We’ll be taking a quick break, so there will be no e-mail this upcoming Monday. Trivia Newsletter CXXIII will be published on Thursday, February 16th.
Hopefully you all will enjoy the commercial that Trivia Factorial paid to have air during the Super Bowl—the hidden theme is that you hear the word “Whopper” repeatedly.
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) “Come down and see the, uh, mile of cars we have on our lot” is a line integral to the plot of WHAT 1980 cult-classic film directed by Robert Zemeckis and starring Kurt Russell, with Steven Spielberg receiving a credit as an executive producer? Until the release of Flight (2012), it was the only film directed by Zemeckis to be rated R.
2) The titles of the following works all share WHAT word? (i) A 2015 BBC mystery thriller miniseries based upon a 1939 novel by Agatha Christie; (ii) a Netflix television series that twice won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series; and (iii) a 1965 film, the only film directed by Frank Sinatra, that is believed to be the first film co-produced between Japanese and American companies.
3) The songs “A Whiter Shade of Pale” by Procol Harum, “Faith” by George Michael, “Light My Fire” by the Doors, and “Swing, Swing” by the All-American Rejects all feature introductions with WHAT instrument perhaps more associated with works such as Toccata and Fugue in D minor?
4) Bix Caleen, Saw Gerrera, Syril Karn, Dedra Meero, Mon Mothma, and B2EMO are some of the characters from WHAT television show that debuted in 2022?
5) Not Krpy, Rookie, Mata, Deft, or Showmaker—WHAT in-game name does Lee Sang-hyeok, generally viewed as the greatest player in the history of the video game League of Legends, go by? By my count, professional charlatan Skip Bayless has referred to LeBron James’s current NBA team by the same name (but pluralized) as a pejorative on Twitter on twenty-five separate occasions.
6) Three of the above answers and two of the above questions allude to members of a certain set. IDENTIFY that set, or identify another element of that set. (A hint: The questions in this newsletter appear in a certain order, except that this question ought to appear fifth, and Question #5 ought to appear sixth.)
Some Pre-Recap Housekeeping
First, you may remember from our recap last Monday that we noticed an error in the online version of the Encyclopædia Britannica. Specifically, a link to George Martin (the Beatles producer) on the page for the Beatles led to the page for George R.R. Martin, a completely different person. We reached out to the encyclopedia, and are pleased to announce that the error has been corrected. Finally, Trivia Factorial has changed the world, or at least has changed the World Wide Web.
Second: All the way back in mid-December, we asked readers as part of the recap of Trivia Newsletter CVIII to write a trivia question that was better than the question I had published. Specifically:
Can you write a better trivia question where the answer is “Brazil and Croatia,” or where the question implicates Brazil and Croatia in a way that helps a reader determine the theme? The question should not actually be about the 2022 World Cup or soccer.
Recall that the questions in that set were about the 2022 FIFA Men’s World Cup quarterfinal matchups, and one of those was Brazil vs. Croatia. Unlike other pairings (such as England and France), I struggled with coming up with a plausible question for Brazil and Croatia, and so I turned to you.
My favorite response, by far, was the following:
It is too early in the day for that my man
We also received two earnest responses. One of our long-time readers who regularly crushes our leaderboards submitted this NBA question:
NBA 6th man of the Year winners Toni Kukoc (1996) and Leandro Barbosa (2007) are from what two countries?
Another of our long-time readers turned to fighting sports, as Mirko Filipović (better known as “Cro Cop”) is a Croatian fighter known as one of the greatest MMA fighters of all time. There’s always a choice on how general or specific to go, but that could lead to constructions like this one:
Wanderlei César da Silva, one of the greatest fighters in the history of Japan’s Pride Fighting Championships, was not knocked out (excluding TKOs) until his 38th professional fight, when he lost to Mirko Filipović. WHAT countries were represented by the two fighters?
Or, perhaps more simply:
Professional fighter Mirko Filipović is known by the name “Cro Cop” and is especially known for his proficiency in a martial art known by the initialism “BJJ.” WHAT COUNTRIES do “Cro” and “B” stand for, respectively?
