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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) Hell’s Kitchen, MasterChef, MasterChef Junior, and Kitchen Nightmares are all shows helmed by chef Gordon Ramsey that have aired at least eight seasons in the United States. NAME the Ramsey show that, in contrast, is relatively new to American audiences, debuting on January 2, 2022 on FOX. The show’s set features three kitchens stacked on top of one another.
2) The University of Michigan faces the University of Washington in the 2024 College Football Playoff National Championship. NAME the university that is the reigning CFP champion; in its victory last year, the school set the record for largest margin of victory in a bowl game, which it then surpassed nine days ago in the Orange Bowl.
3) Wings and 7th Heaven were among the first works to be honored with WHAT, designed by Cedric Gibbons?
4) In 1994, NBC aired an episode of Seinfeld called “The Mom and Pop Store” and an episode of Friends called “The One Where Underdog Gets Away.” Both episodes, as well as the start of the 1947 film Miracle on 34th Street, feature WHAT event that first took place in 1924?
5) Jimmy Carter is the most recent president to deliver WHAT in writing to Congress, doing so in 1981? This act fulfilled the requirements of Article II, Section 3, Clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution.
6) This newsletter alludes to five items that appear, respectively, as #92, #74, #60, #45, and #21 on a recently published list. WHAT, unsurprisingly, is #1 on that list?
Trivia Newsletter CLXXXIX Recap
1) Many universities have “facebooks,” directories of current students with photographs. The facebook for the University of Chicago Law School, from which Laura Wingfield presumably did not graduate, bizarrely shares its name with WHAT 1944 memory play?
This is THE GLASS MENAGERIE.
Why is UChicago Law’s facebook called that? Our story starts with what the law school’s central building looks like:
That building, designed by architect Eero Saarinen, was completed in 1959. Three years later, the school’s Law Student Association published a set of caricatures of faculty members created by David Rothman, a student graduating that year, and he entitled that set The Glass Menagerie, referring to the above building. “A menagerie is where animals are kept and trained for exhibition, such as in a circus,” the Law School itself helpfully states. That set of caricatures was the genesis for what is now the student facebook.
Charmingly, you can go to Rothman’s website and look at the caricatures. For example, here’s Rothman’s take on Professor Soia Mentschikoff:
Our best guess is that the discussion referenced in the image regards the Uniform Commercial Code, which makes some sense: In addition to being one of the first female partners at a Wall Street firm and being the first woman to teach at the law schools at Harvard and Chicago, Mentschikoff was a primary drafter of the Uniform Commercial Code.
Oh, remember architect Eero Saarinen from a couple of paragraphs ago? You’ll want to know a few things about him for Jeopardy!—he’s Finnish, he designed many buildings, he designed chairs including the “womb chair” and “tulip chair,” and he designed (according to the National Park Service) the tallest U.S. monument, which is WHAT? The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
1) William Goldman never published a sequel to his novel The Princess Bride, but he did build me up with suspense by including a chapter of the sequel in some editions of the novel. The unfinished sequel includes in its title the name of WHAT character, also the titular character of The Princess Bride?
This is BUTTERCUP—the unfinished sequel is Buttercup’s Baby. “Build me up” was a clue in the question to get you to think of the song “Build Me Up Buttercup” by the Foundations. We’ve never read or seen The Princess Bride, but we suspect that Goldman was having a bit of fun with people, and there was never really a planned sequel.
1) A woman between the ages of 18 and 34, as one example, must run a qualifying marathon with a time under three hours and thirty minutes in order to qualify for a general spot in WHAT race, which has been held 127 times? Due to the race’s popularity, the cutoffs are even stricter than the published times—for the 2024 edition of the race, 11,039 qualifying runners applied and were nonetheless turned away.
This is the BOSTON MARATHON. This Medium post from a few years ago sums up the task of qualifying for Boston:
Qualifying for the Boston Marathon is a long-standing goal for many marathoners. To qualify runners must achieve a gender and age related cut-off time in a qualifying marathon. For example, 45–49 year old men need to beat 3 hours and 25 minutes to be in with a shot of qualifying. However, the high demand for participation in the fabled Boston Marathon is such that achieving your BQ standard is not a guarantee for entry, and in recent years increasingly many qualifying runners have been excluded due to limits on participation numbers. For example, a recent Runners World article highlights that, on average, runners had to beat their qualification times by an additional 4 minutes and 52 seconds in order to gain entry into next year’s (2019) race, and consequently more than 7,000 ‘qualifying’ runners who applied could not be accommodated.
1) Whoopi Goldberg is the first Black woman to win the Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album (called the Grammy Award for Best Comedy Recording at the time). NAME the second Black woman to do so, for the album Black Mitzvah; she’s also won a Primetime Emmy for hosting Saturday Night Live, and she appeared in the 2017 film Girls Trip.
