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) There is no substitute for the Sambadrome Marquês de Sapucaí, which was designed by architect Oscar Niemeyer. A year-round multipurpose performance venue, it is most notably used in connection with WHAT annual event that most recently occurred in February 2023?
2) Help me help you with this one: Take the name of a “royal” world capital city where the Bob Marley Museum is located. Add a letter to that city, and now you have WHAT other world capital city, located about a thousand miles away and serviced by nearby Argyle International Airport?
3) You just gotta listen to the lyric “I once had a girl, or should I say, she once had me,” which begins WHAT song by the Beatles? The title of the song, which Paul McCartney later said sarcastically refers to cheap pine wall paneling, was used for the title of a 1987 novel by Haruki Murakami.
4) In January 2023, Splash Mountain, the log flume ride in Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom associated with the 1946 film Song of the South, was closed down; Disney will take a chance to turn it all around with Tiana's Bayou Adventure, a ride that will be based on WHAT 2009 film?
5) According to the magazine Car and Driver, consumers showed Chevy the money when the Chevrolet Cavalier was the best-selling U.S. car model in each of 1984 and 1985. In 1986, though the Cavalier was overtaken by WHAT “famous” Chevrolet mid-size model that also starts with a “C”? This reportedly marked the final time a vehicle made by Chevrolet (or any General Motors brand) was the best-selling car in the United States.
6) You complete me by knowing that the theme of this newsletter is WHAT? (Other formulations may be accepted, but an ideal answer will be a two-word phrase.)
Trivia Newsletter CXXXI Recap
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?
This is TURKEY—or, as they’ve asked the international community to write, the Republic of Türkiye (pronounced tur-KEE-yeh). The State Department wants you to know that “[t]he official conventional long-form and short-form names remain ‘Republic of Turkey’ and ‘Turkey’, respectively. ‘Republic of Türkiye’ should be used in formal and diplomatic contexts. The conventional names may be used in place of or alongside ‘Türkiye’ in appropriate instances, including U.S. government cartographic products, as it is more widely understood by the American public.”
Last month, the deadliest natural disaster in Türkiye’s modern history occurred when a series of earthquakes struck southern and central Türkiye. The full extent of the damage may not yet be known, but as of this writing, more than 57,000 deaths have been confirmed, and the United Nations estimates that over 1.5 million people have been left homeless. There are many accounts online describing and depicting the horrors left behind by the earthquake, including this series of photographs that recently ran in the New York Times.
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?
The phrase here was HUNGER STRIKE. I generally distrust people who have a singular favorite song, as I think that a sensible person’s tastes should change with regularity. However, were I forced to select my five favorite songs, “Hunger Strike” would at nearly all times rank among those five. It’s really great.
You might be wondering whether Constance Bulwer-Lytton is related to Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who wrote the 1830 novel Paul Clifford, which is the novel from which the phrase “it was a dark and stormy night” originated. Recall that we wrote about him in the recap for Trivia Newsletter CIII, and for those of you who partake, there was a LearnedLeague question about him days later. The answer is yes—Constance was Edward’s granddaughter. The family was influential in British politics; Constance was the daughter of a viceroy and the sister of a member of the House of Lords. To avoid special treatment, however, she went by the name Jane Warton while being imprisoned:
Once her secret was discovered, the harsh treatment of Constance-as-Jane became a national scandal. ‘Lady Constance Lytton’s Latest Freak’ was one of the newspaper headlines. Christabel Pankhurst pronounced it a signal victory over the government. Constance’s brother Victor was moved by her bravery and pressed home her cause in the Times and with his friend Winston Churchill, who was now home secretary. The differing treatment of the two women was a clear case of double standards, Victor said, and he called for a public inquiry to ensure that future ‘Jane Wartons’ were treated more fairly. The inquiry never happened, but Churchill did introduce Rule 243a, under which WSPU members would enjoy more lenient treatment in prison, so long as they were not guilty of any violent crimes.
Read more about Bulwer-Lytton’s role in the suffragette movement in this article, which is where the above excerpt came from (warning: depictions of self-harm and torture).
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.
The acronym in question is “PIN,” as in a personal identification number used at an ATM. Atalla is also a key figure in the history of transistors.
The article referenced in the question points out that publicizing a safe PIN may lead to undesirable outcomes:
Unfortunately, because you (and other readers) now know the safest pin out there, you might want to consider something else. Reader’s Digest turned to cybersecurity analyst Jamie Cambell, PhD, and Director of Content at Security Baron, Gabe Turner, for their advice. Here are some savvy suggestions:
Pick obscure dates like when you had your first kiss or the time you were born.
Go with a birthday of a close friend, the date of your favorite holiday, or the current time.
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?
This is SPARE, the memoir by Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex.
I’m sure Spare is just great, but every quote I read from it is very funny:
Just as Pa instructed, I ran to the water’s edge, sang to [the seals]. Serenaded them. Arooo. No answer.
Meg joined me, and sang to them, and now of course they sang back. She really is magic, I thought. Even the seals know it.
And this one may be the most British thing I’ve ever read:
I rubbed her back and eventually put her to bed. Weak, near tears, she said she’d imagined a very different end to Date Four.
'"Stop," I said. Taking care of each other? That’s the point. That’s love, I thought, though I managed to keep the words inside.
Writing “the most British thing I’ve ever read” reminded me of one of my favorite blog posts of all time: “Things No One Says After Being Introduced On British Quiz Shows,” a quick read by the inimitable Daniel Lavery:
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.
This is 300. Read more about Iran’s stance on 300 here.
Stelios, one of the Spartan soldiers in the film, was played by WHAT ACTOR, making his film debut? He had previously made television appearances in programs such as Band of Brothers, and he has been nominated for two Academy Awards. 300 is the second-highest grossing film (domestic) he’s appeared in; the highest-grossing film (domestic) he’s appeared in is X-Men: Days of Future Past. The answer is at the end of this newsletter.1
(This parenthetical is to acknowledge that calling 300 a “2006 film” is technically correct—it debuted at a film festival in December 2006—but possibly unhelpful, as it was conventionally released in North America in March 2007. I still am unsure whether adding release years is more helpful or hurtful in cases like this one.)
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).
Each of these films has a scene IN A BOWLING ALLEY/WHERE PEOPLE ARE BOWLING—we weren’t strict here as long as the idea of bowling was incorporated into your answer. Each of the answers to the questions was a bowling term:
Question #1: Turkey (referring to the act of throwing three strikes in a row)
Question #2: Hunger strike (referring to a strike)
Question #3: PIN (referring to bowling pins)
Question #4: Spare (referring to picking up a spare)
Question #5: 300 (referring to a perfect score in a game of bowling)
Newsletter Title: “Staying in Your Lane,” generally good advice for a bowler, is meant to refer to a bowling lane.
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
The actor referenced above who made his film debut in 300 is MICHAEL FASSBENDER.