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/gebw3nPs4bUseq5dA. 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) According to the title of Jeanette Winterson’s first novel, a bildungsroman about a girl growing up in a English Pentecostal community, WHAT are not the only fruit? The novel is often taught in schools in England and Wales, and was adapted into an award-winning BBC drama in 1990.
2) The Republic of Ireland has 26 of them, Estonia has 15 of them, and the United States has approximately 3,243 of them (or equivalents thereof). WHAT are they?
3) His first words were “JFK,” he obsessively ate sunflower seeds, and he spent time figuring out the circumstances of his sister’s disappearance (the case folder for which is labeled X-40253). WHO is this television character, on screen from 1993 to 2002, and again in 2016 and 2018?
4) Together with entrants like “TiVo,” “wardrobe malfunction,” and “red state/blue state,” WHAT word for a certain mashed-up holiday, said to be a nine-day event, made TIME’s list of buzzwords for the year 2004?
5) The “Nascondino World Championship,” held in Italy, is the world championship of WHAT children's game? The venue for the game has been held in, among other places, an abandoned ghost town and a 25,000-square-meter field. An episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus lampooned the idea of a similar Olympic event for this game, claiming that the current world record was 11 years, 2 months, 26 days, 9 hours, 3 minutes, 27.4 seconds.
6) NAME the television show that completes the following set and that otherwise is the theme of this newsletter: The Bachelor, The King of Queens, The West Wing, Star Trek: Enterprise, Angel.
Here are the answers from last time:
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?
These are the GREAT LAKES—Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario. The Great Lakes are the five largest freshwater lakes located (at least partially) in the United States—what is the sixth largest? The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
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”.
This is GRETA THUNBERG, the internationally recognized climate activist. Thunberg is the youngest person to ever be named TIME’s Person of the Year.2
3) WHAT individual, born in 1942, is generally credited as the first Jewish candidate on a major American political party presidential ticket?
This is JOE LIEBERMAN, who was Al Gore’s VP choice in the 2000 election (but more on Gore below). Lieberman is one of a small number of senators or representatives who have changed parties—the most recent person to do so is Paul Mitchell, a representative from Michigan, who flipped from Republican to “Independent.”
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?
TINA TURNER is from Nutbush, TN—she has a great song about it, called “Nutbush City Limits,” which starts like this:
A church house, gin house
A school house, outhouse
On Highway Number Nineteen
The people keep the city clean
They call it Nutbush
Oh, Nutbush
Call it Nutbush city limitsTwenty-five was the speed limit
Motorcycle not allowed in it
You go t'the store on Fridays
You go to church on Sundays
They call it Nutbush, little old town
Oh, Nutbush
They call it Nutbush city limits
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.
These are all in CHAD, the country in Africa. “Endorheic” is the term for a lake or basin that has no outflow to an external body of water and that generally only loses water to evaporation or seepage. “Exorheic” is the opposite term, not to be confused with “exoteric,” which means knowledge independent from experience that can be ascertained by anyone. Look, maybe just go with “open lake” or “closed lake.”
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).
This is a list of every documentary that has been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song. The missing film is AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH (2006), the documentary about climate change directed by Davis Guggenheim and written by Al Gore. An Inconvenient Truth is the only documentary to win the award for Best Original Song (for Melissa Etheridge's “I Need to Wake Up”).
You had a few paths here—perhaps the first one was that the names of the films suggested these might all be documentaries. From there:
Question #1: Relates to freshwater sources that might be harmed by climate change; question referred to “a hassle to remember everything” as a phrase similar to “an inconvenient truth”
Question #2: Thunberg is a noteworthy climate activist
Question #3: Lieberman was Gore’s VP
Question #4: Gore was a U.S. Senator from Tennessee
Question #5: “Chad” meant to refer to the infamous Florida “hanging chads” that may have decided the 2000 election, which Gore lost
Newsletter Title: “A Troublesome Fact” is another synonym of “an inconvenient truth”
The current-ish* Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
*typically updated 4-6 hours after each newsletter is released
LAKE OF THE WOODS (located in Minnesota, Ontario, and Manitoba).
It is very clever and original of me to point out that this is not true, because “You” were named Person of the Year in 2006, which presumably included people born after Thunberg but before the award was given.