Before we get started: Something I’ve been playing lately and that you might enjoy is PAR Trivia, which launched its open beta just a few days ago.
As a disclaimer, I have no idea who is behind PAR Trivia, I have no affiliation with it, this is not a paid (or even solicited) advertisement, and I am promoting the game solely because I think it’s pretty cool (and for the self-interested reason that if trivia games grow in popularity, it’s more likely that games that I enjoy will continue to be created).
PAR Trivia is a desktop-only (for now?) trivia game that prioritizes speed—the faster you can type the correct answer, the better your score. As the timer for each question advances, the game spots you most of the letters in the answer. The below images should give you a better idea of what I mean:
Again, it’s an open beta, so there’s some work to be done, but there’s a lot that already works well. The questions are pretty good, there are filters for categories, there are “pro” and “casual” difficulty settings, you can use the site both for solo trivia challenges and to play against others, you can play under your real name or a pseudonym, and there’s an interesting matchmaking rating system that will be familiar to you if you’re into chess and/or multiplayer online gaming. There are some pretty serious trivia folks messing around with it that I keep losing to, and despite that I think the game’s worth checking out and following as it undoubtedly grows.
(Entirely coincidentally: The website features a daily quiz, in addition to its other formats, and the daily quiz each Thursday is a set of questions with a hidden theme.)
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) “[She] cannot sing very well. She is flat a good deal of the time. And still cannot sing with anything approaching professional finish,” wrote music critic Paul Hume in 1950 about WHOM? Her father’s response, which included “Some day I hope to meet you. When that happens you'll need a new nose, a lot of beefsteak for black eyes, and perhaps a supporter below!”, led to a minor scandal.
2) “How Come, Chief Willoughby?” is the text displayed on one of the titular objects in WHAT film?
3) Brian Peerless called WHAT song, originally composed by W.C. Handy in 1914, the “jazzman’s Hamlet”? Ethel Waters was the first woman to publicly perform it, and a 1929 film, the only known film in which Bessie Smith appeared, features the song (and has the same name).
4) Khris Davis, Adam Dunn, Nathaniel Lowe, Kendrys Morales, and Brandon Moss are some folks who have, in a sense, littered in what is sometimes claimed to be the largest privately funded fountain in the world, in WHAT city?
5) The term “Gilded Age,” used to describe a period lasting approximately twenty years in the late nineteenth century in the United States, was borrowed by historians from the title of a novel co-authored by Charles Dudley Warner and WHAT prolific writer?
6) The 2008 video game Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots and a 2010 episode of the television show Hawaii Five-0 share WHAT specific distinction with the films MacArthur (1977), Under Siege (1992), and Battleship (2012)?
(As a hint: the distinction is NOT SHARED by films such as Battleship Potemkin (1925), Midway (1976), Winter’s Bone (2010), and Guardians of the Galaxy (2014).)
Trivia Newsletter CXXXIX Recap
“OOPS! ALL SPORTS!” EDITION:
1a) The 149th Kentucky Derby was run this past Saturday. NAME the horse, a relative longshot with 16-to-1 odds, that spellbound viewers as it won the Derby with a time of 2:01.57.
The winner of the Derby was MAGE. We’d be remiss to mention this year’s Derby and not mention the string of horse fatalities that occurred in the days leading up to the Derby. Read more about that here.
There’s nothing we enjoy here more than an unexpected connection, and your strange connection today is that a key figure in the history of the Kentucky Derby is Meriwether Lewis Clark, Jr., who was the grandson of William Clark, of “Lewis & Clark expedition” fame.1 Meriwether's father married Abigail Prather Churchill, a member of an old Kentucky family that owned a swathe of land that includes what is today known as Churchill Downs, where the Kentucky Derby is held.
Here’s more on that (Meriwether’s nickname was “Lutie”):
Late in 1873, Clark came home from abroad with ideas about how to build a racetrack--and to eliminate bookmaking by using French pari-mutuel wagering machines. (The "pari" in pari-mutuel is actually a shortened reference to Paris.) The Churchill family, obviously, financially backed Lutie's racetrack venture. With a need to showcase their racing stock, especially in light of the Cincinnati-Lexington railroad connection (also see Part II), a new racetrack was decided upon and was to be built on Churchill land. The Churchill brothers were the entrepreneurs who arranged the new Louisville Jockey Club and Driving Park Association while Lutie acted as president an on-site manager. Half the Louisville Jockey Club members were local bankers, hotel men and streetcar company owners; the other half were those with large farms and whiskey interests. By selling 320 shares of stock at $100 a share the Louisville Jockey Club came up with $32,000 to build a racetrack.
