As a prelude for today’s newsletter: One of our staff members at the Trivia Factoryial1 accidentally flipped the “sports” lever on the question assembly line! Our first draft thus had five recent sports questions (“Oops! All Sports!”):
In recognition of the fact that sports is sometimes an especially polarizing trivia category, though, we then created a second set of sports-free questions in this newsletter (“Spoilsports”). You can either play the first set (Questions 1a through 6a) or the second set (Questions 1b through 6b). Just think about whether you’re more likely to succeed with all sports, or no sports, and scroll down accordingly.
(Of course, you can also just play both—what are we gonna do about it? A correct answer for either, or both, of Question #6a and #6b will count for a maximum of one correct entry on the Question #6 leaderboard.)
Below are two sets of 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.
“OOPS! ALL SPORTS!” EDITION:
1a) The 149th Kentucky Derby was run this past Saturday. NAME the horse, a relative longshot with 16-to-1 odds, that spellbound viewers as it won the Derby with a time of 2:01.57.
2a) Last week, a college baseball gambling scandal involving bets placed in Cincinnati led to the firing of Brad Bohannon, the coach of WHAT university’s team? The same university is where the #1 pick in the 2023 National Football League draft attended college.
3a) NAME the basketball player who last week won the NBA Most Valuable Player Award for the 2022-23 season. He joins a list of impressive players who won the award exactly one time, including James Harden, Russell Westbrook, Kevin Durant, Kobe Bryant, and Dirk Nowitzki.
4a) New details recently emerged regarding changes in the playoff structure for college football (specifically, for the NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision), now that decisionmakers for the major bowl games (sometimes called the “New Year’s Six”) have reached agreement. Of those six bowl games, which one, which has been played since January 1, 1935, is played in the southernmost location?
5a) A certain annual tournament between two specific universities in England is sometimes called Europe’s largest inter-university sports tournament. On April 30, 2023, Lancaster University defeated WHAT foe in this tournament after competing in at least four dozen events, with a score of 200 to 126?
6a) Each of the italicized phrases in Questions #1a through #5a alludes, at least in part, to WHAT single word?
“SPOILSPORTS” EDITION:
1b) On September 21, 2020, the CN Tower in Toronto was lit up in gold lights in order to celebrate WHAT television show, as its final season had just swept all seven of the Primetime Emmy Awards for comedies, including awards for all four of its primary actors and actresses for playing members of the same family?
2b) NAME the funk rock band, formed in 1966, that is sometimes recognized as the first major American rock group to have a racially integrated and male and female lineup. The band’s members included trumpeter Cynthia Robinson, drummer Greg Errico, saxophonist Jerry Martini, bassist Larry Graham, and the group’s founder together with his brother and sister.
3b) NAME the city in Indiana, the seat of Vigo County, that derives its name from a French phrase meaning “highland,” as it was named by French-Canadian explorers describing its location above the Wabash River. The city is home to a university that has been ranked #1 among engineering colleges that do not offer a doctorate degree by U.S. News & World Report for 24 consecutive years.
4b) Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Cori Bush, Jamaal Bowman, and Greg Casar are the five current U.S. representatives who are members of WHAT political organization founded in 1982, the current national director of which is Maria Svart? Following Chicago’s 2019 aldermanic elections, six of Chicago’s fifty City Council seats were held by members of this organization.
5b) Iva Ikuko Toguri D'Aquino, a Japanese-American disc jockey born in 1916, was convicted of WHAT crime in 1949 and served six years in prison before being later pardoned by President Gerald Ford?
6b) Each of the italicized phrases in Questions #1b through #5b alludes, at least in part, to WHAT single word?
Trivia Newsletter CXXXVIII Recap
1) Grant Park, located in Portland, Oregon, is home to a sculpture garden featuring statues of characters named Henry, Ribsy, and Ramona. WHAT author is that sculpture garden named in honor of?
The statues are in honor of the characters Henry Huggins, his dog Ribsy, and Ramona Quimby, and so the author is BEVERLY CLEARY, who passed away in 2021 at the age of 104:
The children’s books she read at school disappointed, she recalled in an article for The Horn Book in 1982. The protagonists tended to be aristocratic English children who had nannies and pony carts, or poor children whose problems disappeared when a long-lost rich relative turned up in the last chapter.
“I wanted to read funny stories about the sort of children I knew,” she wrote, “and I decided that someday when I grew up I would write them.”
My own memory of the Ramona books is that they dealt with the sort of problems that a “normal” American family might actually have—or, at least, a child’s awareness of them:
Ramona had heard a lot of uninteresting grown-up talk about borrowing money from a bank to pay for it, but nothing had ever come of it. All she understood was that her father worked at something that sounded boring in an office downtown, and there was never quite enough money in the Quimby family. They were certainly not poor, but her parents worried a lot about taxes and college educations.
In Cleary’s works, WHAT IS THE NAME of Ramona Quimby’s older sister? We’ll take either her given name or the nickname that she is known by in the books. The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.2
2) “But you will remember me / Remember me for [a plural term referring to a score of 100 or more runs in a single innings by a batsman in cricket]” wouldn’t be a very good song lyric, so instead of the bracketed phrase, Fall Out Boy used WHAT word in the lyrics of their same-named song in 2014 that was certified quadruple platinum?
The word, and the title of the song, are CENTURIES.
