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) Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers is a work written by WHAT political activist and (former) military analyst?
2) In 2021, the Metropolitan Opera in New York presented Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones, marking the first time that the Met put on a performance of an opera by a Black composer. Fire Shut Up in My Bones is an adaptation of a 2014 same-named memoir written by WHAT journalist, currently a columnist for The New York Times and an analyst for MSNBC?
3) Mayberry R.F.D., a television show that aired from 1968 to 1971, is a spin-off and continuation of WHAT other television show? (“R.F.D.” stands for “Rural Free Delivery.”)
4) According to a 2014 BBC article, WHAT irreverent song featured in a 1979 film is the song most commonly requested to be played at funerals in the United Kingdom? Jack Nicholson sings the same song in the film As Good as It Gets.
5) The 1980 book Hemingway and Film asserts that WHAT 1944 film starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall represents the only film story on which two winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature worked?
6) WHAT notable distinction is shared by each of the following songs? “Atlanta” by Stone Temple Pilots; “Home” by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros; “Moves Like Jagger” by Maroon 5 (feat. Christina Aguilera); “Pumped Up Kicks” by Foster the People; “The Stranger” by Billy Joel; “Walk Like an Egyptian” by the Bangles; “The Walker” by Fitz and the Tantrums.
Trivia Newsletter CXLVI Recap
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.)
The mentioned works are, respectively, The House on Mango Street, The Cherry Orchard, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, and “Watermelon Sugar,” so the answer here is that each title contains an example of FRUIT.
The House on Mango Street is a series of vignettes from the point of view of Esperanza Cordero, a 12-year-old girl in Chicago. It’s a very short, readable work—many of the vignettes take up merely a page or two. The book’s prose is pretty, which I realize is not particularly descriptive, so just read one instead. This one is entitled “Hairs”:
Everybody in our family has different hair. My Papa’s hair is like a broom, all up in the air. And me, my hair is lazy. It never obeys barrettes or bands. Carlos’ hair is thick and straight. He doesn't need to comb it. Nenny’s hair is slippery—slides out of your hand. And Kiki, who is the youngest, has hair like fur.
But my mother's hair, my mother's hair, like little rosettes, like little candy circles all curly and pretty because she pinned it in pincurls all day, sweet to put your nose into when she is holding you, holding you and you feel safe, is the warm smell of bread before you bake it, is the smell when she makes room for you on her side of the bed still warm with her skin, and you sleep near her, the rain outside falling and Papa snoring. The snoring, the rain, and Mama's hair that smells like bread.
There is no “Mango Street” in Chicago, but there is a Mango Avenue. Cisneros has said, though, that her childhood home that was the inspiration for the titular “House” was at 1525 N. Campbell, in Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood. That house was demolished in the early 2000s.
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?
The show is Gossip Girl and the character is BLAIR WALDORF. (“Hospitable” was a hint referring to the fact that some notable hotels share the name “Waldorf.”)
By the way, WHAT ACTRESS voices the titular narrator in Gossip Girl? This actress is notable for (i) playing another titular student and private investigator in a show that originally aired from 2004 to 2007, and (ii) playing the not-titular main character Eleanor Shellstrop in another show that aired from 2016 to 2020. The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
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?
This is JULIUS CAESAR (as he is the husband of Calpurnia).
The heavens themselves really did blaze forth upon Caesar’s death—well, maybe:
According to several Roman writers, a brilliant comet – bright enough to see during daytime – appeared for seven days near the beginning of the Ludi Victoriae Caesaris festival held in honor of Julius Caesar, and was widely believed by the Roman public to be the soul of Julius Caesar ascending into heaven. Octavian shrewdly seized upon this and utilized it to advocate for a deification of Julius Caesar and at the same time push his own political agenda, an effort that ultimately succeeded.
This deification of Julius Caesar is described by, among others, the Roman poet/historian Ovid in Book XV of his Metamorphoses, where he has Jupiter saying to Venus (lines 839-849):
“‘Meanwhile take up Caesar’s spirit from his murdered corpse, and change it into a star, so that the deified Julius may always look down from his high temple on our Capitol and forum.’”
“He had barely finished, when gentle Venus stood in the midst of the senate, seen by no one, and took up the newly freed spirit of her Caesar from his body, and preventing it from vanishing into the air, carried it towards the glorious stars. As she carried it, she felt it glow and take fire, and loosed it from her breast: it climbed higher than the moon, and drawing behind it a fiery tail, shone as a star.”
The Romans even slapped the comet on a coin:
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)?
This is TY COBB. The people who write trivia questions sometimes want you to know that Cobb’s nickname is “The Georgia Peach.”
Stealing home is probably one of the coolest things someone can do in the (major North American) sports. Here is what is probably the most famous recent straight steal of home, from the 2021 playoffs. (A “straight steal” can be contrasted with a “delayed steal”—here is an example of a delayed steal.)
Cobb’s legacy is complicated, but what has become clearer in recent years is that the stories proliferated shortly after Cobb’s death showing Cobb to be a severe misanthropist and avowed racist are, in many ways, inaccurate or incomplete. Here are a couple of NYT pieces to that effect, and here’s a Bleacher Report post predating those articles. Ken Burns’ Baseball, the seminal documentary miniseries on baseball, does Cobb a disservice, as this blog post argues.
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?
This is a WEDGE. Here’s an image of one formulation of the six simple machines:
This is just one way to think of simple machines, and there are others:
Of course there were screws before the nineteenth century. The screw, after all, is one of the six simple machines, those mechanical elements to which traditionally all complex mechanisms can be reduced in both technical and historical analyses. Looking at the other five machines—the lever, the incline plane, the wedge, the wheel and axle, and the pulley—we see that the first three transmit forces along straight lines and the others through rotation but that only the screw turns one into the other. In the grammar of simple machines, the screw is an incline wrapped around a cylindrical shaft. Given that the incline is a variant of the lever and the wedge, and the wheel and the pulley are variants of the cylinder, we may say that the screw is indeed the most primitive of all machines. [Franz] Reuleaux, who established the screw-nut pair as the basic form of all pair-closure, pioneered this reduction and made it fundamental for the project of kinematics.
6) WHAT is the connection among the answers to Questions #1 through #5?
Each of the answers refers to a type of SALAD: fruit salad, Waldorf salad, Caesar salad, Cobb salad, and wedge salad. The newsletter title (“Green in Judgment, Cold in Blood”) was a hint in two ways. Salads are (often) green and cold, but more importantly, the title refers to the origin of the phrase “salad days,” which is a quote by Cleopatra in Shakespeare’s play Antony and Cleopatra: “...My salad days, / When I was green in judgment, cold in blood / To say as I said then.”
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
Dear reader, the actress that voices the “Gossip Girl” narrator of Gossip Girl is KRISTEN BELL (the shows referenced above in the recap that Bell also stars in are Veronica Mars and The Good Place).
-xoxo, Trivia Factorial