And we’re back!
Those of you who played our “escape room” in Trivia Newsletter C, or at least read that newsletter’s introduction, will know why I was very excited to see the final answer of Double Jeopardy! (“Ornaments of Yore” for $2000) for the Jeopardy! episode that aired on December 16, 2022:
Working from National Geographic photos, Don Featherstone designed the first of these lawn ornaments in 1957
What will we learn this year that will also make me jump off of my couch? And am I ever going to get around to summarizing our Brazil-Croatia challenge? Let’s find out those things, and more, as we enter 2023 a few days late:
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. (This change to the instructions is a change to the template we’re generally making going forward. The change is not related to today’s theme, and there are no material changes in that link from what we’ve been doing for the past several months.)
1) On January 2, 2023, Donovan Mitchell of the Cleveland Cavaliers scored 71 points in an NBA game; that individual total has been exceeded in an NBA game on only seven occasions. Kobe Bryant did it once and David Thompson did it once, but WHAT player did it five times?
2) “The Salinas Valley,” “My Valley,” “Down to the Valley,” and “Cain Sign” were some of the working titles of WHAT American novel, first published in 1952? The novel ultimately borrowed its title from a line from the fourth chapter of the Book of Genesis.
3) NAME the 1999 film that, despite only having a budget of around $60,000 for its production, grossed almost a quarter of a billion dollars worldwide. Unusually, the names of the film’s three stars—Heather Donahue, Michael C. Williams, and Joshua Leonard—are also the names of their characters in the film.
4) The lyrics “Well, the south side of Chicago / Is the baddest part of town” begin WHAT song, Jim Croce’s only Billboard number-one hit during his lifetime, which song warns listeners to avoid its titular character?
5) A certain activist, born in 1800 and one of the first paid social workers in Massachusetts, was a conductor on the Underground Railroad and worked with her husband on plans for utopian communities such as Fruitlands. Give us that activist’s MAIDEN NAME, which became the middle name of the second of her four small daughters.
6) The 2013 song “Take Me to Church” by Hozier does not fit into the theme indicated by the answers to the questions in this newsletter, but it would fit if WHAT English word were added to the title of the song?
Trivia Newsletter CXI Recap
1) In cooking, a “drop” is defined as 1/96th of a teaspoon, a “smidgen” is defined as 1/32nd of a teaspoon, and a “pinch” is defined as 1/16th of a teaspoon. WHAT unit of measurement is defined as 1/8th of a teaspoon?
This is a DASH.
The Houston Dash are a team in the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL). Every team name in the NWSL rocks (parentheses indicate where the team plays):
Angel City FC (Los Angeles, CA)
Chicago Red Stars (Bridgeview, IL)
Houston Dash (Houston, TX)
Kansas City Current (Kansas City, KS)
NJ/NY Gotham FC (Harrison, NJ)
North Carolina Courage (Cary, NC)
OL Reign (Seattle, WA)
Orlando Pride (Orlando, FL)
Portland Thorns FC (Portland, OR)
Racing Louisville FC (Louisville, KY)
San Diego Wave FC (San Diego, CA)
Washington Spirit (Washington, D.C.)
“Wait, what does the ‘OL’ in ‘OL Reign’ stand for?”, you are surely asking right now. The majority owner of the OL Reign is OL Groupe, a company that is also the parent company of French clubs Olympique Lyonnais and Olympique Lyonnais Féminin, the professional soccer teams in Lyon, France. Hence, the logo of the OL Reign is a lion, after Lyon, which now that I write it out could have been the basis of a fun trivia question.
2) WHAT is the one-word title (in English) of the below painting by Henri Matisse? Doubling it, in a sense, gives you the name of a Fall Out Boy song released in 2005 that went triple platinum.
This painting is DANCE (or in French, La Danse). This painting is currently located in a museum in Saint Petersburg, the largest art museum in the world by gallery space. WHAT IS THE NAME of that museum, which despite its name has no association with Andrew Jackson? The answer is at the end of this newsletter.1
3) Dr. Mary Walker, a surgeon and prisoner of war during the American Civil War, is the only woman to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor. Some academics speculate that Walker was the inspiration for WHAT character in Henry James’s The Bostonians? The character’s surname is, loosely, a more upbeat synonym for part of Walker’s surname.
This is DR. MARY PRANCE. As the only female recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor, Dr. Walker was widely celebrated throughout her lifetime and received only the respect that she—
/checks notes
Dr. Walker was strongly opposed to traditional women's dress, arguing they were uncomfortable, inhibited mobility, and spread dust and dirt. Her typical clothes -- for which she was often mocked, punished, and treated as an oddity -- were, in the 1860s, trousers with suspenders worn under a knee-length dress (later she would wear jackets and trousers almost exclusively). In 1860, she briefly attended Bowen Collegiate Institute in Hopkinton, Iowa. She was suspended from the school for refusing to resign from the school's otherwise all-male debate team.
