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/gRLdirdNipqX1z8EA. 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) William Blake wrote about a sick one, William Faulkner wrote about one for Emily, William Shakespeare says it doesn’t really matter what we call it, and Umberto Eco says that it is so rich in symbolic meaning that it hardly has any meaning left—WHAT is it?
2) WHO was the first woman to direct a feature-length film in the United States, as well as the first woman in the country to own her own film studio? Though most of her work was harried by censors and is lost to history, she was known in 1920 as the “premier woman director of the screen and author and producer of the biggest money making features in the history of the film business.”
3) NAME the university located in northwest Washington D.C. that is represented in athletics by the Bison and whose graduates include Kamala Harris, Thurgood Marshall, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, and Chadwick Boseman.
4) In the musical comedy Six (2017), the following lyrics appear:
Hans Holbein goes around the world
Painting all of the beautiful girls
From Spain, to France
And Germany
The king chooses one
But which one will it be?
In the plot of the musical (and in real life), WHO is the person who “chooses one” of the “beautiful girls”?
5) Barry, Berrien, Branch, Calhoun, Cass, Eaton, Ingham, Livingston, and Van Buren are nine of the ten counties located in the southern portion of a particular U.S. state named the “Cabinet counties” because they were all named after members of a particular U.S. president’s cabinet. NAME the state AND the president.
6) NAME the (single) U.S. city that fills in both blanks in the following ordered list, which is related to the theme of this newsletter: Lawrence, KS; [BLANK]; [BLANK]; Durham, NC; Fayetteville, AR; Syracuse, NY; Lexington, KY; Salt Lake City, UT; Durham, NC; Gainesville, FL.
Here are the answers from last time:
1) NAME the screenwriter and author who in the late 1990s and early 2000s was a fixture on the cable network E!, at times hosting six hours of programming daily; in addition, she wrote the screenplay to the 2017 film Logan Lucky, which was directed by her husband. Her last name comes from her first marriage, during which she was the daughter-in-law of a seven-time Primetime Emmy Award winner.
This is JULES ASNER, who was generally very highly regarded for her regular roles on E! shows, winning a few industry awards. Asner was briefly the daughter-in-law of Ed Asner, who won five of those seven Emmys for portraying the character Lou Grant in The Mary Tyler Moore Show and its spinoff Lou Grant. With respect to Logan Lucky, Asner chose to use the pseudonym Rebecca Blunt because she did not want the story surrounding the film to be that “[Steven] Soderbergh was directing his wife's script.”
Soderbergh, by the way, is the only director to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director for two films that came out in the same year. WHAT WERE THOSE TWO FILMS, neither of which was referenced above? The answer is at the end of this newsletter.1
2) The “Costume Institute Benefit” is a formal name for an event more commonly known as WHAT, last held on May 2, 2022?
This is the MET GALA. This year’s theme was “In America: An Anthology of Fashion.” The next time you’re having an argument with your friends about the best Met Gala theme (“the Gala peaked with ‘Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations’ in 2012!”), you can couch your opinion with my favorite theme ever, which was 2004’s “Dangerous Liaisons: Fashion and Furniture in the 18th Century.”
3) NAME the noun described by each of the following: (i) an event in the life of Paul the Apostle commonly depicted in baroque art and also known as the Damascus Christophany; (ii) generally, what NFL teams attempt to do immediately after scoring a touchdown; and (iii) in law, an intentional civil offense defined by one court as “any act of dominion wrongfully exerted over another’s personal property.”
Each of these was a CONVERSION—the conversion of Paul on the road to Damascus, an attempt at a one- or two-point conversion, and the tort of conversion known to law students and attorneys. The NFL lagged far behind college football and other football leagues and didn’t adopt the two-point conversion until 1994. Tom Tupa with the Cleveland Browns was the first player to score a two-point conversion in the NFL, running in the ball in the first quarter to make it an 11-0 game on September 4, 1994 against the Cincinnati Bengals. (Cleveland held on, winning 28-20).
4) A 34-year-old singer/songwriter, who is one of the most acclaimed artists in contemporary music and who is known for the albums Channel Orange and Blonde, shares the last name of his stage name with that of a 29-year-old Venezuelan singer/songwriter best known for his 2016 song “Me Rehúso” (later released in English as “Baby I Won’t.” WHAT is that shared last name?
These artists are Frank OCEAN and Danny OCEAN. Frank Ocean (born Christopher Edwin Breaux) selected the stage name by combining Frank Sinatra and the 1960 film Ocean’s 11, which starred Sinatra—but more on that shortly. Danny Ocean (born Daniel Alejandro Morales Reyes) might have named himself after the Danny Ocean character from the films, but all I can find is a quote from him that says he picked the name because “it sounds fresh.”
5) The opening ceremonies for the Summer Olympics that were most recently held in China took place on WHAT specific date (MM/DD/YY), which should come as no surprise due to a certain number being viewed as particularly lucky in Chinese culture (and other cultures)?
The Summer Olympics opened in Beijing on August 8, 2008 (or 08/08/08). In those Olympics, China won 100 medals (48 gold, 22 silver, 30 bronze) and the United States won 112 medals (36 gold, 39 silver, 37 bronze). Which country outperformed the other in those Olympics? I have no idea, but you can certainly imagine the arguments.
6) WHAT distinction is shared by the following live-action films, and by no other live-action films? Gravity (2013); The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003); The Dark Knight Rises (2012); Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian (2009); What Women Want (2000); Jumanji: The Next Level (2019); Battleship (2012); Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part II (2011).
This quiz really wanted you to think of Ocean’s Eight, the 2018 heist film with an ensemble cast of women that is a continuation/spinoff of the Ocean’s series released from 2001 to 2007 (that itself was based on the 1960 Rat Pack film referenced above):
Question #1: Indirectly references Soderbergh, who directed those three Ocean’s films from 2001 to 2007; references Logan Lucky, itself a heist film.
Question #2: The events of Ocean’s Eight involve a heist taking place at the Met Gala.
Question #3: “Conversion” in law is a type of theft of personal property, which is generally the plot of heist films.
Question #4: Danny Ocean and Frank Ocean meant to get you to the Ocean’s series.
Question #5: “Eight” meant to further clue you into Ocean’s Eight.
The newsletter title (“Pros and Cons”) was a similar idea—the film characters are often professionals at running heists and are con artists. From there, we added one more twist—we could have just had any list of films that have the eight Ocean’s Eight actresses; by the way, those actresses are, presented in the same order as the films above (which is the order they receive billing credits in Ocean’s Eight), Sandra Bullock, Cate Blanchett, Anne Hathaway, Mindy Kaling, Sarah Paulson, Awkwafina, Rihanna, and Helena Bonham Carter. But why these particular eight films and no others? Hey, it’s a heist theme, and that means going for the big score; thus, these are the HIGHEST-GROSSING live-action films that each of those actresses appeared in. Several of these films are parts of franchises and are the highest-grossing entry in that franchise, which hopefully helped a bit. I also thought Battleship, which was not a particularly great film and might be best known as “that movie Rihanna is in,” might have been a good hook to help readers figure out the theme.
(Why live-action films specifically? I thought requiring people to know that, for example, Sandra Bullock’s highest-grossing role was “Scarlet Overkill” from Minions (2015) or Rihanna’s highest-grossing role was “Tip” from Home (2015) was less fun than sticking to movies with on-screen appearances by these actresses.)
The current-ish* Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
*typically updated 4-6 hours after each newsletter is released
Erin Brockovich and Traffic, both of which came out in 2000.