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) gloria jean watkins, who authored works such as feminist theory: from margin to center, is closely associated with berea college in kentucky and is best known by what pen name?
2) NAME the novelist who (i) produced Safe Haven (2013), The Best of Me (2014), The Longest Ride (2015), and The Choice (2016) and no other films based upon his works, (ii) was the screenwriter for The Last Song (2010) and no other films based upon his works, and (iii) has written eighteen other novels, perhaps most famously a 1996 novel that was adapted into a 2004 film directed by Nick Cassavetes.
3) NAME the recipient of a PhD in astrophysics from Imperial College London in 2007 for his thesis entitled A Survey of Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud; his research was carried out in the early 1970s, but was interrupted by his music career, which included repeated recognition as one of the greatest guitarists of all time.
4) NAME the activist who, just months after settling a years-long legal dispute with the group OutKast regarding their use of her name in the title of the most successful radio single of their album Aquemini, passed away and became the first woman to lie in honor in the Capitol Rotunda.
5) Holden Caulfield’s misremembering of the line “if a body meet a body” from the 1782 poem “Comin’ Thro’ the Rye” as “if a body catch a body” is the basis of the title of J.D. Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye. WHO wrote “Comin’ Thro’ the Rye”?
6) WHAT is the theme of the answers to Questions #1 through #5? (A single word will suffice.)
Trivia Newsletter CXL Recap
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.
This is MARGARET TRUMAN, the daughter of President Harry Truman.
The “Capital Crimes” series of mystery novels is written under Margaret Truman’s name and is ghostwritten by Donald Bain. The first three are entitled Murder in the White House, Murder on Capitol Hill, and Murder in the Supreme Court, so right away all three branches of the federal government are accounted for. Later entries put murders in the Smithsonian, Embassy Row, the FBI, the CIA, and the Pentagon, but the powder was running dry at that point. The most recent entries have murders in K Street, Foggy Bottom, and sometimes not even in D.C., such as in Murder in Havana. Unbelievably, the 24th entry in the Capital Crimes series (with Margaret Truman’s name still on the cover two years after her death) is merely titled Murder in the Beltway—I guess Murder at the Gun Barrel Fence wouldn’t have gotten many readers.
According to the Truman Library, that letter from Truman to Hume was purchased by real estate developer Harlan Crow, who has been in the news lately for his relationship to Justice Clarence Thomas of the U.S. Supreme Court.
2) “How Come, Chief Willoughby?” is the text displayed on one of the titular objects in WHAT film?
This film is THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE EBBING, MISSOURI.
Martin McDonagh, the director of Three Billboards, was in a Greyhound bus in southeast Texas when he saw three signs on the side of Interstate 10, likely similar to the signs in the below image, relating to a father’s frustration that no one was charged in the death of his daughter. It was this sight that inspired McDonagh to make Three Billboards.
Frances McDormand received one of her three Academy Awards for Best Actress for the film. In addition, Three Billboards is one of fifteen films (but only three since 1990) to receive multiple nominations for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor (Woody Harrelson and Sam Rockwell; Rockwell won the award). WHAT are the two most recent films to hold this distinction? The titles of both films have a connection to the same country. The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
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).
This song is “SAINT LOUIS BLUES.”
From the National Blues Museum:
The 1929 short film St. Louis Blues is the only footage we have of the foundational, legendary, and essential blues singer Bessie Smith performing. It is also one of the National Blues Museum’s most gripping and beautiful pieces. Directed by Dudley Murphy, the film is unique for its all-Black cast, presented in a relatively unprejudiced light for the time period. It is from early in the period of films with sound, or “talkies,” and makes use of audio to capture Smith and a band made up of seminal early blues musicians like pianist James P. Johnson, cornetists Thomas Morris and Joe Smith, guitarist Bernard Addison, and the legendary choir led by Francis Hall Johnson.
