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) Yeah, uh-huh, you know what it is: the title of a certain 2010 song that is about the singer’s Dodge Challenger, as well as about the city he grew up in, contains two colors. Of those two colors, WHICH ONE is most associated with the body of water in which one can find Snake Island, an island that prominently figured into world affairs in 2022?
2) In the 2010 NBA Eastern Conference Finals, a team led by Paul Pierce, Ray Allen, and Rajon Rondo took on Dwight Howard, Jameer Nelson, and Vince Carter’s team. NAME the city that the winning team in that series played (and plays) in.
3) The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, originally a radio broadcast created by Douglas Adams, was adapted into several other formats, including six novels. In one of those novels, the protagonist Arthur Dent meets his soulmate, a woman named Fenchurch, who is named after (and was conceived at) London’s Fenchurch Street railway station. Adams said that Fenchurch’s character was inspired by a different station, but he picked Fenchurch in order to avoid confusion with WHAT other fictional character?
4) A 1958 album sometimes cited as “the first British comedy LP created in a recording studio” starred WHAT actor and comedian? He is famous for his many roles in film and television, and sometimes his many roles in the same film, such as in The Mouse That Roared (1959) and Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964).
5) “Espero Alegre la Salida – y Espero no Volver jamás” (“I joyfully await the exit – and I hope never to return”) were the last written words of a certain artist, who passed away in 1954 and who then lay in state at the Palacio de Bellas Artes under a Communist flag. WHAT is that artist’s first name?
6) Each of the answers in this newsletter can, at least in part, be associated with WHAT specific word? (A hint to avoid frustration: One of the answers in this newsletter is only used for its first syllable.)
Trivia Newsletter CXVIII Recap
1) NAME the term that, while adopted as a form of spacetime travel in the novel A Wrinkle in Time (1962) and as an object used for sinister ends in the film The Avengers (2012), is used in geometry to refer to the four-dimensional analogue of the cube (so, the answer to this question is to the cube as the cube is to the square).
This is a TESSERACT.
In 1963, The New York Times ran an article by Madeleine L'Engle (the author of A Wrinkle in Time) in which she grapples with the question of what makes a good children’s book:
Read more of that directly from the page here (with a NYT subscription).
By the way, WHAT is the name of the primary antagonist in A Wrinkle in Time? It is also the name of a 1986 novel, a 1990 television miniseries, and a 2017 film. The answer appears at the end of this newsletter.1
2) To quote The New York Times, an atmosphere of “poverty, unemployment, political demonstrations and street fighting between the forces of the extreme left and the extreme right” serves as the mostly unseen backdrop to WHAT musical, which is based upon the 1951 play I Am a Camera (which was itself adapted from the 1939 novel Goodbye to Berlin)?
This is CABARET. The people who write trivia questions will sometimes want you to know that the name of the club in Cabaret is the Kit Kat Club. Did Kit Kat, the chocolate-covered wafer bar candy, take its name from Cabaret? No—the snack food adopted its name in 1937, and Cabaret opened in 1966. The story goes that the use of the term “Kit Kat” (or variations thereon) goes back to meetings of the “Kit-Cat Club,” an early eighteenth-century club in London. “Kit” is a nickname for Christopher (like Kit Carson or Kit Marlowe), and Christopher Catt (or “Katt,” sources differ) was the owner of the club, which made mutton pies called “Kit-Kats.” Even back then, though, the source of the name seemed unclear to writers. One epigram (people disagree who wrote it) from the time goes as follows:
Whence deathless Kit-Kat took his name
Few critics can unriddle
Some say from pastrycook it came
And some from Cat and Fiddle.
From no trim beaus its name it boasts
Grey statesmen or green wits
But from the pell-mell pack of toasts
Of old Cats and young Kits.
3) The NFL player who led the league among qualified passers in passer rating the most times (six individual seasons) and the MLB player who was the first player to win four Cy Young Awards both go by WHAT first name?
These folks are STEVE Young and STEVE Carlton.
