Today’s questions were written by Patrick Iber, the lead editor for the recently completed Hidden Connections 3 MiniLeague on LearnedLeague. He’s written several sets of questions with us: Check out our About Page for a list of our past guest posts.
(Our newsletter title today, “Guest Post,” merely describes the newsletter and is not a hint regarding the newsletter’s theme.)
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) Doing research for this question, it dawned on me that James Rado, who was the co-author of the book and lyrics of a particular musical, was born on January 23, 1932. But what really sent me to the fifth dimension was the realization that (according to further research) some people born on that day are calm and sensitive, while others are enthusiastic and active. WHAT was the musical?
2) WHO was the costume designer for Rear Window, Samson and Delilah, Roman Holiday, All About Eve, and many other films, and whose eight Academy Awards are the most of any woman?
3) WHAT inanimate object is the typical shape that the Dungeons & Dragons monster known as a “mimic” assumes?
4) The fruit of the rose—which can be used in jams and teas—is sometimes referred to as a hee or a haw, but most often called WHAT?
5) At 2:02 pm on October 11, 2022, the official Twitter account of the company Meta published a single-word tweet that described a product update. The word in question is, in a mathematical setting, the more common name for catheti. WHAT was that tweeted word?
6) WHAT unit of measurement continues this newsletter’s theme?
Trivia Newsletter CXCVIII Recap
1) NAME Vernor Vinge’s colorful 2006 novel that won the Hugo Award, in which human life in 2025 is not exactly a pot of gold, but instead faces new challenges following the technological singularity, including the pervasiveness of the Internet and augmented reality in day-to-day life.
This is RAINBOWS END. “Colorful” and “not exactly a pot of gold” were clues for you. Approximately three seconds after publication, we realized that we should’ve written “a Hugo Award” or “the Hugo Award for Best Novel,” not “the Hugo Award.”
Rainbows End (no, there's no apostrophe) is not a Singularitarian novel. In some ways, it reads as a riposte to some of the technotopian visions imagined by the more ardent followers of the transhumanist and extropian movements that eagerly embraced Vinge's concepts. It also quite handily reframes many ideas bandied about by the 80's cyberpunks. In Vinge's 2020's, the world may not be governed by (take your pick) a benevolent/evil AI. But here we have a future where the evolution of the Internet into an even more pervasive and invasive social, political, and economic phenomenon has forever changed life just as decisively. Wearing computers is the norm here, their owners permanently logged into their VPN's, firing silent instant messages back and forth to friends and family or members of their chosen clique, or "belief circle". With contact lenses that overlay what the wearer sees with skins that redress the environment to your taste — for gamers, imagine World of Warcraft reconfigured as some kind of VR LARPing experience — it's no wonder entertainment conglomerates are even more vast and influential than they are now. Where walking around with your brain jacked into some "net" made you an edgy rebel in the cyberpunk lexicon, in Rainbows End you're just another consumer.
But this all-encompassing technology has made both personal and national security a headache beyond the worst-case ravings of conspiracy theorists. Anyone from pranksters to outright terrorists can corrupt and piggyback on individual systems. In every nation, governments and their security branches have all they can do to stay one step ahead of terror capabilities unimagined two decades before. The biggest fear is the successful development of YGBM, or "You Gotta Believe Me" technology, which could lead to something quite like mind control. Annoying enough if advertisers get their hands on it, but in the hands of terrorists (or worse, corrupt governments) almost unthinkable. Again, we're not watching a Terminator/Matrix future where technology is evil. It's one where technology has simply given plain old ordinary human evil more leeway to be creative.
2) A ruling by a federal appellate court in late 2023 revived a lawsuit by Spencer Elden, who turned 33 this week, regarding the use of a photograph of him on the cover of WHAT 1991 album?
This is the Nirvana album NEVERMIND—it’s that iconic cover that shows a baby in a swimming pool with a dollar bill on a fishhook.
Here’s the most recent judicial opinion in that case. Nevermind was re-released in 2021, which, according to the court, may have reset the relevant timeframes for the purposes of applicable statutes of limitations.
