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/P6ghSuXF5g1Yukzc7. 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 1960 Broadway musical, a popular choice for high school and college productions, the titular character of which is likely intended to be a composite of Conway Twitty and Elvis Presley and the main character of which is Albert Peterson, a high-strung music executive.
2) “Blue (Da Ba Dee)” by Eiffel 65, “Crocodile Rock” by Elton John, “Night Moves” by Bob Seger, “Thunder Road” by Bruce Springsteen, and Prince’s first song to reach the top ten of the Billboard Hot 100, together with many other songs, mention in their lyrics WHAT automobile brand, or a specific model of car thereof?
3) In December 2005, the U.S. Senate issued “Senate Report 109-322,” subtitled “A Nation Still Unprepared.” The 737-page PDF uses WHAT five-letter word (and its plural form) 645 times, usually as a noun but sometimes as an adjective modifying words such as “breaches,” “failure,” and “walls”?
4) Whether you’re making a Negroni or a Boulevardier, you’re going to need vermouth and Campari. The difference between the cocktails is that, while a Negroni calls for gin, a Boulevardier requires WHAT spirit?
5) U.S. presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson coincidentally passed away within hours of each other on a date that was a major anniversary in American history. WHAT was the date that they died?
6) WHAT song is missing from the following ordered list of songs that share a specific distinction? “Poor Little Fool” (Ricky Nelson), “Volare (Nel blu dipinto di blu)” (Domenico Modugno), “El Paso” (Marty Robbins), “Hey Jude” (The Beatles), [BLANK], “All Too Well (Taylor's Version)” (Taylor Swift).
A quick aside: Many of this newsletter’s subscribers participate in LearnedLeague, an online trivia league. Relatedly, former Jeopardy! champion Ben Raphel publishes a newsletter wherein he recaps his daily LearnedLeague performance, and I wrote a guest column this past weekend, accessible by clicking the below button. Even if you aren’t a LLama (as folks on the site call themselves), you might have fun reading the questions and seeing my thought process:
Here are the answers from last time:
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?
The name of this poem is “Sympathy,” and the last line is “I know why the caged bird sings!” You may recognize that phrase as the title of Maya Angelou’s autobiography. What you may not know is that I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings covers Angelou’s life up to the age of seventeen, and is the first of seven autobiographies she wrote. The others are:
Gather Together in My Name (1974)
Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas (1976)
The Heart of a Woman (1981)
All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986)
A Song Flung Up to Heaven (2002)
Mom & Me & Mom (2013)
As for Dunbar, I’ll quote the Poetry Foundation, the literary society:
In the years immediately following his death, Dunbar’s standing as America’s foremost Black poet seemed assured, and his dialect poems were prized as supreme achievements in African American literature. In the ensuing decades, however, his reputation was damaged by scholars questioning the validity of his often stereotypic characterizations and his apparent unwillingness to sustain an anti-racist stance. More recently Dunbar’s stature has increased markedly. He is once again regarded as America’s first great Black poet, and his standard English poems are now prized as some of his greatest achievements in verse. … For [Nikki] Giovanni, as for other Dunbar scholars, his work constitutes both a history and a celebration of Black life. “There is no poet, black or nonblack, who measures his achievement,” she declared. “Even today. He wanted to be a writer and he wrote.”
2) Note: A “before and after” question takes two phrases and combines them—so, 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.)
The answer here is MARGIN CALL ME, with the last hint offering you Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” as another point of entry.
“Call Me” was #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for six consecutive weeks in 1980. In the same year, a different artist was the only artist to have two songs hit #1 on the Hot 100, both of which have five-word titles and were off of the album The Game. NAME THE ARTIST—the answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
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?
This is TIMON OF ATHENS, sometimes categorized as a problem play and sometimes called unfinished. The play is based upon a real person in Greek history (at least according to Plutarch); Timon lived during the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC) and was famous for his misanthropy. According to Strabo, after Mark Antony was defeated at Actium, he built a retreat for himself called the Timonium, as he too considered himself abandoned by his friends and wanted to live in solitude.
Middleton, himself a great poet and playwright (most notable for The Changeling, Women Beware Women, and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside), probably co-wrote Timon of Athens—but if you really want to irritate your Shakespeare-loving friends, tell them that Middleton also co-wrote All’s Well That Ends Well.
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?
The title translates to the phrase “OVER THE WAVES”—I mentioned crests and troughs, which are the terms for the tops and bottoms of waves, as a hint. If you find this song on YouTube and listen for about forty seconds, you will quickly realize after that point “oh, it’s that song!” Or, if you prefer, just hit play:
Rosas was born in Santa Cruz, Guanajuato in Mexico—later, the city renamed itself Santa Cruz de Juventino Rosas in his honor.
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?
This book is WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE. A couple of years ago, the New York Public Library released their list of the works that have been checked out of the NYPL system more than any other books:
1) The Snowy Day (Ezra Jack Keats)
2) The Cat in the Hat (Dr. Seuss)
3) 1984 (George Orwell)
4) Where the Wild Things Are (Maurice Sendak)
5) To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
6) Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White)
7) Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury)
8) How to Win Friends and Influence People (Dale Carnegie)
9) Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (J.K. Rowling)
10) The Very Hungry Caterpillar (Eric Carle)
Apparently, Goodnight Moon (Margaret Wise Brown) likely would have made the list, except that one influential and long-tenured librarian hated the book so much that the NYPL didn’t carry it for the first 25 years after the book was published.
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?
The set of films is “films that Harrison Ford appears in,” and the most recent film that he appeared in is The Call of the Wild (2020), based upon the Jack London novel. The theme here was that The Call of the Wild can be found in the exact middle, in terms of word count, of the answers:
Question #1: I Know Why THE Caged Bird Sings
Question #2: Margin CALL Me
Question #3: Timon OF Athens
Question #4: Over THE Waves
Question #5: Where the WILD Things Are
But how could you have known to look in the middle of each answer? There were two paths here. First, the newsletter title (“It Just Takes Some Time”) is a reference to the first line of the chorus of the 2001 Jimmy Eat World song “The Middle,” by far the band’s most notable song. If you’re not up on your emo songs from 21 years ago, the second hint was that, in Question #3 (the middle question of the first five), we italicized the “middle” in Thomas Middleton’s name to give you another reason to think about the middle of each answer.
The current-ish* Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
*typically updated 4-6 hours after each newsletter is released
QUEEN (for “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” and “Another One Bites the Dust”)