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 animated sitcom created by Lisa Hanawalt that debuted on Netflix in 2019, with subsequent seasons appearing on Adult Swim. The show stars the voice talents of Tiffany Haddish and Ali Wong as an anthropomorphic toucan and song thrush, respectively.
2) Jerry Brown (California), Bill Clements (Texas), George Clinton (New York), Mills Godwin (Virginia), Philip La Follette (Wisconsin), Richard Oglesby (Illinois), Al Smith (New York), and George Wallace (Alabama) are some of the many governors to hold a certain distinction held by WHAT U.S. president (and no other president)?
3) “Going shopping,” “staying at home,” “eating roast beef,” “not eating roast beef,” and “exclaiming while returning” could be said to be the fates of WHAT particular animals from a nursery rhyme?
4) A Woman of No Importance and An Ideal Husband are two drawing-room plays by WHAT poet and playwright, more famous for his sole completed novel and his two other drawing-room plays?
5) “About, about, in reel and rout, / The death fires danced at night; / The water, like a witch's oils, / Burnt green and blue and white.” These lines from the poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner are generally believed to refer to WHAT specific weather phenomenon, also identified by name and as a “light play” in the novel Journey to the Center of the Earth?
6) The answers in this newsletter generally relate to WHAT long-running television show?
Trivia Newsletter CXXII Recap
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.
This is USED CARS. Kurt Russell plays a sleazy used-car salesman in a rivalry with the dealership across the street, run by Russell’s character’s twin brother.
The film’s climax kicks off when the rival edits a commercial for our protagonist’s dealership to make it sound like the dealership was advertising a “mile of cars” and then pushes to sue for false advertising, since the dealership does not actually have a mile of cars. In order to thwart this attempt, our heroes have to arrange for 250+ used cars to show up at the dealership. This leads to some of the best open-field car convoy scenes you’re going to see this side of Mad Max: Fury Road (about the 2:45 mark):
We’re going to hand this part off to excerpts of Letterboxd reviews of Used Cars that amuse me (I’ve added, in brackets, the star rating that the user gave from 0 to 5):
A car jumps over a moving train: automatic 4 stars [4 stars]
Used Cars may be a bit rough around the edges, but it's a totally charming comedy. The immoral heroes are quite lovable and some of the darkest moments are the funniest. The final car chase is a real highlight and I now think they should add this film to the Fast & Furious canon just for a laugh. [3.5 stars]
"If I can build and install a pacemaker in this man's chest, I damn well can bounce a microwave off a satellite!" [3.5 stars]
Lost my [s***] at the absurdity of hijacking a presidential address to sell used cars and then blame it on the Ayatollah [4 stars]
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.
The shared word is “NONE,” as the works were And Then There Were None, Master of None, and None But the Brave.
Agatha Christie’s novel has been adapted into many works, but we’re going to talk about a 1980 computer game, Mystery House:
Remember, it’s 1980. Pong came out in 1972, and Super Mario Brothers is going to come out in 1985. Mystery House came out in the same year that Pac-Man did. This game is one of the first horror games ever, but more importantly, it is one of the first games to attempt to tell any kind of real story with graphics at all. I gave this game a quick spin (and so can you!). The first thing you can do is ask for instructions:
There are a lot more instructions, and they include some relics of the era:
Once you actually launch the game, it’s just great. It’s hard to describe how nostalgic images like the below make me:
The visuals are just…man, they rock:
The game is tricky and frustrating (better find and light the candle before it turns dark!), but with some effort, you too can be “declared a guru wizard.”
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?
We were looking for an ORGAN here.
This website has a long list of instances of people parodying the phrase “a whiter shade of pale” for their own ends. Keith Reid, who wrote most of Procol Harum’s songs, has said that “The phrase ‘a whiter shade of pale’ has been ripped off so much … I feel that I should get some credit for introducing something into the English language,” and in at least one sense, that’s now true—the phrase is attributed to Reid in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.
Toccata and Fugue in D minor, probably by Bach, is one of those pieces that you’ve definitely heard in your life over and over—it’s that organ piece associated with horror scenes in old films.
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?
These are all characters from ANDOR. The most useful hint here may have been Mon Mothma, who is a character not just from Andor, but also from Return of the Jedi (1983) and Rogue One (2016).
The Ringer has had glowing coverage of Andor over the past few months—here, it makes the argument that Andor, and not House of the Dragon or The Rings of Power, has “achieved what its fantasy peers have so far struggled to accomplish: expanding the literal and tonal range of an already sprawling story, imbuing the far fringes of its mythology with meaning despite a predetermined outcome.”
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.
The answer here is FAKER—Bayless loves referring to the Los Angeles Lakers as the “Fakers.”
Trivia Factorial is loathe to write positively, even indirectly, about Skip Bayless, who generally says horrifically wrong things whether the stakes are very low or very high and is better at upsetting people professionally than almost anyone else in the history of non-politics. With that in mind—this short video of Skip Bayless “arguing with himself” is fantastic.
By the way, NAME Skip Bayless’s brother, who has won seven James Beard Awards. The answer is at the end of this newsletter.1
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.)
This was a noble gases newsletter (“xenon” would have also been acceptable). That was pretty hard to get to, so we tried to give you a few clues here in Question #6, but let’s go to the list first:
Question #1: “uh, mile” is in the question and is an anagram of “helium.”
Question #2: “None,” the answer to the question, is an anagram of “neon.”
Question #3: “Organ,” the answer to the question, is an anagram of “argon.”
Question #4: “Andor,” the answer to the question, is an anagram of “radon.”
Question #5: “Not Krpy”2 is in the question and is an anagram of “krypton.”
Question #6: We tried to give you three clues here, and we mangled one of them:
The first was explicitly telling you that three answers mattered, in the hopes you’d turn to the questions and look for odd phrases for the other two items.
The second was the phrase “identify another element of that set,” where we hoped you’d realize that we picked the word “element” purposefully.
The third was a reference to a particular order. The order of the naturally occurring noble gases on the periodic table, from lightest to heaviest, are helium, neon, argon, krypton, xenon, and radon. This clue should have been helpful—now you know that there’s a particular order—but attentive readers will notice that somewhere along the editing process, I messed this up. I had meant to write that Question #6 should be #5, and that Question #5 should be #4, and Question #4 should be #6, but the order of our questions changed at some point. That’s on me, and it’s my hope that no one got close enough to realizing these might be noble gases and then was thrown off by that error.
Finally, the newsletter title was “Righteous,” a synonym of “noble” and a hint that our answers might appear on the “right” of something—specifically, on the right side of the periodic table.
“A DRAMA BANGS” is an anagram of “ANAGRAMS BAD,” so after how this one went, we’ll be keeping them to the newsletter titles for the foreseeable future.3
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
RICK BAYLESS.
Thanks to minor League player Krpy for making this particular newsletter possible.
(For the avoidance of doubt—there are no anagrams intended to help you in Trivia Newsletter CXXIII, including in its title.)