Thanks to those of you who played along.
Trivia Newsletter CXXI Recap
1) The below image relates to the plot of WHAT film that was shot primarily in the San Fernando Valley, including several scenes in and around a motel called (in real life) the Travel Inn?
This image relates to the film MEMENTO. The film has a non-linear narrative, as studying the image might suggest.
Christopher Nolan directed Memento and based the film’s plot on a short story his brother, Jonathan Nolan, wrote. You can read that short story by following this link (warning: generally unpleasant and graphic themes):
Here's the truth: People, even regular people, are never just any one person with one set of attributes. It's not that simple. We're all at the mercy of the limbic system, clouds of electricity drifting through the brain. Every man is broken into twenty-four-hour fractions, and then again within those twenty-four hours. It's a daily pantomime, one man yielding control to the next: a backstage crowded with old hacks clamoring for their turn in the spotlight. Every week, every day. The angry man hands the baton over to the sulking man, and in turn to the sex addict, the introvert, the conversationalist. Every man is a mob, a chain gang of idiots.
This is the tragedy of life. Because for a few minutes of every day, every man becomes a genius. Moments of clarity, insight, whatever you want to call them. The clouds part, the planets get in a neat little line, and everything becomes obvious. I should quit smoking, maybe, or here's how I could make a fast million, or such and such is the key to eternal happiness. That's the miserable truth. For a few moments, the secrets of the universe are opened to us. Life is a cheap parlor trick.
But then the genius, the savant, has to hand over the controls to the next guy down the pike, most likely the guy who just wants to eat potato chips, and insight and brilliance and salvation are all entrusted to a moron or a hedonist or a narcoleptic.
2) NAME the stadium that was home to the Federal League’s Whales from 1914 to 1915 and a different league’s Bears from 1921 to 1970; its most famous tenant has been playing there since 1916.
This is Chicago’s WRIGLEY FIELD—the Chicago Cubs, of course, are Wrigley’s most famous tenant.
In the spring of 1996, a sign with the text “Eamus Catuli!” with a string of letters and numbers was posted outside of Wrigley. When the sign was first posted, the string would have read “AC075188”—the below image would have been from 2012:
“Eamus Catuli” is a Latin approximation of the phrase “Let’s Go Cubs!” (though it’s probably closer to “Let’s Go Whelps!”). “AC” stands for “Anno Catulorum,” another approximation for “The Year of the Cubs.” The numbers represent the number of years it had been since the Cubs won (1) their division, (2) the conference/pennant, and (3) the World Series. To the relief of many Cubs fans, but not your author, the sign was reset to “AC000000” in 2016.
Apparently, there was a competition for folks to try to derive the meaning of the signs. It took a year and a half for someone to do so, probably because Trivia Factorial wasn’t around yet.1
3) Charles Michelson is believed to have first employed WHAT term to describe shanty towns of unhoused individuals at the beginning at the Great Depression and to attack the president at the time? That president lost the next election, leading to the creation of alphabet-soup programs responding to the Depression such as the CCC, TVA, and FDIC.
The term is HOOVERVILLE. A blog run by the Herbert Hoover Library and Museum states that, according to an associate of Hoover, “[Hoover] held a grudge against only one person who was not FDR but Charles Michelson.”
This might raise some questions, like “Wait, the Herbert Hoover Library and Museum has a blog?” and “For whom is the Herbert Hoover Library and Museum’s blog intended?” and “If I keep writing the word ‘Hoover’ over and over, will it lose all meaning?” By the way, WHAT ALLITERATIVE TWO-WORD PHRASE refers to that psychological phenomenon—the one where repeating a word over and over can cause the word to temporarily lose meaning? The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.2
The Hoover blog is hilarious if you, like me, are easily amused by unamusing things. The blog sprints to every imaginable, and some unimaginable, defenses of Hoover. People might say that Hoover had poor social skills, but hey, they said that about Abraham Lincoln too. What, you think Hoover wasn’t a funny guy? That’s not true because he once said that he outlived all of his enemies. People said he wouldn’t always shake people’s hands, but it’s hard to shake hands without bruising. I implore you, dear reader—find someone who loves you the way that the Herbert Hoover Library and Museum’s blog writer loves Herbert Hoover.
