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) Article 37 of the Geneva Conventions (as amended in 1977) allows for “ruses of war” such as camouflage and misinformation but specifically prohibits WHAT act, examples of which include “the feigning of an intent to negotiate under a flag of truce or of a surrender” and “the feigning of an incapacitation by wounds or sickness”?
2) English philanthropist George Williams is most notable for founding WHAT organization in London in 1844? Originally intended as a place that would not tempt young men into sin, one version of the organization’s mission statement today is “[t]o put Christian principles into practice through programs that build healthy spirit, mind and body for all.”
3) The website of the International Powerlifting Federation (IPF) states that one of the three disciplines that make up powerlifting is the squat. NAME both of the other disciplines of powerlifting, according to the IPF.
4) “I goofed this case. I forgot about the jury. I forgot about the question of guilt or innocence and a proper presentation on that point because I was so wrapped up in getting it dismissed on constitutional questions,” said pro bono defense attorney John Flynn in 1967 during his client’s retrial. WHAT was Flynn’s client’s last name?
5) Coincidentally, four of the top five leaders in career regular-season rushing touchdowns in the National Football League have last names that end in WHAT letter?
6) Each of the sets of questions and answers in this newsletter relates, in some fashion, to the act of doing WHAT? (A hint: If I had to give this newsletter an additional subtitle, that subtitle would be “Vault 101”).
Trivia Newsletter CXII Recap
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?
This is WILT CHAMBERLAIN. Reciting some of Chamberlain’s records sounds akin to telling those old Chuck Norris jokes, except there’s no punch line. Wilt Chamberlain is probably most famous for scoring the most points ever scored in an NBA game (100), but did you know he also has the most rebounds ever, uh, rebounded in an NBA game? On November 4, 1960, Chamberlain had 34 points, 4 assists, and 55 (!!!) rebounds against Bill Russell and the Boston Celtics. Most ridiculous, at least to me: Wilt Chamberlain once averaged more than 48 minutes played per game in a season, despite the fact that an NBA game is typically a 48-minute affair.
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.
This is John Steinbeck’s East of Eden.
By the way: What do Jeanne Eagels, James Dean (twice), Spencer Tracy, Peter Finch, Ralph Richardson, Massimo Troisi, Heath Ledger, and Chadwick Boseman, and no other person, have in common? The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
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.
This is THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT.
Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 is the clunky title of the sequel to The Blair Witch Project. The sequel did some interesting things (it takes place in a world where The Blair Witch Project, the first film, came out), but was not well received.
The VHS and DVD releases of Book of Shadows had a short featurette called “The Secret of Esrever.” If you can figure out what “esrever” might mean, and you have a copy of the film, as well as a time machine that lets you go to a time before the film’s website was taken down in 2008, you too can decode the Secret of Esrever and be added to a list of people who solved the mystery! In lieu of those things, you can read this article or watch this video.
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?
This is “BAD, BAD LEROY BROWN.” Here’s Croce talking about the song:
This is a song about a guy I was in the army with... It was at Fort Dix, in New Jersey, that I met this guy. He was not made to climb the tree of knowledge, as they say, but he was strong, so nobody'd ever told him what to do, and after about a week down there he said "Later for this" and decided to go home. So he went AWOL—which means to take your own vacation—and he did. But he made the mistake of coming back at the end of the month to get his paycheck. I don't know if you've ever seen handcuffs put on anybody, but it was SNAP and that was the end of it for a good friend of mine, who I wrote this tune about, named Leroy Brown.
(The qualification “during his lifetime” in the question was necessary because the song “Time in a Bottle” went to number #1 following Croce’s death.)
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.
This is MAY, as the activist is Abigail May. The second of her four daughters was Louisa May Alcott, who wrote Little Women (hence, our clue of “small daughters”). Little Women is loosely based on the Alcott family home and on Louisa’s interactions with her three sisters.
Louisa, together with her parents and two of her sisters, is buried at “Authors’ Ridge” at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts.2 Many notables are buried at the ridge or otherwise in the cemetery, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Daniel Chester French (the sculptor of the Lincoln Memorial), Marc Daniels (director of, among other television shows, I Love Lucy), and Ephraim Wales Bull (creator of the Concord grape).
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?
Each of the answers in this newsletter contained a British prime minister’s3 last name:
Question #1: Wilt Chamberlain (Neville Chamberlain)
Question #2: East of Eden (Anthony Eden)
Question #3: The Blair Witch Project (Tony Blair)
Question #4: “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” (Gordon Brown)
Question #5: May (Theresa May)
The answer I expected was “ILL,” in order to potentially make “Churchill” (as in Winston Churchill) appear in the title of the song. Variations such as “HILL” were accepted. There would have been no problem, I suppose, with adding a word such as “peel” or “temple” or “petty” as well, in order to capture other, lesser-known PMs. The newsletter title, “Earl Grey,” fit into this theme as well, since Charles Grey, the 2nd Earl Grey, was a prime minister in addition to being the namesake of the drinkable Earl Grey. And that’s the tea.
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link. (We will likely be delayed 24-48 hours on updating this, but we’ll be all caught up by Thursday.)
Each was posthumously nominated for an Academy Award for acting. Dean was nominated for East of Eden (1955) and Giant (1956). Those two films, together with Rebel Without a Cause (1955), were Dean’s only credited film roles. To quote BoJack Horseman:
“Why did you bring me to Griffith Park? Are we gonna get in a knife fight like in Rebel Without a Cause?”
“I hate that title.”
“He had several causes!”
Though it would be charming in a literary sense if this were the same Sleepy Hollow from Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” it is not; Irving’s Sleepy Hollow is in New York.
Avoid getting a trivia question wrong soon by remembering that the current British prime minister is Rishi Sunak.