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1) Also a word for a shade of green and a (perhaps outdated) first name, WHAT six-letter word describes a specific family of plants whose members include eucalyptus, guava, rose apple, Surinam cherry, and feijoa? Allspice, clove, and oil of bay rum are spices derived from plants of this family.
2) Firm, united let us be,
Rallying round our liberty,
As a band of brothers joined,
Peace and safety we shall find.
These words are the chorus of WHAT patriotic song, now primarily used as the ceremonial entrance march of the vice president of the United States?
3) Of the fifty U.S. state capital cities, seventeen are the most populous cities in their states (based upon the most recent census). For example, Atlanta, GA is one of these seventeen cities (as no city in Georgia has more people than Atlanta), but Raleigh, NC is not (as Charlotte has more people than Raleigh does). NAME the two capital cities that are the least populous of those seventeen; they start with the same letter.
4) Hỏa Lò Prison, originally used by French colonists in Indochina for political prisoners, at various times held captives such as Nguyễn Chí Thiện and Floyd James Thompson. WHAT two-word alliterative name was sometimes used to sardonically refer to the prison? The phrase was reportedly first written down by Navy aviator Robert H. Shumaker.
5) NAME the university that is the reigning NCAA Women's Division I Basketball Championship winner; the school won its first such championship in 2017 and its second in 2022.
6) NAME the distinction, related to the theme of this newsletter, shared by each of the following films at least in part: The Big Chill (1983), Full Metal Jacket (1987), Glory (1989), Magic Mike XXL (2015), The Notebook (2004), The Patriot (2000), The Secret Life of Bees (2008).
Trivia Newsletter CIX Recap
This recap is shorter than usual due to ongoing holiday/end-of-year obligations. We’ll also catch up on the Brazil-Croatia question challenge in the near future.
1) Chance the Rapper’s song “How Great” includes the lyric “Hosanna Santa invoked and woke up enslaved people from Southampton to Chatham Manor.” “Southampton” almost certainly refers to Southampton County, Virginia and to a rebellion led by WHAT man in 1831?
This is NAT TURNER.
The Confessions of Nat Turner is a novel by William Styron, who also wrote Sophie’s Choice, the novel. Confessions won a Pulitzer Prize, was included in TIME’s 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005, and was named by Bill Clinton as one of his 21 favorite books in 2003. The book has also been met by considerable backlash, however, due in part to Styron’s position as a white author.
2) The Creation, The Seasons, and The Seven Last Words of Christ are some of the many works of WHAT Austrian composer, sometimes called the “Father of the Symphony” and whose tomb, oddly enough, contains two skulls?
This is JOSEPH HAYDN. Read more about that two-skull thing here.
3) The below image depicts a painting by Roy Lichtenstein (based on original art by Tony Abruzzo) that is one of the most famous pop-art paintings. It is sometimes known by the names Secret Hearts or I Don’t Care! I’d Rather Sink, but is most commonly known by WHAT quite literal two-word name?
This one is DROWNING GIRL. Let’s quote MoMA:
Many of Roy Lichtenstein’s early paintings appropriated imagery found in comic books. Drowning Girl, samples a page from issue #83 of Secret Hearts, a romance comic book illustrated by Tony Abruzzo and published by DC Comics in 1962. In Abruzzo’s original illustration, the drowning girl’s boyfriend appears in the background, clinging to a capsized boat. Meanwhile, the drowning girl in the foreground laments with closed eyes.
To create Drowning Girl, Lichtenstein cropped Abruzzo’s splash page (a comic book page with a single image surrounded by a frame), showing the woman alone and encircled by a threatening wave. He also changed the caption from “I don’t care if I have a cramp!” to “I don’t care!” and the boyfriend’s name from Mal to Brad. Describing his use of the comics medium, Lichtenstein says, “My work is actually different from comic strips in that every mark is really in a different place, however slight the difference seems to some. The difference is often not great, but it is crucial.”
Critics continue to debate the differences between Lichtenstein’s painting and Abruzzo’s illustration. The similarities continue to invite questions about authorship, style, and the value society ascribes to different forms of art.
4) The Royal Burial Ground in the Frogmore estate near Windsor Castle is generally used by the British royal family for the burial of family members who were not themselves sovereigns. Of the approximately thirty people buried in the Royal Burial Ground, NAME the only person who was born in North America; this person passed away in 1986.
This is WALLIS SIMPSON. King Edward VIII abdicated the British throne in 1936 in order to marry Simpson, an American twice-divorced socialite. (Trivia Factorial doesn’t care about the twice-divorced part, but Jeopardy! likes to mention it.) Simpson is the answer to “Who was the first woman to be named TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year?” (though they used “Woman of the Year” for that one at the time).
Excluding Soong Mei-ling (named together with Chiang Kai-shek as “Man and Woman of the Year” in 1937), NAME the two other women named as TIME’s Woman of the Year before 1999; one was given this distinction in 1952, and the other in 1986. (You can disregard communal categories such as “U.S. Scientists” or 1975’s “American Women.”) The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
5) The title of a film that won the Academy Award for Best Picture in the 1980s, the titles of two different songs that are both in the Rolling Stone’s top 250 songs of all time, and the name of a certain horseshoe-shaped geographic belt that is about 25,000 miles long all end with WHAT two words?
This was “OF FIRE” (Chariots of Fire, “Ring of Fire,” “Great Balls of Fire,” and Ring of Fire).
Buy a fire extinguisher! Fire is very bad [citation needed] and a fire extinguisher is one of the very best “value to dollar” purchases that anyone can make to mitigate day-to-day risks. Here’s a link to some fire extinguisher that looks fine. Just buy it! Like we always say here at Trivia Factorial, “you can’t learn trivia if you’re on fire.”
6) Here are some pairs of numbers that have a certain property, which property is related to the theme of this newsletter. IDENTIFY the number that has been replaced by X in the final pair shown:
(1, 8)
(7, 9)
(8, 10)
(10, 19)
(19, X)
Questions #1 through #5 all had answers (Nat Turner, Joseph Haydn, Drowning Girl, Wallis Simpson, “of fire”) where the last letter of the first word was also the first letter of the second word. Our newsletter title (“How Wheat This Sound”) was an adaptation of the line “how sweet the sound” from the song “Amazing Grace” (which itself also follows our phrase rule), except the words were changed to make each word’s first letter the previous word’s last letter.
Thus, the rule describing these pairs was “figure out what letter the first number ends with, and then the second number is the number that next follows the first number that starts with that letter.” So, “one” ends with “e,” and the next number that starts with “e” is “eight.” “Nineteen” ends with “n,” and the next number that starts with “n” is “NINETY,” the answer to Question #6.
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link. (We’re all caught up, as of twelve hours ago.)
QUEEN ELIZABETH II and CORAZON AQUINO.