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) Also the name of the highest-charting single (on the Billboard Hot 100) by indie-pop trio AJR, WHAT is the name of the social-deduction card game with a “spaghetti Western” theme designed by Emiliano Sciarra wherein one may play as the Sheriff or as Deputies, Outlaws, or Renegades?
2) The 2010 TIME article “Top 10 Overplayed Wedding Songs” and the 2018 PopSugar article “50 Wedding Songs You Should Avoid If You Want Your Big Day to Be Unique” both prominently feature Etta James’s 1960 cover of WHAT song, which was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999?
3) Hannah Glasse’s wildly popular eighteenth-century cookbook The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy contains a recipe that suggests using twelve eggs together with approximately 454 grams of each of butter, flour, and sugar to make WHAT?
4) According to the U.S. Department of Labor, under federal law, an employer of a “tipped employee” is only required to pay WHAT amount per hour in direct wages to the employee if that amount, combined with the tips received by the employee, equals at least the federal minimum wage? That three-digit number, sans decimal point, is also the original area code established in 1947 for southern California, including Los Angeles.
5) In the late nineteenth century, economist Vilfredo Pareto asserted that approximately eighty percent of the land in Italy was owned by approximately WHAT portion of the Italian population? This observation was later borrowed by management consultant Joseph Moses Juran in the context of quality control.
6) WHAT nine-letter word, a particular role or profession, could continue the theme of this newsletter?
A quick interstitial reminder for the many of you who participate in LearnedLeague: The Hidden Connections 3 MiniLeague starts up on Tuesday, January 16th! The team behind that has a great lineup of hidden connections, and the deadline to sign up is very soon. You can do that here.
Trivia Newsletter CXC Recap
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.
This is NEXT LEVEL CHEF—the idea is that there are three kitchens of varying quality:
Here are some phrases that The Guardian uses to review the UK version of the show (which appears to have the same format as the US version):
“Bizarre, banal nonsense”
“How bewildering”
“[O]bsessed with contrived competition”
“[B]reathless, bewildering gabble of a show”
The Great British Bake Off, it is not.
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.
This was the UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA, sometimes shortened to “UGA.” The team mascot is the Bulldogs, and appropriately enough the team’s live mascot is Uga the bulldog:
We included the Google Search caption there, because we like the idea that Uga is perpetuating the scam.
We’re sad to announce that Uga doesn’t hold a candle to the University of Washington’s live mascot, Dubs (they’re the Huskies):
3) Wings and 7th Heaven were among the first works to be honored with WHAT, designed by Cedric Gibbons?
We were looking for ACADEMY AWARDS, or OSCARS.
Wings (1927) is the film that won the first Academy Award for Outstanding Picture (now Best Picture), and Frank Borzage (director) and Janet Gaynor (Best Actress) were recognized in connection with 7th Heaven (1927).
This question was a bit of a misdirect, since Wings is also the name of a sitcom that ran from 1990 to 1997, and 7th Heaven is also the name of a family drama that ran from 1996 to 2007. The intended thought process (for those of you who don’t automatically know that Wings won the first Best Picture, since we know some of you do) was for you to think “The Emmys? The Golden Globes? But that doesn’t really make a lot of sense—why would it be those two random TV shows? Wait, the question doesn’t say TV shows. What’s going on here?”
Wings and 7th Heaven, the films, entered the public domain in the U.S. in 2023. NAME the star of Wings, who was unhappy with her role, saying “[Wings is]...a man's picture and I'm just the whipped cream on top of the pie.” Jeopardy! sometimes wants you to know that she was “the It Girl” of the 1920s. The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
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?
This is the MACY’S THANKSGIVING DAY PARADE.
We’re making this a quote, since otherwise it’ll sound like we’re making it up, but the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade had the partial role of replacing New York’s Ragamuffin Day:
Before Halloween was the holiday known for dressing up in costume and begging for candy (this practice did not become common until the 1940s and '50s), children in NYC often participated in what was called Ragamuffin Day. On Ragamuffin Day—which was Thanksgiving Day—children would dress themselves in rags and oversized, overdone parodies of beggars (à la Charlie Chaplin's character “The Tramp”). The ragamuffins would then ask neighbors and adults on the street, “Anything for Thanksgiving?” The usual response would be pennies, an apple, or a piece of candy.
The New York Tribune ran an article on November 21, 1909 which dated the tradition 40 years back to about 1870. Reverend James M. Farrar said, “Those of you who have always lived in New York do not think of this Thanksgiving game of ragamuffin as a strange custom, but the strangers coming to our city are greatly surprised, and ask what it means.” Farrar thought that the tradition of “dressing in old clothes, many sizes too large, painting their faces or putting on masks” was “here to stay.”
However, by 1930, articles were appearing in The New York Times calling for an end to the practice. William J. O'Shea, Superintendent of Schools at the time, sent a circular to the district superintendents and principals which stated that “modernity is incompatible with the custom of children to masquerade and annoy adults on Thanksgiving day.” Shea also stated, “many citizens complain that on Thanksgiving Day they are annoyed by children dressed as ragamuffins, who beg for money and gifts.”
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.
This is the STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS. The relevant portion of the Constitution states this obligation of the president:
He shall from time to time give to the Congress information of the State of the Union and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.
A trivia chestnut that often comes up is that the State of the Union was generally delivered in writing until Woodrow Wilson began the practice of delivering it as a speech, in part as a way to rally support for his agenda. In 1981, Carter delivered the State of the Union in writing on his way out, and Ronald Reagan started the practice of delivering a SOTU-like speech in his first year that is not actually the “State of the Union” speech. Reagan’s was entitled “Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the Program for Economic Recovery.”
This handy website contains a list of all of the State of the Union addresses.
We should have probably made this a newsletter theme and not a throwaway line in a recap, but if a newsletter asked you for the Monroe Doctrine, FDR’s Four Freedoms, the kickoff of California’s “Gold Rush,”2 Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, and George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil,” the theme of that newsletter would be “things introduced in State of the Union speeches.”
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?
Our answer is SUPER BOWL LVII (we accepted “Super Bowl”), as the list we alluded to was the list of top-watched television broadcasts in 2023 in the United States. Next Level Chef (as the Super Bowl leadout show), the CFP national championship, the Oscars, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, and the State of the Union address were five of the seven broadcasts in the top 100 that were not National Football League games. (The other two were other college-football games.)
Our newsletter title (“Surely You Can’t Be Serious”) is, of course, a reference to the iconic line from the film Airplane!:
That line is directed towards, and the equally iconic response (“I am serious, and don’t call me Shirley”) is given by, the character played by Leslie Nielsen, and it was the Nielsen ratings we were asking you to consider.
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
The star of Wings and the original It Girl was CLARA BOW.
We cannot get over that James Polk just told people in 1848 that there’s a bunch of gold in California that they could go get right now:
It was known that mines of the precious metals existed to a considerable extent in California at the time of its acquisition. Recent discoveries render it probable that these mines are more extensive and valuable than was anticipated. The accounts of the abundance of gold in that territory are of such an extraordinary character as would scarcely command belief were they not corroborated by the authentic reports of officers in the public service who have visited the mineral district and derived the facts which they detail from personal observation.