The track opened amid great hoopla on May 17, 1875. Believe it or not, the Kentucky Derby was not planned as the main attraction of the inaugural meet, but when H.P. McGrath's Aristides set a new world's record for the mile-and-a-half distance, "the crowd went wild." Still, racing three-year olds was a relatively new venture, and there were two other races that day which were bigger than the Derby: the Louisville Cup, discontinued after 1887, and the Gentlemen's Cup Race, in which a member of a recognized jockey club rode his own horse. After only one year, Lutie Clark and the track were considered a success.
Meriwether was a bit of a mess, and also did not like Chicagoans:
[W]hen Clark was working as a steward at a Chicago track, a bartender at Clark's hotel took offense at Clark's calling Chicagoans “thieves and liars,” and told Clark so. Clark took off, then returned with a gun, rested the muzzle on the bartender's chest and forced the man to apologize. There were plenty of witnesses, because the story was retold in both Chicago and Louisville newspapers. The Churchill brothers were not pleased with the negative publicity.
2a) Last week, a college baseball gambling scandal involving bets placed in Cincinnati led to the firing of Brad Bohannon, the coach of WHAT university’s team? The same university is where the #1 pick in the 2023 National Football League draft attended college.
Bohannon coached baseball at the UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA. College sports have a long history of being involved in gambling scandals, which involvement may only grow as sportsbetting becomes more normalized and more easily accessed. One of the most infamous instances of such a scandal involved the 1978-79 Boston College men’s basketball team. Several members of the team reached an agreement with two small-time Pittsburgh gamblers to engage in “point shaving” (i.e., generally not change the game’s outcome, but try to ensure that the team either wins or loses by a certain margin, so that gamblers in the know can profit).
Those Pittsburgh gamblers coordinated with Henry Hill, a Lucchese crime family associate from New York in order to facilitate the operation and ensure that everyone would get paid. The story goes that nine games were potentially affected by the scheme, which winded down after a game between Boston College and Holy Cross in 1979 did not end with the desired result. The conspiracy was revealed when Hill was arrested in 1980 on unrelated charges and offered the entire story in exchange for immunity.
In WHAT 1990 FILM is Hill’s involvement in the Boston College scandal briefly mentioned? The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.2
3a) NAME the basketball player who last week won the NBA Most Valuable Player Award for the 2022-23 season. He joins a list of impressive players who won the award exactly one time, including James Harden, Russell Westbrook, Kevin Durant, Kobe Bryant, and Dirk Nowitzki.
The winner of the NBA MVP Award was JOEL EMBIID of the Philadelphia 76ers.
Tonight, the Sixers will take on the Boston Celtics in Game 6 of the Eastern Conference semifinals with a chance to win the series and proceed to the Eastern Conference Finals. The Sixers have lost in the semifinals in four of the past five years; they have not made it past the semifinals since the 2000-01 season, when they lost in the Finals to the Los Angeles Lakers.
It has been a transcendent past few months for Philadelphia sports, as the Eagles made it to the Super Bowl, the Phillies made it to the World Series, and even the city’s MLS team, the Union, played for the MLS Cup. (All three of those teams did not win their championships, but if you’re a sports fan who judges a year’s success only by whether your team won a ring or not, you are almost certainly a very unhappy sports fan.)
4a) New details recently emerged regarding changes in the playoff structure for college football (specifically, for the NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision), now that decisionmakers for the major bowl games (sometimes called the “New Year’s Six”) have reached agreement. Of those six bowl games, which one, which has been played since January 1, 1935, is played in the southernmost location?
The southernmost New Year’s Six bowl game is the ORANGE BOWL, played in Miami Gardens, Florida. In the 2024-25 season, the D-I FBS playoff structure will expand from four teams to twelve teams.
