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) Once described as “a gilded romantic hero and a pratfalling chancer” by The Guardian, WHAT actor was born Archibald Alec Leach in 1904? He is most famous for his roles in films such as Bringing Up Baby (1938), His Girl Friday (1940), Notorious (1946), and North by Northwest (1959).
2) “How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference,” “The Power of Thinking Without Thinking,” “The Story of Success,” and “Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants” are some of the subtitles of works by WHAT author (and occasional guest on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon)?
3) A “before and after” question asks you to link two answers—so if I said “Hilly from The Help becomes the subject of The Aviator,” you’d say “Bryce Dallas Howard Hughes.” In that spirit, please give me the answer to the following “before and after” question: “An Emmy-winning voice-over actor who frequently collaborates with Ken Burns becomes the voice-over actor nominated for more Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Narrator than any other person.”
4) NAME the singer known as the “Empress of Soul.” A member of the National Rhythm & Blues Hall of Fame and winner of seven Grammy Awards, she is, in a sense, associated with the dots found on dominoes and dice.
5) In September 2015, presidential candidate Donald Trump called NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, “[t]he single worst trade deal ever approved in [the United States].” In WHAT YEAR was NAFTA ratified, before taking effect in January 1 of the next year? In the same year (that is this question’s answer), Ruth Bader Ginsburg was sworn in as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court and the Intel Corporation shipped the first Pentium chips.
6) To WHAT film do the answers to the first five questions of this newsletter relate? If you can’t find a way, think about the world to which the questions to this newsletter might relate.
Trivia Newsletter CXV Recap
1) The title of a 2022 film (scheduled for wide release on January 20, 2023) starring Rooney Mara and Claire Foy based upon real-life events at an ultraconservative Mennonite community in Bolivia shares WHAT word with the title of a 1989 film starring John Travolta, Kirstie Alley, and the voice of Bruce Willis?
The films are Women Talking and Look Who’s Talking, so our answer was TALKING.
The events underlying Women Talking are horrific. Rather than try to summarize them, I recommend this BBC article.
2) NAME the band formed in southern France in 1978 that is generally credited with popularizing the genre of music known as rumba flamenca around the world. The group is most famous for songs such as “Bamboléo” and their cover of “Volaré”; in addition, their cover of “Hotel California” was featured in The Big Lebowski (1997) and their cover of “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” was featured in Toy Story 3 (2010).
This is the GIPSY KINGS.
“No other group has been more responsible for the rising American interest in world music during the past quarter-century than the Gipsy Kings,” claimed the Encyclopedia of Great Popular Song Recordings in 2013. The Gipsy Kings are still around and still regularly tour; in fact, they’re in New York next week.
3) “The chief business of the American people is business” is a quote by WHAT famously taciturn U.S. president, who defeated John Davis and Robert La Follette in his sole presidential election?
This is CALVIN COOLIDGE.
The second sentence of the following quote is one of those stories that I’m pretty sure is apocryphal, but according to the White House website:
Both his dry Yankee wit and his frugality with words became legendary. His wife, Grace Goodhue Coolidge, recounted that a young woman sitting next to Coolidge at a dinner party confided to him she had bet she could get at least three words of conversation from him. Without looking at her he quietly retorted, “You lose.” And in 1928, while vacationing in the Black Hills of South Dakota, he issued the most famous of his laconic statements, “I do not choose to run for President in 1928.”
4) In mathematics, WHAT one-word name is given to the function that takes as its input a real number and gives as its output the greatest integer less than or equal to that number? The function is typically denoted with brackets; for example, so [2.4] equals 2 and [-2.4] equals -3.
This is the FLOOR FUNCTION. No bonus points for guessing what its counterpart, the ceiling function, does.
You’ve perhaps heard of the children’s game “the floor is lava,” in which participants attempt to avoid touching the floor, due to the floor’s in-universe property of being made of lethal lava. In 2014, the Journal of Interdisciplinary Science Topics published a short piece on what would happen if the floor were actually lava, concluding that such a game would not be possible in most circumstances.
5) WHAT name is given to (typically alcoholic) drinks served before a meal in order to stimulate one’s hunger? Vermouth, champagne, and gin are common examples.
