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) The titular character in a Disney Channel show that aired from 2001 to 2004, the current stage manager of (and a longtime “Clue Crew” member for) the television show Jeopardy!, and the U.S. labor leader credited by the AFL-CIO’s website as the “father” of Labor Day all share WHAT last name?
2) The two Boeing VC-25 aircraft that have the callsign “Air Force One” while the president of the United States is on board as well as the Boeing C-32 designated “Air Force Two” when the vice-president is on board are typically when not in use stationed at a joint base located near Morningside, Maryland known by WHAT name?
3) According to its entry in the U.S. National Register of Historic Places, a particular vessel sometimes called the S/L Livingstone is docked in Key Largo, Florida. The vessel is most notable for its use in a 1951 film. GIVE the last name of the author who wrote the 1935 novel that the film is based upon. (The film, novel, and vessel all have the same name, plus or minus the word “the.”)
4) Change one letter in a name that appears in a nonprofit journalism school and research organization perhaps most notable for operating the website PolitiFact.com in order to yield WHAT dog breed?
5) The official state bird of Oklahoma, Tyrannus forficatus, is a flycatcher with a distinctive tail. WHAT adjective appears in the bird’s name to describe its tail?
6) WHAT is the seven-letter word that can connect each of the answers to Questions #1 through #5?
Trivia Newsletter CXCIV Recap
1) “Denzel Washington and Viola Davis set to convert Tonys to Oscars” was part of a newspaper headline for an article reviewing WHAT 2016 film? Only one of the headline’s two predictions came to pass.
This is FENCES.
The standard trivia thing to remember is that Fences was written by playwright August Wilson, as the sixth entry in his series of ten plays known as “The Pittsburgh Cycle” or the “American Century Cycle.” As Trivia Factorial reminded you way back in Trivia Newsletter XIV:
A quick fact about The Pittsburgh Cycle—nine of the ten plays are set in (obviously) Pittsburgh, while one (Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom) is set in Chicago.
You should know that the premise of Fences is that the main character, Troy Maxson (played by Denzel Washington in the versions we mentioned in the question), is consumed by the fact that he almost “made it” in baseball. He’s promised his wife (played by Viola Davis) that he’d build a fence around their property, but he keeps putting that off. The story is about fences—in baseball, around your home, and in society—and who builds them, what they keep in and keep out, and who decides.
We tapped into the Trivia Factorial expense account and bought a JSTOR subscription so that we could read “Baseball as History and Myth in August Wilson's ‘Fences.’” It’s a brisk and illuminating read. Here’s an excerpt:
Besides invoking the history of the Negro Leagues in Fences, Wilson makes use of the mythology of baseball to reveal the failed promise of the American dream. As Deeanne Westbrook observes in Ground Rules: Baseball and Myth (1996), baseball's playing field can be understood as an archetypal garden—an image of innocence and timeless space—an American Eden. In W. P. Kinsella's novel Shoeless Joe (1982), for example, the protagonist Ray Kinsella rediscovers Eden by building a baseball park in his Iowa cornfield, creating "a walled garden of eternal youth." Players from baseball's past enter this magical garden, "not middle-aged or elderly, as they were at their deaths, but young, as they were at their moments of peak performance. They occupy the mythic present" (Westbrook 102).
In Fences the closest that Troy comes to participating in the American dream—and hence inhabiting such a paradise—is during his life in the Negro Leagues. Wilson associates the American dream with Troy's younger days as a ballplayer: with self-affirmation, limitless possibilities, and the chance for heroic success. The very act of hitting a home run—especially when the ball is hit over the fence—suggests extraordinary strength and the ability to transcend limits. Troy's son Lyons recalls seeing his father hit a home run over the grandstand: "Right out there in Homestead Field. He wasn't satisfied hitting in the seats . . . he want to hit it over everything! After the game he had two hundred people standing around waiting to shake his hand" (94). Troy himself claims that he hit seven home runs off of [BLANK]. "You can't get no better than that," he boasts (34).
