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) NAME the active placekicker, a six-time Pro Bowler, who holds the National Football League career records for longest field goal (66 yards) and career field goal percentage (90.5%, min. 100 attempts); in addition to his football accolades, he is a classically trained bass-baritone who can sing opera in seven different languages.
2) NAME the English architect primarily known for his contributions to rebuilding 52 churches in London following the Great Fire in 1666, including St. Paul’s Cathedral. The oldest academic building in continuous use in the United States, which is located on the campus of the College of William & Mary, bears his name, although his connection to the building is tenuous.
3) Jeopardy! fans may know that host Mayim Bialik played the title character in the television sitcom Blossom (1991-1995). NAME Bialik’s co-star in Blossom who played the character Joey Russo; he also voiced Oliver in Oliver & Company (1988), played Joe Longo in Melissa & Joey, and released the Billboard-charting song “Nothin' My Love Can't Fix.”
4) NAME the actor, perhaps most notable for his roles as Cedric Daniels in The Wire and Charon in the John Wick films, who passed away on March 17, 2023. His final live-action television project was playing the role of Albert Wesker in Resident Evil.
5) NAME the entrepreneur who, in 1902, opened his first store in Kemmerer, Wyoming. When he passed away in 1971, over 1,600 stores bore his name; that retail chain still exists today following a 2020 bankruptcy.
6) The answers in this newsletter allude to WHAT group? [A small hint: We purposefully picked today’s date for this particular newsletter.]
This is an interstitial note not related to today’s theme that we’re doing before the recap. This note contains a spoiler for last Friday’s episode of Jeopardy!—we are going to talk about one of the prompts and the correct response and a connection those had to a recent newsletter. The prompt in question was not a Daily Double or the Final Jeopardy prompt; regardless, if you watch Jeopardy! on a delay, you may want to close your eyes and scroll a few paragraphs down to the text that says “Trivia Newsletter CXXXVI Recap.”
**SPOILER ALERT**
We’ve written almost 900 questions here at Trivia Factorial, with most centered around what I’d call the American “trivia canon,” and so it’s very normal and expected to have some overlap between my efforts and outlets like Jeopardy!, which asks people to recall thousands and thousands of trivia tidbits every year. I was particularly pleased, though, to see this prompt on last Friday’s episode ($2000 in “Animated Entertainment”):
Lincoln has 10 sisters on this Nick series whose title indicates that things might be chaotic at home
The intended response is The Loud House, which you might remember because we asked about it last Monday and talked about it in the last recap:
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?
This was a tough one—Jeopardy! has never asked about or mentioned The Loud House before last Friday, and none of the contestants buzzed in. Perhaps one of you playing on the couch got this one with the help of Trivia Factorial, though, which would make me very happy.1
**END OF SPOILER ALERT**
Trivia Newsletter CXXXVI Recap
1) NAME the children’s novel by Katherine Paterson first published in 1977. The book, routinely challenged and censored by critics for its profanity and ostensibly sacrilegious themes, was adapted into a 2007 film starring Josh Hutcherson, AnnaSophia Robb, Bailee Madison, and Zooey Deschanel.
This is BRIDGE TO TERABITHIA.
The film was directed by Gábor Csupó, who is most famous for co-founding the animation studio Klasky Csupo, which animated many of Nickelodeon’s shows in the 1990s, including Rugrats, Aaahh!!! Real Monsters, and The Wild Thornberrys. Klasky Csupo also animated the first three seasons of The Simpsons. Bridge to Terabithia was the first live-action film Csupó had ever directed.
“Klasky” in the studio’s name is from its other co-founder, Arlene Klasky (who was married to Csupó from 1979 to 1995). Klasky was the creator of Rugrats:
Originally, I wanted to call the show Onesomething, after the TV series Thirtysomething. But in the end, we decided on “Rugrats”, a phrase used to describe kids crawling about on the floor, which wasn’t so well known at the time.
The idea came to me in 1989. I was working at home, looking after my two sons, then aged four and 15 months. I was doing a bit of work on Sesame Street for the animation company I ran with my then husband, . But I knew I didn’t want to go back to work yet full-time.
One day, Gábor called to say that Nickelodeon wanted to discuss ideas. I thought: “Oh my gosh – all I do right now is watch my kids go to the bathroom. If they could speak, what would they say? Why do they do the funny things they do?”
We had a meeting at home, so I could watch my kids, and came up with the main characters. There was Tommy (one), the leader and the hero; Chuckie, the scaredy cat; and the bully. Every show needs a villain – Angelica was ours. Later, we added in their families, and the neighbours across the street.
2) “She did the drawings people think of when they think of Frank Lloyd Wright,” a scholar said of WHAT architect born in 1871 who is generally considered an original member of the Prairie School and who was instrumental in designing Canberra, the capital of Australia?
This is MARION MAHONY GRIFFIN. (“Mahony” is pronounced “MAH-nee.”)
The second woman to graduate from MIT’s architecture program,2 she worked closely with Wright:
When business slowed and Perkins could no longer afford Mahony’s $6 a week salary, Wright hired her to work with him at his new Oak Park studio. She had a talent for freehand drawing and for setting buildings in harmony with nature–another hallmark of the Prairie style. On at least one occasion, recalled architect Barry Byrne, who got his start under Wright, her work was declared superior to the master’s.
