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/TTNSXJEumEJ7Sapv8. 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) Below is a passage from a poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar:
When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,
When he beats his bars and would be free;
It is not a carol of joy or glee,
But a prayer that he sends from his heart's deep core,
But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings –
WHAT phrase, also the name of a 1969 autobiography, completes the passage?
2) Note: A “before and after” question takes two phrases and combines them—so, as an example, the answer to “the capital of the Silver State, AND a romcom starring Nicolas Cage and Meg Ryan” is “Carson City of Angels.”
WHAT is the answer to this “before and after”? “The warning an investor might receive if their equity account falls below a certain maintenance level, AND the 1980 song, arguably Blondie’s biggest hit, that was the theme to the film American Gigolo.” (If you don’t know the song, you can add a word, maybe, to get the name of the only song by a Canadian female artist since 2010 to hit #1 on the Billboard Hot 100.)
3) Whether or not Thomas Middleton co-wrote it, WHAT is the only play generally attributed to William Shakespeare that has the name of a world capital in its title?
4) The 1888 waltz “Sobre las olas” by Mexican composer Juventino Rosas is associated with ice skating and circuses and is likely one of the most famous Latin American pieces of music worldwide. You don’t need to look down at crests and troughs to know that “sobre las olas” translates into WHAT three-word English phrase?
5) The plot of WHAT Maurice Sendak children’s book begins with a boy named Max being sent to bed without supper because he was, while wearing a wolf suit, making mischief?
6) There exists a set of approximately sixty films released between 1966 and 2020 that share a specific distinction not shared by any other film. The Secret Life of Pets 2 (2019) is one of the films in the set. WHAT film, based upon a novel, most recently joined this set of films?
Here are the answers from last time:
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?
POCKETS are found on/in all of these things. While the details changed a lot between the first and second editions of The Hobbit, the basic idea is the same: Bilbo and Gollum play a game of riddles. The answer to Bilbo’s question (which Bilbo said while thinking to himself, not intending it to be a riddle, though Gollum misunderstood) was, of course, the One Ring.
Here’s another of Bilbo’s riddles: “A box without hinges, key, or lid, Yet golden treasure inside is hid.” WHAT is the answer given in The Hobbit? The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
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.”
This is THE FORBIDDEN PALACE, located in Beijing, China (“Forbidden City” also acceptable). The Last Emperor (1987) was the first Western feature film authorized by the People's Republic of China to film in the Forbidden City; it was nominated for nine Oscars and won all of them, tying the record set by Gigi (1958) for the most Oscars won by a film that won every Oscar it was nominated for. This record was shattered later by The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, which won all eleven Oscars for which it was nominated.
It’s hard to win every Oscar you’re nominated for, and so there are some odd bedfellows in that category. For example, the two most recent films to be nominated for 3+ Oscars and win all of them? That’s right, CODA (2021) and The Bourne Ultimatum (2007). (Might’ve been a good idea for a newsletter.) When you limit yourself to films that (for the most part) didn’t get “too” nominated, that’s how you end up with The Bourne Ultimatum as a correct answer.
Here’s a related, but also completely different, trivia question: WHAT MLB PLAYER has the most seasons in his career of stealing at least one base without ever getting caught? Maybe it’s Barry Bonds? Rickey Henderson? One of the guys who is very good at avoiding getting thrown out, like Carlos Beltran, Mike Trout, or Chase Utley? Nope, it’s legendary pitcher Greg Maddux, who had ten such seasons, despite only stealing eleven bases in his career and not being known at all for his hitting or baserunning prowess. In fact, this leaderboard is stacked with slowpokes, as the players most likely to steal at least one base a season without getting caught are the players who very rarely try to steal at all (list below).
Greg Maddux (10 seasons)
Russell Branyan, David Ortiz, Sherm Lollar (8 seasons)
Edwin Encarnación, Paul Konerko, Ramón Hernández, Phil Nevin, Jeff Conine, Tim Spehr (7 seasons)
(Thanks to the always tremendous Baseball-Reference and its Stathead tool, by the way, for that statistic.)
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?
Each of these persons was EXPELLED FROM THE UNITED STATES CONGRESS. A tedious note: members of Congress cannot be impeached, but they can be expelled. Blount was expelled for treason (conspiring with the United Kingdom to invade Louisiana, then controlled by Spain, to increase the value of his land holdings), Myers was expelled for taking bribes (as part of the “Abscam” scandal in the late 70s and early 80s), and Traficant was expelled on ten charges, including taking bribes and making his congressional staff do household chores. The years given for the other seventeen persons correspond to the beginning of the American Civil War and likely speak for themselves.
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?
The error message is ABORT, RETRY, FAIL? (or sometimes “Abort, Retry, Ignore?”). Apparently, in the late 80s and early 90s, parodies of “The Raven” like the excerpt below were popular:
Once upon a midnight dreary, fingers cramped and vision bleary,
System manuals piled high and wasted paper on the floor,
Longing for the warmth of bed sheets, still I sat there doing spreadsheets.
Having reached the bottom line I took a floppy from the drawer,
I then invoked the SAVE command and waited for the disk to store,
Only this and nothing more.Deep into the monitor peering, long I sat there wond'ring, fearing,
Doubting, while the disk kept churning, turning yet to churn some more.
But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token.
"Save!" I said, "You cursed machine! Save my data from before!"
One thing did the phosphors answer, only this and nothing more,
Just, "Abort, Retry, Ignore?"
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?
The words are override and OVERDRIVE.
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.
Each of these is a president who never exercised his veto power to veto a bill from Congress. Franklin Roosevelt has the most vetoes, with 635; Grover Cleveland has the most vetoes in one presidential term, with 414 in his first term. It probably goes without saying that a president is significantly more likely to veto bills if Congress is controlled by members of the opposite party; that’s part of why, as of now, President Biden has not vetoed a bill.
The questions were generally trying to get you to think of vetoes:
Question #1: A “POCKET veto” is a type of veto exercised by “pocketing” the bill, so to speak, and taking no action.
Question #2: FORBIDDEN Palace/City meant to tie into the fact that veto is Latin for “I forbid.”
Question #3: Directly tied into Congress; reference to “two-thirds supermajority vote” alludes to the fact that overriding a veto requires the same number of votes.
Question #4: “Abort, Retry, Fail” referring to to the fact that, after a veto, a legislature can try again, override the veto, or let the bill die.
Question #5: “OVERRIDE” referring to a legislature’s choice to override a bill.
Newsletter Title: “PERMISSIVE” meant to be the last clue you need once you put together the “veto” theme—these are presidents who let every bill pass.
The current-ish* Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
*typically updated 4-6 hours after each newsletter is released
AN EGG