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) The International Organization for Standardization designates two-letter national codes pursuant to its 3166-1 standard; for example, the United States is “US” and Italy is “IT.” WHAT is the only ISO 3166-1 two-letter code that is also a possessive adjective in English? The relevant country is home to Merdeka 118, one of the tallest buildings in the world.
2) Each of the following film titles has WHAT word in common? (i) a 2005 film that is a fictionalized portrayal of the twelfth-century life of Balian of Ibelin, (ii) a 2008 film that won the Razzie Award for Worst Prequel, Remake, Rip-off or Sequel, (iii) a 2012 film nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, and (iv) a 2018 film that grossed well over a billion dollars worldwide.
3) In 1976, Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Haken proved a certain theorem in mathematics that states that no more than HOW MANY colors are required to color the regions of any map so that no two adjacent regions have the same color?
4) The last sentence of a 1850 novel, in describing a tombstone, begins “[i]t bore a device, a herald’s wording of which might serve for a motto and brief description of our now concluded legend” and then states that motto: “On a field, sable, the letter [BLANK], gules.” WHAT letter fills in the blank?
5) In addition to Kevin Durant’s stable of accomplishments in the National Basketball Association, he happens to be the only two-time champion of WHAT short-lived competition sporadically held as part of the league’s All-Star festivities? Durant’s second win, appropriately enough, was hosted by the Dallas Mavericks.
6) WHAT play is associated most closely with this newsletter’s theme?
Trivia Newsletter CXXXII Recap
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?
This is CARNIVAL, which is held around the world, but perhaps most notably is celebrated in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil.
A typical Jeopardy! construction that wants you to say “Carnival” is this (category: “Jolly Holiday”):
This pre-Lenten festival of merry making typically ends with Shrove Tuesday or Mardi Gras
One of the tropes on the addictive website TV Tropes, which categorizes tropes that commonly appear in and out of fiction, is “It’s Always Mardi Gras in New Orleans.” This refers to the phenomenon in writing where, if the characters show up in New Orleans for any reason, it is improbably likely that a Mardi Gras parade will be occurring that day, and the same holds for Carnival in Rio. Also referenced on that TV Tropes page is WHAT street parade held between Boxing Day and New Year’s Day throughout the English-speaking Caribbean world, but particularly in the Bahamas? The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
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?
The capitals in question are Kingston, the capital of Jamaica, and KINGSTOWN, the capital of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. “St. Vincent and the Grenadines is well known for a wide variety of mouth-watering dishes,” says the offputtingly chipper text of Argyle International Airport’s website. “If you are looking to excite your taste buds, then look no further!” it tells you, without telling you anything else about the wide variety of mouth-watering dishes available.
The largest island in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines is, well, Saint Vincent. The second-largest island is an island called Bequia, as indicated by my poorly drawn red arrow in the image below. The island measures some seven square miles (for context, O’Hare International Airport in Chicago is about eleven square miles) and is home to about 5,000 people.
In 1774, Bequia became home to James Hamilton, the father of the American founding father Alexander Hamilton. The sole extant letter we have a copy of between James and Alexander Hamilton is a letter from James in 1793 stating that he hoped to soon visit Alexander. All indications are that this never happened.
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.
The song is “NORWEGIAN WOOD (THIS BIRD HAS FLOWN)” and the novel is Norwegian Wood. The song contains the first example of a sitar, the Indian string instrument, being played on a Western rock recording. In 2003, Rolling Stone ranked “Norwegian Wood” #83 on its list of the 500 greatest songs of all time:
This wry, wistful folk ballad was among the first of the Beatles' revolutionary studio experiments. The inclusion of the sitar, an instrument that George Harrison had recently discovered, was groundbreaking. The song, written by Lennon, is the tale of a late-night tryst — although it's electric with sexual possibility, the bemused cad ends up sleeping in the bathtub (and maybe takes his revenge by burning the place down the next morning). Lennon said that the lyrics disguised an actual affair: “I was very careful and paranoid because I didn't want my wife, Cyn, to know that there was something going on.”
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?
The film is THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG.
Disney carefully defines who is, and is who not, a “Disney Princess.” Here is the officially designated list of Disney Princesses, ranked based upon the release order of the relevant films:
Snow White – Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
Cinderella – Cinderella (1950)
Aurora – Sleeping Beauty (1959)
Ariel – The Little Mermaid (1989)
Belle – Beauty and the Beast (1991)
Jasmine – Aladdin (1992)
Pocahontas – Pocahontas (1995)
Mulan – Mulan (1998)
Tiana – The Princess and the Frog (2009)
Rapunzel – Tangled (2010)
Merida – Brave (2012)
Moana – Moana (2016)
Objections are easy to imagine (“hey, they aren’t all princesses” or “wait, is Brave even a ‘Disney film’?” or “what about Anna or Elsa from Frozen?”), but are no match for the Disney merchandising empire. For a time, Esmerelda (The Hunchback of Notre Dame) and Tinker Bell (Peter Pan) were included as Disney Princesses, but were later removed for reasons that are less than clear to me.
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.
This is the Chevrolet CELEBRITY. I’ve never heard of it myself, so we tried to spot you “famous” and “C”—and hey, it was the best-selling car in 1986, right?
They just don’t make them like this anymore:
Look, if you’re not convinced, you can just watch this video that is over 40 years old that advertises the Chevy Celebrity by putting it in front of mansions while dryly talking about it. Truly, they do not make videos like this anymore, either.
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.)
Each of the answers refers to a major CRUISE LINE. Throughout the newsletter, we included various movie quotes by Tom Cruise—or, CRUISE LINES—to reinforce the theme. (We also accepted variations thereon that got close enough.) We leaned heavily on Jerry Maguire because, hey, Tom Cruise doesn’t actually have that many quotable film lines:
Question #1: Carnival, referring to Carnival Cruise Line (“There is no substitute” referring to Cruise’s line in Risky Business: “Porsche. There is no substitute.”)
Question #2: Allusions to “royal” capitals in the Caribbean pointing to the Royal Caribbean Group (“Help me help you” referring to Cruise’s line in Jerry Maguire: “Help me help you.”)
Question #3: “Norwegian Wood,” referring to Norwegian Cruise Line (“You just gotta listen” referring to Cruise’s line in Tropic Thunder: “The universe is talking to us right now. You just gotta listen.”)
Question #4: The Princess and the Frog, referring to Princess Cruises (“take a chance to turn it all around” referring to Cruise’s line in Vanilla Sky: “Every passing minute is another chance to turn it all around.”)
Question #5: Celebrity, referring to Celebrity Cruises (“showed Chevy the money” referring to Cruise’s line in Jerry Maguire: “Show me the money!”)
Question #6: “You complete me” referring to the same line from Jerry Maguire)
Newsletter Title: “Mission Accomplished” was meant to do three things—(i) get you thinking about the Mission: Impossible films, (ii) quote Tom Cruise again, in a scene for which another character makes fun of his character immediately afterwards, and (iii) try to nudge you towards the sea and large ships by trying to remind you of what is probably the most culturally relevant meaning of “Mission Accomplished” these days:
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
The annual festival in (among other places) the Bahamas is JUNKANOO.