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The reactions of the audience are particularly intriguing to watch, and those around her eventually join her in beautiful harmony singing (the singers are members of Francis Hall Johnson’s choir). In all, the film is fascinating as a portrayal of Black culture made by the racist, white-run entertainment industry (RKO pictures distributed the film), but its real value is the performance of Smith, whose vocal and performance style set the tone for generations of vocalists in blues, jazz, soul, and all other forms of American music.
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?
These are baseball players, and so their “littering” was hitting home runs into the fountain in Kauffman Stadium in KANSAS CITY. A useful connection here is that Kansas City is called the “City of Fountains” and is sometimes said to have more fountains than any city in the world other than Rome, Italy. (“Is sometimes said” is the cowardly trivia writer’s refuge when something seems especially hard to research.)
Adam Dunn hit the 400th home run of his career in Kansas City as a member of the Chicago White Sox, and that ball went into the Kauffman fountain. A White Sox fan got arrested for retrieving it, and that’s just perfect. You see, that little anecdote about going for broke is a perfect segue into Adam Dunn’s career.
Those who know me well will know that my favorite athlete of all time is Adam Dunn. I’m about to write (and copy/paste) over a thousand words about Dunn, so if that sounds just awful, please scroll down a whole bunch or do a Ctrl+F on “Gilded Age”.
Adam Dunn is designed for this newsletter.2 To start, he had the weirdest baseball career. It was a fantastic career—the only two MLB folks with more 40+ home run and 100+ walk seasons than Dunn are Barry Bonds and Albert Pujols—but it was weird. In over half of Dunn’s plate appearances, the other team could have had all of its fielders sit down, because the ball didn’t land in the field of play. Dunn had four consecutive years where he hit exactly forty home runs, and no other player has ever had a four-season streak of hitting the same number of home runs when that number is greater than four. Dunn personified the Three True Outcomes more than just about anybody. Forget excuse-me singles and suicide squeezes; there’s power in just going for it, and Dunn went for it with power.
(If you’re not a baseball person, just think of Jeopardy! and the thrill of seeing contestants bet on themselves with aggressive wagers on Daily Doubles as opposed to conservative wagers. The metaphor isn’t perfect, but my point is that there’s a thrill to seeing people willing to risk everything, and either succeed or fail spectacularly, instead of playing it safe.)
Of course, there was a flip side. Dunn’s strikeout totals were prolific. Of players who played in the wild-card era (when there were more playoff spots), he holds the distinction of having the most games played without appearing in a playoff game. He did “appear” in a playoff game—in the final game of his career, he sat on the bench during a 9-8 loss. His 2011 season with the Chicago White Sox was one of the worst seasons in history. The point is, Dunn’s career was never boring.
The weirdness goes beyond baseball. You know the 2013 film Dallas Buyers Club?3 You know, that movie that was nominated for Best Picture? Adam Dunn is a bartender in that movie:
My favorite quote by Dunn: “if people didn’t post people’s batting averages on the scoreboard or in the media, people would be batting .400. I’m serious. I believe that.” I think about that quote a lot, including outside of baseball. I haven’t even mentioned that his nickname was “The Big Donkey.” What, you thought it’d be something normal?
The age of chivalry is Dunn, so to speak. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded, and nowhere is that clearer than in baseball. Dunn’s career started in 2001, and Moneyball (the book) came out in 2003, which led to a surge in the popularity of analytics in baseball. Dunn, a prolific power hitter and walker, came to represent a cause bigger than himself—to quote FiveThirtyEight, “Because he provided value with walks and power instead of contact hitting, Dunn was initially highlighted by statheads as the type of player who would frequently fall through the cracks of traditional analysis.” Smart people regularly wrote impassioned defenses of Dunn, whose approach seemed undervalued by many in the media compared to speedy players with gaudy batting averages and little power, like Juan Pierre. Hold that thought.
