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/acRzwD8uXCYJRqep6. 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) NAME the systemic narcotic analgesic, isolated in the early nineteenth century by Friedrich Sertürner, that is generally believed to be the first isolation of an active ingredient from a plant. It is a Schedule II drug in the United States (together with drugs such as codeine, cocaine and fentanyl), and as an injection is sold under brand names such as Duramorph.
2) Each of David Childs, Le Corbusier, Oscar Niemeyer, Kevin Roche, Denise Scott Brown, Robert Venturi, and Jørn Utzon is a notable name in WHAT specific profession?
3) For a brief time in the early 1950s, a certain “Automatic Computer and Logical Engine” used in a certain science-forward city in the eastern portion of Tennessee was the fastest computer in the world. WHAT six-letter acronym was this all-knowing machine known as?
4) Andrei Rublev is often regarded as the greatest medieval Russian painter of Orthodox Christian icons, and almost certainly his greatest icon, also known as The Hospitality of Abraham, is better known by WHAT title, as it depicts the silent communion of three angels at the center of the composition?
5) The following are the initials of the titles of all nine feature-length films directed by a specific director (who is himself sometimes known by an initialism): HE; BN; M; P-DL; TWBB; TM; IV; PT; LP. NAME the director of these films, the first of which came out in 1996 and the last of which came out in 2021.
6) NAME the (single) film that fills in both blanks in the following ordered list; the answer is related to the theme of this newsletter: Patch Adams, A Civil Action, Varsity Blues, She’s All That, Payback, Message in a Bottle, Payback, 8mm, Analyze This, Forces of Nature, [BLANK], Life, [BLANK], Entrapment, The Mummy.
Here are the answers from last time:
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?
Each of these is a ROSE—specifically, Blake wrote the poem “The Sick Rose,” Faulkner wrote the short story “A Rose for Emily,” Shakespeare wrote in Romeo and Juliet that “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” and Eco was describing the title of his novel The Name of the Rose.
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.”
This is LOIS WEBER. Don’t feel too bad if you didn’t get this one—based on my quick Google searches, Weber has never been referenced in a Jeopardy! question or answer (or for that matter a LearnedLeague question or answer, for those who partake). Her name gets tweeted a couple dozen times a month, usually in connection with a silent-movie GIF.
I’ll let the Criterion Channel (the streaming service of the Criterion Collection, the cinephile distribution company) take it from here:
Trailblazing writer and director Lois Weber combined technical mastery, creative control, and thematic daring to become arguably the first auteur in film history. Tackling controversial subjects such as sex work and birth control, Weber put forward a strikingly personal, ahead-of-its-time vision in films like THE DUMB GIRL OF PORTICI, the first epic directed by a woman and the only feature film to star legendary ballet superstar Anna Pavlova; SHOES, a remarkable proto-neorealist study of poverty; and THE BLOT, a class-conscious romantic melodrama often cited as her masterpiece. Though a giant in her time—she ran her own studio, was the first woman director accepted into the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and at one point was the highest-paid director in Hollywood—her radically progressive body of work was obscured by the male-dominated consolidation of the studio system, making it now ripe for rediscovery.
Why isn’t she more notable in the “trivia canon,” whatever that is? That’s out of my pay grade, but she certainly seems worthy of a trivia question—and of a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, which she received in 1960.
“Weber” comes late in the alphabet, but she isn’t close to the end of the list of people alphabetically who have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (sorted by last name). NAME the three living persons who have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame whose last names start with the letter “Z.” One is primarily known for acting, one is primarily known for directing, and one is primarily known for composing. The answer is at the end of this newsletter recap.1
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.
This is HOWARD UNIVERSITY. Of course, the above was only a small selection of the university’s many notable alumni; Elijah Cummings, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Nick Cannon are also alumni. Ralph Bunche, the first Black person to win a Nobel Prize (the Peace Prize, in 1950), didn’t graduate from Howard but did teach there.
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”?
This is KING HENRY VIII, and this question was meant to give you two paths to the answer; you might either know what Six, the musical, is about (the six wives of Henry VIII), or you might know what Hans Holbein is most notable for (being the court painter for Henry VIII). Six was nominated for eight Tony Awards; the awards ceremony is next month, but doesn’t it feel like Six should be up for two fewer awards?
Get ahead of your current-events trivia now by knowing that A Strange Loop is up for eleven Tonys, the most of any work this year, that it also won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and that it was written by someone named Michael R. Jackson (a dream for people who write trivia about things that have connections to other things).
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.
The tenth missing county is Jackson County, because they are named after ANDREW JACKSON and his cabinet, and are in southern MICHIGAN. Calhoun and Van Buren created guessable paths here, but “Jackson” may have tempted you to pick Mississippi. Jackson County, Michigan is actually more populous than Jackson County, Mississippi; however, both are less populous than Jackson County, Oregon (where Medford is) and all three are much less populous than Jackson County, Missouri (containing a significant portion of the Kansas City metropolitan area).
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.
This was a quiz about the Fab Five, the legendary recruiting class for the University of Michigan’s men’s basketball program in 1991:
Question #1: Rose, reference to Jalen Rose
Question #2: Lois Weber, reference to Chris Webber
Question #3: Howard University, reference to Juwan Howard
Question #4: King Henry VIII, reference to Jimmy King
Question #5: Jackson and Michigan, reference to Ray Jackson (and the Michigan theme)
The newsletter title (“Maybe I’m Amazed with Blue”), besides being a reference to the Paul McCartney song “Maybe I’m Amazed,” was meant to get you to think of the University of Michigan’s famous colors, maize and blue, and also to reference that the Fab Five were something that would amaze people.
The list itself was a list of the home cities of all of the runners-up in the NCAA D-I men’s basketball tournaments in the 1990s. The Fab Five and Michigan famously did not win a championship; they lost to Duke in 1992 and to North Carolina in 1993, and thus both blanks are filled with ANN ARBOR, MICHIGAN, where the University of Michigan is located. (Technically you could argue that these things never happened, as many of the Fab Five’s wins were vacated due to Chris Webber’s alleged role in a financial scandal with a booster, but no one submitted an answer of “nowhere” or “null,” so we can put that aside.)
The current-ish* Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
*typically updated 4-6 hours after each newsletter is released
Those three “Z-listers” are Renee Zellweger (probably most famous for Bridget Jones’s Diary and Cold Mountain), Robert Zemeckis (probably most famous for the Back to the Future films and Forrest Gump), and Hans Zimmer (probably most famous for that BRAAAAAAM sound in the soundtrack of films like Inception and Interstellar).