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 photographer who took the following photograph of Florence Owens Thompson’s stone-cold gaze in 1936. Today known as Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California, it is one of the most famous photographs in history.
2) Sticks, stones, and WHAT, alluded to in the title of a song released in 1978 by Warren Zevon, can hurt you? Named after its inventor, it was officially used by the United States military from 1938 to 1971 and is sometimes also called the “Chicago Typewriter.”
3) Take the name of the Athenian lawgiver famous for his harsh legal code written on stone tablets who shares his name with a constellation, change a letter, and now you have WHAT name, also the last name of a 1970s Major League Baseball player who is in the top-ten Kansas City Royals pitchers in several career statistics, but is most famous for giving up Hank Aaron’s 755th and final home run?
4) Star Gazers’ Stone, a monument in Embreeville, Pennsylvania that marks the site of a temporary observatory built in 1764, is just a few miles from the borders that Pennsylvania shares with Delaware and Maryland. NAME the two men said to have placed Star Gazers’ Stone.
5) In 2013, Rolling Stone asked its readers to vote on the worst band of the 1990s. NAME the band that “won” the poll by a wide margin; it had disbanded in 2004, with its lead singer seeking out a solo career and its other members forming a band with Myles Kennedy that continues to be active.
6) The answers in this newsletter, presented in no particular order, allude to characters most closely associated with WHAT film franchise?
Trivia Newsletter CXXIV Recap
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?
This is ARIES, the Ram. Perhaps you’re an Aries. If so, here is your horoscope for today, presented by horoscope.com:
You may feel insecure about your appearance today, Aries. This can be a vicious cycle to get into. The result is almost always negative. Rather than pick yourself apart, consider finding ways to accept your looks. Whether it's your weight or age or anything else, if you can't accept yourself, you will always find something wrong no matter how many changes you make.
Bah. Let’s turn instead to Terry Pratchett and The Light Fantastic, the second Discworld novel:
“He was born under The Small Boring Group of Faint Stars which, as you know, lies between The Flying Moose and The Knotted String. It is said that even the ancients couldn't find anything interesting to say about the sign, which—”
“Yes, yes, get on with it,” said Trymon irritably.
“It's the sign traditionally associated with chess board makers, sellers of onions, manufacturers of plaster images of small religious significance, and people allergic to pewter. Not a wizard's sign at all. And at the time of his birth the shadow of Cori Celesti—”
“I don't want to know all the mechanical details,” growled Trymon. “Just give me his horoscope.”
The astrologer, who had been rather enjoying himself, sighed and made a few additional calculations.
'Very well,” he said. “It reads as follows: ‘Today is a good time for making new friends. A good deed may have unforeseen consequences. Don't upset any druids. You will soon be going on a very strange journey. Your lucky food is small cucumbers. People pointing knives at you are probably up to no good. PS, we really mean it about druids.’”
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”?
This is the BLACK PANTHER PARTY, originally stylized the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense.
Just a few days ago, CNN ran a piece by Gayle Fleming entitled “Opinion: Her days as a Black Panther are long behind her. Her path of activism hasn’t ended”:
On my first day working with the Panthers, I met Kathleen Neal, who would later become Cleaver’s wife. The daughter of a career diplomat and recent dropout from Spelman College, she and I bonded immediately.
Had Kathleen not been there, I’m not sure I would have stayed. She was a college girl like me. She wasn’t from “the hood” and neither was I. In my decidedly middle-class Black neighborhood in the hills of Oakland, most residents were teachers, lawyers, doctors and such.
Kathleen Cleaver, described in the above passage and today a senior lecturer and research fellow at Emory University School of Law, has an incredible story that includes working as the Black Panther Party’s first Communications Secretary, years of exile in Algeria and France, and a stint at swanky New York law firm Cravath, Swaine and Moore. I thought this transcript of a 1997 Frontline interview with her was a good read.
3) You can check out any time you like the national flags of Albania, Egypt, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Montenegro, and1 Zambia, as each displays WHAT animal?
Each flag displays an “EAGLE.” The phrase “You can check out any time you like” was included as an allusion to “Hotel California,” the song by the Eagles, to give you another clue.
