As we announced last week, and will remind you one or two more times, 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) 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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
6) Of the many books written by Stephen King, WHICH ONE fits the theme of this newsletter?
Trivia Newsletter CXCVII Recap
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?
This is IRON. The motto is "oro en Paz, Fierro en Guerra." A bit more on the war:
San Francisco's Presidio would be the training center and embarkation point for the U.S. Army's land invasion of the Philippines. The invasion force was under the command of U.S. Army General Wesley Merritt. In May of 1898, over 10,000 "volunteers" would come from the western and middle-west states to train in the Presidio. Like the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the Spanish-American War was so popular that a draft was not needed!
Camp Merriam was hastily erected on the southern end of the Presidio. Made of canvas tents, the Camp processed and trained recruits who enlisted for the War. In some cases, entire regiments would show up, for instance, the Tennessee Volunteers. Soon, with thousands of people living in a constricted place, the campgrounds became an unsanitary muddy mess. Morale and enthusiasm for the war was high, and through careless discharging of firearms, some soldiers were killed even before they saw the Philippines.
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”?
A LINE is a length without breadth.
In the same work, Euclid offers five postulates for plane geometry:
1. A straight line segment can be drawn joining any two points.
2. Any straight line segment can be extended indefinitely in a straight line.
3. Given any straight line segment, a circle can be drawn having the segment as radius and one endpoint as center.
4. All right angles are congruent.
5. If two lines are drawn which intersect a third in such a way that the sum of the inner angles on one side is less than two right angles, then the two lines inevitably must intersect each other on that side if extended far enough.
WHAT alliterative term is that fifth postulate sometimes called? Its rejection and replacement often forms the basis of non-Euclidean geometries. The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
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?
This is Elizabeth FRY—Stephen Fry is the host of the current British version of Jeopardy!
Here’s an excerpt from her work Prisons in Scotland and the North of England:
Notice the argument here, made over 200 years ago. Her assertion isn’t (merely) that the condition of prisons at the time was cruel; the point is that the cruelty isn’t even working, and “both parties”—the sufferer and the public—are losers.
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?
The missing word is HEAD. Here’s that article.
Nine Inch Nails was formed in 1988; “Head Like a Hole,” one of their most notable songs, was written in 1988 and released in 1990. It still seems wildly implausible to us that the band’s name and the name of this wildly famous song both come from the same incredibly convoluted and inorganic quote, but what do we know?
A bit of trivia for you Chicagoans—the music video for “Head Like a Hole” was filmed at the original location of the nightclub Exit. That’s on Wells Street in the Old Town neighborhood, about a block from Second City.
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?
This is a spinning TOP. We always have fun here, but this question might have been a little much even for us—”top” just appears in ChrisTOPher Nolan’s name.
Here’s a sentence from Roger Ebert’s review of Inception (four stars!), regarding the name of the architect recruited in order to create a “deceptive maze-space” in a character’s dreams:
Is it a coincidence that Ariadne is named for the woman in Greek mythology who helped Theseus escape from the Minotaur's labyrinth?
…no?
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?
This word is SOUS, because each of this newsletter’s answers was a word that might come before “Chef,” either to specify a type of chef or a television show: Iron Chef, line chef, fry chef, head chef, and Top Chef. We wanted you to think about the kitchen brigade system, and so we used the word “hierarchy” in this question.
A sous-chef is the “second in command” in the kitchen, who reports directly to the head chef. “Sous” means to be subordinate or “under-”, and the relevant Verne work is Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (Vingt Mille Lieues sous les mers).
Why was the newsletter title “All the World’s a Stage,” the line from Shakespeare’s As You Like It? Well, the word “stage” was playing the role of making you think we were referring to a theatrical stage, but we intended the word stage (pronounced like “stahje”), referring to the unpaid internships taken on by aspiring chefs.
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
Euclid’s fifth postulate is sometimes called the PARALLEL POSTULATE.