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) The titles of the first novel written by Sandra Cisneros, the last play written by Anton Chekhov, the first film for which Leonardo DiCaprio received an Academy Award nomination, and Harry Styles’s first number-one single on the Billboard Hot 100 chart (as a solo artist) all have WHAT in common? (One word, please.)
2) “They were like, ‘Be bitchy and nice, ugly and pretty, young and old, stupid and smart, innocent and slutty, blond and brunette. Can you be all those things?’” said actress Leighton Meester about a character with WHAT hospitable last name that she played in a CW television show from 2007 to 2012?
3) “When beggars die there are no comets seen; The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes” says Calpurnia to her husband in WHAT play by William Shakespeare?
4) Rickey Henderson has the most stolen bases in MLB history, and Jackie Robinson has the most famous steal of home plate specifically (doing so in Game 1 of the 1955 World Series), but WHAT player stole home more times than any other MLB player, whether measured in a career (54 times) or in a season (eight times, in 1912)?
5) An axe blade, as a compound inclined plane that can be used to split apart wood or other objects, is an example of WHICH one of the six simple machines?
6) WHAT is the connection among the answers to Questions #1 through #5?
1) “Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit” is a quotation by WHAT wit?
This is OSCAR WILDE.
John Sholto Douglas, the 9th Marquess of Queensberry, is notable for two things. The first is his connection to Wilde: The Marquess of Queensberry accused Wilde of homosexuality (illegal in the United Kingdom at the time). These accusations led Wilde to pursue a lawsuit against the Marquess, and this chain of events was ruinous for Wilde—read more about that here.
There’s a second reason you might see the 9th Marquess of Queensberry come up in trivia. He is notable for publicly endorsing a set of rules governing WHAT sport? The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
2) Over the course of his (short) lifetime, WHAT composer wrote at least 59 mazurkas for piano, reflecting the music of his home country?
This is FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN.
Jeopardy! really wants you to know that Chopin was in a relationship with writer Aurore Dupin (known by her pen name George Sand). As a few of many examples:
POUND! SAND! for $200: French novelist George Sand had several lovers, including this Polish-French pianist & composer
THE COMPOSER PORTRAYED for $1200: Hugh Grant in "Impromptu" (1991) (Judy Davis as George Sand)
COMPOSERS for $400: He spent the summer of 1839 at Nohant, George Sand's country house
The so-called honeymoon for Chopin and Sand proved to be a disaster. The people of Majorca were weary of Chopin's coughing, assuming it to be tuberculosis. And Sand did not attend church, which was seen as a scandal. Chopin, at first, thought the island a paradise, but several weeks later his health worsened and he was unable to enjoy the pleasures of the island.
Sand took great care of Chopin and insisted that he spend five months of the year at her country home in Nohant, France, where he would file and polish his compositions of the winter. Chopin and Sand spent almost nine years together and eventually ended their relationship. This was very unfortunate for Chopin because she protected and nursed the increasingly consumptive and irritable composer while attending to his every whim.
The separation with George Sand and his ill health broke Chopin. His weight dramatically decreased while his coughing became continuous. In the last two and a half years of his life, he only composed a few pages of music. He played his last concert in Paris on February 16, 1848; the year of the French Revolution.
Legend says that George Sand paid a last-minute visit to him while on his deathbed, however this has not been proven to be true. His funeral was a major event held at the Madeleine Church (L'église de la Madeleine) in Paris. Mozart's Requiem was played at his own request. He was buried at the Paris cemetery, Père Lachaise, and it is said that there has never been a day since his death that flowers have not been placed on his grave.
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!)
This is MARCEL MARCEAU. Here’s that scene from Silent Movie, which is fantastic.
Marceau’s one-hundredth birthday would have been last March, and Google made a doodle in honor of him:
If you don’t know who Marceau is (or why it’s very funny that he has the only line in Silent Movie), Google’s write-up may help:
Today’s Doodle celebrates French mime artist Marcel Marceau. The actor and master of silence was born on this day in 1923 in Strasbourg, France with the name Marcel Mangel. During the German occupation of France, he changed his surname to Marceau to avoid being identified as Jewish.
In his childhood, Marceau was introduced to movies and dreamed of starring in silent films. He entertained his friends with impersonations of famous actors and mimes and would later use his silent acting skills to help smuggle Jewish children out of Nazi-occupied France. His pantomimes were used to keep children quiet during dangerous moments on the journey to the Switzerland border. Marceau made three of these trips and liberated at least 70 children during World War II.
After the war, Marceau studied dramatic acting and mime at the School of Dramatic Art of the Sarah Bernhardt Theatre in Paris. In 1947, he began playing his famous character Bip the Clown, a tragicomic figure with a striped shirt, white face paint, and a battered beflowered hat. Bip explored the range of human emotions and his actions spoke louder than words could. Soon after, he founded the Compagnie de Mime Marcel Marceau, the only pantomime company in the world at the time, to develop the art of silence.