“Hotel California” also includes this lyric:
So I called up the Captain
“Please bring me my wine”
He said, “We haven't had that spirit here
Since 1969”
In a 2009 interview, a music critic asked Don Henley, the singer on “Hotel California,” if he regretted the ostensible inaccuracy of the lyric (wines are typically not categorized as “spirits”). Henley had little patience for the question:
Thanks for the tutorial and, no, you're not the first to bring this to my attention—and you're not the first to completely misinterpret the lyric and miss the metaphor. Believe me, I've consumed enough alcoholic beverages in my time to know how they are made and what the proper nomenclature is. But that line in the song has little or nothing to do with alcoholic beverages. It's a sociopolitical statement. My only regret would be having to explain it in detail to you, which would defeat the purpose of using literary devices in songwriting and lower the discussion to some silly and irrelevant argument about chemical processes.
So what does the lyric refer to? Well, whatever you want it to refer to, but turning to Genius:
So what happened in 1969? A LOT. 1969, and in particular the excessive Woodstock Festival and the horrific Altamont Music Festival, is often considered the year when the brief reign of social change in the music business ended, and hedonism and cynicism took its ascent. 1969 is also the year that the Catholic Church reorganized its mass to give the common worshipers the same wine as the priest. And it’s the year that the polemic The Satanic Bible was published. In short, 1969 is a great shorthand when, like Don Henley, you prefer your lyrics to be a little cryptic.
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)?
This is the SEA HAWK or SEAHAWK. “SH” was a clue here, as was the hint that we wanted a naval parallel to Black Hawk.
Actually, there is no such thing. No ornithologist would refer to them as such. (They don’t even spell it as one word.) Some people, though, consider “sea hawks” to be a nickname for ospreys or skuas.
Ospreys are found on every continent except Antarctica, while skuas are migratory birds found from the North Pole to the South Pole (Good luck trying to find one in North America, though. They rarely come ashore.)
If Jeopardy! asks you for an ornithologist, there’s a pretty decent chance that you ought to shout out WHAT NAME, which (as a question) would be the correct response to prompts such as “This society named for an ornithologist is responsible for dozens of sanctuaries nationwide” and “William MacGillivray helped write 'Ornithological Biography', the text that went along with this man's drawings”? The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.2
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”?
The Balloon Boy’s name is FALCON.
“You would have thought that nuclear secrets had been stolen from [the] Pentagon the way the media descended upon Fort Collins," Larimer County Sheriff Jim Alderden was quoted as saying by USA Today in a retrospective about the Balloon Boy hoax. “I refer to it as the ‘balunacy,’” Alderden went on to say, apparently auditioning for a writing position with Trivia Factorial.
Falcon’s parents were given short sentences, and eventually were pardoned in 2020.
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.
This is a list of performers who headlined SUPER BOWL HALFTIME SHOWS IN WHICH QUARTERBACK TOM BRADY PLAYED AND WON WHILE WITH THE NEW ENGLAND PATRIOTS.3 We excluded Prince, the Black Eyed Peas, and Rihanna, as they've played halftime shows in Super Bowls not involving Brady—thus, just saying “Super Bowl halftime performers” was not sufficient.
The answers pointed to NFL teams defeated by the New England Patriots in Super Bowls in the order defeated (except that the Rams were the first and the sixth team defeated by the Patriots):
Question #1: Aries, pointing to the St. Louis Rams
Question #2: The Black Panther Party, for the Carolina Panthers
Question #3: Eagle, for the Philadelphia Eagles
Question #4: Sea Hawk, for the Seattle Seahawks
Question #5: Falcon, for the Atlanta Falcons
Newsletter Title: “The Brady Bunch” was meant to refer not to the television show, but to this bunch of NFC teams that saw their title hopes dashed by Brady while he was a Patriot. The goal was for you to realize that Question #6 was probably Super Bowl performers (as Rihanna performed just earlier this month) and then put the theme together from the newsletter title and other answers.
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
The word “and” was omitted here in the original publication of this newsletter.
[JOHN JAMES] AUDUBON. His major work, a color-plate book called The Birds of America, is sometimes asked about as well.
You may have been concerned about whether I’d draw a distinction between “Super Bowls won where Tom Brady was a starting QB” and “Super Bowls won where Tom Brady was a starting QB for the New England Patriots,” as Tom Brady won seven Super Bowls, six of which were with New England. The way we handled this was not mentioning The Weeknd, who headlined the halftime show of Super Bowl LV, where the Tampa Bay Buccaneers won with Tom Brady. Thus, both answers were correct due to this purposeful omission. Answers such as “Super Bowl halftime shows where Tom Brady played” also were okay, since we also purposefully didn’t exclude any Super Bowl performances where Tom Brady’s teams lost. The goal was to get you to “Tom Brady Super Bowls,” not to make sure you knew the ins and outs of each of them.