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) An animated character voiced by Jack Black, one of the titular characters from the television show Teletubbies, and a river originating in the Cottian Alps that flows into the Adriatic Sea all share WHAT name?
2) In conjunction with the release of Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones, a website called the HoloNet News promoted the film by sharing “in-universe” news stories. One such story was headlined “Senator Grebleips to Fund Extragalactic Survey”; this, together with a previous cameo appearance in the Galactic Senate in Episode I, are generally understood to be Easter eggs referring to WHAT 1982 film?
3) You can add a letter to a 2020 Taylor Swift album title (Evermore) to get a word that appears eleven times in the poem “The Raven” by Edgar Allen Poe (“nevermore”). Similarly, you can subtract four letters from another 2020 Taylor Swift album title and be left with WHAT word that ends the second line of “The Raven”?
4) WHAT number, when raised to the power of an exponent that equals the product of “the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter” and “a solution to the quadratic equation x^2 + 1 = 0”, equals negative one?
5) The equivalent of WHAT French word is en in Dutch, und in German, e in Portuguese, and, and och in Swedish?
6) The following is a list of the initials of twenty-four individuals in chronological order (most recent to least recent) who share WHAT connection? AL, JH, TKH, JFH, CW, NT, PL, WSM, KR, CS, DH, TK, LG, BC, SK, RP, RH, RD, MVD, JB, MS, HN, RW, RPW. (A two-word answer is sufficient.)
Trivia Newsletter CXLVIII Recap
A quick note before we jump in: On June 12th in Trivia Newsletter CXLVII, we asked a question about Daniel Ellsberg and his connection to the Pentagon Papers, and we wrote about him in the corresponding newsletter recap on June 15th. On June 16th, Ellsberg passed away. There are plenty of competent obituaries of Ellsberg out there that you can find, such as this one, but did you know that one reason Ellsberg managed to avoid jail time was a party thrown by Barbara Streisand? Read more about that here.
1) A lock company established in Stamford, Connecticut in 1840 (and now a subsidiary of a Swedish company) shares its name with WHAT other institution located in the state of its founding?
This is YALE; the lock company is the Yale Lock Company. In 2022, the parent company of Yale Lock Company, a Swedish conglomerate called Assa Abloy, was sued by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division in connection with its proposed purchase of yet another lock company. As part of a settlement reached last month, Assa Abloy will be required to sell off some of its holdings, including Yale, in order to move forward with its purchase.
2) The Connecticut Sun are a professional sports team in a league with twelve total teams. One of the other teams in that league has a name that could describe a particular object in orbit around the Sun (though a different meaning was probably intended). WHAT CITY does that other team represent?
This league is the WNBA and the other team is the PHOENIX Mercury.
As of this writing (a few days before publication), the Phoenix Mercury are in last place with a record of 2-8, and the Connecticut Sun are in second place at 9-3. WHAT TEAM, at the time of this newsletter’s publication, has the best record in the WNBA? The same team is the most recent WNBA champion, having defeated Connecticut in the 2022 WNBA Finals. The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
3) An OutKast song released in 2000 (before the election of George W. Bush) was reinterpreted by many as a pro-war song after 2003. WHAT was that song’s three-letter title? (The song’s full title contains a parenthetical clarifying what the title stands for, but please just provide the abbreviated title.)
The answer here is “B.O.B.”—the parenthetical is “Bombs Over Baghdad.”
Here’s the Los Angeles Times in 2003:
On top of one of the most deliciously dynamic hip-hop beats since Dr. Dre’s teaming a decade ago with Tupac Shakur on “California Love,” the chorus sounds like an Iraq battle cry: “Bombs over Baghdad / Don’t even bang unless you plan to hit something / Bombs over Baghdad.”
The problem is Big Boi was strongly opposed to the U.S. invading Iraq without United Nations support and he never intended the song as a pro-war exercise.
…
“We make a record and then it is up to people to take what they want from it,” he said by phone this week from his home base in Atlanta. “We explain a song when people ask, but we can’t control how they feel about it.
“In our case, fans know where we stand pretty much. I talk to them in the street all the time. I really think Bush should have gone through the United Nations before going over there. But once the fighting starts, everything changes.
