A quick programming note: We’ll be taking this weekend off. We’ll be back on Thursday, March 9th with Trivia Newsletter CXXVIII.
Before we jump into the newsletter, I wanted to plug some trivia newsletters and non-trivia newsletters on Substack that I personally think are great.1 The note “($)” indicates that a paid subscription is required for full access, but each paid newsletter offers limited free content. Some of these you’ve already seen on my recommendations list that’s a part of Substack, and some you haven’t. Because we do six questions each newsletter, let’s do two sets of six here:
Six Non-Trivia Newsletters
My single favorite publication on Substack is Haterade, written by a freelance food writer. I aspire to one day write something as good as this account of tasting rodent-repelling car tape, and this impassioned defense of Malört lies close to my heart.
I have a lot of appreciation for people who get excited about their hobbies without shame or abandon. If you’re into games, Game & Word ($) is a must-read. You can’t read a post without thinking “man, this guy loves games,” and the passion and energy that goes into the posts is truly contagious. Here’s a good recent example.
Speaking of games, I get a kick out of Adventure Snack, which sends free short interactive adventures to your inbox twice a month. I haven’t dug into it as much as I’d like, but I did like this one a lot.
And speaking of words, On Words and Up Words ($), a newsletter centered on wordplay and puzzles, is another one I’ve been meaning to dig into. I understand that subscribers receive regular cryptic crossword puzzles; here’s a free post all about our favorite thing here at Trivia Factorial, anagrams.
Some Dogs is just posts about dogs with pictures of dogs. It’s great. More things should just be posts about dogs with pictures of dogs. This post is a good way to let sleeping dogs lie.
J!ometry, a recent Substack by a 2022 Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions semifinalist, doesn’t dig into trivia per se but instead digs into Jeopardy! data and analytics itself. This recent post, which includes a great aside about inclusion and allyship inside and outside of the trivia sphere, is a good example of what J!ometry does.
Six Trivia Newsletters
16% of you already read Yu Oughta Know ($), and more of you should; it’s the go-to newsletter for current events to keep you sharp on what’s going on, both for trivia and for just being able to hold a conversation. This free post from last year is a great example of how the newsletter features punchy, concise questions and thoughtful recaps thereof.
Alex Jacob of Jeopardy! fame recently moved his School of Trivia ($) operation onto Substack. Buzzy Cohen (also of Jeopardy! fame) explicitly called out School of Trivia on a Jeopardy! podcast as a potential resource for people trying to get on the show. Here’s a free post highlighting some of his question sets.
We’ve also been plugging Loaded Questions ($) for a while; I think the question sets are usually extremely challenging, but are also a good way to stretch yourself a bit. Here’s a recent (free) set of literature questions they did.
A relatively new entrant in this space is JAQR (Jeopardy Answer & Question Recap), which is completely free and runs through certain Jeopardy! questions on a weekly basis. If you regularly watch Jeopardy!, you’ll want to avoid the recaps until you’re caught up on the show, but they’re a good way to reinforce what you’re learning. Here’s the most recent post.
An even more recent entrant in this space is Mister Skeleton’s Trivia Zone. I still can’t really figure out why it’s called that, but make no bones about it—it’s a quippy and breezy read, and it’ll give you good trivia questions consistently and for free. Here’s a post I liked quite a bit.
Again on the free side of things, Troyale is a great Substack that sends out five general-knowledge questions twice a week. The questions probably lean “easier” than the other examples on this list, and it’s always a sound and competent production. I thought this recent post was fun.
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) A “Chicago-style” hot dog is an all-beef frankfurter on a poppy-seed bun that is topped with chopped white onions, sweet-pickle relish, a dill-pickle spear, tomato slices (or wedges), pickled sport peppers, and a dash of celery salt, and is roped with WHAT other ingredient that is absolutely, positively not ketchup?
2) NAME the civil rights activist who served as the Executive Secretary of the NAACP from 1929 to 1955 and is credited with drafting the presidential executive order that desegregated the military. He coincidentally shares his first and last name with one of the most famous characters in television history; the antepenultimate episode of that character’s show depicts a heartwrenching knife fight.
3) Fay Bainter was the first actor or actress nominated for two different Academy Awards in acting categories in a single year, for two films released in 1938. WHO is the most recent person to have accomplished this feat, doing so for two films released in 2019?
4) From 1979 to 1981, in an effort to fight off the effects of an ongoing pipeline of bad television shows and poor ratings, NBC created an advertising campaign and slogan stating that it was as proud as a WHAT?
5) The Leavenworth Case, an 1878 detective novel, is the first and best-known novel by WHAT author? The novel, with a classic plot featuring a murder carried out with a revolver, was influential in the development of the genre of detective fiction; Agatha Christie cited it as an influence on her own works.
6) Name either the fruit or the former stadium that would complete one of the two related sets alluded to in this newsletter.
Trivia Newsletter CXXVI Recap
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.
The answer here is a RESEARCH university. Let’s turn it over to Johns Hopkins:
“What are we aiming at?”
That’s the question Daniel Coit Gilman asked in 1876, at his inauguration as Johns Hopkins University’s first president. His answer, in part: “The encouragement of research . . . and the advancement of individual scholars, who by their excellence will advance the sciences they pursue, and the society where they dwell.”
