This newsletter marks the final newsletter of “Series 3,” for those of you who follow the Question #6 leaderboard. We’re taking a short break for Memorial Day weekend. Trivia Newsletter LXI, which will be sent out on Thursday, June 2, will mark the beginning of “Series 4” and a new Question #6 leaderboard, so you have a chance to start anew and win the competition even if you’re a recent subscriber.
Happy hunting—and if you know anyone who might enjoy this newsletter, we always welcome new subscribers.
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/WRxxeagfkRAN7R9CA. 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) It’s on a billiards table, Bilbo Baggins asked about the contents of it in his last riddle to Gollum in The Hobbit, and at least four of them might be on your person right now. WHAT is it?
2) The computer game Civilization V (like other entries in the series) lets players build “wonders,” unique architectural accomplishments. WHAT wonder, in reality completed in 1420 and called the largest collection of preserved ancient wooden structures in the world, prompts in-game the following John Lubbock quote upon completion? “Most of us can, as we choose, make of this world either a palace or a prison.”
3) William Blount (1797), Michael Myers (1980—and no, not that one), Jim Traficant (2002), and seventeen other individuals (all either 1861 or 1862) are the twenty individuals to hold WHAT specific distinction, which of course required a two-thirds supermajority vote?
4) Mireille Hildebrandt, a Dutch lawyer and philosopher, once said the following: “It has become an icon of poor interface design, because it led exactly nowhere ... [T]he only viable option appeared to be to keep typing R until one was willing to accept that one's work was lost and there was nothing left to do but shut down the program and start anew.” WHAT tripartite error message, common in the MS-DOS operating system, is Hildebrandt describing?
5) A certain word can mean (as a verb) “to reject” or (as a noun) “a device to cancel an automatic process.” Add a “d” to the middle of that word, and change another existing “d” to a new letter. Now the word can mean (as a verb) “work to exhaustion” or (as a noun) “the highest gear in a car’s automatic transmission.” WHAT’s the new word?
6) WHAT do the following U.S. presidents, and no other U.S. presidents, have in common (as of May 22, 2022)? John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, James Garfield, Joe Biden.
Here are the answers from last time:
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?
This is SERIAL, hosted by Sarah Koenig; the podcast is often credited with making podcasts widely popular. Maybe you like Koenig’s past work as a producer for This American Life—personally, what I find most relatable about her is that she went to grad school for a degree in Russian history, but then stopped after two weeks because she didn’t feel like doing that. One of the things no one tells you in advance about going to law school in 2011 is that every person you will meet for the remainder of your academic and professional life is intimately familiar with the programming that can be heard on National Public Radio (NPR), and it is weird and bad not to have any idea what This American Life or All Things Considered is.
Another trivia question: in Hulu’s lovely mystery-comedy show Only Murders in the Building (starring Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez), an in-universe podcast parodies Serial. The podcast’s name begins with “All is Not” and ends with WHAT three-word punny phrase, referring to a U.S. state? The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
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).
This is RINGO STARR. Wikipedia says that his playing style emphasized “feel” over “technical virtuosity”—rude!
Starr is one of twenty-six performers to be technically inducted at least twice into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (since you can be inducted either as part of a group or for your solo career). Stevie Nicks, Carole King and Tina Turner are the only women to be inducted twice, and Eric Clapton (solo career, Cream, the Yardbirds) is the only performer to be inducted thrice.
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?
A farrier specializes in caring for the hooves of HORSES, including by making and fitting horseshoes. “Farrier” takes its etymology from the Latin word for iron (ferrum), which is why it’s close to our word “ferric.” Farriers are not formally regulated in the United States; however, you can become certified with the American Farrier’s Association. That apostrophe is in the official name, and it will bother me to no end.
An earlier draft of this question referred to the UK law as having an ePONYmous name, but I didn’t want to stirrup groans from the readership.
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.
This film is CLOVERFIELD. After directing Cloverfield, Reeves directed a couple of those new Planet of the Apes films and most recently the 2022 Batman film. A bit implausibly, Reeves is not the only person to direct both a Planet of the Apes film and a Batman film—Tim Burton shares this same distinction.
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?
This is Nena’s “99 Luftballons,” or “99 Red Balloons”—I didn’t pin this one well because pins around balloons are dangerous, so either was fine. The line “This is it, boys, this is war” is sung in her English version of the song; exactly the same line is sung in the 2012 song “Some Nights” by the band fun. I am pretty sure these are references to the film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
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.
It’s a Lucky Charms newsletter!
Question #1: Serial referencing “cereal”
Question #2: “Hearts” mentioned in album name; “Starr” reference to “stars”
Question #3: Farriers make “horseshoes”
Question #4: Cloverfield referencing “clovers”
Question #5: “99 Luftballons” referencing “red balloons”
Question #6: Pots of gold and rainbows
Newsletter title: “Blue Moon”
Lucky Charms is the General Mills breakfast cereal with the ad campaign showing an accursed leprechaun forever fleeing the mad ravenous children hunting him across the world (and, in more recent commercials, across time periods) to get his lucky charms. Like Steinbeck’s The Pearl, Lucky’s “lucky charms” are in truth gravely unfortunate reminders of man’s greed, and the thesis of the Lucky Charms Cinematic Universe is surely that Lucky should renounce his knick-knacks and live a quiet, peaceful life—but, I digress.
The commercials often had a jingle that went like this, referring to the various marshmallows in the cereal: “Hearts, Stars, and Horseshoes, Clovers and Blue Moons, Pots of Gold and Rainbows, and Tasty Red Balloons!” The newsletter pointed to each of these items. Pots of gold were phased out at one point for hourglasses, “red balloons” had a part-time stint with “swirled moons” for a while, and more recently hourglasses were replaced by unicorns because someone surely realized that hourglasses are not known to be lucky.
The current-ish* Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
*typically updated 4-6 hours after each newsletter is released
The in-universe podcast, hosted by a character played by Tina Fey, is called “All is Not OK IN OKLAHOMA.”