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. Like most trivia, the answers can be readily found via Google, so you’re on the honor system (i.e., do not use external resources to help you answer any of the questions). The SIXTH question of each set is generally designed to be a question that cannot be easily Googled; correct answers to those will be tracked and recognized in the next newsletter. The answers, and the next set of questions, will be published on Mondays and Thursdays.
1) The Battle of Al Wajbah took place in March 1893 on a small peninsula on the northeastern coast of the Arabian Peninsula. The battle, between the Ottoman Empire and one of its provinces, is considered a defining moment in the eventual establishment of WHAT nation as an independent state, thanks in part to the leadership of Jassim bin Mohammed Al Thani?
2) The below statement contains placeholders X, Y, and Z, each of which stands in for a word. NAME any of what X, Y, or Z stands for:
Although sources vary, according to the Pew Research Center, the European countries with the highest percentage of X among their populations (excluding microstates such as, of course, the Vatican) are, in no particular order, Poland, Ireland, Malta, Italy, and Y, a country that borders the Adriatic Sea. The country in the world with the most X in the world is not in Europe, though; according to the CIA Factbook, Z has more X than any other country.
3) In the late 19th century, a series of stock market crashes and depressions hit many countries around the world; for example, Argentina faced a years-long depression that hit immigrants especially hard. An association of wealthy immigrants in Buenos Aires formed the “Wilhelmina Society,” a charity intended to help their fellow countrymen who had come to Argentina from WHAT specific nation?
4) The Desastre de Tânger refers to a massive military failure in 1437 by WHAT person, generally regarded as the primary initiator of the “Age of Discovery”? Though this person is generally known by a famous appellation, he was not known by it at the time; that title came from German historians and British biographers in the nineteenth century.
5) The following quote, describing the thoughts of a character contemplating the guillotine, is the last sentence of WHAT novel? “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.” Part of the work’s first sentence, which is 119 words long, is likely more famous.
6) WHAT is the theme of this newsletter, as suggested by the first five questions and the newsletter title?
Trivia Newsletter CVII Recap
1) In yoga, the Hanumanasana (or “Monkey Pose”) and Samakonasana, though not full-bodied poses per se, are examples of poses that place the practitioner in WHAT physical position (which may or may not have an “s” at the end)? Bowling and ice cream aficionados may know this answer in other contexts.
The answer here is THE SPLITS (or “SPLIT”).
Split is a 2016 film directed by M. Night Shyamalan that stars James McAvoy and Anya Taylor-Joy. The next two paragraphs are going to have a bunch of spoilers for Split, so watch out!
In Shyamalan’s typical fashion, Split has a plot twist. Taylor-Joy’s character, the protagonist, is kidnapped by McAvoy’s character, an awkward misfit who suffers from dissociative identity disorder. McAvoy’s character has 23 personalities, and as the film proceeds, we are alerted that McAvoy’s character may have a mysterious 24th personality, a superstrong monster known as “The Beast.” A bunch of things happen, and as we approach the ending, Taylor-Joy’s character almost escapes, and “The Beast” corners her and notices scars from self-inflicted wounds on her body. Thus, the monster lets her go, as it apparently reasons that she has suffered like he has. The “twist” is that Taylor-Joy’s character is rescued by the police and is released to the custody of her uncle, who has previously been revealed to have abused Taylor-Joy’s character in the past. And that’s pretty dark and sad, right?
The movie then shows a twistier twist in a post-credits scene, when Bruce Willis appears and it becomes clear that Split is a stealth sequel to Shyamalan’s 2000 film Unbreakable. Shyamalan followed up Split with Glass (2019), and that trilogy is sometimes called the “Eastrail 177 Trilogy” (the Eastrail 177 is the train in Unbreakable that crashed and set the plot of the trilogy in motion).
Domestically, Shyamalan’s three best movies (in terms of box office receipts) were The Sixth Sense, Signs, and Split. Something about the letter “S” works for the man, I guess. WHAT FILM is fourth on this list? A word was dropped from the film’s title before its release to avoid confusion with a film that came out a year prior. The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
2) NAME the opera singer, known as the “Swedish Nightingale,” who was one of the most highly regarded nineteenth-century singers. Emily Dickinson wrote the following about one of the effervescent singer’s concerts during her tour of America with P.T. Barnum: “[H]ow bouquets fell in showers, and the roof was rent with applause – how it thundered outside, and inside with the thunder of God and of men – judge ye which was the loudest.”
This is JENNY LIND.
People really liked saying superlative things about Lind. “There will not in a whole century be born another being so gifted as she,” said the composer Felix Mendelssohn, whom she collaborated with. “Through Jenny Lind I first became sensible of the holiness of Art,” said Hans Christian Andersen (most famous for writing fairy tales such as “The Little Mermaid”), adding “[t]hrough her I learned that one must forget one's self in the service of the Supreme. No books, no men, have had a more ennobling influence upon me as a poet than Jenny Lind.” Andersen had a thing for Lind: Andersen’s fairy tale “The Nightingale” was likely inspired by Lind and is the probable source of her nickname. Andersen even proposed to Lind; she said no by writing back:
Farewell… God bless and protect my brother is the sincere wish of his affectionate sister, Jenny.
