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.
Note: The bolding or italicizing of any word in any question will never be a clue to the sixth question or to the newsletter’s theme. This note may not be included with every newsletter, but is always in effect until this newsletter dictates otherwise.
1) "King Henry Died Monday Drinking Chocolate Milk," "Kings Hate Dragons Because Dragons Can’t Make Money," and variations thereon are all sentences suggested by the Internet and by teachers to help memorize WHAT?
2) Of the fourteen times a Black actress has been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role, only one instance has resulted in that actress winning the award. Name that ACTRESS, or the FILM she starred in.
3) The subsequent query assumes that you are bounded to U.S. roads and that you cannot get on a plane, teleport, cross over to Canada or south of the border, or use oceans or other waterways: You wake up near Portland, Oregon. Now you must return home by car to Montgomery, Alabama. However, your buddy on the journey becomes deathly unwell when he enters any US state whose name makes use of the 9th letter of the alphabet (he had an eye gouged out once and the letter sets the guy off). You're a thoughtful chap and agree to take a route to dodge any such states. What's the LOWEST NUMBER of states between Oregon and Alabama your route could take you through?
4) Hill, Wisconsin is a town of 364 people in north-central Wisconsin that is aptly named because it contains the tallest point in the State of Wisconsin, at 1,951 feet (above sea level). This is not close to the "lowest high point" of any US state; instead, that honor goes to Britton Hill, the tallest natural point (above sea level) in WHAT state? The state has at least fifty buildings taller than Britton Hill, and our buddy from Question #3 could not travel to this state.
5) Guest hosts of Saturday Night Live who have appeared on the show five or more times are known as members of the "Five-Timers Club," a club that the show has repeatedly acknowledged. Three of the members of the Five-Timers Club were born in 1980 or later; name any one of them.
6) What unusual distinction is shared by each of these individuals? Ann Richards, Caitlyn Jenner, Charlie Daniels, Dale Earnhardt, Dennis Hopper, Don Meredith, George Foreman, Gwen Stefani, Henry Winkler, Martina McBride, Tony Danza, Troy Aikman, Wynonna Judd, Willie Nelson, and Yakov Smirnoff.
Here are the answers from last time:
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.
This one is Xerox; like Pepperidge Farm, they’re headquartered in Norwalk, Connecticut, and unlike Pepperidge Farm, they make copy machines and related products. I know life is not this charming, but I like to imagine the Xerox Corporation’s IP lawyers taking their jobs way too seriously and yelling at their friends and families whenever they accidentally say “Xerox” as a verb.
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?
Scent of a Woman is the answer here. Apparently, Pacino’s character in the film (a retired Army officer) says “Hoo-ah!” at some point, and that quote was nominated for the American Film Institute’s 2005 list of the top-100 movie quotes of all time. It, uh, didn’t make the list.
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.
We were looking for Michigan and Ohio, who fought a minor boundary war in 1835—now, the University of Michigan and THE Ohio State University regularly play each other in college football. To oversimplify greatly, the dispute (also sometimes called the Toledo War) resulted in Ohio getting Toledo and Michigan getting the entire Upper Peninsula. The “parity” label of this newsletter does not describe the sports rivalry, by the way: Ohio State has won all but two matchups since 2001.
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, 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?
The coin, subsidiary (by way of American Airlines), and brand are all American Eagle. Here is a highly professional image I made. Which one would win in a fight? (It’s American Eagle, the brand—no one’s meaner than high school kids.)
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. 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?
He used the term “WEIRD,” which stands for, well, Western, educated, industrialized, rich, (and) democratic. In addition to coining the term and pioneering “emerging adulthood” as a field of study, he wrote a book about heavy metal culture and its connection to adolescence. Weird!
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.
I read your e-mail
It's quite apparent
Your grammar's errant
You're incoherent
Saw your blog post
It's really fantastic
That was sarcastic (Oh, psych!)
'Cause you write like a spastic
I hate these Word Crimes…
This is a complete list of all of the songs which have been parodied by Alfred Matthew “Weird Al” Yankovic for which the parodies themselves have hit the Billboard Hot 100, in descending order of where the parodies charted. Hints were abound—Questions #1, #3, and #4 were meant to make you think of copies of things and the boundary fights around them, Questions #2 and #5 explicitly spotted you “Al” and “Weird,” and the name of the newsletter, “Parity,” is in a sense a parody of the word “parody.”
I accepted any entry that made mention of Weird Al. Hopefully no two people with the same initials ever submit answers correctly!
SIXTH QUESTION LEADERBOARD:
CK - 2
SM - 2
EM, JK, KM, MM, MS, RC, WM, ZM - 1