Hi all—our questions today are brought to you by Patrick Iber, who also wrote the questions for Trivia Newsletter CXXXIV back in April. As always, you are in great hands with Patrick.
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) “Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit” is a quotation by WHAT wit?
2) Over the course of his (short) lifetime, WHAT composer wrote at least 59 mazurkas for piano, reflecting the music of his home country?
3) In Mel Brooks' film Silent Movie, WHO, after fighting his way across a room with a strong gale, has the only spoken line? (That's the joke!)
4) The Raft of the Medusa, a controversial painting inspired by gruesome true events, is considered the masterwork of WHAT Romantic artist?
5) Actor Canada Lee played Bigger Thomas in the 1941 Broadway run of a play based upon a novel published in 1940 by WHAT author? The production marked the last time that producers Orson Welles and John Houseman, co-founders of the legendary Mercury Theater, worked together.
6) NAME either the (deceased) American rock star who shares a notable connection with each of the answers to Questions #1-5, or the notable connection itself that is shared by each answer.
Trivia Newsletter CXLIV Recap
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 Award, for Carmen Jones (1954)?
This is DOROTHY DANDRIDGE.
Dandridge has an incredible story that is also an incredibly sad story. Read more about that here:
There was a disastrous marriage to failing nightclub owner Jack Denison, which was filled with drinking and intense fights. “Some people kill themselves with drink, others with overdoses, some with a gun; a few hurl themselves in front of trains or autos. I hurled myself in front of another white man,” she dryly recalls.
Dandridge was forced to file for bankruptcy after a bad investment in oil wells, and [her child] Lynn was returned to her after she failed to pay her caretaker. They had no choice but to move out of the star’s beautiful house in the L.A. hills. Lynn played the piano while the movers carted out Dandridge’s hard-earned possessions. She describes the scene:
Ever since early childhood she had liked to sit at the piano and play ‘do-re-me’…over and over for hours…once in a while she turned around coyly on the stool and wanted me to applaud. The truckmen noted the single themed concert and got the idea. They applauded too.
Papers kept arriving and I, grinning as if this were all a routine ritual, served hamburgers, and coffee, applauded my daughter and patted the dogs. Yet inwardly I could see and feel my whole career in show business—and my whole personal life—tapping right off stage.
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?
This is RESONANCE—the hint was pointing towards an MRI, as that stands for “magnetic resonance imaging.”
In 2003, Paul Lauterbur and Peter Mansfield were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work on the development of the MRI. This caused a stir, as Raymond Damadian is generally credited as the person who created the first MRI machine. Nobel Prizes can be shared by up to three individuals, but the Nobel Committee seemingly purposefully excluded Damadian. There’s a lot of writing online about whether Damadian’s exclusion was fair, but the most interesting theory is that Damadian was snubbed in part because he was a creationist:
But it is difficult not to at least consider another explanation: that scientists on the assembly or in other positions of influence could not abide Damadian’s staunch support for “creationist science.” Damadian is a firm believer in a literal translation of the Bible: he has no doubt that the earth was created by God during a six-day stretch about 6,000 years ago. Damadian has also served as a technical adviser to the Institute for Creation Research, which rejects the standard model of evolution. “The non-biblical account would have us believe that all life originated from a single common ancestor—a slime mold—and give or take a billion years, we’re expected to believe that the descendants of this slime mold climbed out of the ocean and stood up and started giving lectures,” Damadian says. “Do the math on that. The sheer statistics of that violate any sense of reality.”
Asked if he thinks that his beliefs, which take aim at what is arguably the core guiding principle of modern biology, may explain his fate in the Nobel race, Damadian shrugs. “I have no way of knowing,” he says. “Nobody has ever raised it. Maybe they’re too polite.”
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”?
This is MIDORI GOTO, who performs under the name MIDORI (originally MI DORI). As we noted, Midori is also a liqueur:
Let’s go to that New York Times story:
Mi Dori, a diminutive 14-year-old Japanese violinist who studies at the Juilliard School in New York, pulled off just that triple play Saturday at Tanglewood, astounding the audience and the Boston Symphony itself with her aplomb in a situation that might have daunted the canniest veteran.
All had gone normally through the first four movements of Leonard Bernstein's Serenade, assuming you count as “normal” a technically near-perfect performance on a muggy night of a difficult piece played from memory (Mr. Bernstein, who was conducting, used a score) with winning artistic insight by a 14-year-old.
