Below are six a bunch of 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.
WARNING: I recommend reading the last question first.
1) “The Munsters,” “Rehearsal,” “Connor’s Wedding,” “Honeymoon States,” and “Kill List” are titles of episodes of WHAT television show that have aired for the first time this year?
2) From 1999 to 2008, the U.S. Mint released commemorative quarters honoring each of the fifty U.S. states. Multiple presidents (or depictions thereof) are on certain of the quarters; for example, Mount Rushmore is depicted on South Dakota’s quarter. NAME the two presidents, in perhaps a technical sense, depicted on New Jersey’s quarter.
3) The Loud House, an animated television show that debuted in 2016 and airs on Nickelodeon, has been nominated for five GLAAD Media Awards and six Daytime Emmy Awards. The show centers on the alliteratively named middle child (and only boy) amongst the titular family’s eleven children, whose first name is WHAT?
4) Catherine Keener plays the novelist Harper Lee in a certain 2005 film. Other characters in the film include convicted murderers Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, investigator Alvin Dewey, and novelist Jack Dunphy. What is the FIRST NAME of the titular character of the film?
5) Give the LAST NAME of the environmental lawyer and author, accused by many of promoting vaccine misinformation, who on April 5th filed paperwork to run as a Democrat in the 2024 U.S. presidential election.
6) The song “Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be)” serves an important part in the plot of the 1956 Alfred Hitchcock film The Man Who Knew Too Much; snippets of the song are also sung in the films Please Don’t Eat the Daisies (1960) and The Glass Bottom Boat (1966). What is the LAST NAME of the actress and singer who sung the song in each instance, as well as in the opening credits of a sitcom she starred in that aired from 1968 to 1973?
7) Julia Louis-Dreyfus (12) and Mary Tyler Moore (10) have been nominated the most times and second-most times, respectively, for Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series. What is the LAST NAME of the actress and comedian who has nine such nominations, primarily for Maude and The Golden Girls (and not at all for the made-for-TV Star Wars Holiday Special)?
8) “The scene they went to witness would produce one of the most famous screen images in history -- [BLANK], in simple summer white, standing on a subway grating, cooling herself with the wind from a train below. But what sent [BLANK] into a fury was the scene around the scene.” What are the LAST NAMES of both individuals, a married couple, that are redacted from this quote describing a 1954 event?
9) The 2013 biopic Behind the Candelabra, starring Michael Douglas, concerns the last years of the life of WHAT person, who passed away in 1987, and that person’s relationship with Scott Thorson (played in the biopic by Matt Damon)?
10) What is the LAST NAME of the Italian conductor born in 1867 who was at times the music director of La Scala in Milan and the New York Philharmonic? Most famously to Americans, perhaps, he was the music director of the NBC Symphony Orchestra from 1937 to 1954. Among his many accomplishments, he conducted the world premiere of Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings.
11) What is the LAST NAME of the wide receiver, now a Hall of Famer, who played for the Indianapolis Colts from 1996 to 2008 and is in the top-five in NFL history in receptions and receiving touchdowns? His son, who currently plays for the Ohio State University, is widely considered to be one of the top receivers in college football as of today.
12) “No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were.” This quotation, first made publicly available on June 26, 2015, has since been incorporated into many wedding ceremonies. What is the LAST NAME of the quote’s author?
13) Oh no! We misprint this newsletter! This newsletter is composed in part with questions that point to a false theme that should be ignored! Even worse, there may be similarities between some of the false-theme answers and some of the true-theme answers.
Look, there’s no use trying to determine who ignited this disaster. The true-theme questions, whichever they are, should lead you to three pairs of certain individuals. Each of those pairs has something in common with the other pairs. These three pairs happen to be half of the total number of such pairs that have this particular quality. NAME one of the missing pairs. (Your answer should be two people, and there are three possible pairs that will be marked as correct answers.)
[As a warning: Any answer to this question that mentions this newsletter’s false theme will not receive credit, even if the correct answer is also mentioned.]
Trivia Newsletter CXXXIV Recap
Thanks again to Patrick Iber for writing this set of questions!
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.
This is CARRIE NATION. Nation, who lived from 1846 to 1911, is most famous to the world as a member of the temperance movement opposing the consumption of alcohol. More specifically, she is most famous to the world for, on dozens of occasions, taking a hatchet and smashing bar fixtures and bottles of alcohol. This question pointed towards the slogan that become popular in refutation of her: “All Nations Welcome Except Carrie.”
The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation, Nation’s autobiography that is freely available online, provides this defense:
Persons have often remarked, "How did you feel, when you went in these places?" Imagine a burning house, a frantic mother, for her heart treasures, her babes, are in that building. She hears their cries, she sees their little arms, waving behind the closed window, amid the smoke that soon will be a flame. She seizes an axe or hatchet near at hand, with which she breaks open door or window to let her darlings escape. Is there a mother in all the land that would not act thus? The mighty ocean, in its anger is lashing a frail vessel, storm tossed, the captain orders the cannon to boom! boom! boom! arousing and calling for help to save the crew. We amputate the diseased limb with a knife, we pull the aching tooth with an instrument of steel. Why? In order to save. Just so, the people are asleep, while our precious ones are in danger of being engulfed in ruin. The smashing is a danger signal, and I kept it up, to prevent the people from relaxing into indifference, just as a frantic, living mother would think only of the salvation of those she loved.
