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: https://forms.gle/xh5PwwqwtroAE2Eg9. Like most trivia, the answers can be readily found via Google, so you’re on the honor system (i.e., do not use external resources to help you answer any of the questions). The SIXTH question of each set is designed to be a question that cannot be easily Googled; correct answers to those will be tracked and recognized in the next newsletter. The answers, and the next set of questions, will be published on Mondays and Thursdays.
1) The Robert Gould Shaw Memorial, honoring Colonel Shaw and his 54th Regiment, together with the Oneida Football Club Monument, the Soldiers and Sailors Monument, and entrances to the Boylston and Park Street subway stations, are all located in or a near a certain public park in WHAT U.S. city?
2) FILL in the blanks below with the four-word phrase twice spoken by Joseph Welch, special counsel for the United States Army, nearly sixty-eight years ago:
Senator, may we not drop this? We know he belonged to the Lawyers Guild ... Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator; you've done enough. Have you [BLANK], sir? At long last, have you left [BLANK]?
3) The number 66 can be expressed as the sum of three positive square integers in three different ways (so, 1^2 + 1^2 + 8^2 equals 66, and so do 1^2 + 4^2 + 7^2 and 4^2 + 5^2 +5^2). 66 is not the smallest positive integer with this property; WHAT number is? The same number is also the following: (a) the primary jersey number worn by Tedy Bruschi, Aroldis Chapman, Zach Thomas, and Brian Urlacher, and (b) the number of countries in Africa, based upon membership in the United Nations.
4) NAME the 1998 film starring Ryan Phillippe, Salma Hayek, Neve Campbell, and Mike Myers that focuses on a legendary disco club in New York City. The film was widely panned at release, but the director’s cut of the film, restoring the film as originally intended without executive meddling, was shown at the prestigious Berlin Film Festival in 2015 and was called by Vulture “a kind of cult status as a lost classic of gay cinema.”
5) “Easy Listening,” “Middle-Road Singles,” and “Pop-Standard Singles” are previous names for a category used by Billboard to track WHAT two-word broad genre of music since 1961? Elton John, Neil Diamond, and Barbra Streisand have been standard-bearers of the genre, though the song to spend the most consecutive weeks at #1 in the Billboard category is “Girls Like You” by Maroon 5 (feat. Cardi B).
6) WHAT distinction is shared by each of the following individuals? Christie Brinkley, Jackie Chan, Hugo Chávez, Carly Fiorina, Matt Groening, Amy Heckerling, Sid Meier, Angela Merkel, Catherine O’Hara, Walter Payton, Condoleezza Rice, Jerry Seinfeld, Al Sharpton, John Travolta, Oprah Winfrey.
Here are the answers from last time (due to some recent travel, this recap is truncated):
1) In 1957, the perhaps appropriately named Donald Featherstone designed WHAT ornamental invention, sometimes unpopular with homeowners’ associations? Featherstone received an Ig Nobel Prize, the tongue-in-cheek award recognizing those who “first make people laugh, and then make them think,” for his work in 1996; Featherstone was the first person to accept his Ig Nobel in person.
(PLASTIC PINK) FLAMINGO
2) The city of Thebes was one of the most important cities in ancient Egypt—located on the Nile River, it was often the capital of Egypt and served as a key religious area, evidenced by the nearby Valley of the Kings and Valley of the Queens. The ruins of Thebes are today located in WHAT modern city, which has a population of about 400,000 people?
LUXOR
3) A Fata Morgana, named after Morgan le Fay from Arthurian myth, may explain sightings of the Flying Dutchman ghost ship and other false sightings of UFOs, islands, boats. A Fata Morgana isn’t quite a hallucination, as it can be captured on camera—instead, a Fata Morgana can be properly categorized as an example of WHAT six-letter natural phenomenon?
MIRAGE
4) You are an ambitious bartender trying to come up with new drinks. You decide it would be fun to create a spin on a vodka gimlet, so you take that recipe and sub out simple syrup, instead adding triple sec to get some more citrus, and you add a splash of cranberry juice to make it more tart. You try your invention, and suddenly realize with dejection that you’ve just reinvented WHAT popular cocktail?
COSMOPOLITAN
5) Today’s the first day of the National Football League draft. In that spirit—halfback Jay Berwanger, the first winner of what would become the Heisman Trophy, was also the first player ever drafted in an NFL draft (though he elected not to play professional football). Berwanger, in addition to being probably the only Heisman winner to be tackled by a future U.S. president in Gerald Ford, attended WHAT university, which today is a Division III school not particularly renowned for athletics?
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
6) WHAT distinction is shared by each of the following films (together with many films and other works)? The Godfather (1972), Rain Man (1988), Honey, I Blew Up the Kid (1992), Indecent Proposal (1993), Leprechaun 3 (1995), Mars Attacks! (1996), Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997), Con Air (1997), Rush Hour 2 (2001), Up in the Air (2009), Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 (2015), Jason Bourne (2016).
SOME OR ALL OF THE FILM IS SET IN THE AREA OF LAS VEGAS, NEVADA. Q1 THROUGH Q4 ARE ALSO NAMES OF LARGE LAS VEGAS RESORTS/CASINOS; Q5 WAS A QUESTION ON THE NFL DRAFT, WHICH TOOK PLACE IN LAS VEGAS STARTING ON THE DATE THIS NEWSLETTER WAS RELEASED. THE NEWSLETTER TITLE, “PARADISE,” REFERS TO THE FACT THAT MANY OF THE TOURIST AREAS OF LAS VEGAS, INCLUDING THE LAS VEGAS STRIP, ARE ACTUALLY LOCATED IN THE UNINCORPORATED TOWN OF PARADISE, NEVADA.
The current-ish* Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
*typically updated 4-6 hours after each newsletter is released