But then, in the heat of the long and complex fifth and final movement, Miss Dori broke her E string. She quickly turned to Malcolm Lowe, the concertmaster, who looked nonplussed but finally handed over his Stradivarius. There was a moment's pause while Miss Dori fitted her chin rest onto the new violin. But then she proceeded absolutely unfazed.
Then it happened again - another snapped E string. By this time Mr. Lowe was playing the Guadagnini of the acting associate concertmaster, Max Hobart, and Mr. Hobart had retuned Miss Dori's violin and was playing it, “faking” his way around the missing E string.
Miss Dori took Mr. Hobart's Guadagnini from Mr. Lowe, thinking at first it was her own violin, restrung. Realizing that it wasn't, and unwilling once again to interrupt the music, she played on, perfectly. When there was a brief pause in her part, she snapped on her chin rest, and finished the piece on Mr. Hobart's violin.
When it was over, audience, orchestra and conductor-composer joined in giving her a cheering, stomping, whistling ovation. Mr. Bernstein is a hugger and a kisser, but this time everybody hugged and kissed Miss Dori, starting with Mr. Lowe and Mr. Hobart. Aside from its sheer bravado, Miss Dori's feat impressed the musicians for several reasons. Her own violin is a slightly smaller than normal copy of a Del Gesu, given her tiny size. Yet she was able to proceed flawlessly on two different new instruments, each larger than what she was used to and different from each other.
4) Margaret Brennan stares down the United States as the current moderator of WHAT news program that has aired on CBS since 1954?
This is FACE THE NATION—“stares down the United States” was a clue.
I was writing this recap early one morning and glanced at CBS’s page describing Brennan, which has this line:
The broadcast also received two Emmy Award nominations in 2022 for its coverage of the collapse of Afghanistan as the Taliban took over and for Brennan's exclusive interview with Dr. Deborah Birx, White House COVID-19 Response Task Force Coordinator under President Trump, where she detailed the challenges and pitfalls of the role under that administration.
Let me tell you, that sentence reads much differently if you, like I did, don’t notice the phrase “and for.”
The Ringer had a podcast episode a while back where they sat down with Margaret Brennan and talked about her efforts in preparing for episodes of Face the Nation. I don’t know if that’s any good, because I don’t really listen to podcasts and there doesn’t seem to be a transcript available, but there you go.
5) Choiseul, New Georgia, Santa Isabel, Guadalcanal, Malaita and Makira are islands that are part of WHAT country, the capital of which is Honiara?
This is the SOLOMON ISLANDS.
The Solomon Islands are a U.N. member nation. What’s the OTHER U.N. member nation, located just under 1,500 miles away from the Solomon Islands, that has the word “Islands” in its name? The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
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.
We were looking for either LATVIA or LAOS.
This was a “Do-Re-Mi” newsletter, referring to the music education system for teaching music scales. (Recall from the recap of Trivia Newsletter LVIII that this is sometimes called “solfège.”) The first six syllables of the system are Do, Re, Mi, Fa, So (or Sol), and La, and those were the first letters of our answers:
Question #1: DOrothy Dandridge
Question #2: REsonance
Question #3: MIdori
Question #4: FAce the Nation
Question #5: SOlomon Islands
Thus, your task was to think of a country that starts with “La-”, and your choices were Laos and Latvia. (The part in the question about limiting it to UN member states was just so that I could avoid having to accept answers such as Latveria or other edge cases I hadn’t thought about.)
Our newsletter title (“A Deer, a Female Deer”) was a direct reference to “Do-Re-Mi,” the song from the musical The Sound of Music. My hope was that, even if you didn’t know the song, knowing a female deer is a “doe” would be a clue to give you a way in. In the song “Do-Re-Mi,” the character Maria teaches the Von Trapp children the musical scale by linking the solfège syllables to similar-sounding English words:
Do, a deer, a female deer
Re, a drop of golden sun
Mi, a name, I call myself
Fa, a long, long way to run
So, a needle pulling thread
La, a note to follow So
Ti, a drink with jam and bread
That will bring us back to Do, oh, oh, oh
Gosh, they really mailed it in on “La,” didn’t they?
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
The other U.N. member with the word “Islands” in its name is the MARSHALL ISLANDS. The fact you’ll sometimes be asked about the Marshall Islands is that they are home to Bikini Atoll, notable as a site of U.S. nuclear testing between 1946 and 1958.