under ten million” bit was to avoid arguments that “the United Kingdom” should be accepted.)
Our answers were all eponyms/namesakes. More specifically, they were all eponyms/namesakes relating to Scottish folks:
Question #1: Mackenzie River (named after explorer Alexander Mackenzie)
Question #2: Brownian motion (named after botanist Robert Brown)
Question #3: Douglas fir (named after botanist David Douglas)
Question #4: Jameson (named after John Jameson, who spent the first 30+ years of his life in Scotland)
Question #5: Macadamia nuts (named after the Scottish-Australian chemist John Macadam)
Our newsletter title (“1.21 Gigawatts...Great Scott!”) was a reference to the film Back to the Future. 1.21 gigawatts is the amount of power required to cause the DeLorean in the film to time travel, and “Great Scott!” is Doc Brown’s catchphrase. The title also gave you two clues for the theme. “Watts” are named after James Watt, who is Scottish. In addition, this newsletter required you to think about people who might each be called a “great Scot.”
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
Canada’s second-longest river is the NELSON RIVER. Our clue was about Horatio Nelson, the British admiral famous for his victories over Napoleon. Nelson was killed while on board the HMS Victory at the Battle of Trafalgar. The HMS Victory, though a museum, remains in service today.