Remember when we did a newsletter (Trivia Newsletter XXXII) modeled off of the word game Wordle? Well, now we’re on Trivia Newsletter LXIV, and every XXXII newsletters, we do Wordle. If you don’t know what Wordle is, this link and the rules found there may help you: https://www.nytimes.com/games/wordle/index.html
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/t7Gv6wZQfXAiGxx49. 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) WHAT word, in a culinary sense, is derived from a Swedish word for “loose, fat flesh” and describes a domestic pigeon that is less than one month old, or the meat thereof, which meat is typically roasted?
2) WHAT word is generally used in an informal sense to refer to any unspecified short period of time? In some scientific fields, the word has been given more formal definitions—for example, Gilbert Newton Lewis proposed defining it as the length of time it takes light to travel one centimeter in a vacuum, and in electronics, it can be defined as the period of alternating current cycles (so, in the US, one-sixtieth of a second).
3) Nevada (mostly lobbyist objections) and Utah (mostly cultural/religious objections) are among the five states that as of today do not have a formal statewide version of WHAT? Please, use the five-letter informal term for your answer.
4) NAME the pop-rock band (but drop the article) responsible for the hit song “My Sharona.” What, you don’t know that? You mean you don’t have an acquired or natural skill at knowing the names of bands, or a tendency of figuring it out?
5) Besides being something our avian friend from Question #1 might use, and an obscure unit of measurement (just like our Question #2 answer) used by surveyors, WHAT is the term for the circus balancing act where one performer balances atop a pole that is being balanced by another performer?
6) I forgot to write Question #6 again! Look, can you just name a FAMOUS WORK (e.g., a song, play, musical, book, movie, TV show) that came out the same year that the Summer and Winter Olympics were most recently held in the same calendar year, and that otherwise fits with the theme of this newsletter? The below image might help you:
[Do not assume the chart represents optimal guesses, but do assume that all answers are valid Wordle submissions.]
Here are the answers from last time (note that certain words in the questions have been fully capitalized and italicized for emphasis, and that they did not appear that way in the original newsletter):
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?
This city is MELBOURNE, in Australia. Sydney is the most populous Australian city by a nose—after Melbourne, the next three are Brisbane, Perth, and Adelaide. Just about two weeks ago was “National Sorry Day” in Australia (recently rebranded as the “National Day of Healing”), an annual event to remember the mistreatment of Australia’s indigenous peoples.
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.
This question is describing the Musée d'Orsay in PARIS. A bit surprisingly, at least to me, is that the Musée d'Orsay (and not a museum in the United States) is where the painting Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 permanently resides, because France bought it in 1891 from an American-born painter. WHAT COLLOQUIAL NAME is that painting better known as, due to the subject of the painting? The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
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.
This statue is in Parliament Square near Westminster Palace in LONDON. The statue was dedicated to mark the centennial of the passage of the Representation of the People Act, which for the first time gave (some) women the right to vote in the UK. Parliament Square has twelve statues, including statues of Winston Churchill, Mahatma Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln, and Nelson Mandela.
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?
That address is in Greenwich Village in Lower Manhattan in NEW YORK CITY, and this question was a description of the leadup to the Stonewall riots, where members of New York’s gay community spontaneously protested police raids on gay bars. The first large-scale pride parades in major US cities occurred in June 1970 to mark the one-year anniversary of the event and have been occurring regularly since then.
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?
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE is the author here—the allusion at the end of the question is to his novel Infinite Jest. Wallace gave a commencement speech at Kenyon College in 2005 that I think is generally terrific; here’s an excerpt:
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”
…
If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.
Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it.
This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.
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).
Each of these films depicts PEOPLE PLAYING TENNIS and/or generally has tennis as a plot point in some fashion.
You might have thought it a bit odd that four different questions wanted cities as answers. These were purposefully picked as the cities that host tennis’s four Grand Slam tournaments, in the order the tournaments are played in a calendar year—so, Melbourne (the Australian Open), Paris (the French Open), London (Wimbledon), and New York (the US Open). The fifth question pointed to Wallace because he was a junior tennis player and lifelong fan of the game; “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley” is an essay about growing up and playing tennis, and tennis figures heavily in some of his other essays and in Infinite Jest.
Each question also had a small tennis pun in it (serve, return, broke, set, and court). Finally, the newsletter title, “Let’s Fault Love,” is a sentence made up of three more tennis terms.
The current-ish* Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
*typically updated 4-6 hours after each newsletter is released
WHISTLER’S MOTHER (painted by James Abbott McNeill Whistler)