Here’s a quick prelude before today’s newsletter that does not relate to today’s theme. What do the following have in common: (i) the title (in English) of François Truffaut’s first feature film, (ii) a notable accomplishment in baseball last reached by Ted Williams in 1941, (iii) the number that a centurial year must be divisible by, in order to be a leap year, and (iv) the subscriber base of Trivia Factorial?
That’s right, they all relate to “400,”1 in part because Trivia Factorial reached 400 subscribers for the first time yesterday. Thanks for being a part of the journey thus far. Consider helping our continued growth by sharing Trivia Factorial with people you know:
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 1973, physicist Andrew Woods calculated the geographic center of all of the Earth’s land surfaces as the point 39°00′N 34°00′E, which is in WHAT country, approximately the world’s 36th-largest country by size and its 17th-largest by population?
2) Also the name of the most commercially successful song by the group Temple of the Dog, WHAT two-word method of nonviolent resistance has been used by many throughout history, including suffragettes such as Marion Dunlop, Lady Constance Bulwer-Lytton, and Alice Paul?
3) Engineer Mohamed Atalla filed U.S. Patent 3,938,091 in 1972, which was for a remote security system related to WHAT acronym used in everyday life? Today he is sometimes called the father of this acronym. A 2023 Reader’s Digest article claims that, statistically, “8068” is a particularly rare example of this acronym and “2580” is a particularly common one.
4) As of March 22, 2023, WHAT book, which was ghostwritten by J. R. Moehringer, is #1 on The New York Times’s list of best sellers in the category of “Combined Print & E-Book Nonfiction,” just ahead of Ron DeSantis’s The Courage to Be Free and Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score?
5) NAME the 2006 film, sometimes adopted by Michigan State University for its promotional videos and football gameday traditions, that was at one time called “hostile behavior which is the result of cultural and psychological warfare” by a spokesperson for the Iranian government.
6) WHAT distinction, alluded to by the answers in this newsletter, is held by each of the following films? Superman III (1983), Uncle Buck (1989), The Flintstones (1994), The Next Karate Kid (1994), The Big Lebowski (1998), Pleasantville (1998), The Break-Up (2006), Men in Black 3 (2012).
Trivia Newsletter CXXX Recap
1) “You're the first person ever to win two Olympic tennis gold medals,” said BBC host John Inverdale in 2016. In response, Inverdale was told “I think [BLANK] and [BLANK] have won about four each.” NAME the two individuals who fill in the blanks in the preceding quotation.
VENUS and SERENA WILLIAMS are the mentioned folks. Inverdale was attempting to point to Andy Murray’s accomplishment of becoming the first man to win two Olympic tennis gold medals in singles play, but in his actual statement overlooked the three gold medals that Venus and Serena won together in doubles play, plus Venus’s singles gold medal at Sydney (2000) and Serena’s singles gold medal at London (2012). Inverdale also managed to overlook a few folks, primarily from the early twentieth century, who had won multiple Olympic tennis gold medals if all categories are considered. Murray, of course, gave the response in the question above.
The incident wasn’t Inverdale’s first gaffe, or his worst. As just one example:
The BBC was forced to apologise after Inverdale, speaking before [Marion] Bartoli's match against Sabine Lisicki, told listeners of Radio 5 Live: "Do you think Bartoli's dad told her when she was little: 'You're never going to be a looker, you'll never be a Sharapova, so you have to be scrappy and fight'?"
2) Though likely not as celebrated as Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein and the other Americans who advanced the pop art movement, WHAT Scottish artist, the son of Italian immigrants, is notable in the history of pop art for his “BUNK!” series of works, including the seminal 1947 collage I was a Rich Man's Plaything that featured the word “pop” years before the term for the movement was coined?
This is EDUARDO PAOLOZZI. Here’s what I was a Rich Man’s Plaything looks like:
3) NAME the 2020 film, named after a desert resort city in California, that won actress Cristin Milioti the Critics' Choice Super Award for Best Actress in a Science Fiction/Fantasy Movie and her co-star the Critics' Choice Super Award for Best Actor in a Science Fiction/Fantasy Movie.
This is PALM SPRINGS.
Palm Springs is located in the Coachella Valley, which is why the name of the giant music festival held about twenty miles away from Palm Springs (in Indio, CA) is Coachella. The three headliners for Coachella next month are Frank Ocean, Bad Bunny, and WHAT South Korean girl group consisting of members Jisoo, Jennie, Rosé, and Lisa? The group has shattered numerous records and was named Time's 2022 Entertainer of the Year. The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.2
4) “But there's really no question. It always comes down to just two choices. Get busy living or get busy dying,” is a quote written by WHAT author in Different Seasons, a collection of novellas published in 1982?
