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) WHAT four-word phrase, in addition to being the name of songs by groups such as TV On the Radio, The Offspring, U2, and many other bands and artists, describes an action that should be avoided because it can lead to a condition known as retinopathy?
2) NAME the theoretical framework, advanced by physicists such as Gabriele Veneziano and Edward Witten, a core assumption of which is that subatomic particles are not zero-dimensional points but are instead one-dimensional objects.
3) NAME the title shared by each of the following television episodes: (i) a Season 1 episode of Only Murders in the Building punnily named after a guest star famous for his music career; (ii) a Season 4 episode of Futurama depicting the aftermath of a battle with giant space bees; and (iii) a Season 7 episode of The Office in which the main characters set up a deceptive sale to learn a rival’s sales techniques.
4) The 2002 film My Big Fat Greek Wedding held the distinction of being the highest-grossing film (domestic) never to hit #1 at the box office until it was overtaken in that respect by WHAT 2016 film?
5) “She had thought the studio would keep itself; / no dust upon the furniture of love” are the first two lines of WHAT early-career poem by Adrienne Rich, which depicts a young woman living with her male partner outside of marriage (and takes its name from how traditionalists might view such an arrangement)?
6) WHAT’S the only U.S. state that has (exactly) as many counties as the atomic number of the element that is believed to have the highest atomic weight of the primordially occurring elements? Determining the theme of this newsletter may make this question easier. Please provide only the state’s postal abbreviation.
Trivia Newsletter CXVI Recap
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).*
This is CARY GRANT. North by Northwest is the film with that famous crop-duster scene, one of the most iconic scenes in film history:
*The original distribution of this newsletter said that North by Northwest came out in 1957. It actually came out in 1959. My apologies for the error.
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)?
These are the subtitles of works by MALCOLM GLADWELL. Respectively, these works are The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, and David and Goliath.
Whether you think Gladwell’s style is great or grating, there’s no denying that that joke works better verbally than it does in writing. If you’re in the latter camp, you might enjoy this parody piece by The Guardian:
Most people make assumptions about power and jump to ridiculous conclusions. Who does not think the country with the most men and weaponry will automatically win a war? Not counting those of you who lived through Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. Take the American invasion of Grenada. Although Grenada was much the smaller country, it actually held all the aces. Had Grenada played its cards just a little better, the US would have been wiped off the face of the earth.
…
Malcolm wrote a book telling people how everything they knew was wrong. It became a bestseller. So Malcolm wrote another book just the same. And another. He even rewrote Aesop's Fables. Still no one noticed. Malcolm cultivated a persona of being an outsider while earning huge amounts of money from banks, tobacco and pharmaceutical companies. Malcolm earns more for a one-hour talk than you will earn in a year. So who is laughing now?
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.”
The answer here was KEITH DAVID ATTENBOROUGH.
WHO is the most recent winner of the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Narrator? The award was for his narration of Netflix’s Our Great American Parks, although he is more famous for other pursuits. The answer is at the end of this newsletter.1
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.
This is GLADYS KNIGHT. Her long-time family musical group was called Gladys Knight & the Pips, and “pips” are what we call those dots on dominoes and dice. “Hey, didn’t we already have a Gladys Knight question back in Trivia Newsletter XXVIII?” Yes, we did.
Just a few weeks ago, Knight (together with George Clooney, Amy Grant, Tania León, and U2) received Kennedy Center Honors. I hadn’t known Grant and León’s names; Amy Grant is a singer who started in contemporary Christian music before moving to pop music in the 1980s and 1990s; she had the first Christian album to ever go platinum. Tania León is a composer; she won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Music for her orchestral composition Stride.
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.
NAFTA was ratified in 1993.
1993 was also the year that, following a settlement, the NFL started using the system that we now call “free agency.” The NFL went through a tumultuous period in the 1980s—there were two work stoppages and a series of antitrust lawsuits as players and management fought over several issues, including how much flexibility players should have in deciding where to play. In exchange for free agency, players agreed to a salary cap for teams, which is why 1993 is often marked as the beginning of the NFL’s modern-day financial structure. Read more about the NFL world before free agency here (which often consisted of teams just being able to, essentially, control the rights to players for the entirety of those players’ careers).
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.
Each of the answers pointed to the film JURASSIC PARK, and each of the questions contained a clue relating to the follow-up film Jurassic World:
Question #1: Cary Grant (for Dr. Alan Grant, a protagonist of JP); the question used the word “pratfalling” (for Chris Pratt, who played a protagonist of JW).
Question #2: Malcolm Gladwell (for Dr. Ian Malcolm, Jeff Goldblum’s character in JP); the question referenced Jimmy Fallon, who has a cameo in JW).
Question #3: David Attenborough (his brother, Richard Attenborough, played John Hammond in JP); the question referenced Bryce Dallas Howard, who played a protagonist of JW.
Question #4: Gladys Knight (for Wayne Knight, who has a role in JP); the question referenced “Blues” for Blue, the velociraptor who figures into the plot of JW.
Question #5: 1993 is the year that JP, the film, was released; 2015, referenced in the question, is the year that JW came out.
Question #6: The question has a slight reference to the famous JP quote “life finds a way,” and also spots you “world,” referring to the title of JW.
Newsletter Title: “Cloud Island” is a rough translation of the island where the events of JP and JW take place, Isla Nublar.
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
BARACK OBAMA.