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?
This is RODION RASKOLNIKOV, the protagonist of Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment.
Here’s more on that sentiment from Raskolnikov, pre-regret:
I simply hinted that an ‘extraordinary’ man has the right... that is not an official right, but an inner right to decide in his own conscience to overstep... certain obstacles, and only in case it is essential for the practical fulfilment of his idea (sometimes, perhaps, of benefit to the whole of humanity).
…
I maintain that if the discoveries of Kepler and Newton could not have been made known except by sacrificing the lives of one, a dozen, a hundred, or more men, Newton would have had the right, would indeed have been in duty-bound... to eliminate the dozen or the hundred men for the sake of making his discoveries known to the whole of humanity. But it does not follow from that that Newton had a right to murder people right and left and to steal every day in the market. Then, I remember, I maintain in my article that all... well, legislators and leaders of men, such as Lycurgus, Solon, Mahomet, Napoleon, and so on, were all without exception criminals, from the very fact that, making a new law, they transgressed the ancient one, handed down from their ancestors and held sacred by the people, and they did not stop short at bloodshed either, if that bloodshed—often of innocent persons fighting bravely in defence of ancient law—were of use to their cause. It’s remarkable, in fact, that the majority, indeed, of these benefactors and leaders of humanity were guilty of terrible carnage. In short, I maintain that all great men or even men a little out of the common, that is to say capable of giving some new word, must from their very nature be criminals—more or less, of course.
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?
These figures are Babe, the blue ox, and PAUL BUNYAN.
Quick, imagine what you think the figures look like. We’ve already told you that they’re ten and eighteen feet tall and were made in the 1930s.
Have you imagined the figures?
No, actually do it, before you look at the image below.
Okay, did you imagine this?
This October, you can run the Bemidji Blue Ox Marathon, where you’ll run right past these statues a few times (they are very close to the circle that says “25” on the below map):
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?
This is JACK TORRANCE, the antagonist of the Stephen King novel The Shining that was adapted into the same-named 1980 film by Stanley Kubrick.
Here’s Stephen King talking about the adaptation, which deviates from the plot of the novel in several ways:
King has never been shy about his preference for the TV version of “The Shining” over Stanley Kubrick’s acclaimed 1980 movie adaptation of the 1977 novel, which follows an alcoholic teacher and playwright as he’s driven to madness and violence by a remote haunted hotel in the Colorado Rockies.
“Let’s put it this way,” King said. “I dislike the film. I always have. I admire the film, and I admire Kubrick as a director, which sometimes gets lost in the mix when people who absolutely love that film take me to task. I love Kubrick as a filmmaker, but I just felt that he didn’t have the chops for this particular thing.”
“I don’t like the arc that Jack Nicholson runs as Jack Torrance,” he continued. “Because it isn’t really an arc — it’s a flat line. He’s crazy from the jump.”
King said that Steven Weber, the star of the ABC series, better grasped the character. “He knew what he was supposed to be doing: He was supposed to express love for his family, and that the hotel just gradually overwhelms his moral sense and his love for his family.”
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?
This is LIZZIE BORDEN, who was acquitted in 1893 of the axe murders of her father and stepmother. (In the ballet, Borden is found guilty.)
Jeopardy! and other trivia outlets will sometimes ask about this traditional rhyme that came into vogue after the trial:
Lizzie Borden took an axe
and gave her mother forty whacks.
When she saw what she had done,
she gave her father forty-one.
Borden’s father actually suffered eleven “whacks,” and her stepmother actually suffered eighteen or nineteen.
Upon Borden’s death in 1927, she bequeathed a significant sum of money to the Animal Rescue League of Fall River—the organization’s website states that, as of today, income is still being derived from her gift.
6) NAME the member of the Fellowship of the Ring who best fits the theme of today’s newsletter.
Each of the answers in this newsletter was a person connected to axes or hatchets:
Question #1: Carrie Nation famously attacked bars with a hatchet.
Question #2: Raskolnikov uses an axe to commit the “crime” that kicks off the action in Crime and Punishment.
Question #3: Paul Bunyan is a lumberjack, regularly depicted with an axe.
Question #4: Jack Torrance in The Shining attacks the protagonists with an axe.
Question #5: Lizzie Borden was on trial for the axe murders of her family members.
Thus, of the nine members of the Fellowship of the Ring in The Lord of the Rings, GIMLI is the correct answer, as he uses axes in combat.
The newsletter title (“Cartesian”) provided one more hint, as it was meant to point to the cartesian plane in mathematics, made up of an x-axis and a y-axis; or, two axes.
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.