A neat trick: for any single-elimination tournament (so, the college football playoff format, or March Madness), the number of games that must be played is just the number of teams in the tournament, minus one. This intuitively makes sense: Every team gets eliminated except the winner, and each elimination requires one game. If someone asks you how many March Madness games there are each year, though, you can say “Okay, so there are four First Four games, plus thirty-two first-round games, plus sixteen for the second round, then eight Sweet Sixteen games, four Elite Eight games, two Final Four games, and a championship, so 4+32+16+8+4+2+1 equals…67,” but it’s much easier to just say “Oh, there are 68 teams, so it must be 67 games.”
5a) A certain annual tournament between two specific universities in England is sometimes called Europe’s largest inter-university sports tournament. On April 30, 2023, Lancaster University defeated WHAT foe in this tournament after competing in at least four dozen events, with a score of 200 to 126?
Lancaster University plays the UNIVERSITY OF YORK in the Roses Tournament. The tourney is a riff on the Wars of the Roses fought between the Houses of Lancaster and York in the late fifteenth century.
The list of sports played in the tournament is really something. I have so many questions. What game(s) did they play for the “eSports” category? What is medics netball? Do a lot of people participate in this, or is there a bunch of doubling up, so that the same guy who’s on the debate team is also on the American football team? The list is just great.
(If you’re looking for Question #6a, it’s after all of the “B” questions.)
“SPOILSPORTS” EDITION:
1b) On September 21, 2020, the CN Tower in Toronto was lit up in gold lights in order to celebrate WHAT television show, as its final season had just swept all seven of the Primetime Emmy Awards for comedies, including awards for all four of its primary actors and actresses for playing members of the same family?
The television show is SCHITT’S CREEK.
From The Ringer:
It took 72 minutes before the Emmys handed an award to a show not named Schitt’s Creek. For its sixth and final season, the Pop TV series won all seven comedy categories: a win in every acting category, writing, direction, and Outstanding Comedy Series. Considering the show was only previously nominated four times—all for its fifth season, without winning a single trophy—it’s an unprecedented turnaround. In fact, Schitt’s Creek is the first show, comedy or otherwise, to win all its Primetime Emmy categories. (This year’s Emmys don’t just have to be remembered for all the Zoom sessions.)
The Schitt’s sweep is also a huge win for Pop TV, a network whose meager output includes such luminaries as [checks notes] Celebrity Big Brother: After Dark. While networks like Hulu went home empty-handed tonight, the tiny network that purchased a series from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation was responsible for one of the biggest Emmy nights ever. In truth, though, Schitt’s Creek is one of many shows that benefited from the well-established Netflix bump, which allowed a larger (voting) audience to find it.
After Fleabag dominated the Emmys in 2019—and then promptly vacated the space—the comedy categories were up for grabs. Now, the cycle repeats itself: With the end of Schitt’s Creek, literally every comedy category will be open to new winners next year. But for the time being, Schitt’s Creek can have its historic moment in the spotlight. Holy Schitt. (Sorry.)
2b) NAME the funk rock band, formed in 1966, that is sometimes recognized as the first major American rock group to have a racially integrated and male and female lineup. The band’s members included trumpeter Cynthia Robinson, drummer Greg Errico, saxophonist Jerry Martini, bassist Larry Graham, and the group’s founder together with his brother and sister.
This is SLY AND THE FAMILY STONE.
I’ve never figured out how to make this a good question, but before I wrote this question, I’ve been messing around with a question that would look something like this:
In the bridge portions of the song “Different People” by Sly and the Family Stone, released in 1968, Rose Stone repeatedly names a sitcom that began airing in 1978 and repeatedly alludes to the name of an animated television show that began airing in 1969. NAME both shows.
The answers (again, to this question that I don’t think is particularly good or workable) are Diff’rent Strokes and Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? Here’s the first bridge in the song:
There is a blue one who can't accept the green one
For living with a fat one, trying to be a skinny one
And different strokes for different folks
And so on and so on and scooby dooby doo-bee
3b) NAME the city in Indiana, the seat of Vigo County, that derives its name from a French phrase meaning “highland,” as it was named by French-Canadian explorers describing its location above the Wabash River. The city is home to a university that has been ranked #1 among engineering colleges that do not offer a doctorate degree by U.S. News & World Report for 24 consecutive years.
