Below are six trivia questions I’ve written. You can reply to this e-mail if you’d like to participate. Like most trivia, the answers can be readily found via Google, so you’re on the honor system. The SIXTH question of each set is designed to be a question that cannot be easily Googled, so correct answers to those will be tracked and recognized in the next newsletter. The answers, and the next set of questions, will be published every Monday and Thursday.
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1) To avoid its company's name going the way of zipper and aspirin, WHAT company aggressively defends its name from "genericization" by insisting that its name should not be used as a verb to describe what the company's most famous product is used for? The company has been known to advertise that “you cannot [BLANK] a document,” where the name of the company fills in the blank.
2) Al Pacino has been nominated for Oscars for his work in the Godfather films, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, ...and Justice for All, Dick Tracy, Glengarry Glen Ross, and The Irishman, but he's only won one Oscar, for WHAT 1993 film?
3) On April 26, 1835, surveyors attempting to demarcate the "Harris Line" were attacked by Brigadier General Joseph Brown and his militia in the Battle of Phillips Corner, leading to scattered musket fire but to no casualties. This battle was part of a boundary war between WHAT and WHAT? In a colloquial sense, the two continue to do battle once a year since 1897 (with a few exceptions), with the next "battle" scheduled for November 27, 2021.
4) These three share the same two-word name: (i) the official silver bullion coin of the United States, (ii) a subsidiary of the world's largest airline (measured by fleet size or by number of scheduled passengers carried), and (iii) a clothing brand that was founded in 1977 and targets male and female high school and university students. What is the shared name?
5) Sigmund Freud's work is often criticized for being based on a limited sample size--that is, he derived many of his conclusions from interviewing a small number of affluent women from Vienna, Austria. Similarly, in 2008, Jeffrey Arnett argued that the American Psychology Association's publications overemphasized conclusions drawn from a sample size overrepresented by those from Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic societies—an idea that he reduced to WHAT five-letter initialism to describe this type of bias?
6) What unusual characteristic do these songs have in common? "Ridin'" by Chamillionaire, "Beat It" by Michael Jackson, "Like a Virgin" by Madonna, "Gangsta's Paradise" by Coolio, "Smells Like Teen Spirit" by Nirvana, "Blurred Lines" by Robin Thicke, "Mickey" by Toni Basil, "King of Pain" by The Police, "Jeopardy" by The Greg Kihn Band, "Bad" by Michael Jackson, and "American Idiot" by Green Day.
Here are the answers from last time:
1) A building in Inglewood, California is the flagship location of what would be an unassuming small chain of dining establishments, except that the building has a 32-foot tall WHAT on top of it? This object has been featured repeatedly in pop culture, including in Arrested Development, Entourage, Iron Man 2, and the music video for "Californication" by the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
It’s a donut! I promise you’ve seen it:
If you looked at the newsletter’s name, “Loops,” that also might have helped you with the shape.
2) Take an eight-letter word that comes from the Latin for "thread" and describes something sometimes made out of tungsten used in light bulbs. Remove the first letter of that word. Then, move one of the remaining letters to a different place in the word. You've now got a word that is a synonym for a minor disease. Name either the word you started with or the word you ended with.
We were looking for filament, which we change to ailment. Did you know that the Latin word for thread is “filum,” and because a filum was once used to bind documents together, that’s where we get the word “file” from?
3) Name the US President who was the first president to visit Europe while in office; he was awarded a shiny golden Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts over there.
Woodrow Wilson was the first president to visit Europe while in office, and he won the Peace Prize for his efforts in creating the League of Nations in the wake of the First World War (though it’d be weird if someone called it the “First World War” in 1919, right?). Teddy Roosevelt, Barack Obama, and Jimmy Carter have also won Peace Prizes, though Carter’s came after his time in office.
There was a stealth clue here—George M. Cohan wrote a song called “Over There” in 1917 that is about the American military being deployed to Europe. Of course, if you picked up on a century-old wartime song, you probably didn’t need the help!