This is TIFFANY HADDISH. Haddish’s best performance, of course, was as Tuca in the animated series Tuca & Bertie:
Like Tuca, Haddish loves to party, but also relates to her on an emotional level. "What I love about this series is that we visit Tuca trying to deal with her emotions and how she's been dealing with them. Which is something that I was doing in my 20s and early-30s," she revealed. "Just getting rid of and stuffing them away. But here's the thing, those emotions always come back with a vengeance. So it's best to deal with them right then and there."
Haddish is currently beefing with comedian Katt Williams about something or other, which you can read about here.
1) Tom Cruise has starred in many box-office blockbusters, but according to film-industry website The Numbers, Cruise has taken three “L”s in his career, as his three lowest-grossing films (domestic) have been Losin’ It (1983), Lions for Lambs (2007), and WHAT 1980s film directed by Ridley Scott?
This is LEGEND. Cruise was just coming off of Risky Business and Scott’s previous film had been Blade Runner, so expectations were high for Legend. Those expectations were not met, and like tears in rain, Legend is a largely forgotten film. Roger Ebert wrote:
Despite all its sound and fury, "Legend" is a movie I didn't care very much about. All of the special effects in the world, and all of the great makeup, and all of the great Muppet creatures can't save a movie that has no clear idea of its own mission and no joy in its own accomplishment.
1) Decius Brutus (Julius Caesar), Sebastian (The Tempest), and Timon (Timon of Athens) are the only three characters in Shakespeare’s plays to say WHAT word (whether singular or plural), this newsletter’s theme, which is also mentioned several times in the King James Bible?
This was a newsletter where you had to find the UNICORNS that were just out of sight:2
A key symbol/plot element in The Glass Menagerie, the play, is Laura’s glass unicorn.
Buttercup is the unicorn toy character in Toy Story 3 and Toy Story 4.3
The unicorn is synonymous with the Boston Marathon—it’s at the finish line, on the finishing medals and jackets, and such.
Tiffany Haddish’s memoir is entitled The Last Black Unicorn.
Unicorns are central to the plot of Legend—Cruise’s character is the keeper of the unicorns.
We numbered each of the questions as #1 to give you a further clue (since “uni-” suggests “one”). Finally, our newsletter title, “Another Scotland Newsletter?”, relates to the fact that the national animal of Scotland is the unicorn (which is why a unicorn appears on the coat of arms of the UK), and also pokes a bit of fun at ourselves, since Scotland was central to a very recent edition of Trivia Factorial.
It took a great amount of restraint not to refer to the Peter S. Beagle novel The Last Unicorn, beloved by us—some of you who are on LearnedLeague may know that we wrote a One-Day Special on it (and its film adaptation) a couple years back. We’ll leave you with this fantastic post from Animation Obsessive about the making of that film:
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
Eero Saarinen created the design for the GATEWAY ARCH in St. Louis.
Question #6’s clues about Shakespeare quotes and the Bible were probably not truly useful, other than as a way for us to pin the answer, but these two links will show you the nine times where the Bible mentions unicorn or unicorns, and here are the Shakespeare quotes. We suspect that Sebastian’s is the most notable:
Sebastian: A living drollery. Now I will believe
That there are unicorns, that in Arabia
There is one tree, the phoenix' throne, one phoenix
At this hour reigning there.
Decius Brutus: Never fear that: if he be so resolved,
I can o'ersway him; for he loves to hear
That unicorns may be betray'd with trees,
And bears with glasses, elephants with holes,
Lions with toils and men with flatterers;
But when I tell him he hates flatterers,
He says he does, being then most flattered.
Let me work;
For I can give his humour the true bent,
And I will bring him to the Capitol.
Timon: A beastly ambition, which the gods grant thee t'
attain to! If thou wert the lion, the fox would
beguile thee; if thou wert the lamb, the fox would
eat three: if thou wert the fox, the lion would
suspect thee, when peradventure thou wert accused by
the ass: if thou wert the ass, thy dulness would
torment thee, and still thou livedst but as a
breakfast to the wolf: if thou wert the wolf, thy
greediness would afflict thee, and oft thou shouldst
hazard thy life for thy dinner: wert thou the
unicorn, pride and wrath would confound thee and
make thine own self the conquest of thy fury: wert
thou a bear, thou wouldst be killed by the horse:
wert thou a horse, thou wouldst be seized by the
leopard: wert thou a leopard, thou wert german to
the lion and the spots of thy kindred were jurors on
thy life: all thy safety were remotion and thy
defence absence. What beast couldst thou be, that
were not subject to a beast? and what a beast art
thou already, that seest not thy loss in
transformation!
In a typo we fixed up shortly before publication, we had written Tory Story 3, and let’s just say it’s hard to imagine that series getting to a third film.