That quote is from the novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, written by STEPHEN KING. That novella about an imprisoned banker who befriends a fellow prisoner later became the acclaimed film Braveheart (1995).
No, just kidding, it’s The Shawshank Redemption (1994). Shawshank was originally a box-office bomb. Here’s how it did during its first weekend being widely released (which was not a particularly wide release):
The film’s subsequent seven Academy Award nominations helped it get more attention in its re-release, but it was the 95th-highest grossing film of 1994 and the 113th-highest grossing film of 1995 (both domestic).
5) NAME the limited series that premiered on Netflix in 2021 and is centered on a young mother who cleans houses in order to make ends meet. The show was Netflix’s fourth-most watched show that year; Margaret Qualley (who plays the main character) and Qualley’s mother (who plays Qualley’s character’s mother) were nominated for multiple awards for their performances.
This is MAID. The television show is based on the book Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay and a Mother's Will to Survive by author Stephanie Land, and the genesis of that book was a 2015 Vox article written by Land. It’s compelling stuff:
The bathroom had two sinks. Hers still had a hair dryer plugged in and hung on a hook. His side had a cup with a comb and whatever medication he took in the morning and at night — it was different every time.
Across from the sink was a wicker shelf. It had a picture of their eldest son on top of a mountain. He had a green bandana and a beard, and gave a peace sign; the photo was framed with that poem you see on bereavement cards: “Do not stand at my grave and weep. I am not there. I do not sleep.” That’s how it starts. I copied it down to give to a friend who’d just lost her dog.
Beside the photo were two little boxes, one made from a heavy clay, the other some kind of dark pewter. His wife’s picture leaned behind the clay box. I opened them once. They had ashes, and tags and statements from the funeral home. I wondered if it comforted him to have them there, behind him, while he combed his hair.
Land later did a similarly compelling interview with Vox:
Q: What is the biggest thing that you hope people who read the book and watch the show take away from them?
A: I hope they gain some empathy for people who are in poverty, especially the people who are experiencing homelessness. I think we have this idea in our heads that it’s always the person who is sleeping on a sidewalk, when that’s really not the case. There are many, many families in this country who are sleeping in their vehicles and taking their kids to school and going to work. And it’s a real tragedy.
I hope that people start to realize that and have some compassion, and take that compassion with them when they go to the voting booth. And vote some people into office who have lived experience in the margins, or have empathy for those who do.
6) WHAT distinction, in a sense also shared by this newsletter, is shared by each of the following countries and no other countries? Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina. (As a hint, the correct answer may be written as a single word.)
Each question, in some fashion, alluded to someone named Andy or Andie without directly mentioning them:
Question #1: The second quote in the question is by ANDY MURRAY, whose (shared) accomplishment is being recognized by the first quote.
Question #2: We wrote “Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein and the other Americans who advanced the pop art movement,” and a fairly large omission was the most famous American pop artist, ANDY WARHOL.
Question #3: We alluded to Cristin Milioti’s co-star in Palm Springs, ANDY SAMBERG.
Question #4: The quote “Get busy living or get busy dying” is most notable in pop culture because the character ANDY DUFRESNE says it in the film The Shawshank Redemption.
Question #5: Margaret Qualley’s mother, who plays Qualley’s character’s mother in Maid, is ANDIE MACDOWELL, notable for films such as Groundhog Day (1993) and Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994).
The theme of this newsletter was that “Andys” (or Andies) were running through each of the questions. The answer to Question #6, then, was that Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina are the seven countries that the ANDES MOUNTAINS run through. (Answers such as “Andes” or “Andean” were accepted.)
The newsletter title was “Charlie, Dennis, Frank, Mac…”, with the ellipsis telling you that something was missing. Those are the first names of four out of the five primary characters in the long-running television show It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Dee Reynolds is the missing character, so what we were missing was “and Dee,” another way of alluding to the Andy/Andie/Andes connection present throughout the newsletter.
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
The others: (i) Truffaut’s first feature film was Les Quatre Cents Coups, or The 400 Blows in English, and that film, an exemplar of the French New Wave, is often considered to be one of the greatest films ever made; (ii) Ted Williams was the last MLB hitter to have a .400+ batting average in a qualifying number of at-bats, and (iii) a centurial year (like 1400, or 1900) is a leap year if it is divisible by 400 (so 2000 was a leap year, and 2400 will be as well).
The South Korean girl group headlining Coachella in a few weeks is BLACKPINK. Long-time readers of Yu Oughta Know, the current-events trivia Substack we sometimes promote here, will have heard of BLACKPINK more than once.