For Troy, however, the American dream has turned into a prolonged nightmare. Instead of limitless opportunity, he has come to know racial discrimination and poverty. At age 53, this former Negro League hero is a garbage collector who ekes out a meager existence, working arduously to support his family and living from hand to mouth. "I do the best I can do," he tells Rose. "I come in here every Friday. I carry a sack of potatoes and a bucket of lard. You all line up at the door with your hands out. I give you the lint from my pockets. I give you my sweat and my blood. I ain't got no tears. I done spent them" (40). Troy claims that he would not even have a roof over his head if it were not for the $3,000 that the government gave to his mentally disabled brother, Gabriel, following a serious head injury in World War II.
We omitted the name of WHAT ballplayer in the second paragraph of that quote? Following an illustrious Negro Leagues career, he made his MLB debut with Cleveland in 1948, becoming the American League’s first Black pitcher. The answer is at the end of this newsletter.1
2) In Lord Byron’s satirical poem “Written after [BLANK] from Sestos to Abydos,” Byron unfavorably compares himself to Leander, a character from Greek mythology who made nightly efforts to woo Hero. WHAT word fills in the blank in the poem’s title?
The missing word is “SWIMMING.” We’re going to borrow this post’s summary of the story of Leander and Hero:
Hero, a priestess of Aphrodite, lived in a tower in Sestos and Leander, a young man from Abydos, had fallen in love with her. Every night he would swim across (in the opposite direction of Byron’s swim); Hero would light a lamp at the top of her tower to guide him. Their affair lasted all summer and they agreed to part during the autumn and winter but to resume in spring. During a stormy winter’s night, however, Leander saw the light and began to swim. The wind blew out the light and he lost his way, drowning in the treacherous waters. When Hero saw his body in the water, she threw herself into the waters to be with him. Their bodies washed up onto the shore in an embrace. They were buried in a lover's tomb on the shore.
Here’s the poem, which begins with this verse:
If, in the month of dark December,
Leander, who was nightly wont
(What maid will not the tale remember?)
To cross thy stream, broad Hellespont!
You’ll want to know that the Hellespont, the body of water we’re discussing here, is an ancient name for the Dardanelles or the Strait of Gallipoli in Turkey. King Xerxes I crossed it in 480 BC to get to Europe—that’s the same year that his Persian Empire fought the alliance of Greek city-states led by Sparta in the Battle of Thermopylae, depicted to some extent in the film 300.
The editorial staff of the publication Sports Illustrated was just laid off a few days ago for sad and tedious reasons. In 1987, when Sports Illustrated was at the vanguard of telling stories about sport, it published a lovely article, “Lord of the Waterways,” about Byron’s love of swimming:
From his reading of classical literature, Byron knew the myth of Hero and Leander, two lovers who lived on opposite sides of the Hellespont. Each night, Leander swam from his own home in Abydos on the Asian shore to Hero's in Sestos on the European shore. The two then spent the night together before Leander swam home at dawn. Byron, who drew no distinction between mythical and flesh-and-blood rivals, was determined to match Leander's feat.
On their first attempt to cross the Hellespont, Byron and a companion, Lieutenant Ekenhead, misjudged the strength and direction of the current. After an hour in the water, they were only halfway across and decided to give up. Two weeks later they were ready to try again. With Hobhouse watching from a nearby ship, Byron and Ekenhead entered the water shortly after 10 in the morning. Swimming strongly and making better use of the current, Byron and Ekenhead finally reached land about three miles below their starting point. Hobhouse noted "Lord Byron was an hour and ten minutes in the water; his companion, Mr. Ekenhead, five minutes less." To that, Byron added that, despite a strong current, "[we] were not fatigued...and did it with little difficulty."
Byron was never one to keep quiet about his accomplishments. Not only did he write a poem to celebrate the occasion (Written After Swimming from Sestos to Abydos), but he also referred to it in letters for months afterward. To his mother he wrote, "I believe I mentioned to you in my last letter that my only notable exploit lately has been swimming from Sestos to Abydos on the 3d. of this month, in humble imitation of Leander of amorous memory, though I had no Hero to receive me on the other shore of the Hellespont." His friend Henry Drury received a racier version: "The immediate distance is not above a mile but the current renders it hazardous, so much so that I doubt whether Leander's conjugal powers must not have been exhausted in his passage to Paradise."
3) In 2013, a video by fitness-enthusiast Joanna Rohrback went viral. The video introduced viewers to “Prancercise,” a specific type of workout. WHAT non-human animal is most prominently featured on the website and marketing materials for Prancercise?