4) In 2020, political opponents of Bernie Sanders pointed to a 1988 video showing Sanders, on a trip to Moscow with a delegation of Burlington citizens, praising the Soviet Union for, in the words of the Washington Post, its “[BLANK]-filled transit stations.” WHAT word, also the name of a 2014 song by Sia, fills in the blank in the preceding sentence?
Our answer is CHANDELIER.
The Genius page for the song “Chandelier” includes annotations that appear to actually be written by Sia. With respect to the lyric “I'm gonna swing from the chandelier / From the chandelier,” Sia notes that “i’ve never actually done that, but it sounds f****** fun” [redaction mine] and that “i still plan to, but sober.” Her analysis then devolves into repeatedly (though correctly) identifying her lyrics as sad:
5) NAME the writer and activist, nicknamed the “Scarlot Harlot,” who is generally credited with coining the term “sex work.” A street in Charlotte3 shares its name with this original member of ACT UP who was once called “the fairy godmother of the early AIDS direct action groups of San Francisco.”
This is CAROL LEIGH. She passed away in November 2022; The New York Times had a nice obituary about her:
Ms. Leigh took credit for introducing the term “sex work” as an alternative way to describe the business of prostitutes and others. In “Inventing Sex Work,” an essay she contributed to the collection “Whores and Other Feminists” (1997, edited by Jill Nagle), Ms. Leigh recalled a conference organized by Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media that she attended in San Francisco in the late 1970s or early ’80s. The title of a workshop involving prostitution, she said, used the term “sex use industry.”
“The words stuck out and embarrassed me,” she wrote. “How could I sit amid other women as a political equal when I was being objectified like that, described only as something used, obscuring my role as an actor and agent in this transaction?
“At the beginning of the workshop,” she continued, “I suggested that the title of the workshop should be ‘Sex Work Industry,’ because that described what women did.”
Now the phrase is in common use, and it has been credited with helping to reframe the continuing debates on the subject.
6) Nowhere near Las Vegas and probably disapproving of it in a sense, WHAT country is the only country that answers this question and fits into the theme of this newsletter?
The intended answer was VATICAN CITY.
Each question alluded to (or within) a U.S. state, and the last five letters of each answer was that state’s capital:
Question #1: MeMENTO (the San Fernando Valley is in California, and the capital of California is SacraMENTO)
Question #2: Wrigley FIELD (the teams mentioned play in Illinois, and the capital of Illinois is SpringFIELD)
Question #3: HooverVILLE (the question alluded to the TVA, or the Tennessee Valley Authority, and the capital of Tennessee is NashVILLE)
Question #4: ChandELIER (the question mentioned Burlington, which is in Vermont, the capital of which is MontPELIER)
Question #5: Carol LEIGH (the question mentioned Charlotte, which is in North Carolina, the capital of which is RaLEIGH)
Question #6: Besides the thought that Vatican City might not approve of “Sin City,” the question mentioned Las Vegas, which is in Nevada, the capital of which is CarsoN CITY.
Newsletter Title: “Me gusta” might mean “I like [it]” in Spanish, but here it was a clue for what you were looking for—”GUSTA” are the last five letters of Augusta, the capital of Maine, and Maine’s postal abbreviation is “ME.”
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link. (We’re behind, but we’ll have the newest leaderboard live before our next newsletter in a week.)
This slight at the people of Wrigleyville in 1996 is not intended sincerely—puzzles are always easy when you know the answer.
SEMANTIC SATIATION.
I cannot find any evidence that the street in Charlotte is actually named after this Carol Leigh, but (1) either way, the statement in the question is true, and (2) I’ve wanted to get a question about Carol Leigh into the newsletter for a while, as she is not a “trivia canon” person, and this was as good an opportunity as any.