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) WHAT alliteratively named actress, famous for her performances at the Apollo Theater and the Cotton Club, was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Porgy and Bess (1959) and was the first Black actress to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role, for Carmen Jones (1954)?
2) You don’t need magnetic imaging to know that WHAT nine-letter word can refer to the phenomenon that occurs when the frequency of an external oscillation or vibration matches an object’s natural frequency?
3) Also the name of a melon liqueur, WHAT is the name of the accomplished violinist who in 1986 made the front page of The New York Times with the headline “Girl, 14, Conquers Tanglewood with 3 Violins”?
4) Margaret Brennan stares down the United States as the current moderator of WHAT news program that has aired on CBS since 1954?
5) Choiseul, New Georgia, Santa Isabel, Guadalcanal, Malaita and Makira are islands that are part of WHAT country, the capital of which is Honiara?
6) There are 193 member states of the United Nations, two of which could be an answer to this Question #6 that would continue the theme of this newsletter. NAME either country.
Trivia Newsletter CXLIII Recap
1) Boyz II Men Boulevard, James Mtume Way, and Patti LaBelle Way are honorary streets located in WHAT city?
This is PHILADELPHIA.
Patti LaBelle, Cindy Birdsong, Nona Hendryx, and Sarah Dash were the founding members of the band LaBelle (at times the “Bluebelles” or “Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles”). You know the song “Lady Marmalade,” probably most famously covered by Christina Aguilera, Mýa, Pink and Lil’ Kim for the Moulin Rouge! soundtrack? It was (the band) LaBelle’s recording of “Lady Marmalade” that first made the song a hit.
“Lady Marmalade” contains the repeated line “Voulez-vous coucher avec moi?”, which is French for, roughly, “do you want to Netflix and chill tonight?” It might be the most famous thing Patti LaBelle has said in her life, and in 2022 she said that she originally didn’t know what it meant:
One of the group's most notable songs is their rendition of Bob Crewe and Kenny Nolan's “Lady Maramalade,” [sic] a song so renowned for its sexual meaning that no one could misunderstand the sultry lyrics. Aside from one of the singers, apparently! LaBelle reveals that she “had no clue what the message was” when her group recorded the song in 1974, citing the French lyrics as the perpetrators of her confusion.
“We went to Bob Crewe's house on our way to Allen Toussaint to record in New Orleans and he gave us the song before we got on the flight,” she recalls. "When we heard it at his home it sounded great, but that ‘Voulez-vous coucher avec moi,’ sounded so piercing and it just stayed in my ear. So, when we went there, I said to Allen that we had to record that one first. After we recorded the song and the song went out and people were loving it, the nuns talked about us and asked, ‘why are they talking like hookers?’”
2) WHAT single word fills in BOTH of the blanks in the following sentence? “The first amphibious landing conducted by what would become the United States Marine Corps occurred in March 1776 on the island of New [BLANK] with assistance from the covering fire of the USS Wasp and the USS [BLANK].”
This is PROVIDENCE. The thing you’ll want to try to remember is that New Providence is the most populous island in the Bahamas, and the island where the capital of the Bahamas, Nassau, is located. The USS Providence was also the name of a ship that took place in that landing—as a result of investigations and court-martials that took place afterwards, John Paul Jones, often credited with being the father of the American Navy, was put in charge of the Providence.
What was the American military doing in the Bahamas in March 1776? Read more about that here.
3) NAME the city, sharing its name (not coincidentally) with the royal house that ruled Great Britain from 1714 to 1901, that is the capital and largest city of the German state of Lower Saxony.
This one is HANOVER. George I became the first British monarch of the House of Hanover in 1714, and Queen Victoria was the last such monarch.
We’ve done more British monarchy stuff lately than we’d like—when we write this stuff, my thought these days is “he’s just some guy”:
…so, instead, we sought out some local Hanover news for you, and promptly came upon this wild story:
A German newspaper critic has been subject to a literal smear campaign, having dog excrement rubbed on her face after a ballet director apparently took offence to a review she wrote.
Police have opened an investigation, with the daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) reporting that Marco Goecke, ballet director of the Hannover State Opera, approached its dance critic, Wiebke Huester, during the interval of a premiere of a piece on Saturday and asked what she was doing there. The newspaper said that Mr Goecke, who apparently felt provoked by a recent review she wrote of a production he staged in the Dutch seat of government, The Hague, threatened to ban her from the ballet and accused her of being responsible for people cancelling season tickets in Hannover.
He then pulled out a paper bag with animal faeces and smeared Ms Huester’s face with the contents before making his way off through a packed theatre foyer, the newspaper. Ms Huester identified the substance as dog faeces and said she had filed a criminal complaint, the German news agency dpa reported.
4) NAME the Greek island, the second-smallest of the seven main Ionian islands, that has a population of about three thousand people and is most notable as the site of a mythical homecoming.
This is ITHACA—the “homecoming” is the end of Odysseus’s journey in the epic poem the Odyssey.
The ambitious Canongate Myth Series was a series of novellas published by a variety of authors between 2005 and 2013 in which ancient myths were reimagined. One of the most famous novellas to emerge from those efforts was a 2005 novella by Margaret Atwood that looks (in part) on the events of the Odyssey from a female point of view. WHAT is the name of that novella? The answer's at the end of this newsletter.1
5) In 1977, while sitting in the back of a taxicab, graphic designer Milton Glaser came up with what is likely his most famous logo, a pop-culture icon that is primarily in American Typewriter typeface and that is used to profess one’s love for WHAT place?
This is NEW YORK. You’ve seen the logo:
Glaser was inspired by Robert Indiana’s “LOVE” sculpture and design. Remember when we talked about him all the way back in the recap for Trivia Newsletter XXIX? (Gosh, those questions were not very concise, were they?)
You can read a little more about the logo and see the original sketch here.
6) The answers to Questions #1 through #5 make up five members of an eight-member set. NAME any of the three other members of that set.
The questions pointed to five of the eight CITIES WITH IVY LEAGUE UNIVERSITIES:
Question #1: Philadelphia, PA (University of Pennsylvania)
Question #2: Providence, RI (Brown University)
Question #3: Hanover, NH (Dartmouth College)
Question #4: Ithaca, NY (Cornell University)
Question #5: New York, NY (Columbia University)
Thus, you had your pick of CAMBRIDGE, MA (Harvard University), PRINCETON, NJ (Princeton University), and NEW HAVEN, CT (Yale University).
The newsletter title was “Wrigley Field” as Wrigley Field, home of the Chicago Cubs, is famous for its ivy clinging the outfield walls.
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
Margaret Atwood’s 2005 novella is The Penelopiad, and is from the point of view of Penelope, Odysseus’s wife.