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/dd6R3x29zvsemzBe9. 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) The Boon wurrung and the Wurundjeri peoples, for tens of thousands of years, as part of the Kulin nation occupied the land around what we know today as Port Phillip Bay and as WHAT city, which serves as the second-largest city (by population) in its country?
2) The first electrified urban terminal station in the world opened in 1900 in WHAT city? In 1986, the once-closed station returned as an art museum which today hosts the largest collection of Impressionist and post-Impressionist masterpieces in the world.
3) A statue of suffragist leader and social campaigner Millicent Fawcett, endorsed by Sadiq Khan and others, was unveiled in May 2018 in WHAT city in order to mark the centennial of an important event? The statue itself broke ground by being the first statue of a woman, and also the first statue designed by a woman, in the square where the statue resides today.
4) In the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, as police were arresting thirteen individuals at a bar at 51–53 Christopher Street (between Seventh Avenue South and Waverly Place), a woman being pushed into a paddy wagon reportedly shouted to bystanders “Why don't you guys do something!”, setting off a seminal moment in American history. In WHAT city did these events occur?
5) “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley” is an autobiographical essay that appears in the nonfiction collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments by WHAT author, perhaps more notable for courting the literary world with his near-endless encyclopedic novel published in 1996?
6) WHAT distinction, related to the theme of this newsletter, is shared by each of the following films? Strangers on a Train (1951); Annie Hall (1977); The Witches of Eastwick (1987); Clueless (1995); The Royal Tenenbaums (2001); 7 Days in Hell (2015).
Here are the answers from last time:
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.
This is BYE BYE BIRDIE. The musical’s action starts with Conrad Birdie being drafted into the Army, much like Elvis Presley was drafted in 1957. In the musical’s original Broadway run, Peterson was played by Dick Van Dyke; the next year, The Dick Van Dyke Show debuted, making him a household name.
Van Dyke has won three of the four “EGOT” awards (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony), but is missing an Oscar. There are 103 other people who, like Van Dyke, have three of the four EGOT awards (let’s call such people “three-EGOT winners”). By a good margin, what is the RAREST AWARD for a three-EGOT winner to be missing in order to complete the EGOT? (Worded differently: There are four ways to fail to complete an EGOT while having three of the awards. As of today, which of those four ways is shared by the fewest people?) The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
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?
Each of these songs mentions CHEVROLET, or specifically a CORVETTE. The Prince song is “Little Red Corvette.” Julia Roberts was apparently once asked what song lyric most accurately describes her, and she picked the following line from “Thunder Road”: You ain't a beauty, but hey, you're alright.
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”?
The word is “LEVEE,” because the report is about Hurricane Katrina. Quoting the report’s conclusion:
Four overarching factors contributed to the failures of Hurricane Katrina:
(i) long-term warnings went unheeded and government officials neglected their duties to prepare for a forewarned catastrophe;
(ii) government officials took insufficient actions or made poor decisions in the days immediately before and after landfall;
(iii) systems on which officials relied to support their response efforts failed; and
(iv) government officials at all levels failed to provide effective leadership.
But for the word “landfall,” that excerpt could describe a whole lot more than Katrina.
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?
A Boulevardier requires WHISKEY—bourbon or rye are both acceptable. Erskine Gwynne, who descended from the Vanderbilts, invented the drink in the 1920s or so; he founded a monthly magazine in Paris called Boulevardier, which is where the drink’s name came from.
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?
Adams and Jefferson both died on JULY 4, 1826, the 50-year anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. A few weeks after their deaths, Daniel Webster gave a speech eulogizing them in Boston. To quote from it briefly:
If it be true that no one can safely be pronounced happy while he lives, if that event which terminates life can alone crown its honors and its glory, what felicity is here! The great epic of their lives, how happily concluded! Poetry itself has hardly terminated illustrious lives, and finished the career of earthly renown, by such a consummation.
…
But the concurrence of their death on the anniversary of Independence has naturally awakened stronger emotions. Both had been Presidents, both had lived to great age, both were early patriots, and both were distinguished and ever honored by their immediate agency in the act of independence. It cannot but seem striking and extraordinary that these two should live to see the fiftieth year from the date of that act; that they should complete that year; and that then, on the day which had fast linked forever their own fame with their country’s glory, the heavens should open to receive them both at once.
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).
The missing song is “AMERICAN PIE” by Don McLean.2 This is a list of songs that, when they became #1 on the Billboard Hot 100, became the longest song (by runtime) to do so.3 The first two songs in the list are actually the first two songs to hit #1 in what is called the “Hot 100 era.” Mercifully, “El Paso,” a 1959 song, was strangely long for its time, as songs back then were very routinely no longer than three minutes or so, due to physical limitations with vinyl records. “Hey Jude” and the newest version of “All Too Well” are famously very long songs, which may have been a clue.
The answers to the questions were meant to make you think of the chorus of “American Pie”:
So BYE, BYE, Miss American Pie
Drove my CHEVY to the LEVEE
But the levee was dry
Them good old boys were drinking WHISKEY AND RYE
Singing, "This'll be the DAY THAT I DIE"
This will be the day that I die
The newsletter title, “February Paperboy,” was meant to echo the opening lines of the song, in which McLean recounts being a paperboy delivering the news of “The Day the Music Died.” That day was February 3, 1959, when Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and “The Big Bopper” J. P. Richardson were killed in a plane crash.
The current-ish* Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
*typically updated 4-6 hours after each newsletter is released
The rarest three-EGOT winner configuration is to have an Oscar, Tony and Grammy, but to be missing an Emmy; only nine people currently have this distinction, including Henry Fonda and Stephen Sondheim.
Arguably, “American Pie,” the entire song, never hit #1 on the Billboard Hot 100; instead, only the B-side of the song did, which is just the last four and a half minutes of the song or so. Only a single can top the charts, and the song was released as a split single. No one only plays half of “American Pie” on the radio, so I feel pretty good about the question as it stands (plus, you had the newsletter hints anyway), but the following Slate article digs into the debate about song length and is weirdly fascinating: https://slate.com/culture/2021/11/taylor-swift-all-too-well-10-minute-billboard-hot-100-chart.html
This list is my creation and was made by me looking up each song that hit #1. Any mistakes are my own, so feel free to let me know if I’ve erred somewhere.