4) The Raft of the Medusa, a controversial painting inspired by gruesome true events, is considered the masterwork of WHAT Romantic artist?
This is THÉODORE GÉRICAULT.
Here’s an image of The Raft of the Medusa:
And here’s more on those gruesome and true events:
When the work was exhibited in the Paris Salon of 1819, the public would have recognized the subject. It had been in the news just a few years before and quickly grew into a political scandal. In July 1816, a French naval ship, Medusa, was its way to Senegal carrying the new governor of the colony, his family, and some other government officials and others. The government officials came to secure French possession of the colony and to assure the continuation of the covert slave trade, even though France had officially abolished the practice. Another group aboard the Medusa was composed of reformers and abolitionists who hoped to eliminate the practice of slavery in Senegal by engaging the local Senegalese and the French colonists in the development of an agricultural cooperative that would make the colony self-sustaining.
The captain of the Medusa, who had received command of the ship through royal patronage, accidentally ran the ship aground on a sandbar off the coast of West Africa. The ship’s carpenter could not repair the Medusa and the decision was made to put the governor, his family and other high-ranking passengers into the six lifeboats. The remaining 150 passengers found themselves packed onto a raft made by the carpenter from the masts of the Medusa.
The group on the raft included lower-ranking military men, colonists, and sailors of European and African descent. The overcrowded makeshift raft, just 65 x 23 feet, was lashed to the lifeboats, but it impeded their progress so the more elite passengers in the boats took axes and cut the lines to the raft, casting it adrift. Of the 150 people aboard the raft, 15 were rescued by the Argus—the ship that we can barely see at the back of the canvas—and only 10 ultimately survived to tell the tale of cannibalism, murder, and other horrors aboard the raft.
5) The actor Canada Lee played the character 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.
This is RICHARD WRIGHT—the novel is Native Son.
Canada Lee was supposed to play the same role in the 1951 film adaptation of Native Son, filmed in Argentina, but he had problems getting a visa. The film was highly controversial, and actors were fearful of repercussions for being involved in the film, so Richard Wright himself stepped in and played Bigger Thomas, the main character, in the film. More on that:
Wright took responsibility for the film. “I wrote the dialogue. The producers and director gave me carte blanche in whatever concerned my role as actor,” he told a Norwegian journalist in 1950. “If the film is bad, it’s all my fault.”
His words were prophetic. In his pioneering history of African-American film stereotypes, Donald Bogle called Wright the movie’s “greatest liability”: The “successful and sophisticated” author was “thoroughly implausible in the role of a tortured deprived youth.” Yet, in the context of the film as made, this incongruity emphasizes the existential horror of Bigger’s life.
Although Wright’s delivery is forceful and his looks camera-friendly, he can’t avoid seeming inauthentic in a T-shirt and baseball cap, playing a man half his age. (Bigger is 20 in the novel; the movie gives him five additional years. It doesn’t help.) At the same time, Wright’s mature comportment pushes the movie toward psychodrama.
Chenal’s visually adroit direction allows for a few expressionistic passages, including a full-blown dream sequence, but Wright’s presence gives “Native Son” an avant-garde quality. Where film artists like Maya Deren and Kenneth Anger enacted their fantasies on camera, Wright lives (or relives) a nightmare. Like a Brechtian performer, the author is quoting his lines. The effect is usefully alienating as well as didactic. It is one thing to see an actor playing the part of a bewildered ghetto street kid; it is another to watch a celebrated writer assume the role.
The entire film is freely available on YouTube.
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.
The rock star is JIM MORRISON, the lead vocalist of the Doors, and the connection is that each of these folks is BURIED AT PÉRE LACHAISE CEMETERY IN PARIS. The newsletter title (“A Resting Development”) was meant to give you a fighting chance to realize the connection.
Here’s an excerpt about the cemetery from the official tourism website of Paris:
The Père Lachaise cemetery takes its name from King Louis XIV's confessor, Father François d'Aix de La Chaise. It is the most prestigious and most visited necropolis in Paris. Situated in the 20th arrondissement of Paris, it extends 44 hectares and contains 70,000 burial plots. The cemetery is a mix between an English park and a shrine. All funerary art styles are represented: Gothic graves, Haussmanian burial chambers, ancient mausoleums, etc. On the green paths, visitors cross the burial places of famous men and women; Honoré de Balzac, Guillaume Apollinaire, Frédéric Chopin, Colette, Jean-François Champollion, Jean de La Fontaine, Molière, Yves Montand, Simone Signoret, Jim Morrison, Alfred de Musset, Edith Piaf, Camille Pissarro and Oscar Wilde are just a few.
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 9th Marquess of Queensberry sponsored a set of rules that became known as the Queensberry Rules governing BOXING. The rules, still relevant today, can be read here.