Prancercise prominently features, and was compared to the movement of, HORSES. Here’s an image from the Prancercise website:
We’re not going to make fun of Prancercise, since you can easily find plenty of examples of that sort of thing.
We meant to put Taylor Swift references on ice for the start of 2024, but we can’t resist this set of connections:
Taylor Swift’s 2010 song “Dear John” is fairly obviously about John Mayer and her relationship with him.
In 2013, Mayer released the song “Paper Doll,” probably a response to “Dear John.”
For reasons we have yet to fully understand, the official lyric video for “Paper Doll” heavily features Joanna Rohrback Prancercising:
4) Hip-hop artist Joseph Simmons is known by a particular nickname that is part of the name of the group that he started in New York in 1983 with Darryl McDaniels and Jason Mizell. WHAT is that nickname? McDaniels’s stage name makes up the remainder of the group’s name.
This nickname is “RUN”—he’s the “Run” in “Run-DMC,” and Darryl McDaniels is “DMC,” which makes sense to us.
Jason Mizell, or “Jam Master Jay,” was murdered in October 2002. We’ll let an obituary written about him tell us about Run-DMC:
The American hip-hop DJ Jam Master Jay, who has been shot dead at his New York recording studio aged 37, was a member of Run-DMC, the first rap group to capture a worldwide audience; he was also responsible for popularising the idea of a DJ creating a musical collage for a song. His raps never embraced gun culture,2 instead promoting black awareness and education.
Run-DMC were formed by Joe Simmons and Daryl McDaniels in the early 1980s. They enlisted Jay (his real name was Jason Mizell), a musical child who had developed remarkable skills scratching and mixing records while DJing at teenage parties. All three had known each other since childhood in the middle-class black suburb of Hollis, New York, and, having graduated from St Pascal's Catholic school, they turned professional.
Immediately after signing to Profile Records in 1983 for an advance of $2,500, they scored a hit among young black Americans with their first single, It's LikeThat/ Sucker MCs. Their stripped-down sound - with only the rappers' voices, a drum machine and Mizell's percussive scratching of records on his turntable - invented modern hip-hop.
Jury selection in the trial of the two men charged with Mizell’s murder began last Monday, over 21 years after the murder.
5) A 2003 book by Lynne Truss reminders readers of potential syntactical ambiguities by, in its title, alluding to a panda that has a sandwich and then does WHAT two things?
The book’s name refers to this old bar joke:
A panda walks into a bar. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.
"Why? Why are you behaving in this strange, un-panda-like fashion?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda walks towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.
"I'm a panda," he says, at the door. "Look it up."
The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.
"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."
Thus, our answer was SHOOTS AND LEAVES.
I had wondered if Lynne Truss is related to former British Prime Minister Liz Truss. Lynne’s website sets the record straight:
Two things need to be said immediately.
One: as far as I know, I am not related to the infamous economy-disrupting prime minister often mentioned in the same breath as a notoriously bland salad ingredient.
Two: I am genuinely interested in punctuation – but, honestly, no more than many other people. My bestselling book on the subject, Eats, Shoots & Leaves, was financially a miracle in my life, but I had been enjoying my career before it happened; afterwards, I did my best to get back to normal.
6) This newsletter’s answers allude to a version of WHAT event? (Your answer should be a ten-letter word.)
The theme binding these answers was the modern PENTATHLON. The modern pentathlon requires athletes to compete at five skills: fencing (one-touch épée), freestyle swimming, equestrian show jumping, cross country running, and pistol shooting. Fences, “Swimming,” “Horses,” “Run,” and “Shoots and Leaves” were our attempt to get you to think of the modern pentathlon, and our newsletter title (“Multidisciplinary”) just pointed to the fact that the event features multiple disciplines.
Why does the modern pentathlon feature those events? The story you’ll hear is that they are the skills needed to help cavalry riders survive behind enemy lines.
For the show-jumping portion of the pentathlon, athletes aren’t allowed to bring their own horses—instead, you are just paired up with a random horse. This led to all sorts of problems, and show-jumping will be dropped from the event in the next iteration of the Summer Olympics.
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
This was SATCHEL PAIGE.
We find this particular clause an odd thing to include in someone’s obituary, but omitting it from our quoted section seemed odder.