Two quick announcements: First, we’re taking this coming Monday off as a little Father’s Day present to myself. We’ll be back at it with Trivia Newsletter CXLIX on Thursday, June 22nd.
Second, this newsletter is again brought to you by Patrick Iber, who previously wrote Trivia Newsletter CXXXIV back in May (recap) and Trivia Newsletter CXLV just last week (recap). Thanks again to Patrick for his fantastic contributions!
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) 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?
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?
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.)
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.
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”?
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?
Trivia Newsletter CXLVII Recap
1) Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers is a work written by WHAT political activist and (former) military analyst?
This is DANIEL ELLSBERG, who released portions of the Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force, better known as the Pentagon Papers, to the public in 1971. That release revealed information not then known to the public about the extent of the U.S. war effort in and around Vietnam.
Ellsberg was charged with violating the Espionage Act of 1917, a statute that is in the news lately for other reasons. President Richard Nixon wasn’t content to let that case play out, and this pattern led to Nixon’s downfall:
Indicted on 12 felony counts, including theft and violation of the Espionage Act, Ellsberg faced up to 115 years in prison. Not content to prosecute him in court, President Nixon ordered the creation of the Special Investigations Unit to dig up dirt on Ellsberg and “try him in the press.”
As Ellsberg and his lawyers prepared for trial, along with Anthony Russo who had also been indicted, Nixon’s “Plumbers”—a nickname indicating the special unit’s mission to plug “leaks”—broke into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, hoping to find incriminating information. It was a bust, and when the trial judge found out about the illegal break-in, among other criminal acts the government took against Ellsberg, he dismissed the case in May 1973.
But the “Plumbers” didn’t stop their criminality with Ellsberg. Nine months after they broke into Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, they broke into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate complex to bug the office and photograph papers in an effort to help Nixon get re-elected.
President Nixon’s paranoid attempt to destroy Daniel Ellsberg—the whistleblower who leaked the Pentagon Papers—led to other criminal acts that together brought an end to his presidency. Under threat of certain conviction in an impeachment trial, Nixon resigned in August 1974. With his loss of political power, he had to abandon his pledge to renew bombing in South Vietnam to defend the collapsing South Vietnamese government. The war finally ended on April 30, 1975.
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?
The journalist is CHARLES M. BLOW. Here’s a piece he wrote just last week on Pride Month and the state of the American LGBTQ community in 2023.
“The first memory I have in the world,” Blow writes early in Fire, “is of death and tears. That is how I would mark the beginning of my life: the way people mark the end of one.” Read more about the memoir here.
The title of the memoir is, as so many titles are, a Biblical reference:
For when I spoke, I cried out; I cried, “Violence and despoliation!” because the word of the Lord was made a reproach unto me and a derision daily.
Then I said, “I will not make mention of Him, nor speak any more in His name.” But His word was in mine heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones; and I was weary with forbearing, and I could not hold back.
For I heard the defaming of many, fear on every side. “Report,” say they, “and we will report it!” All in my company watched for my halting, saying, “Perhaps he will be enticed, and we shall prevail against him; and we shall take our revenge on him.”
By the way, WHAT IS the correct response to the following Jeopardy! prompt? Jeopardy! has only asked for this response once in its history, and here’s that one instance (notice the quotation marks):
CATEGORY: “JE”-PARDY
$1000: A bitter or warning rant, from the name of a Old Testament prophet
The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
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.”)
This is THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW. We’re pretty sure the last time Andy Griffith played his character from The Andy Griffith Show was in this Ron Howard video from 2008 endorsing Barack Obama.
Mayberry R.F.D. came off the air in the midst of the “rural purge,” in which the networks shifted away from such shows in favor of shows such as The Brady Bunch and M*A*S*H. Read more about all that here. This series of events led to one of the stranger song titles you’ll ever see, Ray Clark’s “The Lawrence Welk-Hee Haw Counter-Revolution Polka”:
The big wheels at the network started spinnin’
The verdict was tha Hee Haw had to go
Cause city slicker don't believe in grinnin’
And who the hell needs jokes in Kokomo
They cancelled all the singin’ and the pickin’
But the stubborn little donkey wouldn't leave
And that little fella’s still alive and kickin'
And Hee Haw is laughin’ up its sleeve
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.
