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) In Western astrology, because the twelve zodiac signs are generally presented in chronological order starting from the first day of spring, WHAT zodiac sign is said to come first?
2) FBI director J. Edgar Hoover in 1969 described WHAT, founded three years earlier in Oakland, California by Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton, as “the greatest threat to internal security of the country”?
3) You can check out any time you like the national flags of Albania, Egypt, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Montenegro, and Zambia, as each displays WHAT animal?
4) The Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk is the primary medium utility helicopter employed by the U.S. Army; the slightly modified Sikorsky SH-60, used by the U.S. Navy, is sensibly enough known by WHAT name (which can be stylized as either one or two words)?
5) On October 15, 2009 in Fort Collins, Colorado, Richard and Mayumi Heene released a helium balloon into the air and then falsely claimed their six-year-old son was trapped in the balloon. WHAT is the unusual, but perhaps appropriate, first name of that “Balloon Boy”?
6) WHAT specific distinction, related to this newsletter’s theme, is shared by each of the following musical artists and groups, but not by (for example) Prince, the Black Eyed Peas, or Rihanna? U2, Janet Jackson, P. Diddy, Nelly, Kid Rock, Justin Timberlake, Jessica Simpson, Paul McCartney, Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Maroon 5.
Trivia Newsletter CXXIII Recap
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.
This is Tuca & Bertie. I watched the first season when it came out—it’s really good!
In the show, Wong’s character Bertie works for a magazine publisher that is based on a real-life global mass media company named after its founder and based in New York City, except that Bertie’s employer has had one letter changed to force a pun. WHAT IS THE NAME of Bertie’s employer? The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
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)?
These are all governors who served non-consecutive terms (Brown and Wallace were perhaps the most recognizable for you politics buffs), and thus GROVER CLEVELAND, who also served non-consecutive terms as president, was our answer.
Philip La Follette was the son of Robert Marion “Fighting Bob” La Follette, who very well might be the most celebrated figure in the history of Wisconsin. Nationally, Robert La Follette may be most famous for running as a third-party candidate in the 1924 presidential election and winning 16.6% of the popular vote, a tremendous showing for a third party. That election is the last time a third-party candidate won a non-southern state.
The La Follette political dynasty (about which you can read more here) survives today. Doug La Follette is the longest-serving statewide elected official (excluding U.S. senators) in American history, having served as Wisconsin’s Secretary of State from 1975 to 1979, and then from 1983 on. In 2022, he barely defeated Republican challenger Amy Loudenbeck by some seven thousand votes.
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?
This nursery rhyme, despite not rhyming, is typically called “THIS LITTLE PIGGY.” On the website fanfiction.net, there are currently not one, not two, and not three, but four different works of fan fiction that portend to be crossovers between “This Little Piggy” and the 1984 horror film A Nightmare on Elm Street (disclaimer: depictions of violence and other unhappy things, but mostly just a feeling of “why would anyone do this?”2).
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?
This is OSCAR WILDE. Those more notable drawing-room plays are Lady Windermere's Fan and The Importance of Being Earnest. Wikipedia says that a drawing-room play is “a type of play, developed during the Victorian period in the United Kingdom, in which the actions take place in a drawing room or which is designed to be reenacted in the drawing room of a home.”
Wilde explained the philosophy of The Importance of Being Earnest in a letter: “[W]e should treat all trivial things very seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality.” As far as a mission statement for Trivia Factorial goes, that would be a pretty good entrant.
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?
You shake my nerves and you rattle my brain
Too much love drives a man insane
You broke my will, but what a thrill
Goodness gracious, [Saint Elmo’s Fire]
This is ST. ELMO’S FIRE—the aurora borealis may have been a tempting answer, but I don’t think it’d make a lot of sense for the “water” itself to be burning. St. Erasmus of Formia, the patron saint of sailors, is the namesake for St. Elmo’s Fire.
6) The answers in this newsletter generally relate to WHAT long-running television show?
