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/q678bdYv68BD7sss9. 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) Jay Ski, C.C. Lemonhead, and JeLana LaFleur, despite not being from (or near) the cities of Davenport, Bettendorf, Moline, or Rock Island, formed a group of disc jockeys, so to speak, most closely associated with WHAT animated film?
2) The partially redacted chart shown in the image below shows a 300-year distribution of WHAT?
3) Take a controversial rock musical that debuted in 1967 that featured, among other things, irreverence for the American flag and nudity, and add a certain set of five letters to its name; now you have a different musical that debuted in 2002 and is based on a 1988 film starring Ricki Lake in her first film role. WHAT five letters were added?
4) NAME the author first responsible for collections of stories centered in a forest that, if its name is to be taken literally, takes up 0.15625 square miles or 404,686 square meters.
5) NAME the artist responsible for the sculpture that today holds the record for the most expensive work sold by a living artist at auction; the sculpture was sold for $91.1 million in May 2019. The artist in question is sometimes criticized for producing art that is kitsch, crass, and based on cynical self-merchandising.
6) WHAT distinction is shared by each of the following films? Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), Fatal Attraction (1987), Akira (1988), Con Air (1997), Donnie Darko (2001), Inland Empire (2006).
Here are the answers from last time:
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.
The novel is called ORANGES Are Not the Only Fruit. Winterson objects to the novel being called a “lesbian novel,” saying “I've never understood why straight fiction is supposed to be for everyone, but anything with a gay character or that includes gay experience is only for queers.”
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?
These are COUNTIES. The most common county name in the United States is “Washington County,” which exists in 31 states. What is, by a fair margin, the most common county name in the United States that does not take its name after any particular person? The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1 My own first guess, Lake County, is wrong—that’s #2 in this list, with 12 states having a “Lake County.”
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?
This is FOX MULDER, a protagonist of The X-Files (we tried to help you with the case file name in the question). I never really got into The X-Files, and a fun thing about trying to catch up enough to write a trivia question about The X-Files is that you get a lot of great phrases in plot summaries like “the discovery of a being that he initially believed to be a ‘giant bloodsucking worm’” and “He had been infected by an alien virus (for the second time).”
Mulder’s conspiracy-theory-investigating buddies, The Lone Gunmen, got their own short-lived spinoff show, The Lone Gunmen (naturally). On March 4, 2001, the first episode aired, which concerned the titular trio uncovering a government conspiracy to fly a commercial airliner into the World Trade Center as a false-flag operation in order to create new American military enemies and increase military spending.
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?
This is CHRISMUKKAH. The idea and variations on it have been around for a very long time, but it took off in 2004 thanks to a certain television show (more on that below). The “nine-day event” clue (eight days for Hanukkah and one day for Christmas) was meant to be the main path here. At the time (in 2004), the New York Catholic League and the New York Board of Rabbis, in a joint statement, condemned “Chrismukkah,” calling it a “multicultural mess.”
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.
This is HIDE AND SEEK. The winning team in the Nascondino World Championship gets “The Golden Fig Leaf,” which the organizers call the biblical symbol of hiding (referring to the Adam and Eve story).
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.
This is almost all of the network TV lineup at 8 PM on a Wednesday night in the fall of 2003. The missing show is THE O.C. on FOX.
Questions #1 and #2: “Oranges” and “Counties” to try to connect you with Orange County, the show’s namesake.
Question #3: “Fox Mulder” to try to gear you towards FOX (and perhaps shows on FOX).
Question #4: Chrismukkah was heavily popularized by the show, as Adam Brody’s character (Seth Cohen) has a Jewish father and a Presbyterian mother and therefore celebrated Chrismukkah, a holiday of his invention (in-universe).
Question #5: “Hide and Seek,” the Imogen Heap song, plays in that one bonkers scene of the show (warning: overwrought violence) that was parodied on Saturday Night Live in the “Dear Sister” sketch.
Newsletter Title: “Here We Come” is from the Phantom Planet song, “California,” the theme song of The O.C. (“California, here we come / Right back where we started from”).
The current-ish* Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
*typically updated 4-6 hours after each newsletter is released
UNION COUNTY (17 states)