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) NAME the term that, while adopted as a form of spacetime travel in the novel A Wrinkle in Time (1962) and as an object used for sinister ends in the film The Avengers (2012), is used in geometry to refer to the four-dimensional analogue of the cube (so, the answer to this question is to the cube as the cube is to the square).
2) To quote The New York Times, an atmosphere of “poverty, unemployment, political demonstrations and street fighting between the forces of the extreme left and the extreme right” serves as the mostly unseen backdrop to WHAT musical, which is based upon the 1951 play I Am a Camera (which was itself adapted from the 1939 novel Goodbye to Berlin)?
3) The NFL player who led the league among qualified passers in passer rating the most times (six individual seasons) and the MLB player who was the first player to win four Cy Young Awards both go by WHAT first name?
4) WHAT is the name of the planet from which the character Genly Ai, the protagonist and narrator of Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1969 novel The Left Hand of Darkness, hails? No, don’t say Earthsea (where several of Le Guin’s other works are set) or Gethen (the planet where the events of the novel take place); the answer is a Latin word, and Genly Ai is generally understood to be a stand-in for the reader.
5) “Positive retributivism,” according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “holds that an offender’s [BLANK] provides a reason in favour of punishment; essentially, the state should punish those found guilty of criminal offences to the extent that they deserve, because they deserve it.” That blank isn’t filled by the Atacama, the Kumtag, or the Western; it’s just WHAT?
6) NAME the only U.S. state that fits into the theme of this newsletter (though perhaps not politically).
Trivia Newsletter CXVII Recap
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?
This is STARING AT THE SUN.
The metaphor of staring at the sun to convey willful blindness to one’s circumstances has, like an object that speaks to musicians, clearly spoken to a lot of musicians. Here’s an excerpt of the U2 song “Staring at the Sun”:
I'm not the only one
Starin' at the sun
Afraid of what you'd find
If you took a look inside
Not just deaf and dumb
Staring at the sun
Not the only one
Who's happy to go blind
And here’s The Offspring’s version:
Though you hear me
I don't think that you relate
My will is something
That you can't confiscate
So forgive me
But I won't be frustrated
By destruction in your eyesAs you're staring at the sun, oh
Here’s an excerpt from my favorite “Staring at the Sun” by Post Malone (feat. SZA):
If you keep staring at the sun, you won't see
What you have become, this can't be
Everything you thought it was
Blinded by the thought of us, so
Give me a chance, I will
Up again, I warned
You in advance
But you just keep on starin' at the sun
Just one more—here is the same-named song by TV On the Radio:
Cross the street from your storefront cemetery.
Hear me hailing from inside and realizeI am the conscience clear
In pain or ecstasy
And we're all weaned my dear
Upon the same fatigueWe're staring at the sun
Oh my own voice
Cannot save me now
That TV On the Radio song is, according to the lyrics website Genius, based upon a poem by WHAT thirteenth-century Persian poet? He is also the correct response to the following Jeopardy! prompt (category: What a Beautiful Name):
Checking multiple cultural boxes, this name signifying beauty in Japanese also belonged to a Muslim mystic poet
The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
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.
This is STRING THEORY.
I thought this fluffy NPR interview about string theory (and about a soccer match between string theorists and high power laser physicists at UC Santa Barbara) was fun:
Dr. KIRSHNER: These are the string theorists. Two, four, six, eight - that's close enough to 11, the way they count.
…
Dr. KRAUSS: To the extent that we even understand string theory, it may imply a massive number of possible different universes with different laws of physics in each universe and there may be no way of distinguishing between them or saying why the laws of physics are the way they are. And if I can predict anything, then I haven't explained anything. If I have a theory of everything, then in some sense, I have a theory of nothing.
HARRIS: And on the field, the string theorists are still out of sync.
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.
Each of these episodes is called “THE STING.” It would have been very unlikely that you knew any of these cold (although the Futurama episode, for fans of that show, ranks among the most emotional and touching episodes), but the idea was for you to think about what word might unite a famous musician, the effect a bee might have, and a type of operation that involves deception.