4) Imagine you were playing a strange version of Scrabble where you could play as many letters as you wanted at once, the board was extremely large, and there were no restrictions requiring you to use English words; however, the letters retained their standard values from the American English edition. Of the seven main-line Harry Potter books, which book's title would be worth the MOST points in this game? Assume all spaces and punctuation marks are worth zero points each, and ignore word/letter bonuses.
Every book title begins with “Harry Potter and the” (which is worth 29), so we can disregard those words when trying to think of the answer. Here are the values of the remainder of each title:
Sorcerer’s Stone: 16 (or Philosopher’s Stone: 27)
Chamber of Secrets: 30
Prisoner of Azkaban: 37
Goblet of Fire: 21
Order of the Phoenix: 36
Half-Blood Prince: 28
Deathly Hallows: 27
Thus, we wanted Azkaban: ”Z” is worth 10, which puts it over the top. The climax of that book involves a time loop, again indirectly invoking our title.
5) "These violent delights have violent ends." These words are spoken by Friar Lawrence in a play written in the late sixteenth century, and are spoken again several times in a television show that began airing in 2016 to a character named Dolores, arguably the lead character of the first season of that show. Name the play or the TV show.
The play is Romeo and Juliet (and boy, did those delights have violent ends), and the TV show is Westworld. I haven’t watched any of it since Season 1, but I guess Jesse Pinkman is in it now? Westworld is another show meant to evoke “loops,” as the park automatons are stuck in behavioral and memory loops.
6) What unusual distinction is shared by these songs? "The Sound of Silence" and “Bridge Over Troubled Water” by Simon & Garfunkel, "X" by Xzibit, "Work" by Iggy Azalea, "Sons & Daughters" by The Decemberists, "Milky Cereal" by LL Cool J, “My Favorite Things” by Julie Andrews, "Devil Without a Cause" by Kid Rock, "Cinderella Man" by Eminem, "Stairway to Heaven" by Led Zeppelin, "The Tide Is Turning" by Roger Waters, "Diamond Dogs" by David Bowie, and "Do You Hear What I Hear?" by many artists.
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light
That split the night
And touched the sound of silence…
Sail on silver girl, sail on by…
Rocking chains, stadium, palladiums, cracked craniums,
My whole skeleton is dipped in titanium…
One day I'll pay you back, for the sacrifice that you managed to muscle,
Sixteen, you sent me through customs so
All aboard my spaceship to Mercury…
When we arrive
Sons and daughters
We'll make our homes on the water
We'll build our walls aluminum…
She ordered potassium, calcium
Carbohydrate scotch with sodium
She took me to her crib, threw me on the couch
I woke up the next morning with a spoon in my mouth…
Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens
Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens
Brown paper packages tied up with strings
These are a few of my favorite things…
Devil without a cause, I'm going platinum!
I'm going platinum, I'm going platinum!
Arsenic flow, lighter fluid saliva, what can you do?
Go get your crew to hype you up, stand behind you like "woo"…
There's a lady who's sure all that glitters is gold
And she's buying a stairway to heaven…
The airwaves were full of compassion and light
And his silicon heart warmed
To the sight of a billion candles burning
Oo, oo, oo, the tide is turning…
As they pulled you out of the oxygen tent
You asked for the latest party…
A Child, a Child shivers in the cold
Let us bring him silver and gold…
Do you see it? Each of those songs has at least one element from the periodic table in its lyrics. That’s pretty hard, so I tried to spot you some clues. Elements are all over this quiz: #1 mentions iron, #2 mentions tungsten, #3 mentions gold, and #5 mentions lead. The Scrabble question has no elements, but tried to get you comfortable with squares that have letters and numbers, similar to how elements are seen on the periodic table. Elementary, my dear Watson—right?
SIXTH QUESTION LEADERBOARD:
CK - 1
RC - 1
RP - 1
SM - 1
WM - 1