The desired answer was SESAME STREET, though for reasons we’ll explain momentarily we accepted THE MUPPET SHOW and derivations thereof. The following were the intended hints:
Question #1: Tuca & Bertie, alluding to the Sesame Street character Bert
Question #2: Grover Cleveland, alluding to the Sesame Street character Grover
Question #3: “This Little Piggy,” alluding to the character Miss Piggy. More on that just below.
Question #4: Oscar Wilde, alluding to the Sesame Street character Oscar the Grouch.
Question #5: St. Elmo’s Fire, alluding to the Sesame Street character Elmo.
Newsletter Title: “Down for the Count” alluding to how a viewer of Sesame Street might be “down with” the Sesame Street character Count von Count.
Bonus Clue: This was Trivia Newsletter CXXIII, or 123. 123 Sesame Street is the most famous address on Sesame Street; it’s the large two-story brownstone apartment building often shown on the show, and the show’s logo is a street sign with that address:
Maybe you’ve already noticed the issue—Miss Piggy is, arguably, not a Sesame Street character, as that character isn’t on Sesame Street. (As a warning, this is about to be a very long digression.)
Having realized the issue approximately forty minutes after publication, I thought about four potential approaches:
Porcine But Not Heard: Just say that, actually, Miss Piggy is a Sesame Street character.
One of the perks of having gone to law school is that you learn how to argue just about anything with a straight face. Look, there she is in a portrait on the wall in one sketch:
And there it is again in a different sketch:
Kermit even makes a joke once on Sesame Street that a pig character reminds him of somebody, clearly alluding to Miss Piggy. Don’t these factors make her a Sesame Street character, or at least make that a plausible claim?
Sow, Who Cares? Acknowledge that Miss Piggy is not a Sesame Street character, but that the error was immaterial.
This one doesn’t need much explanation. The argument goes “Okay, you had plenty of other clues, and we’re going to accept The Muppet Show anyway. It’s all kind of the same universe, and there are no stakes, so whatever.” Right?
No. “We should treat all trivial things very seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality.” We will not pick this particular coward’s refuge, because just about anything worth doing is worth doing well, and we at Trivia Factorial pride ourselves on reaching a baseline level of competence most of the time.
Wallowing in Self-Pity: Acknowledge that Miss Piggy is not a Sesame Street character, and apologize profusely.
Eh. I do think that we should do a better job, but apologies are cheap. “We’re sorry” is what DoorDash tells you when your order was supposed to include a Diet Coke and it wasn’t delivered. We can do a little better than that.
Go the Whole Hog: Just say what happened, realize that mistakes happen sometimes, and let you decide what you think.
So what actually happened is that I, a person who has never watched any of Sesame Street or The Muppet Show, wrote these questions and originally made Question #3 a question that would have asked something like “What animal lays the largest eggs of any animal?” I believe that’s an ostrich, which are especially large birds, and so it would have been an allusion to Big Bird. Then, shortly before publication, I realized that that’s a bit confusing, because Big Bird is not an ostrich and the pinning didn’t feel right, so we threw in the “Piggy” question without really thinking about how we had gravitated from Sesame Street to the Muppets more generally.
The point of this newsletter is for you to learn things. Ideally you’d be learning really interesting new things, like how there’s a giant magnetic anomaly covering most of the Central African Republic, or how the deadliest wildfire in U.S. history, which was in Wisconsin in 1871, entirely coincidentally started on the same day as the start of the Great Chicago Fire.3 Of course, the point of this newsletter is also for me to learn things, and now I've learned that Miss Piggy did not actually appear on Sesame Street (except for the portraits referenced above). It’s a luxury to learn, and for this instance I am grateful. You can probably tell that I am a little annoyed at myself for this error, so that gratitude I feel will have to be my, ah, oinkment.
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
CONDE NEST (based upon Condé Nast, which publishes GQ, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Vogue, and other works).
he writes, 700 words into a trivia newsletter that produces no profit and that is read by fewer people than people who scored a touchdown in the 2022 NFL season
You already knew this tidbit if you were keeping up with Chris King’s excellent trivia newsletter that we’ve been recommending for a while.