P.T. Barnum, in order to drum up interest for Lind’s American tour, launched a PR blitz for Lind:
You can read about that, and much more (including how Lind improbably became embroiled in arguments at the time over the abolition of slavery), in this very good article.
3) Imperial Woman, written by Pearl S. Buck in 1956, is a fictionalized biography of a concubine of the Xianfeng Emperor; upon his reign finishing in 1861, she became the de facto head of the Qing dynasty. Thus, Imperial Dynasty is about WHAT woman, sometimes called the “Empress Dowager”?
This is CIXI.
In 1903, American painter Katharine Carl was asked to travel to China and paint a portrait of Empress Dowager Cixi for exhibition at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis. This was surprising, as China typically did not allow images of their royalty to be publicly disseminated. Carl spent nine months in Beijing’s Forbidden City working on the portraits, one of which is shown below (and is now at the Smithsonian in D.C.):
4) NAME the king of the Neo-Babylonian Empire from 605 BC to 562 BC. Generally regarded as one of the greatest kings of that empire, he may be most famous today for his Biblical appearances (the prophet Daniel interprets his dreams), his brutal military campaigns in the Levant, or for his construction projects (he may have commissioned the Hanging Gardens of Babylon for one of his wives).
This is NEBUCHADNEZZAR II.
The Ishtar Gate, the eighth gate to the city of Babylon, was built by order of Nebuchadnezzar II. It is named after Ishtar, the Babylonian goddess of war and fertility. Jeopardy! likes to ask about Ishtar, especially as a “same name” construction with the 1987 film Ishtar starring Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman that was a box-office bust and critical failure. Elaine May, its director, continues to defend the movie: “If all of the people who hate Ishtar had seen it, I would be a rich woman today.”
Through the Ishtar Gate ran the Processional Way, which was lined with walls showing about 120 lions, bulls, dragons, and flowers. Those walls are located in museums all around the world; for example, one of the lions is at the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago:
The Oriental Institute’s website claims that the lion’s mouth is “opened in a threatening roar.” Maybe he’s just yawning?
5) NAME the vintage film that belongs to, and precedes, the following set of films: Magnum Force, The Enforcer, Sudden Impact, The Dead Pool. I know what you’re thinking—did the film franchise alluded to in this question have six films or only five? Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement, I've kinda lost track myself.
The film is DIRTY HARRY. The second sentence of the question was drawing on the famous quote by Clint Eastwood’s character from Dirty Harry:
I know what you're thinking, punk. You're thinking “Did he fire six shots or only five?” Now to tell you the truth, I've forgotten myself in all this excitement. But being this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world and will blow your head clean off, you've gotta ask yourself a question: “Do I feel lucky?” Well, do ya, punk?
I don’t need to tell you the plot of Dirty Harry because you’ve already seen the same story over and over. It’s all but codified in our culture—a police officer will stop at nothing to stop a serial killer, blurring the lines between cop and criminal and raising the question of how far a free democratic society will, or should, go to protect itself. Roger Ebert gave the film three stars, wrote a bunch of nice things about it, and threw in “The movie's moral position is fascist. No doubt about it.”
Defenders of the movie point to the fact that the movie itself is more nuanced than its cultural legacy. IMDB wants you to know in its trivia section about the film that “John Milius wrote his draft of this movie inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s studies in lone-gun detectives, while producer and director Don Siegel tackled the material from the viewpoint of bigotry.” The film’s original trailer starts with the voiceover “This is about a movie about a couple of killers,” further suggesting a duality that might be absent from many of the film’s imitators.
6) Each of the five sets of questions and answers above refers to an item belonging to WHAT set, the theme of this newsletter? Several parts of the set have not been named or alluded to in this newsletter.
This was a newsletter about WINE BOTTLE SIZES. You may or may not know that wine bottles of non-standard sizes have specific names, as shown in the below chart:
Each question pointed to one of these wine bottles, while also alluding to a word that is sometimes associated with wine tasting:
Question #1: The answer was “split” (the smallest size), and the question included the word “full-bodied,” a wine tasting term.
Question #2: The singer was Jenny Lind, and a “jennie” is another small bottle. We described her as effervescent, which just means, in a wine context, bubbly.
Question #3: The work in the question was Imperial Woman, and so “imperial” was the wine bottle size we pointed to. It was sly, but we included “finished” in the question to point to a wine’s “finish.”
Question #4: Nebuchadnezzar is what the largest wine bottle size is called. We added “brutal” in the question to point to “brut” (which is the French word for “dry”).
Question #5: “Magnum,” another wine bottle size, was in the question, and we threw the word “vintage” into the question as well.
Newsletter Title: Knowing and saying the different types of wine bottles is a way, literally, to “speak volumes.”
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link. (We should be all caught up, as of 18 hours ago.)
THE LAST AIRBENDER (“Avatar” was dropped from the title to avoid confusion with James Cameron’s film Avatar, which came out in 2009).