Speaking of depictions of nude folks in swimming pools, WHO painted the work known as Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), shown below? The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
3) Chris Gardner, a motivational speaker and the founder of the brokerage firm Gardner Rich & Co, makes a cameo appearance in WHAT 2006 film? Critics at the time blasted the mayor of Chattanooga for arranging for a showing of the film to fifteen of the city’s homeless folks.
This film is THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS.
Speaking of those folks in Chattanooga:
Several people left the theater crying and wiping away tears. Tammy “Blondy” Ledford, a 32-year-old woman who has been homeless for nearly eight years, said the movie reminded her of her own life.
“It was sad,” she said. “I remembered how it was whenever me and my three kids got thrown out of my apartment. ... Everybody ought to come watch this movie, especially all the homeless people.”
Lou Dandoy, 46, who said he has been homeless for only a few weeks, called it “one hell of a good movie.”
4) The titles of Jane Austen’s most notable works, Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, follow the true-and-tried format of giving you a short word “and” a longer word. NAME the incomplete work written by Austen in her teenage years that follows the same format; the work is a parody of the romantic novels Austen likely read in her childhood.
This is LOVE AND FREINDSHIP.
Another of Austen’s juvenilia is The History of England, written when she was fifteen. The work lampoons the history textbooks that Austen would have been familiar with. For example:
Edward the 4th
This Monarch was famous only for his Beauty and his Courage, of which the Picture we have here given of him, and his undaunted Behaviour in marrying one Woman while he was engaged to another, are sufficient proofs. His Wife was Elizabeth Woodville, a Widow who, poor Woman! was afterwards confined in a Convent by that Monster of Iniquity and Avarice Henry the 7th. One of Edward’s Mistresses was Jane Shore, who has had a play written about her, but it is a tragedy and therefore not worth reading. Having performed all these noble actions, his Majesty died, and was succeeded by his son.
5) The fictional mini-movie Stolz der Nation (“Nation’s Pride”), starring Frederick Zoller (played by Daniel Brühl), is played in the lead-up to the climax of WHAT film?
This is INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS.
We wondered if Inglourious Basterds happened to be the highest-grossing film in the film career of B.J. Novak (more notable for his role as Ryan Howard on The Office), but the answer to that implied trivia question is actually The Amazing Spider-Man 2, followed by The Smurfs and The Smurfs 2.
6) Of the many books written by Stephen King, WHICH ONE fits the theme of this newsletter?
We were looking for PET SEMATARY, as each of these works has a title with a misspelling or typo:
Rainbows End is purposefully missing an apostrophe.
Nevermind would typically be stylized “Never mind.”
The Pursuit of Happyness purposefully misspells “happiness”:
IMDB: “The title is intentionally misspelled, as it also appears as graffiti in a scene in the film. The misspelled phrase is actually taken from an essay written in 1776 that argued that whites and blacks were created equal. The essay, which was written by Lemuel Haynes, a biracial man living in New England during the Revolution, quoted Thomas Jefferson's well-known sentence from the United States Declaration of Independence, but spelled the last word of the sentence with a y. The sentence, as it appears in Lemuel's essay, is as follows: "We hold these truths to be self-Evident, that all men are created Equal, that they are Endowed By their Creator with Ceartain [sic] unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happyness."“
Austen at one point misspelled “friendship” in her draft of Love and Freindship (perhaps purposefully).
Inglourious Basterds misspells both of its words—there are various theories as to why.
Pet Sematary shares this quality, as the book is named after a misspelled sign outside of the relevant cemetery.
Our apologies to the folks at Spelman College in Atlanta—we purposefully misspelled the institution’s name in our newsletter title (“Spellman College”) as a self-demonstrative clue for you and to get you to think about “spelling.”
Let’s close with a quick quote by Stephen King about his friend Peter Straub’s reaction to Pet Sematary:
Peter Straub, the novelist, called me after he got the manuscript. In a very diffident tone, he said, “Stevie, you misspelled cemetery.” I laughed and told him to read the book.
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) was painted by British pop artist DAVID HOCKNEY.