Passer rating2 is, I contend, the most convoluted statistic that we see in mainstream sports coverage (at least, of the North American major sports). A baseball broadcast, for example, will rarely trouble you with anything more than a player’s slash line (batting average, on-base percentage, and slugging percentage) and perhaps RsBI and HR:
Or, maybe all you’ll get is batting average and some counting stats, sometimes with some attempt to contextualize the numbers:
These stats are not as simple as one might think (“wait, why does reaching base on an error count against your OBP? Why isn’t batting in a runner on a double play an RBI? Why do sac flies lower your OBP, but not your AVG?”), but it’s generally not hard to explain their function. People who actually want to understand what they are watching will turn to stats like Wins Above Replacement and Adjusted OPS, and sometimes the forward-thinking broadcasts will introduce these statistics, but generally, you’re going to see what’s in the above image and not much else.
In the NFL, you’ll also get your basic counting stats (yards, touchdowns, interceptions), but it’s also extremely common to see passer rating:
Audiences, I think, have this notion that a “100” passer rating is good, but don’t ponder the stat much beyond that point. So how do you calculate passer rating? Remember, for something like batting average, the calculation is just “hits divided by at-bats,” with a few tricky carve-outs around “what counts as an at-bat?”
On the other hand, here’s the formula for passer rating:
So that’s pretty convoluted, right? To quickly summarize: The highest possible passer rating is 158.3, based upon four metrics (completion rate, yards per attempt, passing TDs per attempt, and interceptions thrown per attempt). If a QB were to hurl the ball towards the sideline on every play and go 0-for-whatever with 0 yards, 0 TDs, and 0 INTs, that would yield a passer rating of 39.6, and sometimes broadcasters will note this fact to gently mock a QB who has a lower passer rating than that. Among qualified passers, Tua Tagovailoa had this season’s highest passer rating, at 105.5, and (with the same qualification) Patrick Mahomes has the highest passer rating for a career, with 105.7. The NFL has become more pass-friendly over time; Steve Young’s career 96.8 passer rating, once one of the highest career marks of all time, is now 12th.
The problems with passer rating, like the Kansas City Chiefs offense (we’ll see how well that one ages at publication), create a target-rich environment. Even assuming that these four measures of passing are being correctly weighted against one another (which I doubt), what are we not measuring here? For starters:
Anything a quarterback does that isn’t one of those four things (taking a sack, anything that involves “running forward,” drawing or creating a penalty, and so on) is not directly measured.
Like many statistics, especially in sports like football and basketball, team contributions aren’t measured. Throwing a short pass to Travis Kelce, which he then turns into a long touchdown after the catch, counts on your ledger the same as if you had thrown it to the end zone yourself.
More fundamentally, not all passes (or rushes) of the same distance are equally valuable. I contend that if you want to try to better understand what is happening on a football field, and why our basic metrics may betray that understanding, this is a maxim worth repeating. Not all passes of the same distance are equally valuable! A seven-yard pass on 1st and 10 has a different value than a seven-yard pass on 3rd and 18. That’s one of those things that everyone intuitively knows on the field and as a fan, but for some reason we accept our mainstream statistics not taking it into account.
Websites like Pro Football Outsiders attempt to frame conversations around the sport in a way that helps us actually understand what we are watching, in a way that relying on statistics like passer rating generally does not.
4) WHAT is the name of the planet from which the character Genly Ai, the protagonist and narrator of Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1969 novel The Left Hand of Darkness, hails? No, don’t say Earthsea (where several of Le Guin’s other works are set) or Gethen (the planet where the events of the novel take place); the answer is a Latin word, and Genly Ai is generally understood to be a stand-in for the reader.
This is TERRA. The people who write trivia questions sometimes want you to know that terra incognita is a phrase used in cartography to refer to unexplored areas—it translates from Latin to “unknown land.”
The Left Hand of Darkness is fantastic. But don’t take my word for it:
But the highest praise I can give The Left Hand of Darkness is that Le Guin captures the texture of life. This book is full of little moments, bits of sensation and emotion, that show what it feels like to be alive, day after day. Something about the kindness and curiosity in her voice gives substance to all the breadapples and roast blackfish and hot showers and frozen trucks in this book: all the little pleasures and discomforts, the endless struggle and occasional relief of living.
