A quick announcement: Over the next few months, the Trivia Factorial staff (i.e., still just the dogs and I) expects that real life will be less compatible with running a semiweekly trivia newsletter than it usually is. We’d like to keep the newsletter going with some regularity; after all, perhaps the true hidden theme is the friends we made along the way. To that end, this is our first guest-hosted newsletter, and I hope and expect we’ll have more this summer. If you’re interested in submitting a guest newsletter to be played by our subscribers, let me know—I’d love to hear from you.
Today’s questions are brought to you by Patrick Iber. You are in good hands: Patrick was the lead editor of the Hidden Connections 2 MiniLeague on LearnedLeague earlier this year, which was played by nearly five thousand people. Patrick has a knack for this sort of thing, as I think you’ll see.
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 temperance activist born Caroline Amelia Moore in 1846 is remembered by her nickname and the unusual last name of her second husband, which name she adopted. At the height of her campaign, saloons would post signs saying “All [lastname]s are welcome except [firstname].” Give her first and last name.
2) “Power is given only to him who dares to stoop and take it...one must have the courage to dare,” is spoken by WHAT character, a creation of novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky who will eventually regret his reasoning?
3) Bemidji, Minnesota is home to two statues of characters from local folk tales. One debuted in 1937 and is eighteen feet tall. The companion piece was added two years later, is ten feet tall, and primarily uses a single color of paint. WHAT is the name of the taller figure?
4) Jack Nicholson reportedly does not like cheese sandwiches. According to the website IMDb, one notoriously difficult director fed Nicholson only cheese sandwiches for two weeks to put him in a foul mood and elicit the right performance for a certain film. WHAT is the name of the character Nicholson was playing in that film?
5) Fall River Legend, an 1948 ballet by Agnes de Mille, tells the story of WHAT real-life person, but in doing so alters the outcome of that person’s trial?
6) NAME the member of the Fellowship of the Ring who best fits the theme of today’s newsletter.
Trivia Newsletter CXXXIII Recap
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.
This is MY, for Malaysia.
Savvy readers might notice that I wrote “one of the tallest buildings in the world” instead of something more specific, such as “the second-tallest building in the world.” This is because debates about such “tallest building” lists can be contentious and exhausting. Take xkcd’s word for it:
This NPR piece from 2013 about whether One World Trade Center is the tallest building in the United States is fantastic to me because of the quotes they got from New Yorkers. Somehow, these are apparently actual humans they interviewed, and not stereotypes they made up:
The issue has been hanging over the architecture world since the spring, when construction crews hoisted a 400-foot metal mast into place at the top of One World Trade Center. As far as New Yorkers are concerned, it's now the tallest skyscraper in the hemisphere.
“It's a fact. It's taller,” says Jerry Romano of New Jersey. “It doesn't matter to me. I'm just stating facts.”
Veronica Smalls of Harlem agrees. “It has to be the tallest,” she says.
“Not one of the tallest,” interrupts her friend Tyreek Jones of Brooklyn, “'cause New York City needs to be known as No. 1.”
“Hey!” interjected Raymond Ferris of Staten Island. “I’m walkin’ here!”
Okay, I made up the last quote.
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.
These films were Kingdom of Heaven, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Moonrise Kingdom, and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, and so our answer was KINGDOM.
With the release of last year’s Jurassic World Dominion, there are now six mainline Jurassic films. In efforts to capture the magic of Jurassic Park (1993), the films have repeatedly brought back main characters—Sam Neill and Laura Dern have appeared in three of the six films, for example, and Jeff Goldblum has appeared in five (albeit in just a photograph in Jurassic World). Something that Wayne Knight, Samuel L. Jackson, Julianne Moore, Vince Vaughn, William H. Macy, Judy Greer, James Cromwell, and Mamoudou Athie (and others) have in common is appearing in exactly one Jurassic film.
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?
This question contained an approximation of the FOUR color theorem.
August De Morgan, a nineteenth-century mathematician, wrote the following in a letter in 1852, the first known written description of the problem:
A student of mine asked me today to give him a reason for a fact which I did not know was a fact — and do not yet. He says that if a figure be anyhow divided and the compartments differently coloured so that figures with any portion of common boundary line are differently coloured — four colours may be wanted, but not more — the following is the case in which four colours are wanted. Query cannot a necessity for five or more be invented. …… If you retort with some very simple case which makes me out a stupid animal, I think I must do as the Sphynx did….
De Morgan’s reference at the end of that excerpt is to the riddle of the Sphinx, typically worded as something like “What has four legs in the morning, two at noon, and three in the evening?” In the story of Oedipus from Greek myth, Oedipus solves the riddle by responding “Man—who crawls on all fours as a baby, then walks on two feet as an adult, and then uses a walking stick in old age.” This led the Sphinx to throw herself to her death. Honestly, I think De Morgan was being a little dramatic with his simile!
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?
The excerpt in the question is from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, and so the letter is “A”. What does that motto mean? Don’t ask literary experts, who don’t even agree whether the motto is describing a physical inscription on the tombstone.
The popular tradition is that the inspiration for Hester Prynne, the main character of The Scarlet Letter, was a woman named Elizabeth Pain, a settler in colonial Boston. You can read more about Pain here. This is Pain’s tombstone:
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.
The game is H-O-R-S-E. Dallas is appropriate as a host because their logo depicts a horse and their mascot is a horse. “Stable” was a clue as well.
I read somewhere that, one year, the letters of H-O-R-S-E were going to be replaced to honor the event’s sponsor, and so the players would play G-E-I-C-O instead. I have not been able to find proof that this actually happened, but I did find this footage of the 2009 NBA All-Star Game, apparently filmed by Abraham Zapruder.
6) WHAT play is associated most closely with this newsletter’s theme?
The answers to this newsletter spelled out the phrase “My kingdom four a horse,” meant to allude to the quote “My kingdom for a horse!” from Shakespeare’s RICHARD III. Here’s a clip of Ian McKellen saying that line from Richard III (1995) that is very funny to me. In the Civilization series of video games, when a player researches a new technology, the player will sometimes be provided a quote from history to contextualize that research. It was this quote they used to reinforce the importance of horseback riding:
Our newsletter title, Parking Plantagenet, referred to the royal house of Plantagenet, which held the English throne for over 300 years; its reign ended with Richard’s death. We were going for a double meaning—the events described in Richard III were what parked (i.e., ended) Plantagenet, and also Richard’s body was recovered ten years ago under a parking lot.
Let’s hand it off to Shakespeare and that scene at the Battle of Bosworth Field, immediately before Richard’s death:
RICHARD
A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!
CATESBY
Withdraw, my lord. I’ll help you to a horse.
RICHARD
Slave, I have set my life upon a cast,
And I will stand the hazard of the die.
I think there be six [BLANK]s in the field;
Five have I slain today instead of him.
A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!
WHAT word, also the name of a U.S. state capital, fills in the blank in the excerpt above? The answer’s at the end of this newsletter, which you are almost at!1
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
The missing word from the excerpt of Richard III is “RICHMOND,” referring to the character Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond. Richard was the last English monarch to die in battle, as he was slain by Henry Tudor, who took power as Henry VII.