As we announced last time, and will remind you for the next couple of editions, we now release newsletters on Tuesdays and Fridays, not Mondays and Thursdays.
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 flag of the city of San Francisco bears the city’s motto; translated into English, it states “Gold in Peace” and WHAT metal “in War,” perhaps referring to San Francisco’s role in the Spanish-American War?
2) The Elements, Euclid’s fundamental treatise on geometry, begins with a series of definitions: a point is that which has no part, and a WHAT is “a length without breadth”?
3) A contestant on the 2024 British version of Jeopardy! could be told “This woman, sometimes called the ‘Angel of Prisons,’ was portrayed on the reverse of the £5 note from 2003 to 2017” and could be deemed correct by asking for WHAT last name, also the host’s?
4) Though your author is a bit skeptical, the website post-punk.com reports that Al Jourgensen, the frontman of the industrial-metal band Ministry, said in 1987 that “Listening to Ministry is like having a nine inch nail hammered into your [BLANK] like a hole.” WHAT word fills in that blank?
5) The 2010 film Inception concerns implanting ideas into someone’s subconscious so deeply that the person isn’t aware that the idea was externally generated. The director of Inception was apparently so committed to this idea that WHAT object, visible in the final frames of the film, is even “incepted” into his own name?
6) WHAT French preposition, part of the (French) title of a work by Jules Verne, could take its place in the hierarchy suggested by at least some of the answers in this newsletter?
Trivia Newsletter CXCVI Recap
1) Robert Frost won his first Pulitzer Prize for New Hampshire: A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes, and he taught at Amherst College in Massachusetts, but his remains are in WHAT U.S. state, which named him its poet laureate in 1961?
This is VERMONT.
You’re probably reading “The Road Not Taken” incorrectly (to the extent that a correct reading of anything exists):
“The Road Not Taken” has confused audiences literally from the beginning. In the spring of 1915, Frost sent an envelope to Edward Thomas that contained only one item: a draft of “The Road Not Taken,” under the title “Two Roads.” According to Lawrance Thompson, Frost had been inspired to write the poem by Thomas’s habit of regretting whatever path the pair took during their long walks in the countryside—an impulse that Frost equated with the romantic predisposition for “crying over what might have been.” Frost, Thompson writes, believed that his friend “would take the poem as a gentle joke and would protest, ‘Stop teasing me.’”
2) The most played song on Spotify by singer-songwriter Chris Stapleton, a cover of a song originally recorded in 1981 by David Allan Coe, extols the virtues of a certain type of liquor from WHAT U.S. state?
This is TENNESSEE—the song is “Tennessee Whiskey.” Stapleton picked up two Grammys last weekend, both in connection with his song “White Horse.”
WHAT group holds the record for most Grammys won by a group artist in one night by a wide margin, with eight? The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
3) According to the Ecological Society of America, WHAT U.S. state is the only U.S. state to have a continuous border of rivers running along three of its sides? The organization also claims that the state has more navigable miles of water than any other state in the union, other than Alaska.
This is KENTUCKY. Those border rivers are the Mississippi River to the west, the Ohio River to the north, and the Big Sandy River and Tug Fork to the east.
Kentucky is one of the four states that calls itself a commonwealth (the others are Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Virginia). What’s up with that? A blog associated with the Library of Congress gives us an answer:
Ultimately, these four states are commonwealths because their constitutional drafters declared they were. The commonwealth title does not confer any special legal significance, but the word highlights that the states’ governments were intended to serve the well-being of the people.
4) Alfred Kinsey, the sexologist most notable for his namesake scale (also called the Heterosexual–Homosexual Rating Scale), founded in 1947 the Institute for Sex Research at the flagship state university for WHAT U.S. state?
This is INDIANA.
Quick, what’s the hidden connection amongst the Empire State Building, the Pentagon, and the Washington National Cathedral? That’s right, they were all built in part using Indiana limestone. The importance of Indiana limestone will not be lost on you if you visit Indiana University in Bloomington, and particularly not if you do so during, uh, Limestone Month.
5) Carol Moseley Braun and Roland Burris are two of the eleven Black U.S. senators in U.S. Senate history. Braun and Burris represented WHAT state in the Senate, which has been represented by more Black senators than any other state, with three?
This is ILLINOIS. The senator we didn’t mention was Barack Obama.
This question was a bit sloppy on my part—it’d be more proper to refer to Moseley Braun’s last name as, well, Moseley Braun. Here’s a bit more on her:
Born in Chicago in 1947, Moseley Braun came of age in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement and pursued a career in law. In the 1970s her environmental activism led to a political career. She joined the United States Attorney's Office in Chicago before being elected to the Illinois state legislature in 1978, where she served for 10 years. Following an unsuccessful bid for lieutenant governor in 1986, she served four years as Recorder of Deeds for Cook County, Illinois, the first African American elected to a Cook County executive position. In 1992 she defeated both the Democratic incumbent and the Republican challenger for a seat in the U.S. Senate, becoming the first female senator from Illinois and the first African American woman to serve in the Senate. In interviews recorded in 1999, Moseley Braun reflects upon her childhood, the development of a political philosophy, her entrance into political life, and the achievements and difficulties of her Senate career.
(The link above includes text of those interviews.)
6) The states that are the answers to Questions #1 through #5 have something in common with five of the original thirteen U.S. colonies. No other states have this in common. WHAT is that commonality, the subject of a U.S. patent? (Appropriately, a single word will be sufficient.)
Vermont, Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois, together with Connecticut, Virginia, New York, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania, are the ten states with names that appear on a standard MONOPOLY BOARD. Pennsylvania appears twice, for whatever it’s worth. Here’s that patented image:
Our newsletter’s title, “States of Play,” didn’t give you much to work with, but “play” was meant to give you something to work with. We also spotted you that a single word (“Monopoly”) would be sufficient, and that was appropriate because of what a monopoly is—the absence of competition due to a single firm’s dominance.
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
SANTANA won eight Grammys in one night in 2000; their album Supernatural had been released the prior year.