These are APÉRITIFS. Contrast these with digestifs, typically served after a meal.
Saint Diadochos of Photiki, a fifth-century ascetic, wrote the following:
People, who wish to discipline the sexual organs should avoid drinking those artificial concoctions which are called 'aperitifs' - presumably because they open a way to the stomach for the vast meal which is to follow. Not only are they harmful to our bodies, but their fraudulent and artificial character greatly offends the conscience wherein God dwells. For what does wine lack that we should sap its healthy vigor by adulterating it with a variety of condiments?
Whether or not you agree that, uh, small cocktails drunk before dinner greatly offend the conscience, this suggests that the concept of apéritifs are not at all recent.
6) It may sound like the type of seam yielded by cutting down a tree, but in sewing, WHAT word describes the type of seam made by placing one edge inside a folded edge of fabric, then stitching the fold down? For example, denim jeans are typically made with this seam.
This is a FELLED SEAM, also called a flat-fell seam. Here, let’s learn how to stitch (sew? do?) one right now:
Um.
So first you want to press the seam open. Make sure the wrong side is facing up, because the right side is facing down. So, if you’re looking at the wrong side, you’re looking at the right side. You’re definitely going to, um, want to make sure there’s a 5/8” allowance. Can’t not have that allowance. And then there’s the topstitch, which is self-explanatory. Look, its’s all right there in the diagram.
7) MUZJIK (28), QUEAZY (27), and EXEQUY (25) are some of the highest-value six-letter words in the game of Scrabble, but if you have to play a word that has an “R” in it, you can play FROWZY (24) or WHAT other, more common six-letter word also worth 24 points?
So this question is, I think, a bust. The intended answer was QUARTZ, but as I do more research, I’m less sure that this question represents an accurate fact. One intrepid reader pointed out that RAZZLE works just as well. Normally we try to be more robust with our fact-checking, but for this question, I let myself rely on this link, which I no longer trust. My apologies for the bad question—I’ve actually ordered an official Scrabble dictionary to try to avoid this specific issue in the future.
8) Reading, Listening, Speaking, and Writing are the four sections of WHAT standardized test, the internet-based version of which is scored on a scale of 0 to 120? The test is taken by over two million people annually and is accepted by some 19,000 colleges and other institutions.
This is the TOEFL, the Test of English as a Foreign Language.
9) In The Hunger Games novels (and films), President Snow is the primary antagonist. WHAT is President Snow’s first name? He shares it with the title of a Shakespeare play.
Snow’s first name is CORIOLANUS.
The list of common phrases and titles works of literature, film, and everything else that have been borrowed from Shakespeare works is incredibly lengthy, of course. As one of many, many examples, the title of the Aldous Huxley novel Brave New World is borrowed from a quote by Miranda in the play The Tempest. WHAT SHAKESPEARE PLAY is responsible for the quote “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more,” and for the title of the 1992 book Band of Brothers (on which the HBO miniseries is based)? The answer is at the end of this newsletter.1
10) Each of the answers to the questions in this newsletter alludes to a member of a certain set. NAME a film in the James Bond franchise that could be the answer to this question in order to continue this newsletter’s theme. (There is more than one correct answer.)
The first syllable of each of the answers was meant to point you towards items on Moh’s Scale of Hardness, the scale used to measure the relative hardness of minerals:
Question #1: Talking → talc
Question #2: Gipsy Kings → gypsum
Question #3: Calvin Coolidge → calcite
Question #4: floor → fluorite
Question #5: apéritifs → apatite
Question #6: felled seam → feldspar
Question #7: quartz → quartz
Question #8: TOEFL (typically pronounced “toe - ful”) → topaz
Question #9: Coriolanus → corundum
The item at the top of Moh’s Scale of Hardness is a DIAMOND—so, using the same sound-alike rule, either Diamonds are Forever or Die Another Day would get you there. This was, admittedly, a very hard newsletter, but you had two more clues. First, there was our newsletter title (“A Hard Place”), which pointed directly to hardness being an important quality, as well as the phrase “between a rock and a hard place,” which was trying to give you a clue for “diamond” (since a “rock” is often slang for a diamond). Second, we had ten questions instead of six, which may have piqued your curiosity and made you think of notable sets of ten items.
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
HENRY V.