“Every Breath You Take,” the song by The Police (of which Sting was the frontman), was credited by Broadcast Music, Inc. in 2019 as the most-played radio song ever. “Dave’s Music Database,” a blog run by a guy named (surprise!) Dave that seems to be incredibly thorough and well researched, has a large and active leaderboard of the most-played radio songs.
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?
This is SING. If you’ve ever wanted to hear Nick Kroll and Reese Witherspoon sing a heavily and poorly remixed version of Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off,” then boy, do I have a film for you. (“Haters gonna hate,” right?)
Sing had a pretty good box-office performance through late December 2016 and early 2017, but never edged out Rogue One: A Star Wars Story or Hidden Figures. A quick Star Wars trivia bit—of the nine mainline Star Wars films, Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017) is the only film in which a character in the film says the film’s subtitle:
Kylo Ren: The Resistance is dead, the war is over, and when I kill you, I will have killed the last Jedi!
[Redacted for spoiler purposes]: Amazing. Every word of what you just said was wrong. The Rebellion is reborn today. The war is just beginning. And I will not be the last Jedi.
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)?
This is “LIVING IN SIN.” Though it’s not the go-to Adrienne Rich poem if you want to convince people you’ve heard of Rich (that’s the excellent “Diving into the Wreck”), “Living in Sin” is my favorite of her poems that I’ve read. “No dust upon the furniture of love” is one of those lines that has stuck with me—it’s so fun to say aloud in iambic pentameter (“no DUST up-ON the FURN-i-TURE of LOVE”).
Here’s the whole poem:
She had thought the studio would keep itself;
no dust upon the furniture of love.
Half heresy, to wish the taps less vocal,
the panes relieved of grime. A plate of pears,
a piano with a Persian shawl, a cat
stalking the picturesque amusing mouse
had risen at his urging.
Not that at five each separate stair would writhe
under the milkman's tramp; that morning light
so coldly would delineate the scraps
of last night's cheese and three sepulchral bottles;
that on the kitchen shelf among the saucers
a pair of beetle-eyes would fix her own---
envoy from some village in the moldings . . .
Meanwhile, he, with a yawn,
sounded a dozen notes upon the keyboard,
declared it out of tune, shrugged at the mirror,
rubbed at his beard, went out for cigarettes;
while she, jeered by the minor demons,
pulled back the sheets and made the bed and found
a towel to dust the table-top,
and let the coffee-pot boil over on the stove.
By evening she was back in love again,
though not so wholly but throughout the night
she woke sometimes to feel the daylight coming
like a relentless milkman up the stairs.
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.
This is IN, for Indiana. The question itself is not the point (Indiana has 92 counties, and that’s the atomic number of uranium, but who cares how many counties any state has?2). Instead, the idea here was that, starting with the word “STARTING” in the newsletter’s title, each answer was (or contained) a word made by removing one letter:
Newsletter Title: Scratch from STARTING (this was both an inversion of the idiom “starting from scratch” and also your explicit instructions for this newsletter)
Question #1: STARING into the sun
Question #2: STRING theory
Question #3: The STING
Question #4: SING
Question #5: Living in3 SIN
Question #6: IN
We could have gone for one more level, because STARTING plus L gives you “STARTLING.” The chain of words from “startling” to “I” is, I believe, the longest string of words you can create by removing one letter at a time.
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
This is RUMI. What appears to be the poem in question is here, although the online sources here aren’t great. The phrase “Persian poet” on Jeopardy! is more likely to lead to Omar Khayyam, active in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. As we already pointed out in the recap to Trivia Newsletter LXXII, Jeopardy! will typically spot you that he was an astronomer as well, that he wrote “The Rubáiyát,” and/or the fact his last name means “tentmaker” if it wants Khayyam.
Well, you’re the one reading a trivia newsletter, so maybe you care how many counties states have. Texas has the most (254) of any state, and Delaware has the fewest (3).
Arguably, it added confusion to include “in” in Question #5, but I couldn’t pass up an Adrienne Rich mention.