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/vzgwrKgDRA2LoPBz9. 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 Alibi,” “The Breakup,” “Inconsistencies,” and “The Case Against Adnan Syed" are episodes that aired in 2014 of WHAT podcast, which won a Peabody Award in 2015?
2) WHICH of the members of The Beatles was rarely the band’s lead vocalist, with only about a dozen songs to his credit? Because the band had a few songs where all four members sang, he sometimes sang “with a little help from my friends” (but, in the case of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, literally so).
3) Whoa, whoa—if you live in the UK, before you buy that hammer and anvil, you had better make sure you’ve read the Farriers (Registration) Act of 1975. The law’s preamble states that the law is intended to prevent cruelty to WHAT animal?
4) Director Matt Reeves said the following about WHAT 2008 film, a tagline of which was “Some Thing Has Found Us”?
The fun of this movie was that it might not have been the only movie being made that night, there might be another movie! In today's day and age of people filming their lives on their camera phones and Handycams, uploading it to YouTube … That was kind of exciting thinking about that.
5) “Two irresponsible littering youth deploy almost five score of a certain object, leading to the inadvertent triggering of early-warning systems and subsequently global thermonuclear war” is one way to summarize the English version of WHAT song, which version was released in 1984?
6) You don’t need a standalone Question #6! Just follow the rainbow to the pot of gold and tell me WHAT the theme of this newsletter is.
Here are the answers from last time:
1) Ida Noddack, a German chemist and physicist, is generally credited (together with Walter Noddack and Otto Berg) with discovering WHAT element, the last stable element to be discovered? Bordering tungsten and osmium on the periodic table, its symbol is the same as what is generally taught as the second syllable in the system known as “solfège” used to learn Western musical scales.
Ida Noddack, who also was the first person to describe the thing we now call nuclear fission and who was nominated for three Nobel Prizes in Chemistry, co-discovered RHENIUM, named after the Rhine, the river in Europe. A common trivia chestnut is that tungsten has the highest melting point of all known elements (well, except carbon, but we don’t talk about carbon); rhenium is next in line on that list. How rare is rhenium? Well, it naturally occurs and wasn’t discovered until 1925, so probably pretty rare?
“Solfège” is a fancy word for that “do re mi” system, or other such systems, that people use to mentally hear (or “audiate,” if you’re really fancy) the pitch of music. “Re” comes second in “do re mi,” and “Re” is the symbol for rhenium.
2) On November 12, 1986, the King Fahd Causeway was opened and became the longest causeway in the world outside of the United States. The causeway linked (and continues to link) WHAT NATION, the third-smallest nation in Asia, to Saudi Arabia via an artificial island called Passport Island?
Passport Island is between Saudi Arabia and BAHRAIN. The capital of Bahrain is Manama. Recognizing that reasonable people can probably disagree on what is “in Asia,” the Asian countries smaller than Bahrain are Singapore and Maldives.
The SMALLEST landlocked country in Asia (by size) and the LARGEST landlocked country in Asia (by size) start with the same letter. Both countries also have a common neighbor—that is, one country has a land border with both the smallest and largest landlocked Asian countries. NAME the common neighbor. The answer is at the end of this newsletter.1
3) Adam Richard Wiles, who topped Forbes' list of the world's highest-paid DJs each year from 2013 to 2018, is better known by WHAT stage name? Whether or not it’s a force field, you might say that [he] wears [his] heart upon [his] sleeve, like a big deal.
This is CALVIN HARRIS; the quoted song in the last sentence is “Feel So Close,” which was a big hit for him in 2011. The song opens with the line “I feel so close to you right now / It's a force field.” According to Genius, the website where people can crowdsource song lyric explanations: “It makes sense in the fact that a force field is really strong, and the force is pushing him away from something else in order to push him closer to his love interest.”
And…no! A thousand nos. The natural way to describe something that is drawing you towards something else is not “it’s a force field”—that is how you’d describe being repelled from something. And normally you’d say “okay, fine, he just needed a rhyme with ‘big deal,’” except those words don’t even rhyme! Look, this isn’t DEFCON 1 for “people who want their wildly popular pop songs to make sense” like the Nicki Minaj reference to “asbestos” in “Bedrock” was, but it’s not great.
4) NAME the poet whose name is obscured by the black box in the image below. Named the “Writer of the Decade” by The New Republic in 2019, she initially rose to fame for posting her poems on Instagram; she has also published three collections of poetry, most notably Milk and Honey in 2014.
This work is “colonize” by RUPI KAUR. Kaur’s style, typified by the above image, is to write short, often non-rhyming verse with arbitrary line breaks and punchy endings accompanied by hand-drawn sketches. She is probably the most famous “Instapoet”; that is, poets who rose to fame on social media and whose work is optimized for sharing on such outlets.
It’s easy to punch down on such things; certainly many have criticized and parodied Kaur’s work. However, to quote a review of Milk and Honey by Shahina Piyarali, “How did she know I felt that way?” Maybe a good poem is a poem that does nothing more than inspire that sentiment.
5) A geometry student would know WHAT word to mean a line touching (for example) a circle or an ellipse at only one point? Outside of mathematical contexts, the word is synonymous with a digression, a deviation, or an aside.
This is a TANGENT. This is not very rigorous, but imagine a conversation is a curve, and at one point during the conversation you say something new and depart in a completely different direction—you’ve figuratively gone off on a tangent.
6) WHAT is the only U.S. state capital that, based on the theme of this newsletter, shares a specific property with the following incomplete list of world capitals? Asunción, Paraguay; Bratislava, Slovakia; Lomé, Togo; Maseru, Lesotho; Rome, Italy; Vientiane, Laos.
Each of these world capitals is itself situated on an international border; so, Asunción borders Argentina, Bratislava borders Austria and Hungary (the only world capital to border multiple other countries), Lomé borders Ghana, Maseru borders South Africa, Rome borders Vatican City, and Vientiane borders Thailand. For obvious enough reasons, capitals of micronations generally have this quality, so I largely omitted those since I thought they’d be distracting (though I kept in Rome to give you a hint).
The only U.S. capital city to also sit on an international border is JUNEAU, ALASKA. I anticipated that someone might guess that the theme was “a U.S. state capital that borders another STATE” (instead of country), which is why I threw the “only” qualifier into the question, as there are two U.S. state capitals that border different states (Trenton, NJ and Carson City, NV). However, the theme was “borders” in general, so I gave credit for guesses in that vein.
Question #1 - “borders” mentioned in question
Question #2 - explicitly asks about international borders
Question #3 - reference to song “Feel So Close” (theme is about capitals close to other countries)
Question #4 - another reference to national borders
Question #5 - again, theme of boundaries and points of intersection
Newsletter Title: “Crossover Episode” - besides an oblique BoJack Horseman joke, a reference to capital cities where one could, in theory, easily cross into a bordering nation
The current-ish* Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
*typically updated 4-6 hours after each newsletter is released
The largest Asian landlocked country is Afghanistan; the smallest is Armenia. Both border IRAN, the answer here.