“You have guys over there with families here, and you have to support the troops and pray for them. So, if the song helps them keep their spirits up, I don’t have a problem with that.”
Big Boi, who is joined in OutKast by Andre 3000 (Andre Benjamin), saw what he felt was half-hearted U.S. bombing raids on Iraq in the 1990s as an analogy for a lack of dedication among many artists in the music business.
“There were lots of people making music, but there was nothing real about it,” he says. “We were like saying, make music that has something to say or just get out of the way.”
4) WHAT is the nickname of the fictional ex-Confederate soldier and U.S. Marshal who first appeared in a Charles Portis novel in 1968? He was played by John Wayne in the 1969 film adaptation and a 1975 sequel (in which his name was the title of the movie), and he was played by Jeff Bridges in a 2010 remake directed by the Coen brothers.
This character is Reuben J. “ROOSTER” Cogburn.
To quote Ethan Coen on making True Grit, the 2010 film, more faithful to the original novel by centering the story on Mattie Ross, a farm girl featured in the novel:
It's partly a question of point-of-view. The book is entirely in the voice of the 14-year-old girl. That sort of tips the feeling of it over a certain way. I think [the book is] much funnier than the movie was so I think, unfortunately, they lost a lot of humor in both the situations and in her voice. It also ends differently than the movie did. You see the main character – the little girl – 25 years later when she's an adult.
Fortunately for everyone involved, the filmmakers selected Hailee Steinfeld to play Ross in her first feature-film role, and Steinfeld knocked it out of the park (both based upon my personal opinion and the fact that she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress as a 14-year-old herself). If I had written this recap last week, I’d tell you that the highest-grossing film (worldwide) in which Steinfeld has an acting credit is Bumblebee (2018), the Transformers film; now, the answer to that query is Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse.
5) Among the words that have made their way to English from Nahuatl is the name of WHAT animal, with a root that originally meant “trickster”?
This word is COYOTE.
In 1990, The New Yorker published an article entitled “Coyote v. Acme” that imagines a civil lawsuit brought by Wile E. Coyote against the Acme Corporation:
Opening Statement of Mr. Harold Schoff, attorney for Mr. Coyote: My client, Mr. Wile E. Coyote, a resident of Arizona and contiguous states, does hereby bring suit for damages against the Acme Company, manufacturer and retail distributor of assorted merchandise, incorporated in Delaware and doing business in every state, district, and territory. Mr. Coyote seeks compensation for personal injuries, loss of business income, and mental suffering caused as a direct result of the actions and/or gross negligence of said company, under Title 15 of the United States Code, Chapter 47, section 2072, subsection (a), relating to product liability.
That article is the basis of an upcoming film (Coyote vs. Acme) that may come out in late 2023. Here’s Will Forte on that film; he voices Wile E. Coyote’s attorney:
“I mean, it was so fun to make this. It came out of this article that I think is decades old. Wiley Coyote is suing the Acme Corporation because of all the different contraptions that have exploded in his face, and stuff like that. And so, I get to play Wile E. Coyote's lawyer, and it's a mixture of animation, and it's like a Who Framed Roger Rabbit? style movie. And yeah, John Cena is so great in it. Lana Condor is in it. It was so much fun making it, and these guys who are making it are so smart. Because you’ve got to figure out where this animated character is going to move to. It was amazing to be a part of it. So, I'm excited to see how it turns out because, of course, I'm acting with a tennis ball a lot of times. There's a tennis ball for an eye-line, and it's moving around. So, yeah, I think, I don't know how much more I can say about it, but I've blathered on for a while.”
6) The answers in this newsletter, as well as a word in the title of a play that has received multiple nominations for the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play, share WHAT specific connection?
The answers in this newsletter (Yale, Phoenix, Bob, Rooster, Coyote) are all CALL SIGNS IN THE FILM TOP GUN: MAVERICK. The mention of the Tony Award in Question #6 refers to the play The Iceman Cometh and therefore the call sign “Iceman.” The newsletter title, “Off-Brand,” refers to one meaning of the word “maverick” (itself the most famous call sign from the films): an unbranded animal.
Thanks again to Patrick for putting together a great set of questions!
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
The reigning WNBA champion is the LAS VEGAS ACES.