The city is TERRE HAUTE, and the university is the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology.
Terre Haute has plenty to do—you can visit Paul Dresser’s birthplace (he wrote and composed “On the Banks of the Wabash, Far Away,” a hit song that became Indiana’s state song), you can visit the Vigo County Historical Society Museum, you can stand outside the site where federal prisoners agreed to be purposefully injected with gonorrhea as part of a medical experiment, which experiment was the forerunner to flagrant violations of human rights committed by the United States in Guatemala, and you can check out the Kleptz Antique Auto Museum.
4b) Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Cori Bush, Jamaal Bowman, and Greg Casar are the five current U.S. representatives who are members of WHAT political organization founded in 1982, the current national director of which is Maria Svart? Following Chicago’s 2019 aldermanic elections, six of Chicago’s fifty City Council seats were held by members of this organization.
The organization that these folks belong to is the DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISTS OF AMERICA (usually shortened to “DSA”).
If you are “too online,” you will notice that some Twitter folks have a rose next to their usernames—that rose generally signals agreement with leftism, and sometimes specifically with the DSA, as such groups have a long history of using the rose as a symbol:
I swear, the moment this newsletter goes live, I’m going to think of a good joke about how the DSA put their national convention on the same weekend and city as Lollapalooza, and I will regret not writing it here.
5b) Iva Ikuko Toguri D'Aquino, a Japanese-American disc jockey born in 1916, was convicted of WHAT crime in 1949 and served six years in prison before being later pardoned by President Gerald Ford?
D’Aquino was convicted of TREASON.
Jeopardy! hasn’t gone to this well since 2016, but they used to more commonly give prompts such as the following:
NOTORIOUS, $800: Convinced she was wrongly accused, President Ford pardoned Iva Toguri D'Aquino, known by this name during WWII
Jeopardy! wants you to say “What is TOKYO ROSE?” Just a bit more on that:
Wartime radio, broadcast mostly from Tokyo, closely followed the German model (radio officials of the two countries were regularly in touch), though propaganda was interspersed with entertainment and music. NHK was increasingly controlled by military leadership after 1941 and became a news and propaganda outlet supporting Japanese war aims. Japan also captured many radio transmitters in occupied nations. A number of women were called Tokyo Rose as they broadcast (in English) against the Allied military forces in the Pacific. Only one, Iva Toguri D’Aquino, was an American citizen, and she served a prison term after the war before receiving a presidential pardon in 1977. Japan’s broadcast system largely survived the wartime bombings intact and continued to operate under the postwar occupation by American forces.
6a) Each of the italicized phrases in Questions #1a through #5a alludes, at least in part, to WHAT single word?
6b) Each of the italicized phrases in Questions #1b through #5b alludes, at least in part, to WHAT single word?
The answer for both sets was “ROSE”:
1a) The Kentucky Derby is sometimes called the “Run for the Roses” and the winning horse gets a garland of roses.
2a) “Baseball gambling scandal,” particularly one in Cincinnati, was meant to make you think of Pete Rose and his bets while managing the Cincinnati Reds.
3a) We listed a bunch of recent NBA players who won the NBA MVP award once, but omitted Derrick Rose, who won the award with the Chicago Bulls, from that list chronologically.
4a) We mentioned the New Year’s Six bowl games, of which one is the Rose Bowl.
5a) We alluded to, but did not name, the Roses Tournament.
1b) The family central to the plot of Schitt’s Creek is the Rose family.
2b) Sly Stone’s sister in Sly & the Family Stone is Rose Stone.
3b) The university in Terre Haute that we alluded to is Rose-Hulman.
4b) As noted above, the DSA heavily associates itself with the rose.
5b) D’Aquino was popularly known in the media as “Tokyo Rose.”
The title of the newsletter (“All the Red Flags Just Look Like Flags”) is an allusion to a quote from Season 2 of my favorite television show, BoJack Horseman:
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
History rarely lends itself to the word “adorable,” but isn’t it adorable that the Clark family used Meriwether Lewis as a name in the family?
The 1990 film in which Henry Hill’s involvement in the Boston College point-shaving scandal is mentioned is Goodfellas—Henry Hill is Ray Liotta’s character in that film.