She faced indignity after indignity, for silly reasons:
“Small boys pointed their fingers at her, and followed her as they would a circus wagon. The doors of the business houses were crowded with spectators, who laughed and made remarks at the little oddity as she passed by them, many of which she overheard, and we could not see how she or any other woman could stand the embarrassment of the situation. But it was no new thing to her, and she stood it ‘like a major.’ She was an advocate of dress reform among women and women’s rights, and she was only practicing what she preached. Still it was fun for the boys.”
She received the Medal of Honor due to her time as a prisoner of war, but even that Medal of Honor was taken from her:
Dr. Walker was outraged when, in 1917, her medal was revoked on the grounds that she had not been an active combatant. While in Washington, D.C., two years later, petitioning to have it restored, she fell and soon after died at the age of 86 years, on Feb. 21, 1919, in Oswego, N.Y.
(Her Medal of Honor was posthumously restored by Jimmy Carter.)
4) WHAT is the ticker symbol (and common name) for the volatility index promulgated by the Chicago Board Options Exchange? It is sometimes called the “fear index” and, at least in theory, reflects the market’s estimate of future volatility— that is, how fast prices will change—30 days in advance.
This is VIX. “The weird behavior [of the VIX in 2022],” one Bloomberg article warned a few weeks ago, “has fueled warnings that either the VIX has stopped working as it’s supposed to or that the bear market has yet to run its course.”
This much older article tells me that “[a] state of contango represents the expectation that the VIX index will increase from its current level moving forward” and “[w]hen the VIX futures curve does go into backwardation it could signal weakness and overall risk in the market but the market can recover quickly.” I don’t care about those things, but I wondered whether contango and backwardation are real words, or whether I was having some strange kind of stroke. Fortunately, it’s the former:
Contango is a situation where the futures price of a commodity is higher than the spot price. Contango usually occurs when an asset price is expected to rise over time. That results in an upward sloping forward curve.
…
Contango, sometimes referred to as forwardation, is the opposite of backwardation. In the futures markets, the forward curve can be in contango or backwardation. A market is "in backwardation" when the futures price is below the spot price for a particular asset. In general, backwardation can be the result of current supply and demand factors. It may be signaling that investors are expecting asset prices to fall over time.
5) On January 1, 1985, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) created seven “generic top-level domains”; for example, “.net” is one of the seven. WHICH of the seven generic top-level domains created by ICANN is first, alphabetically?
This is .COM. The others are .edu, .gov, .info, .mil, .net, and .org.
On March 15, 1985, a Massachusetts computer manufacturer called Symbolics, Inc. registered a website at symbolics.com, the first .com domain registered in history. Today, the link still works; a guy bought the name and operates the website as some sort of vanity project (or, if you’re more charitable than I am, a young entrepreneur with the “will to win” generously keeps the website running as an example of living internet history).
6) Each of the answers to Questions #1-5 alludes to a member of a finite set. NAME any of the three (four?) other members of that set.
This was our last newsletter before Christmas, and so the questions each pointed to the first syllables of some of Santa Claus’s reindeer, as identified in Clement Clarke Moore’s 1823 poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas” (or in works like the 1939 story Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer or versions of the subsequent same-named song). In all of the works, the first five reindeer are Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, and Comet, and we pointed to them with “dash,” “Dance,” “Dr. Mary Prance,” “VIX,” and “.com,” the answers to the first five questions.
In the original poem, the next three are Cupid, Dunder, and Blixem, and in the song, the next three are Cupid, Donner, and Blitzen.2 We accepted any of those five answers, as well as Rudolph himself. That’s why we said “three (four?)”, since someone could colorably argue that Santa has either eight or nine reindeer in the stories, depending on what you’re counting.
Our newsletter title (“Of Coursers We Know”) was a pun. A “courser” is a term for an animal, like a horse or a dog, that engages in coursing (hunting game), but it’s also the term that Moore uses in his poem for the reindeer themselves:
More rapid than eagles his coursers they came,
And he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name:
"Now, Dasher! now, Dancer! now Prancer and Vixen!”
Most versions of the “Rudolph” song open with:
You know Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Vixen,
Comet and Cupid and Donner and Blitzen,
But do you recall
The most famous reindeer of all?
Do you recall? Of course you do, because of coursers you know.
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
THE HERMITAGE MUSEUM
“Dunder and Blixem”? If you’re wondering how they became Donner and Blitzen, this Snopes article is for you.