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) 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?
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?
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?
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.
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?
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.
Trivia Newsletter CXXXVII Recap
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.
This is JUSTIN TUCKER. Here he is, a few years before kicking the longest field goal in NFL history, singing “Ave Maria.”
The New York Times did a lengthy writeup on Tucker last year:
Fans in Baltimore were stunned [at the team’s decision to go into the 2012 season with Tucker instead of veteran placekicker Billy Cundiff]. In The Sun, the columnist Kevin Cowherd insisted that it was a mistake to “go into the new season with a rookie kicker,” questioning whether Tucker would be able to perform under pressure. “I have this image in my mind: Ravens vs. Pittsburgh Steelers,” he wrote. “National TV audience tuned in. Ravens line up for a field-goal attempt with the game on the line. Welcome to the N.F.L., Justin Tucker.”
Tucker would make 90.9 percent of his field-goal attempts that year, including four against the Steelers; one that clinched the divisional round of the playoffs in double overtime against the Broncos; and two in the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl, which the Ravens won by three points. He also finished the season with a perfect record for extra points — a streak that would continue for the next five seasons, as Tucker rose to the top of the league.
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.
This is CHRISTOPHER WREN.
The College of William & Mary makes the claim that it was the first college to found an inter-collegiate fraternity: Phi Beta Kappa, the academic honor society, in 1776. Jeopardy! sometimes wants you to know that fact from both ends:
COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES, $400: Phi Beta Kappa, America's oldest Greek-letter society, was founded in 1776 at this Virginia college
ORGANIZATIONS, FINAL JEOPARDY: Founded by students at William & Mary in 1776; its members include 17 U.S. Presidents, 41 Supreme Court Justices & more than 140 Nobel laureates
In 1781, the College of William & Mary closed for a brief time due to the extenuating circumstances of the British Army posting up nearby for the climax of the American War for Independence:
In 1781, during the last weeks of the American Revolution, General Cornwallis and his British forces evicted William & Mary President James Madison (cousin of the future American president) and his family from the house, set up headquarters there, and even refused the W&M president the courtesy of drawing water from his own well. Fire destroyed the interior of the structure a few weeks after Cornwallis departed, while the house was being used as a hospital for French officers wounded at the Battle of Yorktown. [W&M] President Madison wrote, "I have not a book left since the conflagration of the house in which I lived."
This would have likely led to the end of Phi Beta Kappa, except that the group had previously allowed their only non-Virginian member to establish more chapters. Chapters were established at Yale (1780) and Harvard (1781), and thus the organization lived on.
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.”
This is JOEY LAWRENCE.
His character’s catchphrase on Blossom was “Whoa,” which is not a very good catchphrase, but hey, it was the 90s. Here’s more on that and its connection to Keanu Reeves:
Played by Joey Lawrence (Hawaii Five-O), Joey Russo was the middle child of the Russo brood. As Blossom’s resident sweet but dumb jock character, Joey was responsible for generating a lot of laughs with his signature line “whoa.” Joey punctuated many conversations with a “whoa” and probably uttered the word hundreds of times over Blossom’s five-season run, using it to signify everything from approval when witnessing an attractive girl walk by, or incredulity at learning something new – which, for a character like Joey, happened pretty frequently.
The Joey Lawrence “whoa” wasn’t entirely original, however. A couple of years before Blossom aired its first season in 1991, the classic comedy Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure was released. Not only was Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure the movie that made Keanu Reeves a household name, it was also the film that unleashed Keanu’s “whoas” upon the world – an expression that has stuck with him and he has dropped in much of his work since, from The Matrix to Toy Story 4.
Keanu’s Bill & Ted character Ted “Theodore” Logan was kind of similar to Blossom’s Joey Russo in that neither of them were very bright. Presumably as a nod to their similarities – and hoping to get a laugh out of a timely pop culture gag – the makers of Blossom had Joey Lawrence do a surfer dude-style “whoa” in the vein of Keanu Reeves. Unfortunately, the gag fell flat with Blossom’s live studio audience so Lawrence reworked his “whoa” from a drawn-out So-Cal drawl to a shorter pronunciation. His own take on the word got plenty of laughs and so a catchphrase was born.
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.
This is LANCE REDDICK.
“Stars, they come and go / They come fast, they come slow,” but they always have a story:
The actor Lance Reddick, who has died suddenly aged 60, played figures of authority with such panache that no matter how many times he was handed such roles, he never seemed typecast. He is best known on film for his part as Charon, the all-seeing fixer in the John Wick movie franchise, but his image was forged playing two ambitious high-level cops on television, Cedric Daniels in The Wire (2002-08) and Irvin Irving in Bosch (2014-21).
