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) Johns Hopkins University, founded in 1876, credits itself as the first school in the U.S. to be WHAT kind of university? Today, the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education lists 146 U.S. universities in the highest tier of this category.
3) NAME the performer who goes by the stage name Sonique and who is believed to be the first person to come out as transgender on a reality television show. In 2021, she became the first transgender woman to win a season of the U.S. version of RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars.
6) The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles, a book written by Captain John Smith in 1629, concerns the general history of Virginia, New England, and a place best known today as WHAT island territory? Smith had never visited this area, but its inclusion was precipitated by events beginning with the wreck of the Sea Venture in 1609.
10) Italy’s La Destra, Germany’s Die Rechte, and France’s La Droite are political parties with names that can be translated into WHAT English word?
15) NAME the city in Colorado where the Coors Brewing Company was founded and that is today home to the Colorado School of Mines. With a population just over 20,000, it was not named in relation to events occurring at nearby Pikes Peak at the time of its founding, but was instead named after a prospector from Georgia.
21) Each of the answers in this newsletter can be paired with WHAT specific word?
Trivia Newsletter CXXV Recap
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.
The photographer here is DOROTHEA LANGE. Take it away, MoMA:
In early March, 1936, Dorothea Lange drove past a sign reading, “PEA-PICKERS CAMP,” in Nipomo, California. At the time, she was working as a photographer for the Resettlement Administration (RA), a Depression-era government agency formed to raise public awareness of and provide aid to struggling farmers. Twenty miles down the road, Lange reconsidered and turned back to the camp, where she encountered a mother and her children. “I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet,” she later recalled. “She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding field and birds that the children killed.” Lange took seven exposures of the woman, 32-year-old Florence Owens Thompson, with various combinations of her seven children. One of these exposures, with its tight focus on Thompson’s face, transformed her into a Madonna-like figure and became an icon of the Great Depression and one of the most famous photographs in history. This image was first exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art in 1940, under the title Pea Picker Family, California; by 1966, when the Museum held a retrospective of Lange’s work, it had acquired its current title, Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California.
In 1942, Lange (as an employee of the federal government) was assigned to document the wartime internment of Japanese Americans. You can find accounts stating that these photographs were censored by the federal government; you can also find an argument by the National Archives that this “censorship” is a misconception. I don’t know what the truth is, but the right answer may be to just look at the photographs.
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.”
This is a THOMPSON SUBMACHINE GUN, better known as a “Tommy gun.” The Warren Zevon song is “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner.” That song is the last song Zevon performed in front of an audience, which he did on the Late Show with David Letterman in 2002.
That episode, clips of which can be watched here, was unusual in that much of the episode was devoted to Letterman talking to Zevon. Zevon had just been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer:
LETTERMAN: How do you feel?
ZEVON: Well, I don't feel as bad as they say I am, you know, that's a good deal.
LETTERMAN: And you have spent a lot of time recently working very hard, haven't you, working on another project?
ZEVON: Yeah. They certainly don't discourage you from doing whatever you want. It’s not like bed rest and a lot of water, you know, will straighten you out.
LETTERMAN: How does that work now, under this circumstance, living with this diagnosis, how is the work now compared to when you assumed you were healthy, when you were only going to see [your dentist] Dr. Stan?
ZEVON: I'm working harder, and, you know, you put more value on every minute, you do. I always thought I kind of did that. I really always enjoyed myself. But it's more valuable now. You’re reminded to enjoy every sandwich and every minute of playing with the guys, and being with the kids and—
LETTERMAN: Yeah.
The phrase “enjoy every sandwich” is the big takeaway from that speech that you’ll see regularly quoted if you look for it.
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?
The lawgiver is DRACO (where we get the word “draconian” from), and the baseball player is DICK DRAGO.
Drago holds the distinction of having more at-bats than any other pitcher in Royals history. (This is a bit of a silly distinction, as the Royals first played in 1969 and the American League instituted the designated hitter rule in 1973.) He was an atrocious batter, even compared to other pitchers, batting .077 in his career. This nice write-up credits him as the 35th greatest Royal of all time (as of 2009).
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.
These folks are CHARLES MASON AND JEREMIAH DIXON, of “Mason-Dixon Line” fame. (The goal here was to make you wonder what two people might have a particular interest in being near the borders of those areas in the late eighteenth century.)
Mason and Dixon’s surveying efforts were an attempt to help resolve a border dispute involving the three states mentioned in the question. That dispute started because of arguably confusing land grants given by King Charles I (in 1632) and King Charles II (in 1681) to WHAT TWO INDIVIDUALS, respectively? The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
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.
This band is CREED. Alter Bridge, the other band referenced in the question, is still going strong today. Their biggest hits, at least in the rock world, include “Open Your Eyes,” “Find the Real,” and “Isolation.”
Back when Slate realized that the key to online journalism is to write hyper-contrarian headlines, they came out with “Creed Is Good,” arguing that, well, Creed is good.
6) The answers in this newsletter, presented in no particular order, allude to characters most closely associated with WHAT film franchise?
Each of the answers refers to one of the adversaries in the ROCKY films:
Question #1: Dorothea Lange (referring to Clubber Lang, the antagonist of Rocky III)
Question #2: Thompson submachine gun (referring to Tommy “The Machine” Gunn, the antagonist of Rocky V)
Question #3: Dick Drago (referring to Ivan Drago, the antagonist of Rocky IV)
Question #4: Mason and Dixon (referring to Mason “The Line” Dixon, the antagonist of the sixth Rocky film, Rocky Balboa)
Question #5: Creed (referring to Apollo Creed, the antagonist of Rocky I and Rocky II who then becomes Rocky’s friend in Rocky III2)
Another clue was that every single question (other than #6) had the word “stone” in it, which was trying to nudge you towards “rocky.” That’s why our newsletter title was “Felled, Spar”—a boxer being knocked down but then getting up and continuing to fight is basically the entire ethos of the Rocky franchise, and also “feldspar” was meant to make you think of, well, something "rocky."3
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
LORD BALTIMORE and WILLIAM PENN.
A little Rocky tidbit I like: Rocky III ends with a freeze frame of Rocky and Apollo Creed punching each other at the same time during a friendly spar. The viewer doesn’t learn who won that fight until thirty-three years later in Creed (2015), when Rocky discloses to Apollo Creed’s son Adonis that Apollo won the fight. The Creed franchise is centered around Adonis Creed, played by Michael B. Jordan.