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/bfTa5jzF4jzDxfTW9. 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) Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, and The Dropout are all works about WHAT company and its founder, who allegedly conned many folks in California?
2) The Mackenzie River is the longest river that is entirely within Canada. The Yukon River and the Saint Lawrence River partially go through the United States, but WHAT river, which meanders solely through Manitoba, drains Lake Winnipeg, ends in the Hudson Bay, and is the second-longest river that is entirely within Canada?
3) On November 7, 2020, prevarications in Pennsylvania were promulgated at a press conference outside WHAT small business in the neighborhood of Holmesburg, Philadelphia, which was not a hotel and definitely was not composed by Antonio Vivaldi?
4) Washington Irving’s short story “Rip Van Winkle” concerns the titular character napping in New York, of course. However, throughout the early nineteenth century, WHAT other state, home to counties such as Wake, Mecklenburg, and Gaston, was given the derogatory nickname “Rip Van Winkle State” due to a perceived lack of development and growth?
5) WHAT term, used in architecture to refer to any building with a circular ground plan (and sometimes covered by a dome), is also sometimes used to refer to a round room within a building? A famous example of one rests on the original grounds of the University of Virginia.
6) WHAT distinction, which otherwise fits with the theme of this newsletter, is shared by each of the following individuals? Jacob Chestnut, William Evans, John Gibson, Billy Graham, Rosa Parks, Brian Sicknick.
Here are the answers from last time:
1) Each of the following people shares the same first name, which is WHAT? (a) the first African-American female author to have a play performed on Broadway; (b) an actress who was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role in the film Goodfellas and four Emmys for the television show The Sopranos; and (c) Marty McFly’s mother in the Back to the Future films.
LORRAINE Hansberry, Bracco, and Baines-McFly are our answers here. The Hansberry play is, of course, A Raisin in the Sun.
Ruby Dee was an actress with many accolades—as just a sampling, she was nominated for eight Emmys for various roles from 1964 to 2003, and was nominated for an Oscar for Best Actress for American Gangster (she played Mahalee Lucas, the mother of Frank Lucas, Denzel Washington’s character). She also, in one of her most notable roles, played Ruth Younger (a lead character) in the aforementioned Broadway production of A Raisin in the Sun. Hansberry died at the age of 34 from pancreatic cancer, and her ex-husband and friend Robert Nemiroff took her unfinished writings and adapted them into a play called To Be Young, Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words. That play was successful off-Broadway and was converted into an autobiography and a made-for-TV movie starring, that’s right, Ruby Dee as Lorraine Hansberry.
Going back to that Oscar nomination, Dee was the third-oldest nominee for Best Supporting Actress ever when she received it at age 85. NAME either actress who was older upon being nominated for Best Supporting Actress. The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
2) Nora Ephron wrote in her semi-autographical novel Heartburn that, in order to make the ideal version of WHAT eleven-letter word, one should “mix two tablespoons of Grey Poupon mustard with two tablespoons good redwine vinegar. Then, whisking constantly with a fork, slowly add six tablespoons olive oil, until [it] is thick and creamy”?
This is VINAIGRETTE, though I admit this question was mostly constructed as a way to help me remember how many letters are in the word vinaigrette and how to spell it. You know Thousand Island dressing, the salad dressing based on mayonnaise that is kind of tangy and sweet? Did you know that the Thousand Islands actually exist? They are in the Saint Lawrence River as it emerges from Lake Ontario, and they straddle the Canadian/US border. For reasons I don’t understand, in order to qualify as a Thousand Island, land in the channel must have at least one square foot of land above water year-round, and support at least two living trees. There are approximately 1,864 islands in the Thousand Islands.
3) WHAT city, served by Interstate 89 and by the Green Mountain Transit Authority, is the least populous of the fifty U.S. state capitals?
This is MONTPELIER. You may have been helped knowing that “Vermont” comes from the French words for “green” and “mountain” and that Vermont is known as the Green Mountain State. This comes up regularly in trivia, usually in the form of shouting “Green Mountain Boys” or “Vermont” when a Jeopardy! answer begins talking about Ethan Allen and the American Revolution.
4) WHAT word, used as an adjective, is used to modify (a) “showers” in the title of a song by the band LMFAO; (b) “problems” in the title of a song by Taylor Swift; (c) “night” in the title of a song by Lady A, and (d) in the title of a 1996 song, a word meaning “a star that suddenly increases greatly in brightness because of a catastrophic explosion”?
The missing word in each song title is “CHAMPAGNE.” The final clue was for the Oasis song “Champagne Supernova,” but since that’s the most famous song in the list (at least, at my age bracket), I figured I’d make you work a little for “supernova.”
Noel Gallagher, who wrote the song and was Oasis’s co-vocalist together with his brother Liam, said that a writer was giving him a hard time about the lyrics:
And he actually said to me: ‘You know, the one thing that’s stopping it being a classic is the ridiculous lyrics.’ And I went: ‘What do you mean by that?’ And he said: ‘Well, 'Slowly walking down the hall / Faster than a cannonball’ – what’s that mean?’ And I went: 'I don’t f—ing know. But are you telling me, when you’ve got 60,000 people singing it, they don’t know what it means? It means something different to every one of them.’
5) WHAT battle of the First World War, taking place over a few days in July 1918 (and in a sense a sequel to a battle fought in September 1914), is generally viewed as the last major German offensive on the Western Front? The battle led to significant German losses and the beginning of the “Hundred Days Offensive” of the Allies that ultimately ended the war.
This battle is typically called the SECOND BATTLE OF THE MARNE. The Marne River is a tributary of the Seine. Um. Rivers. What to write about the Marne. Hmm.
Maybe rivers lend themselves more to art than to words:
Paul Cézanne drew that painting of the Marne. If Jeopardy! wants you to say Cézanne, they are probably going to spot you “Post-Impressionist”—he’s generally viewed as the bridge between the Impressionists and more modern movements, like Cubism.
6) WHAT characteristic is shared by each of these films, which characteristic is also this newsletter’s theme? Casablanca (1942), The 400 Blows (1959), Anastasia (1997), Moulin Rouge! (2001), Before Sunset (2004), The Devil Wears Prada (2006), Taken (2008), Inception (2010).
These are all films WITH SCENES TAKING PLACE IN FRANCE (and, I suspect, Paris in each case, but I didn’t distinguish on that basis).
Question #1: Lorraine is a region in France (of “Alsace-Lorraine” fame, for people who like military history)
Question #2: Vinaigrette comes from French (and was known as “French dressing” in the nineteenth century)
Question #3: Montpelier, VT takes its name from the city of Montpellier in France
Question #4: Champagne is another region in France (look, “Sparkling Wine Supernova” doesn’t sound as nice)
Question #5: The Marne, and much of the Western Front, were in France
And, of course, the 69th newsletter was named “Nice” because Nice is another city in France. What, you thought it was something else?
The current-ish* Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
*typically updated 4-6 hours after each newsletter is released
GLORIA STUART (TITANIC) AND JUDI DENCH (BELFAST).