We’re going to take a detour and talk about Nineteen Eighty-Four, the novel. Yeah, yeah, I know, cultural references to it have been completely ruined by the fact that people readily use, and mis-use, the book and its major themes for political analogies. But I want to talk about the best part of Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Early in the story, Winston goes to a pub to learn about life before Big Brother by talking to a member of the proletariat. The effort is unsuccessful—the old man Winston speaks to is incoherent—but in the lead-up to that scene Winston sees this exchange and buys the old man a beer to try to ply information from him:
‘I arst you civil enough, didn’t I?’ said the old man, straightening his shoulders pugnaciously. ‘You telling me you ain’t got a pint mug in the ‘ole bleeding boozer?’
‘And what in hell’s name IS a pint?’ said the barman, leaning forward with the tips of his fingers on the counter.
‘’Ark at ‘im! Calls ‘isself a barman and don’t know what a pint is! Why, a pint’s the ‘alf of a quart, and there’s four quarts to the gallon. ‘Ave to teach you the A, B, C next.’
‘Never heard of ‘em,’ said the barman shortly. ‘Litre and half litre—that’s all we serve. There’s the glasses on the shelf in front of you.’
‘I likes a pint,’ persisted the old man. ‘You could ‘a drawed me off a pint easy enough. We didn’t ‘ave these bleeding litres when I was a young man.’
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‘May I offer you a drink?’ [Winston] said.
‘You’re a gent,’ said the other, straightening his shoulders again. He appeared not to have noticed Winston’s blue overalls. ‘Pint!’ he added aggressively to the barman. ‘Pint of wallop.’
The barman swished two half-litres of dark-brown beer into thick glasses which he had rinsed in a bucket under the counter.
On the surface, this is just a silly argument between the old ways and the new ways. What makes it brilliant, though, is that the bartender and old man are bickering about a pint versus a half-liter. A pint is 16 fluid ounces, and a half-liter is about 16.9 fluid ounces; this entire dispute is about two sizes that are nearly the same. How many everyday arguments, both trivial and serious, are just half-liters and pints?
Back to Dunn. As the field of sabermetrics advanced past the mid-aughts, folks got better at measuring baserunning and defense. It became clear that there were serious deficiencies in Dunn’s game that materially detracted from his value. Remember Juan Pierre, the speedy, high-batting-average guy we mentioned above?
Adam Dunn, who retired at the end of last season, and Juan Pierre, who officially retired on Friday after sitting out 2014, were selected in the same draft class in 1998. They both played in the majors for 14 years, including one year as teammates with the White Sox. They finished seven games and 48 plate appearances apart. In playing time, they were twins.
In appearance and playing style, though, they were Twins. At 6-foot-6 and (by the end of his career) 285 pounds, Dunn had eight inches and 105 pounds on Pierre, and their listed dimensions may have undersold the difference. True to their physical forms, Dunn was a lumbering slugger, while Pierre was the Platonic ideal of the speedy slap-hitter.
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So, which one was better?
The answer, according to Baseball-Reference’s Wins Above Replacement statistic, is that they’re equally valuable:
In retrospect, the debate over Dunn and Pierre — and, by extension, over contact and speed versus patience and power — seems as silly as an argument about breaking an egg at the big end or the little end. We now know that both sides were right in one sense and wrong in another, and that both players’ methods worked almost equally well. Fortunately, the framework of WAR allows us to say so, even as the implementation of its components continues to be refined.
Pierre and Dunn are the John Adams and Thomas Jefferson of their generation. They rose to prominence around the same time, became the focal points of rival factions, and, in their declining years, saw their differences reconciled. And finally, they exited the stage almost simultaneously, having left us in a far different place philosophically than we were when they arrived.
Half-liters and pints. Adam Dunn and Juan Pierre. How can you not be romantic about baseball?
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?
This is MARK TWAIN. Twain and Warner took the title of the novel (The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today) in part from a quote from Shakespeare’s King John:
To gild refined gold, to paint the lily
To throw a perfume on the violet
To smooth the ice, or add another hue
Unto the rainbow, or with taper-light
To seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish,
Is wasteful and ridiculous excess.