Gilman believed that teaching and research are interdependent, that success in one depends on success in the other, and that a modern university must do both well. Johns Hopkins was the nation’s very first research university, and the realization of Gilman’s philosophy here, and at other institutions that later attracted Johns Hopkins–trained scholars, revolutionized higher education in America.
Time wrote in 1926 that the 1876 inauguration of Daniel Coit Gilman (mentioned in the above quote) marked “the starting point of postgraduate education in the U.S.” and that Dr. Gilman was “the father of the graduate school, the great apostle of university research.”
I admit that I spent no more than ninety seconds on this, but I can’t find any indication of whether Daniel Coit Gilman is related to Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who lived at the same time and is most famous for her short story “The Yellow Wallpaper.” They’re both from Connecticut, but I would think if they were related, someone would have written about it online, and I see no evidence that someone has.
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.
“My name is KYLIE SONIQUE LOVE,” she said on Season 6 of RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars, “but you can call me Kylie. All my friends do.” In 2021, Miley Cyrus asked for, and received, permission to be Love’s “drag daughter.”
Speaking of Miley Cyrus, she’s been #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for the past six weeks with WHAT SONG? That song’s chorus starts with the lines “I can buy myself [BLANK] / Write my name in the sand / Talk to myself for hours / Say things you don't understand,” where the “blank” is also the name of the song. The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.2
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.
This is BERMUDA. You can read the Generall Historie right now, although I do not recommend it!
THE GENERALL HISTORIE OF THE BERMVDAS, now called the Summer Iles, from their beginning in the yeere of our Lord 1593. to this present 1624. with their proceedings, accidents and present estate.
The Description of the Iles.
BEfore we present you the matters of fact, it is fit to offer to your view the Stage whereon they were acted, for as Geography without History seemeth a carkasse without motion, so History without Geography, wandreth as a Vagrant without a certaine habitation. Those Ilands lie in the huge maine Ocean, and two hundred leagues from any continent, situated in 32. degrees and 25. minutes, of Northerly latitude, and distant from England West South-West, about 3300. miles, some twenty miles in length, and not past two miles and a halfe in breadth, enuironed with Rocks, which to the North-ward, West-ward, and South-East, extend further then they haue bin yet well discouered: by reason of those Rocks the Country is naturally very strong…
Bermuda was (inadvertently) settled in 1609 by the Virginia Company and its flagship, the Sea Venture, as the Sea Venture went off course on its way to Jamestown. The wreck of the Sea Venture is generally believed to have been the inspiration for The Tempest, the Shakespeare play.
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?
Each of these means “THE RIGHT.” Our word adroit comes from the French word, in the sense of “rightly” or “skillfully.”
You remember the Fatboy Slim song “Right Here, Right Now” from the late 1990s, the famous electronic/dance song? Here, I’ll remind you of how the lyrics start:
Right here, right now
Right here, right now
Right here, right now
Right here, right now
Right here, right now
Right here, right now
Right here, right now
Right here, right now
According to IMDB, that line (“right here, right now”) is a sample from the 1995 film Strange Days, directed by Kathryn Bigelow, co-written by James Cameron, and starring Ralph Fiennes, Angela Bassett, and Juliette Lewis. The line is Bassett’s from this scene (warning: a little violence and a lot of cursing). Some argue that Strange Days, a box-office bomb, was heavily underappreciated; one writer even calls it the “best piece of cyberpunk to grace celluloid since Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner.”
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.
This is GOLDEN, COLORADO.
Isn’t it wild that Golden was named not after the nearby gold rush, but was instead named after a guy who happened to be named Golden? Well, maybe that’s why he became a prospector.
A fun game [citation needed] is thinking of these “aptonyms” or “aptronyms” (I prefer the former spelling, but you can find both) where people have names that seem to fit them—for example, Usain Bolt has a name befitting a sprinter, and Chris Moneymaker was the 2003 World Series of Poker champion.
21) Each of the answers in this newsletter can be paired with WHAT specific word?
We were looking for TRIANGLE. Each of the answers is something that can be linked with the word “triangle” to create a well known phrase or concept:
Question #1: Research (referring to the Research Triangle, describing the area in North Carolina anchored by North Carolina State University, Duke University, and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill—all three of those are, of course, research universities)
Question #3: Kylie Sonique Love (referring to the idea of a “love triangle”)
Question #6: Bermuda (for the Bermuda Triangle)
Question #10: the Right (for a “right triangle” in mathematics)
Question #15: Golden, CO (for the “Golden Triangle,” which has a few different meanings)
Newsletter Title: Triangles are “180-relating” because a triangle’s interior angles add up to 180 degrees. Also, “triangle” is an anagram of “relating.”
One last hint was that, instead of numbering the questions #1 through #6, we numbered them 1, 3, 6, 10, 15, and 21, which are triangular numbers.
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link. [I expect we will be behind at the time of publication, but we’ll be all caught up by the time Trivia Newsletter CXXVIII goes out in a week.]
For clarity, I have not coordinated these recommendations with anyone and have received nothing in return. I just think people should read good trivia and good other things. This is also obviously not a complete list; there are surely lots of good newsletters I haven’t read, and some good ones that I’ve omitted out of ignorance or for brevity’s sake.
The Miley Cyrus song is “FLOWERS”.