The two worked together for 14 years, but it was a volatile relationship. She later claimed he’d taken credit for her work on the Dana-Thomas House in Oak Park and for many of her drawings in the Wasmuth Portfolio, which launched his international reputation when it was published in Germany in 1910. Her time at the drafting table resulted in just one solo commission, for the Church of All Souls in Evanston, run by a family friend. The September 1912 issue of the prestigious Western Architect featured its exterior stonework, tall gable roof, and skylights, but by 1960 All Souls had been razed for a parking lot.
As Wright prepared to go to Europe with his mistress in 1909, he asked Mahony to continue designing for his clients. For reasons that have never been ascertained, she refused. Wright then turned to Herman von Holst, who turned to Mahony–who agreed to help him “on a definite arrangement that I should have control of the designing.” Prairie School scholars credit Mahony with both designing and rendering the Robert and Adolph Mueller houses in Decatur during this time. Although Wright had done little more than secure the commissions, writes Elizabeth Birmingham, a Mahony biographer and professor at North Dakota State University, “after he returned from Europe, he took credit for them and exhibited them under his name.”
3) “Yes, we can!”, a slogan of Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, likely owes its existence to WHAT motto that was originated by Dolores Huerta in 1972 and that is today a registered trademark of the United Farm Workers of America?
“SÍ, SE PUEDE” is the answer here.
Huerta, who is alive today, was the first Latina woman inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame. Here are President Obama’s remarks upon awarding Huerta the Presidential Medal of Honor, in which he brings up the “Yes, we can” connection:
Similarly, when Cesar Chavez sat Dolores Huerta down at his kitchen table and told her they should start a union, she thought he was joking. She was a single mother of seven children, so she obviously didn’t have a lot of free time. But Dolores had been an elementary school teacher and remembered seeing children come to school hungry and without shoes. So in the end, she agreed -- and workers everywhere are glad that she did. Without any negotiating experience, Dolores helped lead a worldwide grape boycott that forced growers to agree to some of the country’s first farm worker contracts. And ever since, she has fought to give more people a seat at the table. “Don’t wait to be invited,” she says, “Step in there.” And on a personal note, Dolores was very gracious when I told her I had stolen her slogan, “Si, se puede.” Yes, we can. (Laughter.) Knowing her, I’m pleased that she let me off easy -- (laughter) -- because Dolores does not play. (Laughter.)
4) “The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History” (and later “The Extraordinary Story of How the Wildest Man in Congress and a Rogue CIA Agent Changed the History of Our Times”) is the subtitle to WHAT 2003 non-fiction novel that later became a 2007 film, the last film directed by Mike Nichols?
This is CHARLIE WILSON’S WAR. The film and book are about Congressman Charlie Wilson’s (real-life) efforts to cause Congress to support the mujahideen from 1979 to 1992 as they fought the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, which efforts probably had no unintended long-term consequences.
In real life (and in the plot of the novel and film), Wilson was a bit of a partier, and in the early 1980s was accused of using cocaine. That investigation (which ultimately went nowhere) was led by WHAT PERSON, who was the associate attorney general with the Department of Justice from 1981 to 1983? He later became the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York before launching a career outside of law. The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.3
5) “Even when we saw the writing credit which said ‘N Diamond,’ we thought it was a Jamaican artist called Negus Diamond,” said a member of the musical group UB40 in describing WHAT song? UB40 released a cover of the song in 1983.
The song is “RED RED WINE.”
Wikipedia says that the song “is often mistaken for being a Bob Marley song,” with a “[citation needed]” tag thereafter. Without opining on whether “Red Red Wine” is often mistaken as a Bob Marley song or not, I imagine any potential confusion comes from the fact that the UB40 version has sort of a “reggae” sound. There’s a (pretty obscure) internet joke about how, back when music was regularly downloaded off of peer-to-peer file sharing systems such as Limewire, the file names of songs would often be incorrect. As an example:
6) Of the thirty Major League Baseball teams as they exist today, name EITHER of the two teams that fit within the theme suggested by the answers to this newsletter’s questions.
Each of the answers in this newsletter was a three-word answer, where the middle word started with the same letter as either the first word or last word (so, for example, in Bridge to Terabithia, both “to” and “Terabithia” start with “T”). Thus, the two acceptable baseball teams would be the LOS ANGELES ANGELS or the NEW YORK YANKEES.
The newsletter title, “Non Distributio Medii,” is the Latin expression sometimes used to describe a logical fallacy also known as the “fallacy of the undistributed middle.” This is the sort of fallacy that looks like this:
All dogs have hair.
My uncle has hair.
Therefore, my uncle is a dog.
We alluded to that because, in this newsletter, it’d be a fallacy not to distribute the middle word, so to speak, and make sure the letter that started the middle word was the same letter that started one of the other two words.
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
Of course, Jeopardy! episodes are taped well in advance of airing, so the overlap is entirely a coincidence.
The first woman to graduate from MIT’s architecture program? That’s Sophia Hayden, best known for designing The Woman's Building at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. For that reason, she gets a mention in Erik Larsen’s novel The Devil in the White City (which centers much of its narrative around the World’s Columbian Exposition).
The federal prosecutor mentioned in Charlie Wilson’s War who conducted an investigation into Wilson’s activities is RUDY GIULIANI.