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He was so good that the star of [John Wick], Keanu Reeves, given a day off from shooting for his birthday, told his girlfriend he wanted to visit the set, just to watch Reddick in action. Reeves then handed him a note thanking him for “what he brought to the character of Charon”.
Bosch also afforded Reddick the chance to play the piano, thoughtfully improvising at home as if to sort out his thoughts; this might be seen to reflect his own hard path to acting success. Reddick was born in Baltimore to Solomon, a lawyer, and Dorothy (nee Gee), a teacher. His musical talent was apparent at Friends School of Baltimore, and he went on to study at the city’s Peabody Institute, a secondary school specialising in the performing arts. He took a degree in composition at the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music and moved to Boston, intending, in his words, to become a rock star.
But his style of music, influenced by Miles Davis and Sting, never fitted a rock star template, and having married his college sweetheart, Suzanne Louis, in 1986, and had two children, he found himself working odd jobs, including as a singing waiter on a riverboat. Crucially, on a night shift at a newspaper delivery depot, he injured his back shifting bundles of papers. Forced to lie in bed, he contemplated how he could support his family, and decided to turn to acting, where he noticed there were more auditions available.
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.
This is JAMES CASH PENNEY, who went by J.C. Penney, as do the stores in the retail chain he founded.
I don’t really have anything I need to say about JCPenney, so let’s turn to The Onion’s “JCPenney CEO's Severance Package Includes 34,000 Pea Coats”:
PLANO, TX—Following this morning’s announcement that JCPenney is ousting CEO Ron Johnson after just 17 months, members of the department store chain’s board assured the public the executive will receive an ample severance package that will include 34,000 pea coats. “We want the public to know that Mr. Johnson will be taken care of with 34,000 Claiborne wool double-breasted pea coats, along with 1.5 million pairs of Gold Toe socks,” said board chairman Thomas Engibous, adding that Johnson’s package also comes with the standard employee severance of 72,000 boxes of Scattergories and a single Cuisinart skillet. “Additionally, we will be thanking Mr. Johnson for his service with a very generous 60,000 patio sets and a payout of 18,000 corduroy pants every month for the next 15 years.” Engibous added that due to a clause in Johnson’s contract, the company was forced to give him an additional JCPenney gift card for $17 million.
I assume it’s coincidence, but The Onion had also connected JCPenney and the board game Scattergories about a year and a half earlier in its article “Embarrassed JCPenney Announces All It's Sold In Past Year Is Two Fleece Jackets And A Scattergories Game”:
PLANO, TX—Ashamed CEO Myron Ullman III admitted to shareholders of the JCPenney Corporation Thursday that in the past year the company has sold only two fleece jackets and a single Scattergories game. "While the jackets were purchased together as part of an end-of-winter buy-one-get-one-free deal, we still count that as two units sold," said Ullman, noting the new figures corrected earlier sales projections, which had to be revised when a towel set believed to have been purchased at a Tulsa, OK location turned out merely to have been obscured by a stack of Levi's. "This news may be disappointing, but with three Champion sweatshirts sold already this fall, fiscal 2012 is on track to be a year of substantial growth." Ullman said things could have been worse, as an attempted return of the Scattergories game proved unsuccessful when the already-opened product was deemed ineligible for refund.
6) The answers in this newsletter allude to WHAT group? [A small hint: We purposefully picked today’s date for this particular newsletter.]
Each of the answers alluded to a member of the boy band NSYNC:
Question #1: Justin Tucker (Justin Timberlake)
Question #2: Christopher Wren (Chris Kirkpatrick)
Question #3: Joey Lawrence (Joey Fatone)
Question #4: Lance Reddick (Lance Bass)
Question #5: JC Penney (JC Chasez)
As the story goes, the group chose their name in part because “NSYNC” is what you get when you put together the last letters of each member’s first name (JustiN, ChriS, JoeY, Lance, and JC)…or, at least, that was true before original member JasoN Galasso was replaced by Lance Bass.
This quiz came out on May 1st because, around this time of year, lots of folks online like to share images and GIFs of Justin Timberlake singing “It’s Gonna Be May” from the song “It’s Gonna Be Me,” because he says “Me” a lot like one would say the word “May”:
Has the joke passed its expiration date? Probably, but that’s okay—we won’t have a newsletter come out on May 1st again (barring a schedule change) until 2025.
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.