Today’s edition features Trivia Factorial’s sixth Wordle-themed game, because it is a truth universally acknowledged that every XXXII newsletters, we do Wordle.
We’ve added a section at the bottom of our “about page” with links to our past Wordle editions. (We also added a section for the various guest posts that we shared last year—thanks again to the authors of those.)
If you don’t know what Wordle is, this link and the rules found there may help you. Any of the recaps for the previous Wordle newsletters should be similarly instructive.
PLEASE NOTE: In some of our previous Wordle-themed newsletters, each answer was a word that could be validly used in Wordle. That rule does not apply this time! Answers will be five letters and may be, but are not necessarily, Wordle-eligible words.
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) Fidel Castro is on the reverse of Cuba’s current one-peso bill; WHAT is the last name of the man who is on the obverse of the bill?
2) Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d'Arthur begins with the words “It befell in the days of [BLANK] Pendragon, when he was king of all England…” WHAT name fills in the blank?
3) WHAT word fills in the blank in the following excerpt from Percy Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias”? “‘My name is Ozymandias, king of [BLANK]: / Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’”
4) ¿QUÉ MES sigue inmediatamente a 'mayo' cronológicamente? Por favor responda en español.
5) “The merchant of death is dead,” wrote a French newspaper in 1888 about a person with WHAT last name, who passed away in 1896?
6) WHAT WNBA team name, omitting the relevant city or state, could fit the theme of this newsletter? The below image may help you:
[Do not assume the chart necessarily represents optimal guesses. As stated above, the answers to Questions #1 through #6 may be, or may not be, dictionary words that would be accepted in a standard game of Wordle.]
Trivia Newsletter CXCI Recap
We ran into some food poisoning over the weekend, so this recap is, like a W-2 form for an employee who didn’t consent to receive electronic communications, mailed in.
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?
This game is BANG! It’s pretty good! The game is chaotic and there’s a lot of luck involved, compared to other party/politics games, but we think it merits a try among you and your game-playing friends. Read more about it here.
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?
This song is “AT LAST.” This question, of course, was not intended as a swipe at James, the song, or anyone who’s used it at their weddings. It’s a good song!
Here’s James, writing about the song in her autobiography:
I was no longer a teenager. I was twenty-two and sophisticated. Or at least I wanted to be sophisticated. So when Harvey [Fuqua, formerly of the Moonglows, and then James’s boyfriend] got out his “Book of One Hundred Standards” and began playing through old songs, I got excited. I saw in that music the mysterious life that my mother had led when I was a little girl, the life I secretly dreamed of living myself. I wanted to escape into a world of glamour and grace and easy sin.
“At Last” was the first one to hit big…. Because of the way I phrased it, some people started calling me a jazz singer.
In 2009, Etta James said the following, about Barack Obama:
You guys know your president, right? You know the one with the big ears? Wait a minute, he ain't my president. He might be yours; he ain't my president. But I tell you that woman he had singing for him, singing my song — she's going to get her ass whupped.
WHO IS “that woman” that James is referring to? The answer is at the end of this newsletter.1
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?
This is a POUND CAKE, because 454 grams is approximately a pound. You can just read The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy online right now, which is pretty awesome.
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.
This is $2.13. Of course, some states have different rules. The Department of Labor has a nice summary here.
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.
This is TWENTY PERCENT. We’ll let NPR’s Planet Money summarize:
WOODS: The Pareto principle, stated simply, is this - 80% of outcomes are generated by 20% of causes. Turney McKee is a director at a think tank called The Decision Lab, and that uses behavioral science to advise corporations and governments. And he says that the 80/20 rule is a mainstay in the management consulting field.
…
WONG: In fact, a real empirical observation is where this story begins. The 80/20 rule made its first appearance in Italy in the late 1800s, and it showed up in the work of a scholar named Vilfredo Pareto.
…
WONG: And it was during his economist era in the late 1800s that he made an observation. He calculated that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by about 20% of the population.
MCKEE: This was then generalized out to 80% of income, as well as 80% of wealth, were either generated or held by roughly 20% of individuals within a particular country and then that was later generalized out to globally as well.
…
WONG: Pareto died in 1923. Decades later, a management consultant in the U.S. named Joseph Duran applied Pareto's 80/20 concept to business. He called it the Pareto principle, and he said, if you look around, you'll see it's practically universal. Joseph Duran's endorsement of the Pareto principle enshrined the 80/20 rule as a foundational concept for corporate CEOs and business consultants.
WOODS: And interestingly, there are examples in business and economics where the Pareto principle shows up. Microsoft, for example, has said that 20% of common bugs in software causes 80% of system failures. In health care, there's research showing that 20% of Medicare patients account for 80% of spending.
(The actual podcast, we should note, goes on to use anecdotes to poke some holes in the 80/20 generalization.)
6) WHAT nine-letter word, a particular role or profession, could continue the theme of this newsletter?
This was a newsletter about the following area on a typical QWERTY keyboard:
The five answers alluded in some way to the corresponding symbols: Bang!, “At Last,” pound cake, $2.13, and twenty percent. A nine-letter profession that references the ^ symbol, or the “caret,” is CARETAKER.
Our newsletter title, “Powershifting,” referred both to how these symbols are typed out by using the Shift key and to the fact that the ^ symbol is used in mathematics when taking a number to the power of a particular exponent (e.g., 2^2 is how you might write 2², or 4).
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
Etta James was referring to BEYONCÉ, who performed “At Last” for the Obamas as part of Obama’s inaugural ball. She played Etta James in the 2008 film Cadillac Records and performed “At Last” for the film’s soundtrack. Beyoncé’s version of “At Last” eventually was listed on the Billboard Jazz Songs chart; it's her only song to do so.