This is Monty Python’s “ALWAYS LOOK ON THE BRIGHT SIDE OF LIFE.” Our question mentioned a 2014 poll—this was apparently a change from 2005, when “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” came in third, behind “Angels” by Robbie Williams and “My Way” by Frank Sinatra.
“There are several benefits from being more optimistic in daily life,” says this website for a regional health system we didn’t mean to click on while looking up things about “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.” “Not only does it benefit you mentally, but it can also improve your physical health as well. Research has also shown that in the long run, being more optimistic can lead to greater personal success, greater longevity and decreased stress.”
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?
This is TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT. Ernest Hemingway wrote the 1937 novel To Have and Have Not on which the film was based, and director Howard Hawks brought in his friend William Faulkner to help with the script.
But Betty Perske was actually a very shy and insecure young girl. Throughout her life as a movie star named Lauren Bacall (a name chosen by her mentor Hawks), she liked her friends to call her Betty. And she never quite forgot being Betty, though Hawks made her try. He signed her to a movie contract and kept her under wraps for a while. He got her, supposedly, to go out where no one could hear her and scream herself hoarse so that her high voice would lower and become more authoritative, more insinuating. That low voice of hers! Whatever the true story was, the newly christened Bacall emerged with a voice that did sound like the voice of authority.
Only 19 years old, she managed to impress not just Hawks but her co-star Humphrey Bogart in her first movie, “To Have and Have Not” (1944). Together in that film and in their follow-up, “The Big Sleep” (1946), Bogie and Bacall seemed to be having one long hot private joke with each other, and audiences ate it up. They married in between the movies, and this was no small matter. Bogart was in his forties, and he was famously and unhappily married to Mayo Methot, a tough broad who wanted to hold on to her husband. Even more importantly, Hawks did not want his new discovery to marry Bogart; he wanted to mold her career, and he also, tacitly, wanted her for himself. But Bacall chose Bogart, and they had ten or so extremely happy years together until he died of cancer in 1957.
I’ve seen a few times the observation online that Salvador Dalí, who passed away early in 1989, could in theory have seen the film Die Hard in theaters. This is meant to be surprising, as people would typically associate Dalí and Die Hard with very different eras. Similarly, Lauren Bacall in theory could have checked out Guardians of the Galaxy or Snowpiercer before passing away in 2014—or, she could have watched the funniest movie of 2014, Draft Day.
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.
Each of these songs prominently features WHISTLING. (As a bit of insider information: Minutes before release, we removed “(Sittin' On) the Dock of the Bay” by Otis Redding from this list, as we thought it was a bit too much of a giveaway.)
Similarly, our answers in this newsletter were all whistle-adjacent (you might call it a whistlestop tour):
Question #1: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers represent one of the most notable instances of WHISTLEBLOWING in American history.
Question #2: Charles M. Blow’s last name is “blow.”
Question #3: The Andy Griffith Show’s theme song, “Fishin’ Hole,” very notably features whistling.
Question #4: “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” is another song that notably features whistling.
Question #5: To Have and Have Not features one of the most memorable scenes in American film history, wherein Bacall teaches Bogart how to whistle. Bogart was buried with a gold whistle gifted to him by Bacall, inscribed “If you want anything, just whistle.”
Newsletter Title: Because we thought some of you might derive the theme from the list of songs alone, we made this allusion tougher. “Fried Green Tomatoes” refers to the 1991 film Fried Green Tomatoes, which is based upon the 1987 book Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe and, naturally, prominently features the Whistle Stop Cafe.
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
The correct response to the above Jeopardy! prompt (omitting the form of a question) is a JEREMIAD—the prophet they’re referring to is Jeremiah, and that Bible book is also where the “fire shut up in my bones” quote comes from. The jeremiad has regularly been used as a speech format throughout American history, perhaps most famously by Dr. King.