Get ahead of enterprising trivia writers in 2024 by knowing that Fall Out Boy’s fourth studio album (from 2008) was named Folie à Deux, which is the same as the subtitle of the next Joker film that is slated to come out in late 2024. (The National Institutes for Health define folie à deux as “an identical or similar mental disorder affecting two or more individuals, usually the members of a close family,” which is where these works took the term from.)
3) “Terribly Gigantic Monsters Killed [One] Million Men Napping Peacefully” is a mnemonic device sometimes recommended to help studiers memorize the order of a certain set of prefixes. WHAT prefix does “Peacefully” stand for in the device?
These are metric prefixes: tera-, giga-, mega-, kilo-, milli-, micro-, nano-, and then PICO-. (The “one” was in brackets because there is no prefix there—for example, one thousand meters is a kilometer, and a thousandth of a meter is a millimeter, but there’s no prefix needed to describe a meter.) A picometer is a unit of measurement that has virtually no application outside of particle physics and the such; for example, a helium atom has a diameter of about 62 picometers.
We forgot to do a question in the recap last time, so here’s a second one: One hundred picometers give you WHAT METRIC UNIT OF LENGTH, named after a Swedish physicist? The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.3
4) San Giacomo di Rialto, a church that displays a large and mostly inaccurate clock, is located in the sestiere of San Polo in WHAT city? According to tradition, San Giacomo is the city’s oldest church, supposedly consecrated in the year 421.
This church is in VENICE. This question had a few hints, but the one you’ll want to remember for trivia purposes is the Rialto, the oldest of the four bridges spanning the Grand Canal in Venice. Turning to a couple of Jeopardy! questions:
BRIDGE, $800: In “The Merchant of Venice”, Solanio asks, “Now, what news on” this bridge & shopping area
WORLD CITIES, $1200: If you're into bridges, this city has more than 400 of 'em, including the Rialto that crosses the Grand Canal
5) The clause “This act shall continue and be in force until the third day of March, one thousand eight hundred and one, and no longer” in the Alien and Sedition Acts enacted in 1798 in the United States is an example of WHAT type of legal provision that takes its name after a natural phenomenon?
This provision would generally be known as a SUNSET PROVISION.
Here’s more on the Alien and Sedition Acts:
In 1798, the United States stood on the brink of war with France. The Federalist Party, which advocated for a strong central government, believed that Democratic-Republican criticism of Federalist policies was disloyal and feared that "aliens," or non-citizens, living in the United States would sympathize with the French during a war.
As a result, a Federalist-controlled Congress passed four laws, known collectively as the Alien and Sedition Acts. These laws raised the residency requirements for citizenship from 5 to 14 years, authorized the president to deport "aliens," and permitted their arrest, imprisonment, and deportation during wartime. The Sedition Act made it a crime for American citizens to "print, utter, or publish...any false, scandalous, and malicious writing" about the government.
The laws were directed against Democratic-Republicans, the party typically favored by new citizens. The only journalists prosecuted under the Sedition Act were editors of Democratic-Republican newspapers.
Why did the Alien and Sedition Acts include (in part) a sunset provision for March 3, 1801? March 4, 1801 was when the next administration was taking over, and so the most likely explanation was that the folks who passed the law didn’t want it to be used against them by the new administration.
6) WHAT unusual distinction, also alluded to in this newsletter, is held by each of the following songs (and others)? “All I Wanna Do” by Sheryl Crow; “Cowboy” by Kid Rock; “Cracked Actor” by David Bowie; “Electrolite” by R.E.M.; “Free Fallin’” by Tom Petty; “Girls, Girls, Girls” by Mötley Crüe; “I Wish” by Skee-Lo; “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X.
Each of these songs explicitly mentions a STREET IN LOS ANGELES—for example, “All I Wanna Do” has in its chorus “All I wanna do is have some fun /
Until the sun comes up over Santa Monica Boulevard,” and “Old Town Road” has the line “Baby's got a habit: diamond rings and Fendi sports bras / Ridin' down Rodeo in my Maserati sports car,” referring to Rodeo Drive.
The answers to the newsletter referred to major LA streets; respectively, we pointed to Beverly Boulevard, Century Boulevard, Pico Boulevard, Venice Boulevard, and Sunset Boulevard. (It is sheer coincidence that these are all east-west streets.)
The newsletter title (“It'll Be Just Like in the Movies”), besides trying to prime you to think of Hollywood and Los Angeles generally, is a line from David Lynch’s 2001 film Mulholland Drive as another small hint towards the theme. That full line: “Come on, it’ll be just like in the movies! Pretending to be somebody else.”
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
You can pronounce the “Factoryial” in “Trivia Factoryial” like you’re saying “factory” but then suddenly started saying “Real Madrid” at the end.
In Beverly Cleary’s works, Ramona Quimby’s older sister is BEATRICE QUIMBY, and is generally known as “Beezus,” her family nickname because Ramona cannot easily pronounce “Beatrice.” In the 2010 film Ramona and Beezus, Beezus is played by Selena Gomez.
One hundred picometers is an ANGSTROM, named after Anders Jonas Ångström, who was an important figure in the history of spectroscopy. He at one point created a chart that expressed the wavelength of electromagnetic radiation in the electromagnetic spectrum in multiples of one ten-millionth of a millimeter, which is what an angstrom is.