And this is especially true during the long sequence where Genly and Estraven trek across the Gobrin Ice, the frozen waste to the north of Orgoreyn and Karhide. Every inch of their journey is beautifully described, with phrases like “mincing along like a cat on eggshells” and “cinders patter, falling with the snow.” These little moments of poetry go hand in hand with the unrelenting grind of hauling a sled, pitching a tent, eating gichy-michy.
…
The Left Hand of Darkness surprises me again every time I reread it. There are so many wonderful ideas and stark emotional moments, and Le Guin’s language always startles me with its sheer power and wonder. And every detail in the book has little stories embedded inside it, and these stories keep intersecting and building on each other every time I revisit them—until you start to realize that everything is made of stories. As Genly Ai says on the very first page, “Truth is a matter of the imagination.”Gender, sex, romance, desire, power, nationalism, oppression—they’re all just stories we tell ourselves. And we can tell different stories if we choose.
5) “Positive retributivism,” according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “holds that an offender’s [BLANK] provides a reason in favour of punishment; essentially, the state should punish those found guilty of criminal offences to the extent that they deserve, because they deserve it.” That blank isn’t filled by the Atacama, the Kumtag, or the Western; it’s just WHAT?
The answer is DESERT. In philosophy, “desert” is the condition of being deserving of something. In colloquial speech, the only place you’ll generally hear the word is in the phrase “just deserts” (which is why we threw the word “just” into the question). The word “desert” in this context comes from the same Old French word that our word “deserve” comes from.
The Atacama, Kumtag, and Western are examples of (geographical) deserts, which gave you another clue.
6) NAME the only U.S. state that fits into the theme of this newsletter (though perhaps not politically).
The answer here was TEXAS.
Each of our answers in this newsletter was a word made up only of letters on the left side of a typical QWERTY keyboard for which one would typically use only their left hand. In addition, each question contained a clue about the theme:
Question #1: Tesseract (the word “sinister,” which comes from a Latin word meaning “on the left side,” was in the question)
Question #2: Cabaret3 (the phrase “extreme left” was in the question)
Question #3: Steve (Young and Carlton were both famously lefties—particularly in the NFL, left-handed quarterbacks are comparatively rare)
Question #4: Terra (The Left Hand of Darkness was mentioned in the question)
Question #5: Desert (we used the Western Desert, as “west” is typically on the left side of a map)
Question #6: Texas (we pointed to Texas’s political orientation, which would typically be characterized as right-leaning,4 as a clue)
Newsletter Title: “Aggregated Traversers,” besides also being a phrase written on the left side of the keyboard, was meant to refer to how this newsletter involved your traversing fingers on a keyboard, all aggregated on one side.
Of the fifty states, only Texas can be written with only left-hand keys. Ohio, by the way, is the only state whose letters all are on the right side of the keyboard.
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
The antagonist in A Wrinkle in Time is IT, and It is also the Stephen King novel and its adaptations mentioned above. (I had a little fun with the sentence “It is also the name of…” in the question.)
Some people call passer rating “quarterback rating.” We’ve avoided that here, as “QBR” is a proprietary ESPN statistic which we don’t want to confuse passer rating with. Also, for reasons I haven’t explored, “passer rating” is calculated completely differently in college. This newsletter recap deals exclusively with the NFL’s version of passer rating.
“B” is sometimes a close call, as some might use their right hand to press that key. I surveyed several online sources, including Mavis Beacon, and they are fairly consistent about “B” as a left-hand letter, though.
I sometimes wonder whether the concepts of red states and blue states are too reductive, too readily lead us to stereotyping people from states, and too readily make us think that voters get their, well, just deserts. People will talk about states like Minnesota as reliably blue and Texas as (mostly) reliably red, but 45.28% of voting Minnesotans voted for Donald Trump in 2020 and 46.48% of voting Texans voted for Joe Biden in 2020. “Almost eleven out of twenty voters vote blue” sounds a bit different than “blue state,” doesn’t it?