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/LFnbopg3sAZArJM17. 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 a hassle to remember everything about geography, so one mnemonic you can use is “Super Man Helps Every One,” which helps you remember WHAT set of things, in order from west to east?
2) NAME the world figure, thrice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and whom the president of the United States once urged to “chill!”, whose early rise to fame included a three-week protest outside the Riksdag carrying a sign bearing the phrase “Skolstrejk för klimate”.
3) WHAT individual, born in 1942, is generally credited as the first Jewish candidate on a major American political party presidential ticket?
4) The tiny unincorporated community of Nutbush, about sixty miles northeast of Memphis, is most notable not for its odd name but instead of being the childhood home of WHAT legendary singer, born Anna Mae Bullock in 1939?
5) The Ennedi Plateau and the Tibesti Mountains are geographical features of WHAT landlocked nation? Another geographical feature of the nation is the large endorheic lake that gives the nation its name.
6) NAME the film that completes this set of films sharing a specific distinction: Mondo Cane (1962), Chasing Ice (2012), Glen Campbell: I’ll Be Me (2014), Racing Extinction (2015), The Hunting Ground (2015), Jim: The James Foley Story (2016), RBG (2018).
Here are the answers from last time:
This is the completed chart:
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?
This is SQUAB. In England, “squab pie” is a traditional dish that does not contain pigeon at all, but instead mutton and apples. Charles Dickens’s journal All the Year Round describes squab pie thusly:
Of all the west country pies, squab pie is, in our humble estimation, the most incongruous and the most detestable. The odious composition is made of fat clumsy mutton chops, embedded in layers of sliced apples, shredded onions, and — O tempora! O mores! — brown sugar! The result is nausea, unsociability, and, in course of time, hatred of the whole human race. The greasy sugary, oniony taste is associated, in our mind, with the detested name of Bideford.
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).
This is a JIFFY. Jiffy Lube, like Pennzoil, Quaker State, Rotella, and V-Power, is a brand owned by the oil company Shell.
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.
This is the LOTTO. My home state, Illinois, has in recent years expanded legalized gambling, and residents now can easily (i) play video slot machines in bars and restaurants (outside of Chicago), (ii) visit one of our eleven casinos, (iii) bet on sports anywhere in the state on your phone, or (iv) play the statewide or nationwide lotteries. Some back-of-the-envelope estimates from those links suggest that, after accounting for winnings, and not including illicit gambling or casinos across the border, the twelve million residents of Illinois lose about $500 million a month collectively to gambling (despite the majority of residents, almost certainly, not participating in gambling).
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?
This is The Knack, or for our purposes KNACK (having a “knack” for something means you have an acquired or natural skill at something, or a tendency to do something). The song is about how lead singer Doug Fieger, who was 25 at the time, fell in love with 17-year-old Sharona Alperin, which, take that for what you will. Alperin has gone on to have a successful career as a realtor—if you want to buy a $5 million house in Los Angeles, you can contact her now through her website, which uses the song’s title as the URL and plays the song when you visit it.
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?
The answer here is PERCH. In land surveying, a “rod” is sometimes called a “perch” and is today customarily just over 5 meters. An acre is exactly 160 square rods, which is why the measure is useful for surveying.
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.]
The Winter Olympics and Summer Olympics were last in the same year in 1992, and so the answer is Radiohead’s wildly popular song “CREEP.” The best way to get here was process of elimination with the Wordle grid, since I am 90% sure, if you knew the first five answers, the only valid Wordle plays left to you were creep, crepe, and perce. The one clue I gave you was the newsletter title, “I’m a Wordle,” which was not merely descriptive—it was trying to echo the second line of the chorus of the song, which goes “But I’m a creep / I’m a weirdo.”
The current-ish* Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
*typically updated 4-6 hours after each newsletter is released