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).)
The connection here is that these are all works in which THE USS MISSOURI, the battleship, APPEARED.
The USS Missouri is the last battleship commissioned by the United States. It participated in the Battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa and was the site of Japan’s surrender to end World War II. It later had roles in the Korean War and Operation Desert Storm, and now is a museum ship at Pearl Harbor. If I had a nickel for every time I saw a plot where circumstances led to the vast majority of the US Navy’s fleet not being available, so the USS Missouri had to be called back into action, I would have two nickels (MGS 4 and Battleship). It’s not a lot of nickels, but it’s weird that it’s happened twice.
The goal of this newsletter was to get you to Missouri, and hope you could cobble together the rest from the list of works in Question #6:
Question #1: The Trumans are closely associated with Missouri, but also Margaret Truman christened the USS Missouri, and so she christened our newsletter.
Question #2: Three Billboards is set in Missouri and has the state in the title.
Questions #3 and #4: “Saint Louis Blues” and Kansas City, for cities in Missouri.
Question #5: Mark Twain is closely associated with Missouri.
Newsletter Title: “If I Could Turn Back Time” served two roles. First, the USS Missouri is an old ship and it’s often used in fiction for purposes of nostalgia (as described above). Much more directly, the music video for Cher’s “If I Could Turn Back Time” was filmed on the USS Missouri.
The list of works in Question #6 was meant to help you—for example, General MacArthur accepted Japan’s surrender on the USS Missouri, and MacArthur was one of the movies. Hawaii Five-0 takes place in Hawaii, where the USS Missouri is now. We excluded the four movies at the end of Question #6 to try to lead you away from “works set at least in part in Missouri” or “works in which a battleship appears.”
Trivia Newsletter Variety Pack 5 Recap
NAME the letter that is the 30th letter in the Icelandic alphabet and, while not a part of the modern English alphabet, was a letter in the Old English alphabet, as seen in the beginning of the following excerpt from Beowulf: “Þurh runstafas rihte gemearcod.” (Your answer should be a five-letter word.)
We’re going to go fast here—this is THORN.
Let it all out and name the Tears for Fears song that charted at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for three consecutive weeks in 1985, just a few months after “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” was at #1 for two weeks.
This one’s “SHOUT.”
According to one source, bohea, congou, souchong, singlo, and hyson were types of WHAT that were removed from the Dartmouth on December 16, 1773? (Your answer should be a plural word.)
These are TEAS, as the question is referencing the Boston Tea Party. The three relevant ships that day were the Eleanor, Beaver, and Dartmouth.
“It takes a lot to make a [BLANK] / A pinch of salt and laughter too” were the opening words of a “theme song” for a surreal black comedy short that first aired on Adult Swim in 2014. WHAT word fills in the blank in that lyric?
This is STEW, from the short Too Many Cooks.
WHAT do the answers in this newsletter have in common with one another?
THORN, SHOUT, TEAS, and STEW are anagrams of cardinal directions—NORTH, SOUTH, EAST, and WEST. Your only clue was that, in the subtitle for this newsletter, we said “A sense of direction for May 15, 2023.”
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
The two most recent films that have had multiple actors nominated for Best Supporting Actor are The Irishman (Al Pacino and Joe Pesci) and The Banshees of Inisherin (Brendan Gleeson and Barry Keoghan). The connection is to Ireland, given the name of The Irishman and the fact that Inisherin is a (fictional) remote island of the coast of Ireland.
Dunn is designed for this newsletter, but so is everyone else. “I wonder if there's a single place in the whole world that's never had a story. I bet not. I just about guarantee you there's no places like that in America. Every little square of it, every place you stomp your foot, that's where something happened.
Speaking of films with multiple Oscar nominations for acting—Dallas Buyers Club is one of five films that won for both Best Actor (Matthew McConaughey) and Best Supporting Actor (Jared Leto).